Angela leaned back against the trunk of a tree, a wistful, nostalgic smile crossing her face.
Back when Overwatch was first being assembled, the powerful figures spearheading it had settled on “Gabriel Reyes” as its leader.
But as the agents answered the call one by one and the team finally took shape, everyone gradually, without quite meaning to, gathered around “Jack Morrison” instead.
The grave, faintly somber Reyes had simply lost out to the warm, easygoing Morrison when it came to sheer charisma as a leader.
And yet, in those raw early days of the organization, “the ideal” conquered everything.
That small note of discord went overlooked, and they all threw themselves into the fight for a higher cause.
It was right there that the seed of Overwatch’s greatest crisis—its eventual schism—was planted.
The rift between Morrison and Reyes ran far deeper than any squabble over who held the title of leader.
The far larger problem was the vast gulf between what the two of them believed.
Morrison held firm: “We’re here to bring about better outcomes, but we do it inside the bounds of the law—we follow the rules.”
Reyes saw it differently.
He believed that any number of stale regulations and self-serving webs of interest only served to shield criminals, and that in such cases they needed to bring force down like a thunderclap to sweep the shadows clean.
So long as the outcome was good, breaking those laws didn’t matter in the slightest.
At first the clash of their convictions didn’t show itself plainly.
But mission after mission, as Overwatch swelled larger and larger, the conflict between them sharpened into focus, and the dispute over “who leads” was finally laid out on the table.
Reyes wanted to reclaim command of the Overwatch team.
Morrison refused to let go of it, convinced that Reyes’s methods would be the ruin of Overwatch.
In the end, Reyes could no longer stomach an organization he led in name only, one that wouldn’t actually take his orders.
Reyes put forward a proposal: to form “Blackwatch,” a force that would guard the world from the shadows.
Blackwatch would answer to the organization alone, to no national institution, and would submit to no outside oversight; everything bent toward getting the mission done.
Morrison sat down with Reyes over it several times, and every conversation ended badly.
Morrison spoke privately with nearly everyone who held a vote, and his efforts paid off; a great many of the old core Overwatch members either abstained or voted against.
This was exactly how he hoped to make Reyes see that “the majority” had no wish to turn Overwatch into an unrestrained, ends-justify-the-means kind of organization.
But Morrison lost.
When the official ballot was counted, Reyes had carried it by a single vote.
Delighted, he declared, “This is the result of a democratic vote—the will of the majority.” And so he took a contingent of Overwatch agents and slipped down into the “shadows,” becoming an unbound blade in the dark.
From that point on, Overwatch was split.
In name it was still one organization; in reality it had cleaved in two.
For a time Morrison wanted to dig up who had cast that one decisive vote in favor, but he never managed to find out.
He suspected McCree.
He suspected Reinhardt.
But it never once crossed his mind to go and ask Mercy.
What, in that anonymous vote on whether to form “Blackwatch,” had “Angela Ziegler” chosen?
Angela remembered it perfectly well: she had written yes.
The funny part was that she’d asked McCree about it afterward, and McCree, who would later serve in Blackwatch himself, had voted no.
As for the reason he gave for that no vote, it wasn’t worth dwelling on.
The four of them brought their conversation to a close.
Magneto and Jean went inside to carry out the wounded, while Hank and Scott went to fetch the rest of the luggage.
Angela, thanks to being both a woman and a doctor, was spared all this heavy lifting and strolled back to the plane at her leisure.
The return flight went as smoothly as the trip out, without a single mishap.
Charles Xavier stood beside the landing pad, smiling at the group as they came home.
“Welcome back, Scott, Jean, Hank, Angela. It’s been a long time, Erik.”
A while passed before Erik Lehnsherr let a smile come slowly to his face.
“It has been a long time, Charles.”
If you wanted to name the one person who understood the tangle of fate and old grievances between them best, it could only be Mystique—Raven.
A pity, then, that this “mutant hero who saved the president” had walked away from the turf of both the X-Men and the Brotherhood after that affair.
She no longer clung to Charles’s side as she had as a child, nor did she march beneath Magneto’s banner of “mutant supremacy.” She had found a conviction of her own and had been fighting for it for years.
It was no different now—Raven was still out there on the road, working to save mutants, and had not stayed on at Xavier’s School.
As for this touching reunion of two mutant leaders, the curious among the onlookers hadn’t the nerve to stand around gawking at it; a few sweeps of Magneto’s gaze were enough to send them slinking off in defeat.
And the ones who did have the nerve had no interest to begin with—couldn’t be bothered to wonder what those two were on about now.
Because of all that, most of the mutant students who’d come crowding over at the news that “Cyclops and the Phoenix are back” soon drifted off escorting the pair.
Hank, with great presence of mind, withdrew to his lab to busy himself with his own work, the better to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, and he was kind enough on his way out to remind Dr. Ziegler that safety came first.
Angela didn’t answer right away, because she was still reading through her system notifications.
The task to escort the Magneto family to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters was complete.
It had rewarded her with another supply pack.
She now had three supply packs in all, enough to draw twelve supply items—truly enough to set her itching to try.
It took a second call of “Dr. Ziegler” from Hank before Angela came back to herself and swiftly caught his hint.
When Morrison and Reyes used to “talk,” the people standing nearby tended to come off the worse for it; so she took the opening Hank had given her and went off alongside him.
The infirmary and the lab lay in the same direction anyway.
“So—have the principal and ‘Magneto’ always been like that with each other?”
Hank gave a shrewd reply.
“I really couldn’t say.”
That drew a laugh from Angela.
“A fine answer.
I take your meaning completely, Dr. McCoy.”
From what the others had said earlier, it was plain that over these recent years the Professor and Magneto had crossed paths almost exclusively on “the battlefield.” And yet there hadn’t been a trace of drawn-swords tension in the air when the two met just now: only a deep melancholy and nostalgia.
There was no telling whether a day might come when Jack Morrison, now turned into “Soldier: 76,” and “Gabriel Reyes,” who had taken the alias “Reaper,” would meet again like this—whether the cooperation that had once existed only inside a game might at last become real within “Overwatch.”
Overwatch…
The task to build Overwatch in this world was enough to give anyone a headache.
What kind of person with a screw loose could she possibly talk into joining—an organization with no money, no power, no people, and no place to call its own…
Even she felt embarrassed just imagining the words leaving her mouth: Come join Overwatch and be a hero.
The whole thing felt impossibly, excruciatingly awkward.