zelamorre:

I need to be getting a submission ready for a fiction contest. Instead, I’m sitting here thinking about the merits of Field Medic Morrison.

Like, Ana didn’t get her healing rifle until later in Overwatch’s history. And when Overwatch the Strike Team (vs Overwatch the organization) was first formed, it was just Gabe, Jack, Reinhardt, Ana, and Torbjorn. Even the briefly mentioned Liao didn’t come on until later.

So they had to have a medic with them, right? And Jack is the one running around with his Biotic Fields. So Jack Morrison was the medic on their team. Heck, I want to headcanon that he has a medical degree and that’s how he eventually recruited Angela Ziegler to be part of Overwatch.

It’s also how he gets along so well with scientists and not just soldiers.
Well, got along. Because he’s a bitter, old man now. Sometimes he sits in the glow of his biotic field and remembers when other people shared it with him. Sometimes, he wishes he could go back to a time when Gabe would relentlessly tease him about wanting to play doctor.

He wants to go back to a time when people were confused about whether his title was Doctor or Commander. He wants to go back to a time when there was actually a conflict in him between binding somebody’s wounds and causing them. When being a soldier hadn’t swallowed him whole.

I want to headcanon that he went into the military not just to get out of farm life, but because they’d pay for his medical degree. And he stayed. And he was a goddamn great soldier. And now he’s Soldier 76 because the Army, Overwatch, and Gabriel Reyes swallowed Dr. Morrison whole and spit out nothing but a shell of a man.

And I want for him to try to stop the part of his brain trying to diagnose what’s wrong with Gabe. The part of him that wants to heal instead of kill the person he once loved with all his heart. Those tiny,fragments of medical caring are nothing but annoyances, but they keep trying to grow back. If he ever gets Reaper on the ropes, he’s not sure if his brain will let him kill the monster that used to hold his heart in the palm of his hands.

That, above all else, frightens him.