Guardian Angel // An Overwatch Fanfiction

Part 1: Recovery

He was still bleeding when they wheeled the gurney into the Watchpoint Jiangsu emergency ward at one in the morning. They had covered his body with a sheet that was now dark with blood. Doctor Angela Ziegler nearly dropped her cup of coffee when she saw the gurney and smelled the acrid stink of charred human flesh and hair. She set it down hastily on the counter and pulled on a pair of blue surgical gloves. God, help him. Oh God, please, my hands are shaking...

"How bad is it?" she murmured to one of the attendants as they locked the gurney into place and began prepping the equipment.

"Very. Extensive and severe burns on his entire lower body, from the ribs down, down to the bone on much of his legs. His right arm is missing from just below the shoulder joint, and he has multiple lacerations on his left arm, face, and possibly elsewhere on the body. Several broken ribs, and we also suspect that his spinal cord has been damaged somewhere below the thoracic vertebrae. Severe smoke inhalation as well; he's on a breathing tube currently. They pulled him straight out of a burning building."

Angela swallowed and nodded. Her throat was dry, and her pulse thundered in her skull. She turned from the attendant to the man on the gurney, and reached for the sheet. Her hand moved sluggishly into her field of view, as if it were another woman's hand, not her own, and gently, slowly, she pulled back the sheet to his waist. Angela bit her lip, took a deep breath, and slid into doctor mode. Yes, his right arm was missing, but his left arm and pectoral were intact, except for the lacerations. The rest of his chest and abdomen was a mess of charred flesh and dark, coagulating blood. The rise and fall of his chest was labored, unsteady. Even in the medical hum of the bright ward, she could hear the damp rasp in his throat as he sucked in another shuddering breath. In the back of her mind, she dimly noticed his wavy black hair, disheveled and tangled with dried blood against the pillow.

She pulled the sheet down the rest of the way, and let it drop to the floor.

His legs were so, so much worse. Another part of Angela's brain shut down, and the doctor part, the only part left, kicked into a higher gear. She turned to the attendant and began relaying instructions as fast as she could.

"You, prep an IV right away. Someone should have been doing that already. We need to get some electrolytes into him. Nurse, get me a surgical kit. We need to remove all the dead tissue as soon as possible before infection sets in. His..." She paused, licked her dry lips, set her jaw. "His legs will have to be amputated at once. The burns are too severe. Someone get a qualified surgeon." She turned and pointed another one of the attendants to the heavy briefcase that she'd left by the door. "Fetch me the nanobiotic fluid. I need you to dilute half of it with lactate solution and run it through a second IV. The rest goes into the three dispensers in the case. As soon as the burns on his chest are clear, I'll need you to apply a thin coating of the fluid. It will help the tissue regenerate."

They worked for hours. The attendants bustled around the gurney with IVs and antibiotics and fresh bandages, but Angela stood in nearly the same spot until her job was done, cutting away the charred tissue, patiently directing the anxious attendant to apply the nanobiotic fluid to each area as it was cleared, murmuring instructions to the nurse who was bandaging the wounds. When the surgeon came, he shook his head as soon as he saw the state of the man's body, but Angela pleaded with him in broken Mandarin, and with the assistance of one of the Chinese attendants, until he finally assented. "He says it's Overwatch's money you're throwing away on a doomed case, not his," the attendant told her apologetically. Angela hardly heard. The man had been put under with a quick injection after his retrieval, but two more IV lines were put into his arm as the surgeon prepped for his task; one for full anesthesia, and one for morphine.