My name is Matt Garetty and this is my story.

I grew up in Seattle, Washington, USA in an orphanage, but I had as normal a childhood as an orphan could. School, bullies, fights, friends, crushes, heartbreak. Like I said normal.

The start of a turning point in my life came when I turned 16. It was orphanage rules that when a kid became 16, they would have to leave the orphanage and fend for their own. Cruel, but unfortunately it's all the orphanage could do to keep itself open considering the amount of money they had and the number of kids to take care of.

Being grateful for the life the orphanage had given me, I gladly left, got a job, and stayed with some of the older orphans who had been out for a while. Of course, I still stayed in school and just worked part-time after school because I still wanted to go to college so I could do something with my life. I also wanted to give back to the orphanage that raised me, so getting a high-paying job was essential. But, as the saying goes, man plans and god laughs.

The next turning point in my life came when I was 17. I was in my senior year of high school and had good prospects lined up for college. I had received a few scholarships that amounted to enough for me to not worry about paying for tuition and books and would only have to pay for the place I stayed. Life was good.

I was walking home from my part-time job when I decided to stop at a nearby convenience store for a coke. As I walked out of the store, I heard the sound of a girl struggling in the alley. Walking over and taking a peek, I saw one of the girls from the orphanage was about to be r****d by two football players from my school. A couple of rich kids that did whatever they wanted because their parents were wealthy and connected.

Seeing that, I quietly took off my backpack, picked up a big rock nearby, and made my way to the two of them, who had their back turned to me. As soon as I was close enough, I swung the rock at the kid's head, cracking his skull open. Then the other one turned to me and saw that I had a rock full of blood and wanted to run away, but I didn't let him. I threw the rock at his back and managed to hit him in the neck, killing him.

Ignoring the two bodies, I gave the girl a hand and lifted her up before taking off my jacket and wrapping it around her shoulders. She thanked me for helping her but told me to run away before the cops came. I told her it didn't matter and told her to call the cops so she wouldn't be implicated, which she refused.

Unluckily for us, the owner of the convenience store had already called the cops and I was arrested shortly after. Taking into account the story and my perfect record, they gave me two options. The first was I went to jail for 15 years, and the other was I join the military. I took the second option, and the next day I was shipped off to the military.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, for me, I distinguished myself from the rest of my peers and was constantly first place in everything. Though it did lead to some of the other recruits becoming jealous of me, it didn't matter because I would put them in their place when we were doing CQC. Other than that, the military was okay. I thought I would get deployed someplace cushy overseas and never see combat. Then the Omnic Crisis began.

Omniums were factories made by Omnica Corporation that created robots that were meant for labor and other things, but one day, the shutdown omniums started pumping out military-grade robots that started revolting. Because of this, our deployment was struck down and we were sent to the frontlines, to defend our nation. And I shone.

My performance on the battlefield led me to get promotion after promotion before I ended up leading a small group of elite soldiers that would go from battlefield to battlefield helping wherever we were needed. Unfortunately, on one mission, a stray bullet from an Omnic caught one of my soldiers and that led to a domino effect of my soldiers getting taken out. Seeing my soldiers die was hard, but I had a job to do, so I finished it.

In the end, it was just me standing on top of a heap of Omnic parts. Staring at the sky through the blown-open ceiling, I just lay there thinking about my life. Then that's when I heard a call come in through my coms.

"This is Overwatch, we're here to help."

Overwatch was a United Nations-led strike team that operated all around the world trying to end the Omnic Crisis. And apparently, I had impressed whoever led the team because they put in for my transfer, but before that, I was given the opportunity to enter the Soldier Enhancement Program, which I gladly took. They also told me that the criminal record that had been sealed once I joined the military was expunged, making the whole thing go away.

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1 month later, I was officially a part of Overwatch, and I was now stronger, faster, and smarter than ever which led to me quickly rising in the ranks before entering the inner circle of Overwatch. What that meant was I led a team and I had enough voice in Overwatch to be important, but I still fell under the command of the Overwatch Strike Commander, Gabriel Reyes, and his second-in-command Jack Morrison. That's not to say we were at odds with one another, no it was quite the opposite, we were friends, in an older brother kind of way.

We had developed a friendship over the months and nothing builds a bond like fighting on the frontlines with your life on the line. Though I was better friends with Reyes than Morrison, maybe because we both knew that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty if you want things to get better. Still, though, I was good friends with all of them, including Amari, Reinhardt, Torb, and Mina.

But on the war side of things, about 2 years after I joined, we had finally managed to strike at the omnic command and control structure rendering the majority of the omnic armies inert. Which meant the Omnic Crisis was finally over. And I thought that meant I was done with the military and Overwatch, but the UN decided to make Overwatch a peacetime organization, making Jack the Strike Commander.

That didn't mean Reyes was out. He had convinced Jack to let him lead a covert operations arm of Overwatch that he called Blackwatch, which would operate under the radar and beyond the reach of any red tape. And Reyes had asked me to be his second-in-command for Blackwatch, which I accepted. But I told him, the moment our mission changed from doing whatever it took to keep the world safe, the moment it seemed like we were dirty, I was out.

From that moment on, Reyes and I began undertaking the dirty missions that Overwatch wasn't allowed or able to handle which included but were not limited to assassination, espionage, torture, and even on one occasion, a coup. Of course, everything was above board for Reyes and Jack, but no one else, but the founding members of Overwatch knew since it was on a need-to-know basis.

Anyway, fast forward a few years, and we were doing a sting operation on the Deadlock Gang which had been running weapons and military hardware throughout the United States. After a tough fight against them, we had them all locked up and dead to rights. But, I saw talent in one of them, Cole Cassidy, who was a real sharpshooter with a revolver. So, I gave him the option of either rotting in jail forever or joining Blackwatch, he chose the latter.

Initially, he was cynical of Blackwatch but over time he came to believe he could make amends for the sins of his past by righting the injustices of the world. He also appreciated that we weren't hindered by bureaucracy or red tape, which I agreed with. I had seen how Overwatch wasn't allowed to do certain operations because of red tape and I knew I would be frustrated if I was in Jack's position.

The next turning point in my life came 2 years after Cassidy had joined Blackwatch. We were in Europe, tracking a lead on Talon, a particularly annoying terrorist group we had been fighting for years when we walked into a scene of dead terrorists. On alert, we searched the area before I got into a fight with a figure that kept disappearing and reappearing all over the place.

Luckily I was able to catch it with a glancing blow and take a look at the figure. And I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. Thankfully, she got distracted by me as well so it gave me the opportunity to see that she was wearing a pendant that I had seen before on Reinhardt.

After talking to her, we came to know her name was Ciri and she was part of a group of vigilantes that operated in and around Germany. And she got the pendant from the man who had taken care of her as a child who turned out to be Reinhardt.

One tearful reunion with Reinhardt later, and she was now part of Blackwatch. As to why she joined Blackwatch and not Overwatch, after being a vigilante with no one to stop her from getting rid of the bad guys, she didn't want to experience red tape. A few months into her being in Blackwatch, we came to be lovers but kept it both professional and secret from the rest of the squad for as long as possible.

Then a few years later, we inducted another member into Blackwatch, Genji Shimada of the Shimada Clan of Japan. Apparently, he had been nearly killed by his brother who succeeded the clan but was saved last minute by Dr. Ziegler, who was the head of Overwatch's medical research. But this gave Blackwatch an operative who would gladly lead missions against the Shimada clan.

A few months after Genji was brought into Blackwatch, Reyes told me that he wanted to bring someone else into the fold. A formerly renowned geneticist by the name of Moira O'Deorian who was formerly renowned because of a paper she published that tanked her reputation. But, Reyes believed she had potential and wanted to fund her research while having her develop weapons and tech for us. While I was initially skeptical, I saw little downside to it, the downside being she seemed like someone that would work for whoever was funding her research.

Still, shortly after joining, she wanted to conduct an experiment that if successful would skyrocket her research forward. Initially, Reyes was going to do it, but I volunteered, much to both his and Ciri's displeasure. But after standing firm, they relented and I was experimented on by Moira which led to me becoming full of nanites that I could control at will, allowing me to reshape my body with them and interact with nearly any tech imaginable.

And that's my story so far.

~

"So, that's my backstory here, huh? I like it." I said as I finished experiencing my backstory.