HOLY SHIT @wantonlywindswept Im all stressed out with college work so I didnt see your tags AHHHHHHHHH YESSS YESS GIVE ME THIS. listen. Thank you @lilized for showing me these wonderful tags.
WANTONLY GIVE ME MORE OF THAT GOOD ANGST JUICE.
LOOK POST-OVERWATCH JACK WOULD BE THE KING OF TRASH KINGS ALRIGHT THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS
Like, Gabe? I can see Gabe setting shit up in case something went wrong. An alias, a safehouse, a bank account under a different name. You deal in wetwork and secrets all the time like Blackwatch, you’re just gonna make sure you have a backup plan in place: it comes with the territory.
But media darling, civicly-owned-since-he-was-18 Jack? Not so sure about that. He went from (I’m guessing, given age) highschool right into the military, from the military to SEP, from SEP to the omnic strike team, from the strike team to Overwatch. It’s been decades since he’s had to look out for himself in that kind of fashion. Even in the SEP, undercover stuff would have been handled by other people. Living arrangements and income and personal presentation’s been dictated to him since he was a teenager; they’re not stuff he needs to think about anymore, and definitely not high up on the ‘pressing issues’ like it is for, you know, normal people.
Overwatch HQ explodes. Strike Commander Jack Morrison dies. And while Jack wants to keep his death as it is, that means he has no ties to his past life. No support system. And that makes it reeeeally hard to get with the whole vigilante lifestyle. Heck that and his injuries could be why it took him a couple years to pop back up on anyone’s radar (by stealing the pulse rifle) after the explosion.
….vigilante Jack Morrison with just a pair of normal 9mm handguns. Give me a sec, let me roll around in that mental image. Mmm.
Anyway. But yes, with the explosion Jack’s knocked down to brass tacks, and as it’s damnably hard just for normal people to bounce back from that kind of thing, it’s even harder with all the shit he needs. I imagine a mask of some sort/the visor was a pretty quick acquisition after the explosion, even if just in a very rudimentary form. His face is way too famous to keep uncovered. He needs weapons, ammo for the weapons, medical supplies since there’s no way he’s ever gonna go to an actual hospital. He needs information, which is usually bought. Transportation as he tracks people down.
And after all that, if there’s nothing left for food and a good place to sleep? Well, he puts what he considers necessities first.
(Also because, like, how in hell do you make money, Jack? Are you full-blown bounty hunter a la McCree? Do you take random side jobs for a couple months cleaning dishes? I can see him stealing money with weapons and tech from Bad Places and old Overwatch facilities, but I think a lot of the time his pride and battered integrity would keep him from flat-out stealing from regular people, or hunting a lot of ‘good’ people who get bounties put on them. And those big raids for tech/intel can’t be very common opportunities.)
Because post-explosion Jack just doesn’t care about himself. Beyond that, he doesn’t even like himself. At this point he’s just a tool to bring down the people who destroyed Overwatch, and he’ll make sure that he’s functioning but not much else.
One hard thing about that is he doesn’t know how long all of this will take. So for years he just does the bare minimum, sleeps in shitty abandoned buildings, eats far too little for someone with his metabolism and his level of activity. He can still fight because that’s what his body was engineered to do, but in the down times, when he’s not fighting or digging for clues, he’s pretty much just…there. A permanently exhausted, permanently starved trash king holed up in some dump just barely keeping it together one day after the other, alone with his bitterness and regrets.
And the blank, tired apathy that keeps him curled up on his bed for hours just trying to regain his energy? The hollow, gnawing pit in his stomach? If they’re a constant, painful reminder of the empty existence that he deserves after failing everyone so miserably–
Well.
They should be.
This reminds me of the Refuse/refuge series by @joasakura, I recommend it!
