[He frowns a little at the way Genji fires back, not that he didn't expect it. Jack knows that his words can only ring hollow, and he feels a little hollow, saying them, but this is what he can offer. His eyes flick to the way Genji's fingers curl into the metal of the table.
It's been twenty years (so he's had plenty of time to come to terms with it), and he's aware that it's not quite the same thing, but Jack knows what it's like to feel as though his body doesn't belong to him. In many ways, it still doesn't. He'll always be the product of the US military's vaguely unethical genetic experimentation, and he's hyper-cognizant of how that affects his very existence. For every person calling him the best of humanity and a triumph of science, there's another who thinks he shouldn't exist. Some of Overwatch's more increasingly vocal critics bring up the point that enhanced soldiers were a product of a very specific wartime, and that the US government can't have possibility accounted for what may or may not happen two decades later. That they exist now is dangerous, and who can know the long-term effects of their genetic alteration? That they could potentially become unstable. A threat.
Sometimes, on days when things between him and Reyes are particularly strained, and they seem particularly unsuited to handle the nuance of an ever-changing world in peacetime, he wonders if any of them were meant to outlast the war they were built for. What they're even trying to do, running an organization like this.
He remembers feeling it in more literal ways, too. Sick from injections and gene therapy. Breaking things without meaning to. Out of his mind with hypersensitivity. Jack was going to make this something about teamwork, but when all this comes to mind, he decides to take it in a different direction.]
You realize I'm a highly controversial government experiment, right?
[They don't usually phrase it like that, in Overwatch, but that's what he is. Jack isn't trying to make their situations comparable--he's just seizing on potential common ground, with the added bonus of letting Genji know that he's not going to sit around and take the kid's attitude.]
no subject
It's been twenty years (so he's had plenty of time to come to terms with it), and he's aware that it's not quite the same thing, but Jack knows what it's like to feel as though his body doesn't belong to him. In many ways, it still doesn't. He'll always be the product of the US military's vaguely unethical genetic experimentation, and he's hyper-cognizant of how that affects his very existence. For every person calling him the best of humanity and a triumph of science, there's another who thinks he shouldn't exist. Some of Overwatch's more increasingly vocal critics bring up the point that enhanced soldiers were a product of a very specific wartime, and that the US government can't have possibility accounted for what may or may not happen two decades later. That they exist now is dangerous, and who can know the long-term effects of their genetic alteration? That they could potentially become unstable. A threat.
Sometimes, on days when things between him and Reyes are particularly strained, and they seem particularly unsuited to handle the nuance of an ever-changing world in peacetime, he wonders if any of them were meant to outlast the war they were built for. What they're even trying to do, running an organization like this.
He remembers feeling it in more literal ways, too. Sick from injections and gene therapy. Breaking things without meaning to. Out of his mind with hypersensitivity. Jack was going to make this something about teamwork, but when all this comes to mind, he decides to take it in a different direction.]
You realize I'm a highly controversial government experiment, right?
[They don't usually phrase it like that, in Overwatch, but that's what he is. Jack isn't trying to make their situations comparable--he's just seizing on potential common ground, with the added bonus of letting Genji know that he's not going to sit around and take the kid's attitude.]