rlyc00l

[rlyc00l]

Rhys fumbles his way into being a hero, which sucks, but at least he has soap now. Axton is kind of hot if you're into incredibly divorced 26 year old adult men who keep saying "Cool story bro" Zer0 is so nice to Rhys. They're helping him so much. He doesn't even know.

Also under the cut:

“Look, these are two fresh human heads, not even a day old. Buy one, get the other half-off. How often are you going to come across a deal like this?” Rhys never thought this was where a life of pursuing business would take him.  But the former Lanceman who paid out the bounties only looked at the heads with disgust and refused to take them. He at least paid out half the bounty, and was kind enough to suggest they try Doctor Zed’s clinic. 

Zed’s was easy to find, which was a relief, as Zer0 had insisted that he continue to carry the head they’d given him, despite having room in their storage deck. They made no secret of enjoying his discomfort, with their stupid smug sideways smiley faces. Even knowing how unhinged people on this planet were, lugging around a human head made Rhys feel like a freak. Enough so that he was almost relieved to enter the clinic and find it grungy, dimly lit and splattered in blood and viscera– it made selling this thing seem reasonable. He just hoped he’d never need medical attention while he was down here. 

“And how’d you say you killed ‘em?” the “doctor”, Zed, asked. The man matched his workspace, he wouldn’t look out of place as the killer in a horror movie. 

“Zer0 here decapitated them both—quick, clean strokes. Instant death.” Rhys assumed this was the sort of kill a mad scientist would want. Zer0 lurked behind him, holding up both heads for display. They’d agreed to let him do the talking and hadn’t even fought him on his ten percent commission. 

“Hmm… I don’t have anything in the works that needs a head…” Zed rubbed his chin with a gloved hand, leaving a streak of blood on his medical mask.

“Right, but what about when you do need them? You gonna settle for some random bandit’s head? These are Hyperion heads here, that guarantees they had a great diet, no major head trauma, no history of eridium use.”

“I’ll admit, it is tempting.” 

Rhys gave his winning grin. “Trust me, I’ve worked for Hyperion, they may be a bunch of assholes, but they take care of their employees’ heads. You won’t find better.”  “Do they stuff all of yer heads with those cybernetics?” He stepped closer, plainly studying Rhys’s head, now. 

“N-no. That’s optional.” Rhys couldn’t help but notice the buzzaxe leaned against the medical cart, within Zed’s arm’s reach. He hoped all the blood in this place had been just from cutting apart cadavers, but now that he was considering it, would a corpse’s blood spatter that way?  

“I admit… Was kinda curious about the effect those had on a human brain…” 

“Oh, well, I can’t guarantee whether they have cy-cybernetics or not, but...”  He resisted the urge to take a step back. Keeping up the confident facade was getting difficult. 

 “They will sell fast, / Many others expressed interest. / Time is limited,” Zer0 cut in unexpectedly. 

He forced himself to smile and nod. “Yeah, and…” He floundered for another selling point. Usually he was good at this. Usually the client wasn’t some sort of axe murderer. 

“You know the rumors, / Of Hyperion’s workers, / Forced to be robots.”

“Exactly.” Rhys was quick on the uptake. “They start with small implants, stuff we’d never even notice them putting into us. Some guys up on Helios are walking around with more metal than brain matter. There’s a good chance that one of these heads here has at least a chip or two in it.”   Zed considered this for a moment. “Oh, what the hell? I’ll take ‘em!” 

When they got outside again he was half tempted to thank Zer0 for their help. Maybe he would have even complimented them on their sales tactics. Thankfully, they destroyed that urge immediately, “When you end up dead, / I’ll know what to do with you, / It seems he’ll pay well.” They projected a winky face. 

“That’s not funny,” he said, thrusting their cut of the money out at them. “And despite what you may think, I don’t plan on dying here.” 

Zer0 pocketed the money without looking at it, shot him a red glowing “LOL”, and walked away. He wished he would have taken a larger percentage, if they didn’t even care enough to check. Maybe it was them who robbed him in the first place…  

Between the bounty and the heads, the money proved to be enough to buy everything he needed, from toiletries to a basic storage deck holster. Even a second outfit and a quick-change subscription. Sanctuary’s prices were far better than Helios’s, though the clothes here were used and sported some suspicious stains, and everything else was off-brand and of questionable quality. Even the soap smelled vaguely wrong. 

He split up what little money remained and tucked part of it in his insoles. The rest went in the storage deck. He’d have to find a way to make more before he ran out of food money, unless he wanted to live off of old Atlas MREs, which he didn’t. 

For now, Rhys returned to the Archives to stow what he couldn’t fit into his storage deck and give himself some quiet to write up a report to Jack. The place was still deserted, the other Vault hunters must have been out searching for leads on Roland. Fruitlessly, he hoped. Or maybe they’d find a corpse, that would destroy the Raider’s morale.

He sat down on his bed and began to draft out a message, trying to present his mission to Southpaw as if it hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Any correspondence with Jack couldn’t seem like a waste of time, Jack’s time was valuable. Millions of dollars every minute valuable. 

But, really, all he’d gained there was proof that Wot was insane, unreliable, and dead. Rhys tried to fill in the gaps by highlighting his own value, how he’d made himself appear useful to the Vault hunters–scratch that, the bandits, Jack would prefer they be called “bandits”–and how that could be used to Hyperion’s advantage. “They trust me, they’re willing to rely on my ECHOeye. I could use that to lead them right into a trap, if you had one in mind. I have a few ideas of my own, I might be able to hack some of their systems. Gaige uses a homemade bot and Axton’s turret’s security is probably way out of date, if I hacked either of thos–” 

His writing was interrupted by a bright flash and a boom, coming from the center of the room. One second, everything had been still, now papers were flying everywhere, and the floor was slightly on fire, rimming a scorched circle. In the center lay a blood-covered, slightly smoking human figure. 

Stunned, Rhys deactivated his ECHOeye, stood up, and approached cautiously. The woman was skinny, red haired, and blue-tattooed. And still breathing. 

Okay, so maybe Wot wasn’t completely out of his mind.She sure as hell resembled the villain in that  “Liberation of New Haven” reenactment on the ECHOnet, except, smaller and less sinister. 

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked, prodding her with the very tip of his foot, ready to leap away if she moved or started another fire. Her lack of response was unsurprising, there was a lot of blood.  

For a long moment, he just stared at her, expecting something to happen. For her to get up, or disappear again, or burst into flames. Instead, she just lay there. 

He glanced at the door. It remained firmly shut, no one else had come running to investigate the sound. Without their Commander around, no one really had a reason to show up here in the middle of the day, did they? So, he was alone with Hyperion’s greatest enemy, back from the dead, and she was helpless. Opportunity had just up and landed in his lap. 

The thing to do–the thing Handsome Jack would want him to do–would be to kill her before she woke up. All he had to do was smother her with a pillow or something, and pretend she’d arrived here only to die of her wounds. Though, smothering was a bit personal, too hands-on�� His stun baton was charged up again, that might be enough to kill her… Or he could just keep his mouth shut, and wait, she might die on her own. Could he still take credit for that? Jack would want him to take initiative… Okay, fine, he could do the stun baton. His hand found it at his belt. He grasped it, making no move. 

Lilith was scrawny, not a muscle on her. For someone fabled to have burned countless people alive for fun, she didn’t look dangerous. And she certainly wasn’t dangerous right now, which was more reason to seize the moment and kill her. It would be so easy, he could take off her shield first to be sure, returning it when he was done. 

She wouldn’t feel a thing, right? 

And he’d already killed at least five bandits, each time feeling nothing but a sense of victory, what was the problem now? It wasn’t like he’d be a murderer, this was war.  

He managed to get as far as touching the stun baton to the side of her head. He couldn’t make himself push the button to activate it. Kicking himself for cowardice, he turned around and searched up a first aid kit on the wall. Inside, there was a single insta-health, maybe enough to stabilize her. Again, he hesitated. It was one thing not to kill her, another altogether to save her. Still, he found himself jabbing the needle into her arm. Then he ran out of the building to find help. 

———

Afterward, when Lilith, still unconscious, was being taken care of at Zed’s, Rhys ducked out of the clinic, onto the street and finally messaged Handsome Jack. “Lilith is alive and just appeared in Sanctuary.” For the moment, Southpaw was unimportant. 

Jack’s response took a while. “Thought she’d show herself, now that Roland’s missing. She say anything about that?” He sounded pleased, but unsurprised. 

“She’s injured, she’s been unconscious since getting here.” 

Jack laughed. “The Bloodshots must have done a number on her. If she wakes up, she’ll put you on Roland’s trail. Let me know when that happens—I’m gonna need the Vault hunters out of Sanctuary for a few hours.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“Oh, and I don’t need the intel from those assassins anymore. They’re probably smoking husks at this point. Also, I have a surprise for you, coming up. Like, a perk. You’re gonna love it.” 

“Thank you, sir. I’m looking forward to it.” If he even deserved perks, at this rate. He’d even walked with the Crimson Raider’s carrying Lilith to the clinic, watched as Tannis injected her with a syringe of eridium. More because he felt obliged to at that point than anything else, what with the soldiers already praising him for his “quick actions”. But it made him look like even more of a traitor to Hyperion. He sighed, feeling deeply tired as he started toward the Archives. The sun was down, and there wasn’t much he could do now but hope no one else found out. 

“Hey, if it isn’t the hero of the hour!” Axton’s voice shattered this hope before Rhys had cleared town square. A second later he was being clapped on the back. “Nice job, man.” “I-” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. He turned to see Axton, Maya, Salvador, and Krieg. The four were grimy with sweat, dirt, and dried blood, they must have just gotten back into town. “I hardly did anything, to be honest. Just-just was in the right place at the right time, y’know?” 

“And maybe saved the entire Pandoran resistance,” Maya said. “That’s more than we managed today.” 

“Yeah, don’t gotta be fake humble, dude,” said Salvador.  

“Flagellate your principal!” Krieg gave a barking laugh and clapped Rhys on the back about three times harder than Axton had, almost knocking him over.  

“C’mon, we’re headed to Moxxi’s,” Axton said. “I’m sure we could get you a free drink or two. In celebration, or whatever.”

“Is it really a night to be celebrating anything? She’s uh, she’s still hospitalized, and Roland’s missing…” Honestly, though, a drink sounded good about now. 

Axton shrugged. “Look, in the past couple days, I’ve survived an exploding train, fractured my skull, took nearly ten bullet wounds, and got mauled by a skag. Situations like this, you gotta take the chances you get. Also, it’s Friday.” 

———

Rhys had never been so miserable getting free drinks while random strangers occasionally approached to tell him how lucky it was that he was around. How the hell did everyone already know? At this rate, news of his “heroism” was bound to reach Jack eventually. If it hadn’t already. Maybe Jack’s “surprise” was a bullet to the head. Or worse, Jack had some creative ways of killing people. This could be the sort of thing where they’d still be finding his body parts a decade from now when he was a cautionary tale: the stupid jackass who was too soft to kill a mass murderer and win the war for Jack, after Jack had trusted him… 

The other Vault hunters had quickly lost interest in his dour company and he snuck off and find a couch in a quiet corner, going mostly unnoticed by the other patrons. This should have been a bar on Helios. These should be Hyperion employees celebrating him… 

He should march right back to Zed’s, shoot Lilith, and flee town. He had a better chance of surviving the Pandoran wilds than surviving Jack, for what little that meant… He sat there brooding until Axton found him again and took it upon himself to lift his spirits. “What’s a good looking guy like you doing in the sad loser corner?” he’d asked, and soon he was on the couch beside him, regaling Rhys with anecdotes from his life as a Dahl soldier.  

At some point, Axton had slung an arm over his shoulder. Rhys leaned into him, he was completely willing to see where this ended up. Axton might be former Dahl, current bandit, and the sort of divorced guy to wear his ex-wife’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck, but hey, there were worse distractions. And fine, he was hot if you ignored about seventy percent of his personality. Or if you’ve had a couple drinks and needed not to think about anything other than how Jack would kill you.  

“So we’re fighting Vladof on Hestias, and they assign us to protecting this local dign-digni-dignit… VIP. He’s gotta dumb name, like, Jeppery Hands or something? Jepps. Guy’s a total douchebag, he insists on being addressed as ‘my lord’.” “What, like he’s in Bunkers and Badasses or something?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” Axton laughed. “He was really serious about it, nade his servants bow to him and everything? Yeah, he had actual servants and everything.”

“Is that kind of thing normal on Hestias?” 

“Nope. He was a total jackass…We called him Jazz Hands and it would make him so mad…” He broke off into a laugh. “So, Jepps is small time local government, no one really needs the prick, but he was in Dahl’s pocket, and they didn’t wanna have to find a new guy, I guess. And there was this rebel group Vladof was funding, right? They wanted him dead. So, of course Dahl brass decides we gotta keep him alive, protect him at all costs, you know how corps get? They’re all ‘We lose this shitty backwater and your whole squad gets…Gets the firing squad.’” 

“Yeah, sounds about right.” He tried not to think about that too hard. He was supposed to be focusing on being charming and engaged until Axton started making out with him, or whatever. Not on the various ways Jack might execute him.

“Yeah, I bet… Jeez, Hyperion must…They must be pissed at you. Especially after Lilith, imagine the look on Jack’s creepy mask-face when he finds out. Damn, knowing what I know now, wish I’d tried outright treason when I still had the chance…” 

“Oh, yeah… It’s…” Rhys took a long drink. Whatever this stuff was, it managed to be both overly sweet and slightly rancid, and it burned like drain cleaner. Normally, he’d take this as a warning not to keep drinking it. “So, uh, this Jepps guy?”

“Yeah, Jebbs. Total asshole. My squad’s getting killed at every turn trying to keep this dude safe. And like I said, Vladof’s been funding this-this rebel group, the ones who are after Jebbs, and we know they have a base out somewhere, but here’s the thing: that part of Hestias is a shitton of jungle, giant trees blocking out the sun, toxic clouds, man-eating plants everywhere, these monsters with con-concentric-concen…teeth in a bunch of circles, like, whirlpools of teeth, you know those things?” 

He nodded absently when he realized Axton paused. With his thoughts on the Lilith issue again, it was getting hard to follow Axton’s story. He wondered how protected she’d be in Zed’s clinic. Maybe he could still fix this. What if he poisoned her? Less hands-on that way. 

“I saw a guy get blended by one of those things once, it was nasty…” Axton trailed off briefly. “...Where was I?” 

“Uh…” There was a ton of eridium on Pandora… Eridium poisoning was a thing, right? 

“Oh, right. Hestias. Yeah, the jungle there is almost as much of a death trap as this place. And the rebels are hiding out there. Hestias is a real hellhole in general, so…” Axton went on, but Rhys forgot he was trying to be engaged and charming. 

Wait, no, eridium wouldn’t work, that’s how Tannis healed her…  How’d they poison the Atlas CEO? Oh right, Axton. 

“So I put a tracker on Jazz Hands, and we ditch him in rebel territory. The enemy captures him, and takes him straight to their big secret base.” Axton laughed, and Rhys figured he should laugh too, here. “So, we get like twenty bots, load them up with explosives, and send them after the guy. Boom! I end a three-year-long conflict overnight, and no more Jebbs–Jepps–Jazz hands.” 

“Wow.” He’d already forgotten where this story had even started. …Using someone else to solve his problem, though… There was an idea…

“Of course, since I did it the ‘wrong way’ Dahl got pissed. And then, after Tantalus, where I…” He could hire an assassin. Probably. Someone like Zer0. Except not Zer0, because they were a huge asshole. And they wouldn’t do it. 

“...which eventually led to my dishonorable discharge and order for my execution, but hey, it was goddamn awesome.” 

Huh. There was a single person in this city who was absolutely sympathetic to Rhys’s cause, and he was still tied up in the gun store. A trained soldier, just like Axton. 

When there was a long pause he realized that Axton had finished his story. He gave what he hoped was a charming, engaged grin. “Sounds like it.” Damn, Axton had some cool scars. Really added something to his whole face…area. “So… You’ve been doing this whole, uh, this whole action hero thing for a while, then?”

“Ten years,” Axton said with a sly grin. “Why? You into the whole action hero thing?”

“I’m open to finding out.” 

Axton’s face was inches away from Rhys’s, now. Rhys started to close the distance, when an epiphany hit him: Marcus’s would be closed, right now. No one would be there. Except that soldier. 

“I-I’m gonna be right back,” Rhys said, rising suddenly from his seat, spilling the rest of his drink on Axton’s lap. “Sorry! I-I gotta do a thing.”

———

Zer0 didn’t return to Sanctuary until it was well past dark, taking the fast travel into Pierce station. 

It would be too late to get payment from Hammerlock, they’d have to wait until tomorrow. He’d given them several bullymong-related jobs and they’d knocked them all out in one go, in the process experimenting with methods to quickly dispatch the ugly beasts with both blade and gun. Now they were an expert, and the bullymong population outside the city was cut in half—and a fourth of that was literally. 

All in all, a productive day. They were already in a good mood when they saw the Hyperion, shuffling down the street outside the station. He, of course, failed to notice them. 

The Hyperion had yet to prove boring, Zer0 thought he might even be as entertaining as someone could be, outside of a fight. Whatever he was up to, they wanted to see it play out. They followed.

Rhys ended up at Marcus’ Munitions, the store shut tight for the night. They heard an “Ugh” as he tried the door, found it locked, and switched to his cybernetic arm.  He cursed loudly when the door handle snapped off.

Zer0 chose now to speak up, taking the last few steps to put themself next to him. He smelled of alcohol. “What are you doing?”  

He flinched, dropping the door handle. It clanged on the sidewalk. “What are you doing?” He demanded. “Are-are you seriously, actively stalking me?!” 

They put a finger to his mouth to shush him. The “stalking” accusation wasn’t new. Usually it was true, and the accuser was seconds from death. “You were quite noisy. / Curiosity gripped me. / Are you robbing him?” 

“No! Why would I do that?”

“Because you are drunk. / Your judgement, inhibited. /  Perhaps it seemed fun.” 

“I’m not drunk, and I wasn’t going to steal anything, okay? I-I was gonna-” He paused, looking back at the street. “I was gonna kill the Hyperion soldier in there.”

 “Really?” They tilted their head. This guy was full of surprises.

“Not because I’m like-like you or anything. I’m not a murder-happy psychopath.” 

“Of course not.” Zer0 projected a “>:(”. They’d been trying to be nice to him all day, but he was making it hard not to be a little bit petty. True, they enjoyed killing as much as the next assassin, but there was an artistry to their kills that was missing from the average merc’s.  

“This-It’s just basic human decency. You people are torturing him down there. Someone’s gotta take things into their own hands and step up and fix that… You hear how I’m a hero now? That sort of thing is the heroic thing to do.”

“Is that what they say?” They wondered how he’d gotten that idea. Betraying Hyperion would put him in the same category as that Claptrap, wouldn’t it? No one was calling Claptrap a hero. “...Fair enough.” With a slide of their hand they digistructed four kunai and carefully selected one imbued with the corrosive element. That, they jammed into the edge of the door, next to where the handle had been. The Hyperion watched in confusion until the metal began to melt around it. 

“You’re helping me?” He sounded far from grateful.

“You clearly need it,” they said with a smiley. “You’re likely to get caught, alone. / Now, keep your voice down.” 

He hesitated, staring at them in disbelief, then gave a defeated “Okay. Sure.”  

They opened the door once the acid had done its work, then stepped aside. “Use your ECHOeye. / He may have security. / An alarm, or worse.” 

He stood there blinking for a moment while the ECHOeye flickered on. “I don’t see anything.” He started to walk in, Zer0 stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. 

“Go forward slowly. / Keep scanning in—”

“Can you not?!”  He hissed, turning on them and stumbling on the first step. They caught his arm before he could fall. 

“You are much too loud,” they said, projecting an extra-bright “LOL” in his face. If he was going to be so hostile, they were going to have fun with it. 

“You can go now, you know?” he hissed, shaking them off. “Thanks for getting me in, but I don’t need help.” 

“I would like to watch.” 

“That’s really weird.” 

“You may find yourself grateful. / When you mess this up.” He would absolutely mess this up. The only question was how far they’d let it go. They needed him alive, and it was probably better he didn’t completely despise them. Beyond that, though… 

Rhys just sighed, looking around the room. His ECHOeye hadn’t flickered back on, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. They grabbed his shoulder again when he started toward the range. “Before you go in. / I want to know your intent. / How will you kill him?”

He pulled away. “I… I was thinking I’d shoot him a few times and run for it?”  

“He wears a good shield. / You will need to bypass that. / And silence is best.” 

“Uh huh. What do you suggest?” 

They lifted their sword. “In the throat, perhaps. / Or, you could just strangle him. / He’s safely restrained.” They expected him to balk at the suggestion, but he surprised them once again by grabbing for the sword. They pulled it out of his reach, flashing him another smiley as he stumbled. Then they handed it to him. “Don’t hurt yourself.” 

In the range, the soldier was still tied to the target, fast asleep. Rhys had to clamber clumsily over the counter to get in melee range. There he lined up the blade with the soldier’s throat, froze, lowered the sword, and squeezed past the soldier to cut his binds on the back of the target mount. 

“That’s a risky choice,” Zer0 observed, leaning casually forward on the counter to watch. It was what they would have done, if they’d cared enough to kill this guy. Give him a fighting chance. 

“I-I’m not killing a helpless man.” He fumbled with the sword, not confident enough to cut the bonds with one clean stroke, and lacking the control to easily saw through them.  The soldier’s breathing was unsteady, his face a little too tense. He was fake sleeping, Zer0 realized. Rhys didn’t realize this. 

“He might wake Marcus.” 

He ignored that. 

“He’s doomed anyway.”

He ignored that too. 

“Watch out,” they warned as he finished cutting the bonds. The soldier leapt to his feet and turned on the unprepared Rhys, who scrambled backward, holding the sword out in front of him unsteadily. The soldier eyed him with wild desperation, looking for an opening. Of course, the guy wanted a weapon first. 

“You’d best finish it,” Zer0 said. They doubted the soldier had been trained to face a sword, unarmed, and there wasn’t a lot of room for him to maneuver—in lieu of the usual painted lines on the floor, each lane was divided by waist-high concrete barriers. Even a complete novice should have been able to stab him, this was a training wheels situation.

“Can you shut up?” Rhys shot back. “You’re not helping.”

“What is the problem?” 

“I can’t do this,” he hissed, barely keeping the sword lined up with his foe. It swayed in his hand, either from fear or inebriation. Maybe both. 

 “You’ve never stabbed anyone?” They feigned shock. 

“Of course not!” 

“You’re new to killing?”  

“Is that surprising?” 

“The Hyperion?”  

“We weren’t all stabbing each other in the back! Some of us got by on charisma!” He seemed to have forgotten he was trespassing, he was being much too loud.  “Now’s a decent time to learn. / Use the pointy end.” 

The soldier gave up on acquiring the sword, instead springing over the divider to his right, sprinting for the counter, and diving over it. Zer0 cloaked just in time to trip him on the way out the door. Two shots in the head, and it was done. 

“What the—?! Who’s there?!” they heard Marcus call from somewhere further back in the store. 

They activated Decepti0n a second time, and watched Rhys. Predictably, he panicked, abandoning the sword as he threw himself over the counter, fell on his face, got back to his feet, and ran for it. 

Zer0 calmly picked up their sword and left, hearing Marcus make it to the range as they were headed up the stairs. “Son of a bitch!” 

They found Rhys again leaning against Pierce Station, catching his breath. 

“That will be your death,” they said, projecting a frowny face at him. “You are soft, indecisive. / Both traits are fatal.” 

“Yep, kind of getting that.” He slid down the wall into a sit, balling up his hands in his hair. “If you’re gonna gloat, could you do it somewhere else?” 

“I am not gloating.” They were, a little. “And you will get mugged, like this. / Hurry and get up.” 

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Jack…Jack’s gonna kill me anyway.” When he looked up at them, his eyes were watering, and they regretted following him here. If he ended up outright crying, they’d leave.

“Probably not Jack. / I was thinking of bandits. / Or perhaps skag pups.” 

He gave a bitter laugh. “Thanks.” 

“How drunk are you?” 

“What?”  “Can you make it home?” They couldn’t just leave him here to have his ECHOeye dug out of his head by enterprising scavengers, they needed him in one piece. 

“Yeah. I… That… Pandoran drinks are goddamn poison, but… I’m fine.” He got to his feet, wobbling a little. “I’m fine…” 

“Come on, I will walk with you,” they decided. “So you’ll live longer.” 

[rlyc00l]

Zer0 and Rhys both try to play nice, for their own ends, to varying degrees of success. Gaige is mostly just trying to do her job.

Also under the cut:

The Archives were empty when Rhys woke. It was still dim, all the windows shuttered against the sun, but his ECHOeye put the time near 11 AM–he’d slept in. Must have been the last few days of travel and fighting catching up with him. Back on Helios, he’d rarely slept past seven. The mattress was hard and the covers threadbare, but he was sore all over and reluctant to step out into the cold room. Of course, if Jack knew he was dawdling in bed this long, he’d probably strangle him. He sat up with a groan. This would all be worth it when he had his turbomansion,

Beside the bed, he found the clothing he’d put in the wash the night before, dry and folded neatly. A sealed bag of Atlas instant rations sat on top, along with a neatly printed note: “Hurry and get up. I will be at the gun shop. 

While I wait for you.

-0” 

Zer0’s sense of entitlement would put Rhys’s higher-ups back on Helios to shame. He started to put the vest on, only to realize how strange this was. Why hadn’t they woken him? In his short time knowing Zer0, they’d shown little evidence that they could be considerate. Finishing his laundry? Folding it? Remembering the boat ride, he suspiciously sniffed at the vest, then his jacket. Emptying a stun baton on them seemed more worthy of revenge than Axton’s mild teasing. Both items of clothing smelled only of “Aquator Fresh” laundry detergent, an odor that did nothing worse than bring out just how bad the rest of him was starting to stink. Okay, today’s #1 goal: Fix that. Make some money, somehow. Keep an eye out for showers. 

The bag of rations appeared fine, too. Untampered with, and according to the label, it didn’t even expire for another month (though the Atlas branding pointed to it being at least 5 years old). 

“Hey, AI girl? You around?” he ventured. Silence. Of course, the AI wasn’t constantly listening in, waiting to be called on. That was probably for the best. 

“My name’s Angel, for the record,” her voice answered, just as Rhys was beginning to feel foolish. 

“Oh, okay. Hi, Angel.” 

“Hey. Did you want something?” 

“Yeah, Zer0 didn’t do anything weird, did they?” 

“They talk in haiku and sleep in their helmet, you’re gonna need to be more specific.” “They’re not trying to poison me, are they?” He held up the bag of rations, in case she was watching. He hoped she wasn’t.  

“I don’t think you have to worry about that.” There was something like amusement in her voice. “They’ve been waiting for you, at Marcus’s. I think they’re trying to be nice. It may be a peace offering?”

“Uh huh…” More likely, they were trying to hurry him. Better than a second kidnapping attempt, but not enough to change his mind about helping them. He wondered how long they’d wait if he made a point of avoiding this “Marcus’s”. He tore open the meal packaging. “So, you witnessed them do this?” 

“There’s security cameras all over town, I can interface with whatever I need to and pull up the archived footage.” 

“Huh. So you’ve hacked into everything?” He remembered seeing her face when he’d collapsed, before. That was before Jack had contacted him, but if she had hacked him, she could do it again.

“Not everything. Otherwise, I wouldn’t need Vault hunters to stop Jack.”

“How are you talking to me?” He tried to act casual, finding an empty desk to set out the components of the Atlas rations on. A fork, a packet of powdery “eggs”, another packet with crumbled hard bits of “bacon”, and a stale oatmeal bar on the side. Gross, but he was hungry. He looked around for a sink.

“It’s…Complicated. I’m not equipped to explain, I’m powered by Eridium, made with ancient Eridian technology. The Eridians blurred the line between the machine and organic, you know?” It was the kind of answer someone who was hiding something would give. 

“Fair enough,” Rhys said. Did Jack know about her? Who even made her? Why? He found a sink and filled the ration packets up to the marked lines. With water mixed in, the substance inside vaguely resembled food. “Hey, is there a place around here where I can get a shower?”  

“I’m not exactly here to be your concierge, you know. But there are public showers next door. Anything else?” 

“No. Thanks for the help.” 

———

The chill air bit at him worse as he ventured back out with wet hair, but it was nice to be semi-clean (he’d had to make do without soap or shampoo). While he’d showered he’d drafted his message to Jack, “The Vault hunters have an E-tech-powered AI helping them. It claims to have access to most technology on the planet. I think it’s spying on Hyperion operations, but it doesn’t seem to suspect me.” Rereading it a few times, and agonizing over whether to include his suspicion that she had hacked him (he decided against it, it was too risky) he sent it now. 

Jack’s reply was immediate. “Oh, yeah, I know all about Angel. Don’t worry about her. She’s being handled.”

Well, that dampened his spirits. He’d really thought he’d uncovered a major Raider secret.

“Anyway, I got a job for you,” Jack’s voice played in his head as he left the Archives. “One of the Vault hunters just picked up a mission from Sanctuary’s Bounty Board, gonna need you to go with them.” 

“Ok. What kind of mission?” “These Raider doofuses finally realized I had a couple of spy-slash-assassins pretending to be local bandits and keeping tabs on Sanctuary. They put a bounty on their heads.” “So you want me to save them, then?” 

Jack laughed. “After they screwed up badly enough to get themselves noticed? Hell, the Raiders are saving me bullets. All you gotta do is check their bodies for any intel they didn’t send.” This was a message, Rhys realized. Jack was making a point: if Rhys failed or got caught, he was on his own. It was unnecessary, he had no intention of failing, but still, he could appreciate Jack’s tactics, here. He’d yet to prove himself, after all.

“Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it,” he replied, deciding to feel honored that Jack cared enough to warn him personally.

There was a bounty board not far from the Archives, in town square. A digital bulletin board for hitmen, mercenaries, and their employers. There was one back on Helios, rumored to be used by the handful of freelance agents on Jack’s payroll. Anyone could post a hit job against fellow employees on it–the trouble was not getting caught in the act. He’d never seen anyone touch it, nor had it ever been lit up with new jobs like this one. There was a single listing, posted by Commander Roland himself: “Assassination job: Southpaw Steam and Power. Four targets.” Someone had already signed up for it–the bounty board protected the names of mercenaries, but it had to be Zer0. This would be the job Angel told them about last night. Defeated, Rhys added his own name. He’d have to find that gun shop after all. 

He must have done a pretty good job of looking like an actual, legitimate Vault hunter, or at least someone who belonged in Sanctuary. No one bothered him as he wandered the city’s streets, pretending he wasn’t lost. Or maybe he simply didn’t look worth stealing from, Pandorans wouldn’t recognize designer skag leather shoes even if they weren’t caked with dried mud. A few people eyed him as he passed before returning to their business, uninterested.

Finally, he found the shop: Marcus’s Munitions. He recognized the name, Marcus Kinkaid was a licensed vendor of Hyperion guns, he even had a place on Helios. 

Gunshots rang out as he approached the store. The sound barely phased him now. Some planets had the cries of wildlife, Pandora had ever-present distant gunshots and sometimes not-so-distant gunshots. These, at least, didn’t sound like a fight, too rhythmic. The sounds stopped just before he went inside. 

The front area was empty of people, no one even manned the cash register. Off to the side was an open room labeled “Shooting Range”. A voice came from beyond the entry: “See, if you really want to break a shield, one of these Maliwans I got in will do the trick.” 

Inside, he found Marcus himself, Zer0, and a live Hyperion soldier who’d been tied to a target. He cursed and threatened as he struggled against his binds. “It's only a matter of time until Jack burns this city to the ground, you resistance scum!” 

The threat didn’t phase Zer0, who raised the Maliwan pistol and fired twice. The soldier’s shield audibly shorted out. Rhys must have made a sound then, because Zer0 turned to him, projecting an exclamation point. “Finally!” They thrust the gun towards Marcus, the man barely managing to catch it as they dropped it.

Rhys turned on his heel and left. This was a step more messed up than he was prepared to deal with. Zer0 followed. 

“Wait, if that doesn’t impress you, I also have grenade mods!” Marcus called after them. 

Rhys was near Town Square again by the time he stopped, his heart pounding.  

“This is the wrong way. / The catch-a-ride is that way,” Zer0 said from behind him. “Let us get going.”

He turned, sputtering “Wh-what-what was that?” They projected a question mark, glancing back to where he pointed. It didn’t make sense that a faceless killer could look perfectly innocent, and yet Zer0 put off an air of someone who never did anything wrong in their life. 

“The guy strapped to a target?” he specified. “That you were shooting at?” They shrugged. “Marketing gimmick? / Aren’t you glad I warned you, / Against that logo?” A horizontal smiley face appeared over their visor. 

“I-I guess? But that–I mean–he–you–are you a goddamn sadist?”

“So it bothers you?” The emoticon faded. “...I can go finish the job. / Would that comfort you?” 

It was hard to tell what to make of their offer. Zer0’s voice was always almost monotone, tinged with an ever-present intensity. They sounded neither sympathetic nor sarcastic.  

“No? I-I–Look, I don’t care about that guy, it’s just…” In all likelihood, the soldier had been incompetent. He got himself captured, which was all it took to end up as target practice. Not so different than things on Helios, and Rhys wasn’t incompetent. Still, the thought of ending up there churned his stomach.  

“It seems…Unsportsmanlike?” he managed. 

“A fair assessment. / The guns weren’t even good. / A poor use of time.”   

 “Exactly.” He gave a shaky laugh. Worse than Helios, maybe. At least a guy like Vasquez knew when he was being sinister. “So, uh, you wanted a car? Let’s go.” 

The nearest Catch-a-Ride was right outside Sanctuary’s outermost wall. It was a rundown station, half-protected by a crooked shelter of concrete and metal sheets.

Rhys stopped in front of the console. “If I do this for you, we go there together and split the money. Got that?” 

“Eighty-twenty,” Zer0 said.  

“Seriously? Half and half.”  “That seems unbalanced. / You won’t do half of the work. / Why half the reward?”

“You wouldn’t be getting there without me,” he insisted. “I was trying to be generous.”

“Seventy-Thirty.” Even without an emoticon, Rhys suspected they were smirking at him. If that’s how their face worked. If they had a face under there. “I came to Pandora without even a change of clothes, then I got robbed. I can’t go lower than forty percent.” 

“Hey!” came Gaige’s voice from behind them. “Angel told me I’d find you here. You guys going on that assassination mission?” 

“No,” Rhys said, at the same time Zer0 said, “Would you like to come? / Sixty-five-twenty-fifteen. / I get sixty-five.” They projected a smiley. 

“Did you-did you seriously just split that so it fit in a haiku?” Rhys scoffed. 

“Twenty percent?” Gaige crossed her arms. “If you include Deathtrap–which you should–I count for two perfectly good Vault hunters. We should get more than you.”

This was obviously going nowhere. He was approaching this as if either of them respected him, which they didn’t. On Helios, he’d leverage his reputation, his skills, and his connections. Here, he ranked slightly above Claptrap (at least, he hoped he ranked above Claptrap). Negotiating from this kind of position required a certain willingness to demean oneself. He took a deep breath. 

“Okay, considering our current sleeping arrangements, you know, the fact we’ve gotta share a space, I think it would behoove us all if I could afford a Quick-Change subscription or at least a change of clothes? A toothbrush and some toothpaste, even? Soap? I know this planet smells like death by default, but I don’t have to contribute to that.” 

Gaige wrinkled her nose. “Ew. Okay. But next time, when you’re not disgusting, you owe Deathtrap.” 

He looked to Zer0, whose helmet helpfully declared, in glowing red letters, that they’d grown “B0RED” of negotiating. They picked at a loose thread on their glove. “Yeah, fine,” they said, as if they’d never cared in the first place. “Great,” Rhys said, activating the ECHOeye. 

No sooner had he bypassed security than Zer0 pushed in front of him and began scrolling through car color options. 

“Okay? You’re welcome?” He watched as they picked bright blue flames. Pretty tacky, in his opinion, but he kept his mouth shut. Zer0 bounced on the balls of their feet while waiting for the outrunner to digistruct, springing into the driver’s seat when it was done.

“You’ve done well,” they said, starting the car. 

 “Oh, um, thanks.” Zer0 didn’t seem the type to notice other’s abilities, much less to give compliments. Strangely, Rhys almost felt proud. “Give me a sec to digistruct another car and–” 

The car flew past him and disappeared around the bend. 

“Right. I don’t know what I expected…” Sighing, he stepped back in front of the console and began selecting a second vehicle. 

“So that’s really an ECHOeye?” Gaige asked, unphased by Zer0’s sudden exit. Out of the corner of his ECHOeye, he saw her craning for a better look. 

“Yep.” He tried to ignore her hovering.  

“Cool. You think I could get a closer look at it sometime?” He hesitated. “There’s not much of it to see when it’s installed.” “You can’t just, you know, pop it out?” 

“Not safely. But hey, in the not-completely impossible case that a bandit yanks it out, be my guest?” He decided to be nice to her. If he ranked as low as he suspected, the best thing to do was make himself intensely likable. It couldn’t be that hard to earn a teenager’s goodwill, could it? Probably easier than it was with his Hyperion superiors. Both he and Gaige even possessed robot arms, maybe they had some cyborg common ground or something.

“Fine…Can I drive?” 

If her driving was anywhere near as chaotic as her fighting, they’d end up flipping over a cliff. “Are you old enough to drive?” he asked, selecting a black runner. 

“Psh, yeah.”

He considered for a moment, thinking back on his own teenage years. Letting her drive would earn some points. He steeled himself. “Promise not to crash?” 

———

Rhys managed not to throw up until they reached their destination. He had little chance to take in their surroundings before scrambling out of the runner and puking onto the frozen ground. Even partially digested, the freeze-dried breakfast skillet looked concerningly unchanged from when he’d eaten it. 

“Geez, dude, you alright?” Gaige was oblivious to her culpability, here. 

A thorough critique of her driving–the excessive speed, the sudden breaking, the too-sharp turns, the overcorrections–came to him. But instead, he nodded. “Sh-shouldn’t have eaten that MRE, y’know? You could stand to-to drive a teensy bit slower, though.” 

Resorting to the same methods he’d use to soften his criticism of superiors on Helios for a teenager felt pretty pathetic. 

“Yeah, but Zer0 would kill everyone before we even got here.” 

Zer0’s outrunner was parked crookedly by the open gate. Southpaw Steam and Power was, as evidenced by its name, an old steam-electric power plant. It lacked any obvious corporate ties (though it had to be Dahl at some point, right? Had that slipshod Dahl construction to it.) Even without the more recent bandit additions, the place was a fortress–or it would have been if the gate wasn’t wide open. The place was strangely quiet, for a supposed bandit outpost. No gunfire, no yelling, the only sounds were of the machinery inside the building.

“Guess they already went in,” Rhys observed as they passed the gate. He’d expected bodies here, but it seemed the bandits hadn’t even posted a guard for Zer0 to kill.

Gaige frowned. “Maya said we should try to keep one of these guys alive for questioning. You know, since we figure Roland either got attacked by Bloodshots or Hyperion, and these are Hyperions disguised as Bloodshots? I probably should have said that before Zer0 left, in retrospect.”

Rhys thought about the man strapped to a target. Death at Zer0’s hands would be a mercy for these guys, compared to what “questioning” would entail.

“Ugh. You don’t think they would have done the whole entire mission already?” she asked as they got to the entrance.

Rhys would like nothing better, provided he still got paid his share. “Maybe they’re just ninja-ing around? Or they’re dead.” The thought bothered him more than it should have. Zer0’s whole “mysterious for the sake of being mysterious” performance was working, he kind of wanted to know what their deal was. That, and they’d proven good at killing stuff that would otherwise kill him. It was probably better to have them around. 

“If they’re dead, I call the acid gun,” said Gaige. 

Upon entering the building, the two were greeted by a crudely painted bleeding eye on the opposite wall. The pigment resembled fresh blood. Similar graffiti followed as they ventured further into the dim facility. 

The first room they came to had once been an employee locker room before bandits moved in. The lockers lining one wall had been ransacked, and anything the bandits deemed unworthy of taking lay strewn across the ground. A box of pizza sat on the nearby table–it looked like it had been abandoned in the last few hours. 

Less recent was the man’s corpse on the far side of the room. Rhys had initially taken him for one of Zer0’s kills, but the faint smell of decay and blackened blood said otherwise. And he wasn’t dressed like any bandit Rhys had ever seen without a mask or a single scrap of armor. More likely, he was some unlucky passerby. He felt a pang of sympathy, quickly overshadowed by disgust. 

“Is that just normal here? Eating next to a rotting corpse?”

“I’unno. At least it’s really cold in here,” Gaige said. Her eyes found the Hyperion-issue wanted posters plastering the wall above. “Oh, hey, look!” She sped over, pulling one off the wall. “Wow, is that how you did your hair?” She held up the poster, it featured a picture from Rhys’s latest company ID. By now it was over a year old, before his haircut. He’d kept it long enough for loose ringlets to form and parted it to the side. It wasn’t unprofessional, per se, but it hadn’t won him a lot of points in the landscape of slicked-back pure-business hairstyles. 

“Yeah, it was.” 

“You look like one of those broody vampires from those ECHOnet shows.” She laughed. “I don-don’t–I’m smiling in it?”   “Yeah, still. Better than the whole corporate bloodsucker look you had a few days ago. You should really drop the hair gel.” 

“It was styling paste, actually.” An overpriced little tin, endorsed by Jack himself. He doubted it was even sold on Pandora. He ran a hand through his hair as he looked at the other posters plastered on the wall. Rhys’s own listed him as a “Traitor to Hyperion”, with a bounty of six billion dollars. It seemed excessive, but it was the second lowest, right above Axtons. Should he be grateful for that? At least it provided some legitimacy, but what did Jack expect him to do if someone came to collect?

“There is no one here.” Zer0’s sudden entrance made both of them jump. They stood in the open doorway leading to the plant proper, projecting a frowny face. “Their departure is recent. / Their motives, unclear.”  

Rhys almost let himself feel relief at the prospect of avoiding a gunfight. But he needed that reward money. More than that, he needed to prove himself to Jack. “Did they at least leave anything useful behind?” 

“You could tell us that. / Your eye might be of some use, / In hunting things down.” 

Rhys was starting to get the sense that Zer0 saw him as an ECHOeye with a hunk of meat attached to it. Still, if that was what made him valuable, here… “Look, it’s algorithm-based, not a magical clue-identifying device? So, I can’t guarantee it’ll find anything. But, if I do, and that leads us to them? I get a bigger cut.” 

Zer0 projected a “9_9”, tilting their head up.

“What-what’s that one mean?” “I’m rolling my eyes,” they said, like it was obvious. “But yes, if you prove your worth, / You will earn the pay.” 

Rhys activated his ECHOeye, starting further into the plant. The eye immediately picked up another corpse, some crumpled-up catalogs, and an icy spot where a pipe leaked onto the concrete floor. “Sooo…” Gaige began as they walked. “Did Hyperion rip your eye out when they hired you, or how did that work, exactly? Do you go to them and offer up limbs?” 

“What? Why would they–or I–do that?” 

“I dunno, I heard Hyperion takes its employees' body parts and replaces them with robotics to make them more efficient workers. So eventually, over time, you become more robot than human?” “Is this a common belief?”  “I’ve heard it too.” Zer0 shot a smiley face over their shoulder. 

“Yeah, it’s all over the ECHOnet,” Gaige insisted. “Right. Okay. No, Hyperion didn’t take my arm. O-or my eye, geez… What would they even have to gain from that? Sure, the ECHOeye is pretty useful, but…”  

“I’unno, so they technically own more of you? Or so they can turn you into robotic super-soldiers? Maybe construct some freaky flesh abomination with the parts they take?” 

He laughed, trying not to think of the first part too hard. Hyperion had rights to the lives of all its employees, the cybernetics just made that a little more literal. “I wouldn’t put flesh abominations past R&D. Still, who voluntarily has an arm chopped off?” 

“Okay, wow, rude.” She sounded genuinely offended. 

He stared at her. For a moment he’d almost let himself forget what planet he was on, who he was with. She’d almost convinced him that he was the oddity here. “I-I-I mean, fair enough, I let them drill into my skull and stick a bunch of stuff in my head? And I admit, if I had both arms at the time, maybe I’d consider letting them chop one off. S-so, pretty good choice, on your part, there.” His ECHOeye saved him then, highlighting a boot sticking out from behind a generator. Intuitively, he knew it was another corpse, which tainted the stab of relief he felt. “Oh, hey! There’s something!” 

The dead man wore armor, old and dented and painted in unmistakable Hyperion yellow. A deep red gash crossed his neck, drenching his front with the more appropriate Bloodshot color. Scanning him gave only the name “Wot” and “Hyperion assassin. In deep cover, any action that may jeopardize this agent’s mission will be met with consequences”. “Hyperion’s database says this is one of our guys. Guess someone beat us to him.”

Wot’s still held an ECHOcomm in an outstretched hand. Rhys dare not try anything sneaky this time. He picked it up and played it for the other two to hear. 

“Jack,” a low voice spoke, modulated much like Zer0’s. “I, Wot, killed the Siren known as Lilith. You’ll find her head attached to this message. My colleagues, Reeth, Oney, and Rouf, tragically fell in the battle to take her down. After Roland got–” The man paused suddenly. “Oh, hey Reeth! I’ll be right behind you guys. I’m finishing up a report.” 

“Oh, is that what it is?” Another man’s voice. 

“Yeah, man. I figured I should update Jack, right? In case things go south. You better get back into character, you’re looking a little too–” His words turned into a choked gurgle. “Thought you would double-cross me? Asshole.” The ECHO ended.

“...What was that?” Gaige asked after a moment. 

Rhys realized she was looking at him. “It…It’s pretty typical Hyperion…Cutthroat…Stuff. Seems like this guy planned to take all the credit and–” 

“No, I got that part, I meant Lilith.” “Oh, yeah. I don’t know, I mean, Jack killed her like, what, four or five years ago? It was a whole thing.”. “So Handsome Jack claimed.” Zer0 kneeled by the corpse. “Good for morale, if she’s dead. / Bad, if she comes back.” 

“Well, yeah. I-I mean, I worked in Security Propaganda. Which–It’s the Security division and the Propaganda division, combined, after budget cuts–but, I mean…” He hesitated. Even after putting out so much stuff that bent the truth about Pandora, he couldn’t believe Jack would lie about something as big as this, just for morale. Unless morale was that important? It had been early into Jack’s conquest of Pandora, and if Lilith truly hadn’t died, Hyperion had gained little from Old Haven. The other major targets notoriously escaped, but Lilith’s death was a symbol to rally behind. Yeah, okay, it was justifiable. A respectable command decision. What the rest of Hyperion didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Shit, was he supposed to know about this? What would Jack do if he reported this to him? “Yeah, I guess you’re right. And that’s one part of our job done, we found out why they’re here, apparently? Or, part of why they’re here. The intel might net us partial pay. We can take credit for killing this guy, too.” 

Zer0 projected a “:\”. “I wished to kill him,” they said, drawing their sword. It took Rhys a second too long to realize what they were doing. Before he could say anything, the dead man’s head was on the floor. Zer0 picked it up by the hair and thrust it out toward him.

“Um…” Rhys took a step backward, his hands up in refusal. “The job description didn’t say to bring their heads, do we need heads?” 

Zer0 shrugged. “Some like the trophy.” They didn’t lower the head.  “Right… You have a storage deck, you can take it.” 

Zer0 projected another “9_9”. 

They encountered two more corpses as they traversed the power plant. The first was barely notable aside from being a corpse lying around where people lived. A Bloodshot, slumped against a wall who might have been sleeping if it weren’t for the bullet holes. 

The second was hanging from a grate in the center of a wide corridor. He, too, was clad in yellow.  A dead bird had been crudely painted on the floor in front of him, along with the words “THE FIRHAUK IS SO DED” in the same blood red as the rest of the graffiti. 

“Another of yours?” Zer0 asked Rhys. “Hyperions lack loyalty, / Or so it appears.”

“Did they all dress in yellow? I thought they were supposed to be blending in?” asked Gaige. “Okay, first of all, they’re not ‘mine’, I’m not Hyperion, and–” “Yes, disloyalty.” Zer0 projected a winky face.

Rhys scoffed. “And second, that’s the wrong yellow.” He tried to scan the corpse, but the ECHOeye targeted the clothing instead, telling him that the fabric was fireproof, and indeed, not a Hyperion-approved shade of yellow.  The other two looked at him. 

“We-they have a specific set of approved shades of yellow,” he explained. “Gold, saffron, lemon, and citrine. Sometimes a little bit of amber, depending? What he’s wearing is more…Mustard and safety yellow.” 

“O…Kay…Does that matter?” 

“Probably?” He’d never known anyone to get marked up for a dress code violation. For all he knew, it was an offense you didn’t come back from. “Anyway, he’s not in the database, so he’s probably not one of them.” 

Zer0 had already gone up to the corpse, turning it on the rope for a better look. “Stiff. Not dead too long.” They pulled the shirt up. “Bloodshot tattoos, burned off. Scarred. /  A defector, then?”

“Right, so what do we do with that?” Rhys asked. 

Zer0 gave a shrug. “This is a message. / Pointing others to his clan. / They must be warring.” They sounded confident enough, but that was their default tone of voice. They could easily be making it up on the spot. How much did Zer0 know about Pandoran bandit warfare? 

“So…Firhauk, huh? Fur-ha-uk…Hauwk?” Rhys tried the word as he scanned the graffiti. It meant nothing to him, and nothing came up in the database. Maybe Jack would recognize it, but asking might just annoy him. 

“I think they meant ‘hawk’,” Gaige pointed out. “See, the drawing kind of has that hooked beak? So, a hawk in a fir tree? Or a furry hawk?” “Would a hawk be a bandit mascot…Or whatever?” Did it even matter what it was? It wasn’t as if there was a searchable database with the address of every illiterate bandit clan on this planet. 

“Dunno… Oh, right!” Gaige clapped a hand to her head. “Hey, Angel! You know all sorts of stuff. Help us out here?” She raised her voice as she asked their invisible watcher. 

This time, the AI didn’t answer. 

“That’s some dependable technology, huh?” Rhys grumbled. At this rate, all he had for Jack was the possibility that Lilith was alive, and his assassins intended to kill her. Facts that Jack probably already knew. And he wasn’t doing much better in terms of getting that bounty. “I… I think I’m gonna dig through the lockers we passed in the front. Bandits might have overlooked some hand soap or something…” 

“If you needed clothes,” Zer0 said, nodding toward the hanging corpse. 

“I’m not that desperate.” One piece of clothing stripped from a corpse was plenty. “I…I mean, we’re still splitting the reward for that head, right?” 

Zer0 seemed to consider for a moment, and once again, before Rhys said another word, the hanging bandit had fallen to the floor with a thump, sans head. That, they picked up, using the bottom of his mask like a bag, and presented it to him. 

“Another spy’s head. / No one will suspect different. / And I’m not a snitch.” 

Rhys hesitated and took it in his cybernetic hand. At least rot hadn’t set in yet. And he did need the money. “Thanks?” “Payment for your eye. / I will get more use from you. / Or so I expect.” 

[rlyc00l]

Rhys going to watch Zer0 play at Circles of Slaughter, sitting in the audience between huge scary bandits and he's getting really rowdy going "That's my partner! I date them! Let's go Zer0! Wooo!" and booing their foes as they enter. He's generally so out of place and pissing off nearby audience members so bad that he is at risk of being murdered until Zer0 ends up leaping into the stands mid-round to kill three of them to make a point When they do not place highest because Axton got more kills than them, Rhys is internally going "wow that's such bullshit" but Zer0 is already such a sore loser so Rhys is trying to comfort them like "okay but clearly if they were scoring for style you'd win. And using a turret is so cheap, you got those kills yourself!" as they vehemently nod along

[rlyc00l]

I really loved them in BL3. Rhys defended Zer0 and it was so cute

[rlyc00l]

Zer0 is an understimulated house cat (and a spiteful one, at that), Angel is a babysitter calmly reasoning with a difficult child, Rhys is really good at his job (kind of), and Hyperion weaponry is like, stupidly dangerous.

Also under the cut:

The Dahl commando stomped around the ship, shoeless and sighing angrily. “Where the hell are you, Zer0? I just want to talk.”

Zer0 sat on the wheelhouse’s roof, watching him. His boots they had tied together and hung from the side of the boat–after soaking them in water, naturally. Undeployed, his beloved turret was a small box with a strap on it. They hung that from the boat’s antenna. In their experience, no one ever looked up. 

The only one helping the commando was the Hyperion, who was quick to offer up Zer0 as the explanation for why his stuff was scattered around the cabin and his boots and turret missing. He’d even pretended to find the knife they’d given him. It had been a disappointment, but at least the brief panic they’d gotten out of him with the stolen knife was funny. 

Dahl-guy stepped into a puddle as he passed the wheelhouse again. He sucked in air through his teeth. “I swear, I’m going to kill them.” That almost sounded like a challenge. For the second time, Zer0 considered the merits of taking his head. He was well-trained, it might be an interesting fight. And he thought far too much of himself for a guy who called his turret “babe” and wore a tacky wedding ring around his neck. He probably deserved to die. 

The problem was, if they killed him, they’d have to fight the others, and the siren presented a complication there. They had yet to work out the limitations of her power, and, as much as it frustrated them to admit, if she caught them in her phaselock, they were dead. Instead, they had to settle for the lesser entertainment of making him mad. 

The turret took twenty minutes to find. It was the ECHOeye that did it, they doubted the Hyperion probably knew what he was looking for before that device highlighted it. “That’s your turret, right?” The stooge asked, pointing. Goddamn killjoy. 

Dahl’s eyes followed his finger. He sighed heavily. “Yup, that’s it.” 

Zer0 cloaked as he climbed up past them, muttering to himself. He was slightly too short to reach the turret. but he drew his rifle, managing to hook it on the barrel after a couple attempts. They should have hidden his storage deck unit, too. 

The shoes took longer to find. “They wouldn’t have thrown them overboard, would they?” The Hyperion ventured, eventually. 

Zer0 had considered it, but that lacked finesse. Their way was funnier. 

“Shit, I hope not.” The commando peered over the side of the boat, and followed the edge, until he found them. “Are you goddamn kidding me?! Zer0, I’m finding you next!” 

“Can you keep it down?” the Siren called from her spot, not looking up from her book. 

“Oh! Maya, you can’t like, help me out with your powers?” Dahl asked, approaching and holding up his ice-crusted boots. She glanced up. “What exactly am I supposed to do with those?” 

“You know, do your siren magic thing, and uh, thaw them out and dry them?” 

“I can temporarily send your shoes to an alternate dimension, but I fail to see how that’ll help you. Sorry.” She returned to her reading.  

The commando spent much of the rest of the ride trying to melt and towel dry the ice from his boots. It was cold enough that this was futile. When the boat touched the icy shore, Zer0 was tempted to stick around, watch the man suffer in his frozen boots, but they had a CEO to kill and a Vault to open. They left their perch and leapt from the deck with only a “Bye,” to the others.

It was a little past midday, which didn’t give them much time to travel before dark. The days were short, this time of the Pandoran year. They weren’t sure where to find Jack or the Vault, but a Hyperion outpost would be where to find out. Hyperion seemed to have the most success installing its operations in the west: The Friendship Gulag, Lynchwood, Opportunity, the Hyperion Preserve… 

The only path from the shore was a ravine through the cliffs that lined the beach. Bullymong holes were clustered on both sides. Zer0 cloaked as they passed through, leaving their silent hologram at the end. It was difficult to care about fighting bullymong when there were much bigger targets ahead of them.  

“You should really stick with the others.” The AI girl spoke again as they came out into an open area. Ahead of them was a great fish-like skull and a Catch-a-Ride station. Here and there, other giant bones stuck out of the ground. 

“I do not need them. / Tell me, how do I reach Jack? / I wish to kill him.” They made a bee-line to the Catch-A-Ride. A vehicle was just what they needed. 

“Like I said, the Crimson Raiders–in Sanctuary–can help you.” “Are you useless, then?” 

“No, I can help you too, but not alone.” There was a tinge of frustration in her voice. 

“Aid would be useful. / But it’s not necessary. / I’ll find my own way.” “Good luck with that.” 

A buzzaxe was embedded in the Catch-A-Ride console’s screen, rendering it unusable. Did Pandora’s bandits follow no code? These machines should be off-limits, bandits needed vehicles as much as anyone else. 

“Can you make it work? / You accessed the drop barge before. / Digistruct a car.”

“It…It’s too damaged,” she said. “Again, seriously, wait for the others. This planet is dangerous. You’ll want their help.” 

“If working alone, / Is a more challenging feat, / That is what I’ll do.” From what time they’ve spent on Pandora so far, Catch-a-Rides seemed as ubiquitous as fast-food chains were on inner planets. They’d find another. They continued their trek, crossing a rickety bridge made from scrap metal, and entering a second ravine, this one longer and narrower. The opening at the top was so narrow that it was dark inside, almost a cave. There were so many bullymong inside they had no choice but to fight a few packs before they made it through. It set them back another hour. The sun was getting low.

Three Horns Divide proper was a more developed landscape than the Southern Shelf. Dahl had left behind pumps and power lines and surprisingly functional roads that split into several directions. Not far from the ravine’s end, they passed a little cluster of raised buildings turned into a bandit encampment. 

For a few seconds, the ground shook–a small earthquake that shifted the snow on the towering crags and upset a nearby bullymong nest. A regional announcement on their ECHO device followed: “Handsome Jack here, reminding you all not to worry your pretty little heads about those earthquakes. See, with every tremor, my drills get closer to the Vault–to freedom, order, and safety for us all! Except you asshats in Sanctuary.”

That made things easier. If they figured out where the drilling was coming from, they’d find the Vault. Then they could lure Jack out. 

“You could at least stop in Sanctuary, they need a hero.” The AI said. 

They had thought she’d given up. “If you will not help. / Can I shut you up somehow? / Some admin command?” “No, I’m going to continue to bother you until you either work with me or die.” She sounded equally unhappy about this. 

The light was dim when they came to the next Catch-a-Ride. This one, at least, appeared functional. They activated it, only for the words “ACCESS DENIED” to flash on the screen. “Whoa, unauthorized user up in my grill!” a man’s voice played through the machine’s speaker. 

“You can be useful. / This, you can hack for me, right? / So, get me a ride.” 

No response for a long moment, then: “I can’t access that remotely.” She almost sounded pleased with herself. “But you know, I believe a member of your former party is in possession of an ECHOeye. Maybe you should join him in Sanctuary.” 

“Are all of these locked?” 

“Probably. Scooter–the man in charge of them–rigged them to keep bandits from using them. He’s also in Sanctuary. He’ll only authorize you if you join the Raiders.” 

They considered this. The Hyperion stooge wasn’t a skilled enough combatant to diminish their feats. They could take him with him to the Hyperion bases, make him hack their intel for them. In return, they’d keep him safe and alive–the others would certainly fail in that respect. 

“...Fine,” Zer0 said. “I’ll go there.” 

“Great. Would you like me to mark a route on your ECHO device?” 

They’d never heard an AI sound so smug.

———

Rhys had let himself hope that when they touched shore after a fifteen-hour boat ride, they’d be somewhere different from Windshear Waste. Somewhere that wasn’t just ice and bullymongs and bandits. Three Horns Divide was Windshear Waste with more random giant bones sticking out of the ice.  

At least Claptrap was so convinced the Sanctuary locals wanted to throw him a “Welcome Back” surprise party that he stayed behind to give them time to prepare. And even better, Zer0 had left. If anyone was going to catch him doing anything suspicious, it was the sneaky weirdo who popped out of nowhere and seemed to relish in causing problems. 

They could have at least done the group the favor of clearing out the bullymong as they passed ahead of them, but the way to Sanctuary was an endless battle against giant, freaky ape monsters, many of which threw chunks of ice the size of cinderblocks. Rhys felt like he was getting pretty good at dodging by the time Sanctuary’s outer wall was in sight. Beyond it, the city glowed against the darkening sky. 

As they approached, a comm came to Axton’s ECHOdevice. “So you're the ones I've been hearing all this radio chatter about? The Vault hunters Jack tried to kill?” a man’s voice spoke. “Name's Roland–Commander of the Crimson Raiders. That you who our lookout’s spotted, coming up on Sanctuary’s gate?”

“Yeah, that would be us,” Axton responded. 

“Great! I’ll ECHO Lieutenant Davis to let you in. Welcome to the Crimson Raid–” The sounds of yelling and gunfire on his end interrupted him. “Ah, dammit. I’m being attacked, I’ll see–” The comm ended. 

“Huh, that sounds…Bad?” Gaige said.

“Are you kidding? I think that’s just normal here,” Rhys pointed out. “He’s probably got…Guys with him? Soldiers?” Getting the Raiders’ commander out of the picture so soon seemed too good to be true. 

Outside the gate was a little cluster of elevated buildings, seemingly once built for a Dahl settlement, now with all the telltale signs of bandit activity. Graffiti, pelts, bullet holes… A large sign for Sanctuary loomed above it. Right, Rhys reminded himself, he’d have to get used to skull bouquets and corpses staked to walls. 

The gate had an intercom next to it, Maya took the initiative to press the button. “Hey, uh–”

“You’re never getting into Sanctuary, you Bloodshot skaglicks!” A man’s voice responded. A hologram of the speaker appeared over the intercom, a man wearing old Crimson Lance armor. “Oh! Hold up. You’re those Vault hunters! Hurry and get inside!” The heavy gate opened slowly. Ahead was more road, a bridge crossing over a deep gorge–at some point the middle had caved in and been replaced by scrap metal–and, behind a second wall, the city of Sanctuary. Around that wall circled small, vertical structures, next to which the air seemed to glow and distort–the perimeter of a massive shield.

“They’ve got a shield generator right before you get through the gate,” he heard Handsome Jack in his head again. “Why don’t you see if you can hack it? Don’t worry, you should be far enough out of the city that our bombardment won’t hit you. Probably.” 

It was difficult to walk and enter a response, especially while terrified of pissing off Jack, but Rhys managed. He just hoped he made it look natural. “I’d need to get close and my eye glows when I use it–it’ll be hard to do without getting caught. I’ll have to find the right moment.” He braced himself for Jack’s reply–you weren’t supposed to say anything resembling “No” to the man.

“Fair enough,” Jack said. “You know what? I’ll work on a solution for you.” 

“Fantastic! Thanks! I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t.” 

As he communicated with Jack, the group made it to the gate, where another armored soldier awaited them. Rhys caught the end of the exchange he had with Maya, “Commander Roland’s ECHO went offline. He left orders for this contingency–make yourself useful, go meet with the town mechanic.” 

“Crap. I mean, uh... darn.” It was the AI’s voice, now. “Roland needs your help. Without you, the Crimson Raiders don't stand a chance against Jack. Please find out where he's gone.”

Past the gate, Sanctuary didn’t seem as savage as Rhys had pictured, or as Hyperion propaganda had promised. That shouldn’t have surprised him, being in Security Propaganda and all, but the bandits had lived up to the hype. 

It wasn’t a nice place, by any means. The road was crumbling, graffiti covered the walls, and trash was everywhere. Not a great first impression, but no skulls in sight.

“So, the mechanic…” Maya started, looking around. “He didn’t give us a map, but-” 

“It’s right there.” Axton gestured to the building in front of them. 

 “Oh.” She seemed uncharacteristically sheepish. “Was that obvious?” 

“Yeah,” Salvador said. 

“There’s a tire. And a garage,” Gaige put in. 

“Of course.” 

“Scraping your innards out from the rock they crushed you with!” Krieg said. It almost sounded like he meant to reassure her, in a weird way. 

They found the mechanic dozing off with his chair leaned back, feet propped on a stack of oversized tires. A wrench still hung in one hand. He was exactly the sort of dirty, grease-stained guy Rhys would have pictured, considering the location and profession. 

He woke as they entered, looking up, blinking. His mouth fell open as he saw them. “Oh, crap, is you Hyperion? Now, if you're here to kill me, you should probably know–” He leapt onto the tire stack, wielding his wrench. “You'll never take me alive, you robotic sons of–” “Woah, hold on.” Rhys put his hands up. “I’m not Hyperion. Anymore. I’m on your side?” Did he still look that Hyperion? He shouldn’t have emulated Jack’s style quite so hard. Maybe he needed a haircut. 

The mechanic scowled, not lowering the wrench. He was looking at Maya, not Rhys. 

“We’re all on your side,” Maya said calmly. “You’re Scooter, I presume? Roland’s missing. Lieutenant Jessup told us to see you about a contingency plan?”  He relaxed, grinning as he climbed off the tires. “Ha! Well, hang me upside down from a telephone pole, cover me in honey, and leave me to a slow death at the hands of hungry spiderants. You’re those new Vault hunters, ain’tcha?”  “So it seems,” she said. “So Roland’s gone missin’, huh?” He paused, considering. “He told me if he ever disappeared, I was supposed to initiate Plan B—or, as I like to call it, Plan Turn-this-city-into-a-floatin'-ass-fortress-of-airborne-awesomeness.” He shuffled around the garage, grabbing three small fuel cells and balancing them on top of each other against his chest. “Y’all wanna help me get these to the center of town?”

Damn, Rhys hadn’t expected much from the Crimson Raiders, but this was far below his least charitable assumptions. Just up and trusting people at their word? No wonder Jack was winning so thoroughly.

Plan B itself worried him. Sanctuary, he’d read back on the boat, was indeed once a Dahl mining ship—hundreds of years ago. Trying to get it airborne again seemed to border on suicidal. Still, against his better judgment, he soon found himself at the town square, bent over an ancient ignition primer and installing an off-brand fuel cell. He kept his metal hand on it as much as he could, lest it started leaking acid. Maya stood over him, holding a flashlight so he could see what he was doing. There were three primers in total. Gaige and Sal worked together at one, Axton and Scooter on the other. Krieg wasn’t to be trusted either to install a cell or hold a flashlight steady—instead, he was alternating between staring at Maya and smacking himself in the head.

“Roland said we gotta have an exit strategery just in case he ever disappeared,” Scooter explained from the next ignition primer over.

“He seriously thinks you can get this ship running again?” Rhys asked, trying to sound genuinely interested. Jack would want to hear this. “Ha! Course I can get ‘er in the air! Just…” He struggled to close the ignition primer’s door and slammed his wrench into it. “Coulda used more time on it.” With all the ignition primers plugged in, the ship's central structure began to glow, emitting intermittent humming sounds. For a second, Rhys almost believed it would get off the ground. Then it shut down with a sad groan and a puff of smoke. “Damn. Well, now we really gotta find Roland. I think he mighta left a message for your types in the Archives.” 

Sanctuary’s City Archives faced town square, not far from the primers. A soldier guarded its door, using a key to let them inside. It seemed to be one of the older buildings, maybe at one point it could have been called “classic”. Now it was a dilapidated mess. Inside, the place was made up of various heaps of stuff: papers and boxes and trash and books. The wall was lined with bunk beds and lockers, like the worst hostel Rhys could imagine. Hanging over the room was a banner: “FIGHT BACK! JOIN THE RESISTANCE”. All lit by dim, bare lightbulbs. It wasn’t skull bouquets, but it wasn’t much better. He almost didn’t notice the woman there. She darted away into the corner when she saw them, then acted like she’d never noticed them. 

“Uh, hi?” Rhys greeted. At least she wasn’t brandishing weapons. 

She looked at him with so much disgust he checked to make sure his shirt wasn’t caked in bullymong guts. Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted her ECHO to her mouth and spoke in hushed tones. “Roland, when you return, we must discuss who you allow into the Archives. It is only a matter of time before I bite someone—and mind you, it won’t be my fault.” 

Right, that tracked, Pandora... 

“Sorry to bother you,” Maya asked, disregarding the woman’s extremely direct, indirect warning. “But we were told Roland left a message here. Where would that be?” The woman’s eyes widened when she saw her. “Disregard that, Roland.” She marched straight up to Maya and plucked out a strand of blue hair before the siren could react. “Roland’s ECHO recording is around here somewhere, but first, if I could make a cast of your teeth…” 

Surreptitiously, Rhys scanned the room, facing away from the others. Finding an ECHO recording with his eye was easy, and soon enough his eye highlighted the only one in the room, sticking out from under a pile of recruitment posters. He downloaded a copy of its contents, then corrupted the original. 

He played the original to himself. “Hey, soldier. If you're hearing this, I'm in trouble. Right now, you're the only thing standing between this city—hell, the whole planet—and Handsome Jack's army. I left info about my last whereabouts in my safe. Good luck.” A code was attached to the message: 9-1-8-0-1-2. It wasn’t useful information for Jack, but hiding it might keep Roland from ever being located. A moment later, Axton found the original recording. Rhys’s hack hadn’t destroyed everything, fragments of audio remained. “...If you're….  Right now, you're the...be-be-be-between this city - hell….army. I left in-in-… luck.” 

Axton frowned. “Uh. Did he have a copy of this?” he asked the strange woman. 

She gave a shrug, too focused on studying Maya’s tattoos. She looked simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. 

Silently, Rhys celebrated. If he kept this up, Jack would have to notice his initiative. See his value. “Never could have done it without you, Mr. Strongfork. You basically single-handedly killed the commander of the Crimson Raiders with that masterful hack,” his imagined Jack saying, shaking his hand at some sort of fancy party he figured the Hyperion bigwigs would have, once they conquered Pandora. 

“Well, shit, what do we do now?” Salvador asked. 

Maya shrugged, pulling her arm back. “If someone’s captured Roland, they’re not gonna stay quiet about it–I imagine Jack is the type to brag?” She looked at Rhys, as if he were an expert on what Jack would do. 

“Probably, yeah,” he said. Which he thought was true. 

“We can keep looking, ask the locals, monitor the ECHOnet. Something’s bound to turn up.” She ventured. “For now, I think we could all use some rest. Tomorrow, we can resupply and begin searching.” 

———

It appeared the beds in the Archives were going unused, so the Vault hunters claimed them for the night. The beds were musty and questionable, but they almost seemed inviting after a freezing boat ride then a long, also freezing, trek. There were laundry machines here too, Rhys had no change of clothes—which was getting grosser by the day, he needed to get some money and go shopping—but he at least threw the bandit jacket in, and, after some hesitation, his vest. It was dry clean only, but it seemed pretty doomed, regardless.

He reported to Jack as he started the cycle. “Their commander’s missing. They want to get Sanctuary flying again. It doesn’t seem to be working,” he wrote. “I hacked a message the commander left about his last location, I think it should slow them down.” 

“Wait, wait, they want the city to fly?” Jack laughed in his head. “What is flying supposed to do?” 

He hadn’t thought about that. “That’s unclear. They seem to think it’s going to do something.” “Well, it’ll kill them faster once the lunar bombardment takes out their engines. I’ll give them that.” Another laugh. “Speaking of, I got an update for you. You’ll be able to switch your eye’s glow off and on now. Keep it on sometimes, good misdirection.” After a few seconds, his ECHOeye received the update. He waited for it to load, then gave his eye a few tries in front of a mirror, just in case. It worked just how Jack said it would. 

“You ready to try the shield generator?”

“Of course.” He wasn’t, he wanted to go to bed. If this worked, he didn’t know when he’d next get the chance to rest. And there was the matter of the Vault hunters. He needed to shove that into the part of his brain furthest from his conscience. Rhys was good at compartmentalizing. He’d screwed plenty of people over before, the Vault hunters were no different from any other coworker he’d backstabbed. The sooner he got it over with, the less bad he’d feel. 

Don’t think about it too hard. 

Do not think about it.  

“See if you can disable their Fast-Travel afterward,” Jack added. “I’d like to get this done all at once. No loose ends, ya get me?”

The other Vault hunters had already gone out to explore the city before settling in for the night, there was no one to question him doing the same. 

Sanctuary had little in the way of bright street lights, and the locals took on a sinister appearance in the dimly lit streets. Most of them, he noticed, had some weapon or other strapped to them. Rhys held onto his collapsed stun baton as he walked. In theory, it would drain a shield better than either of his guns. Thankfully, he walked through the streets and out the city gate unbothered. 

The shield generator was on a raised concrete platform, attached to a building. He climbed the short stairs to it and met face-to-helmet with a Crimson Raider. Of course there’d be a guard. 

“What are you doing here?” The guard demanded.

Rhys scrambled for an explanation. “Sorry, uh, I was—” 

“Oh! I recognize you! You’re one of the ones Jack tried to kill, aren’t you?” His tone became reverent. Like Rhys was some kind of badass. “The new Vault hunters?” 

“Yup, that’s me!” He tried to look proud of it. His heart was pounding. 

“Huh! So, what are you doing out here so late?” 

“Oh, you know, I-I-just getting my bearings. I wanna be prepared if Jack attacks the city, y’know?” He took a deep breath as he looked around, pretending to take in his surroundings. “Sooo…This is the shield generator, huh? Nice piece of tech.” 

“Yup, keeps this whole city protected.” 

“So do you, then, right?” He flashed what he hoped was a charming smile. “This uh, this has to be the first thing they’d target, and you’re the one protecting it.” With what he hoped was a subtle glance, he scanned the generator. His ECHOeye told him it was of Dahl make, but nothing else. 

“You’d think so, but Jack’s given up on attacking us head-on, and it's been a while since bandits made it over the bridge.” Even as he said it, the soldier stood up a little straighter. 

It was old tech, unconnected to a network. Keeping the shield running was a simple matter of plugging the core in and throwing some switches that would be in the building. The best Rhys could do was shut it off until someone hit the switch again. That wasn’t worth risking his life. 

“Hey, still, gotta-you gotta stay vigilant. Can’t be easy, out in the cold all day-or, night.” Rhys went in for a wildly uncharacteristic slap on the shoulder—it seemed like the kind of thing you did with soldiers who inexplicably respected you. “Keep-keep at it.”  

He tried to walk away at a normal pace, and only exhaled again when he was out of earshot. Well, that was a bust. At least he could get some sleep. 

“Can’t hack it. But, good news, they only have the one guard on it?” he sent to Jack.

“Naw, they have bunkers inside that building. Alarm goes off, there’s about twenty more of ‘em. We tried that already.” 

“Oh.”

“Good try, though, kiddo. You’re gonna be useful yet.” 

Rhys felt a surge of pride, even through the residual anxiety. He was back at that imaginary party. This time it was short-lived—just as he walked through Sanctuary’s gate a hand clamped around his wrist. 

He swung back, and there stood Zer0, giving him an intense, faceless stare. “I-I- um…” Did they know? How could they know? Why were they here? 

“I need something hacked,” Zer0 said. “That AI is unable. / She says to use you.”  He stumbled forward as they began to pull him along after them.

“For the record, that’s not what I said,” the AI put in.

“What?! What the hell, Zer0? Let me go!” Rhys tried to pull away, almost falling as they yanked back. Their grip was steel.

They looked back at him as they walked. “You’re doomed here, you know? / But, if you’re useful to me, / I can protect you.” 

“Sorry, Rhys,” the AI spoke again. “I was trying to convince them to work with everyone, not kidnap you.” 

Shit.“Yeah, um, I’m my own man.” Rhys thrust the stun baton at them, intending to give them a quick, warning shock. He had a split second to realize “Oh wait, crap, that was stupid” before the searing pain hit him. 

Both he and Zer0 were on the ground when he became cognizant of anything other than that pain. He was sore all over, his right arm was twitching, and he’d bitten the side of his mouth hard enough that he tasted blood. 

“That was uncalled for.” Zer0 sat up, rubbing the singed spot on their abdomen. “OW” floated in front of their helmet. They looked at him, and the letters changed to an “XD”. “You managed to shock yourself? / That’s hilarious.” 

“Yeah, well…” He looked at the stun baton lying next to him. Its battery indicator showed it had been completely drained. Good thing he’d been wearing the shield—also drained. 

Zer0 rose, offering a hand. “Let’s go.” 

“You can’t take a hint? After that?” “You just proved my point. / You won’t make it very far. / Accept my offer.” Standing, Rhys stepped back, wondering if he should run before Zer0 resorted to threats. Instead, he drew his pistol. “Stay back.”

They gave him a “:o” and held their hands up. It felt mocking. “I will not hurt you. / I have perhaps been hasty. / But I mean no harm.” 

“You get why I don’t believe that, right?” 

“No.” 

“Seriously? Are you seriously being weird and menacing by accident?” 

They shrugged, letting their hands fall. “I need one thing hacked. / You don’t need to stay, after. / You can come back here.”  “I’m not stupid.” This was probably how Vasquez lured people into an airlocking. 

“Hold on, Rhys, I’ll talk to them,” said the ever-present AI. 

Zer0 was silent, then cocked their head. “Like what?” they said, softly. It took Rhys a moment to realize they were replying to the AI. They crossed their arms, projected a “¬_¬”.  “Why does it matter / To you, that I work with them? / Why so invested? …Hm…I’ll consider it.” 

“You’ll consider what?” he asked. 

“I’ll stay here tonight. / Tomorrow, you will help me. / Maybe I won’t leave.” “Like hell.” He lifted the gun, in case they’d forgotten. “You-you can stay out here.” 

A red “LOL”. “A puffed-up kitten. / I cannot fault your courage. / But really, calm down.” They bent down to pick up his abandoned stun baton and held it out to him. He snatched it without letting the gun fall, and they walked past him, into the city. Of course he didn’t shoot them. 

“Don’t worry,” the AI said. “They may be a di- erm, a jerk, but they’ll cooperate for the moment. I told them about an assassination job on the bounty board. As long as they think it’ll entertain them, they’ll work with us.” “I don’t see why we need them to work with us. Especially if they don’t want to and would rather go around being sinister and condescending.” Not to mention sneaky and occasionally invisible. 

“Trust me, they’ll come in handy.”

[rlyc00l]

Rhys is going to put his skills to work and make these people trust the crap out of him if it kills him (Actually, he doesn't want it to kill him, he's actually going to try to avoid dying). Zer0's ego goes through some stuff. Everyone could benefit from like, team building exercises or something.

Also under the cut

The first thing Rhys did, after giving up on lying sleeplessly and considering his new position, was draft a message for Vaughn and Yvette. “Hey, I’m alive, on Pandora. Vasquez tried to have me killed. Sorry for doubting you. I don’t know what he’s gonna do now, be careful. I’ll be back soon.” He paused and deleted the “soon”, replacing it with “Sorry to be vague. I’ll explain everything next time I see you.” before sending. It wouldn’t satisfy them. When he got back to Helios, he’d launch the two of them up the corporate ladder (just slightly below himself) to make it up to them. And then he’d brag about this forever. 

But first, he had to secure his victory.

Step one: Gaining trust. He’d been a pro at that up on Helios. Building trust with your coworkers was one of those pillars of success in business (it went hand-in-hand with “strategic betrayal”). There was even an acronym: DARGH. Dependability, Approachability, Respect, Gratitude, and Honesty. Three out of five were easy, he could do those without trying. He’d have to do away with honesty, which left dependability. Dependability required competency, and he was far from competent in this setting. He still hadn’t even figured out how to reload. Luckily, he had the ECHOnet. He activated his ECHOeye and pulled up everything the Hyperion database could teach him about guns and shooting, and found diagrams of the two guns in his possession.

By sunrise he was outside, dry firing the pistol while aiming at distant bullymong holes, trying to get used to the gun’s auto-stabilizers. 

“What are you doing?” 

Rhys flinched, fumbling with the gun. It was Zer0, of course. The others were still asleep. His immediate impulse was to snap at them–why the hell were they always there? He restrained himself for the sake of DARGH and instead summoned all his Hyperion brand faux-affability. 

“Oh, hey Zer0.” Fake smile. Cheery voice. “I-I’m practicing. Getting ready for today, you know? You’re welcome to join.” Goddamn, that sounded phony. He was better than this. The whole double agent thing was throwing him off his game. 

Zer0 looked at him, then his gun. “There’s a camp, not far. / Living targets are better. / With a loaded gun.” 

“That…I-I’m good, thanks. I’d rather conserve ammo, y’know? For those uh, those Fleshripper guys?” 

“There’s a vendor, there.” They thumbed over their shoulder. An Ammo Dump vending machine leaned haphazardly against a nearby building.

“I don’t have–” 

“Oh, right. Your wallet’s empty. / Save your bullets, then.” A smiley face.

“W-wait, you saw who stole my money?”

They ignored that. “Still, practice, needless. / Today, I’ll kill the bad guys. / Just stand back again.” The word “coward” didn’t fit at the end of their haiku, but it was implied. Their “>:P” made that clear.

Later, as they ventured through Fleshripper territory, he did his best not to deserve the label. At least, his best within reason. He stood back, sure, but only because he didn’t have a shield and the others did. A thrown buzzaxe bounced right off of Axton’s head when it would have split his skull open otherwise. Salvador walked right into oncoming gunfire to kill the shooter. A grenade landed at Gaige’s feet and only gave her a few scratches. A shield was undeniably a necessity, here. 

Rhys checked bodies for one when he got the chance, but there was little intact for him to take. A few dollars here, some bullets there. The bandit’s actual killers got first dibs on everything. So he was forced to shoot from afar, careful to avoid his “allies”. Most of his shots missed, but sometimes they hit, and sometimes the bandits died. Those kills didn’t feel like that first time, but at least he wasn’t almost dying. Small victories.

A further small victory came for his “DARGH initiative”. With Zer0, of all people. 

Bringing up the rear occasionally put him near them, when they’d switch from up-close fighting to sniping. Their sudden appearances had startled him the first few times. They seemed to teleport, but it was a clever combination of hologram and cloaking technology. Rhys found that if he paid attention, he could sometimes see when their footprints in the snow parted from the hologram. Even then, he missed it more often than not.  

Zer0 may have been a total asshole, but it was pretty cool to watch. They’d appear with their sword buried in one man’s back. When the next bandit fired on them, the hologram would feign an attack from the front while they climbed a nearby roof, blowing his brains out without him ever knowing he’d been tricked. Rhys wondered if Jack knew about their method, or if he should report it. If Zer0 meant to fight Hyperion, the soldiers should be forearmed with that knowledge, the way these Fleshrippers weren’t. 

As he was considering recording them for Jack, a gunshot rang off from his left and two bandits dropped dead at the same time. Zer0 appeared with their sniper rifle on a low roof next to him. “Holy crap. Did…Did you just do that?” 

“Yes.” They projected a “:D”. 

“That was actually pretty badass.” 

They didn’t respond, only moved to a higher position, taking out another pair of bandits the same way, then a third with a headshot.

If he didn’t know better, he would have thought they were showing off. But there was no way they cared what he thought, right? It was worth testing. Rhys was well-practiced in the art of sycophancy. “You, uh, you think you could hit that guy way down there before Krieg gets to him? The one taking cover behind the crates.” 

The bandit in question was on the other side of camp, firing at Krieg as he charged. Only a small portion of his head was visible. 

A second after he said it, they’d shot, and the bandit’s head vanished in a spray of red. Krieg slowed to a stop, with a bellow of “Disappointed!” 

“Nice!” The enthusiasm in his voice wasn’t hard to fake. He never expected Zer0 might actually be easy to win over. 

“As I said before. / You need not participate. / I’ve got this handled.” 

“Right, clearly.” It was the same on Helios, flattery didn’t get you respect in return. Still, if he’d swallowed his pride and sucked up to Vasquez, the man wouldn’t have tried to blow him up. Zer0 was more the “literal backstabber” type, but still, the point stood. 

———

Captain Flynt, leader of the Fleshripper bandits, was the last thing standing between the Vault hunters and the mainland. He’d made his throne on a wrecked freighter sitting precariously atop an icy clifftop. Rhys lost count of how many the group had killed on the trek through the surrounding camps and the climb up to the ship’s deck. At that point, a reasonable person would surrender. Captain Flynt wasn’t a reasonable person. 

Claptrap had raced in ahead of the rest of them, waiting at the top of the ramp that led to the ship’s deck. “Yoohoo! Minions, this way!” He waved them on impatiently. 

Maya stopped there. “We should go in with a plan. One would have to be pretty hard to kill to lead a bandit clan of this size for more than a week, and Hammerlock claims he’s tough.” 

Zer0 barely glanced at her as they moved on after Claptrap. 

“I was thinking we shoot him full of bullets. Until he dies.” Salvador said, passing her.

“Yeah, that was more or less what I was gonna say?.” Axton stopped for only a moment, hesitating before jogging after Zer0. “Sorry, not about to let them get all the glory!” he called over his shoulder.

“I need to get keelhauled!” Krieg followed the other three. 

“Hey, wait up!” Gaige had the decency to look guilty as she passed. “Sorry, Maya, but I mean, we have more guns?” 

Rhys could only offer a shrug. “For what it’s worth, I was onboard with the ‘having a plan’ plan.” 

The battle was underway by the time he and Maya caught up. Flynt wasn’t alone, at least twenty more bandits fought alongside him. He was unmistakable among his cohorts. The man dwarfed even Krieg–but part of that might have been the thick, padded suit and the tall horns atop his helmet. He wielded both a flamethrower and an entire anchor with ease. Also, he was on fire, which didn’t seem to bother him.  

Yesterday, Rhys might have stayed on the ledge overlooking the deck, never directly joining battle. Today, he had a promotion and a turbomansion to look forward to, and DARGH to think of. Amazing what getting contacted personally by Handsome Jack could do to a guy. At least, it was enough to make Rhys hop down onto deck–only to slip on a patch of ice and fall on his face. Thankfully, this went unnoticed. The bandits were too occupied with those who got there before him. Each Vault hunter seemed to be fighting their own battle. Huge plumes of fire intermittently shot up from the vents in the deck, leaving thick clouds of smoke in its wake. Maya was already further up, he saw a flash of purple lift Flynt into the air. A buzzaxe-wielding bandit took notice of him as he was getting to his feet. Rhys shot him as he charged, and he stumbled to the ground and didn’t rise again. Then a second bandit was shooting at him. Bullets whizzed past his face, barely missing. Finding flimsy cover behind a wooden crate, he returned fire. Either one of Rhys’s bullets hit the mark, or someone else’s did. Regardless, that bandit fell too. 

He got another glimpse of Flynt near the broken edge of the ship. Zer0 was behind him, sword bearing down at his back. Flynt turned, delivering a blow with his anchor that knocked them off their feet. He lifted the anchor, ready to bring it down on them. Flames went up. Rhys fired a few shots where he’d seen Flynt. The fire faded. Flynt was running at Salvador, whose pair of shotguns seemed to do little to slow him. No sign of Zer0. 

“Krieg, come on! You’re in the way!” He heard Axton before he saw him. He was shooting over a pile of crates. His turret was perched on a crate firing at Flynt, only, Krieg was in front of its target. 

Fire again. A flaming bandit came rushing out of a nearby vent, screaming in agony. Rhys backed up, pulled the trigger. Out of ammo. The bandit fell anyway. He ducked behind cover. His shotgun held only two shots in it, and he’d never actually used it before. It would be better to stay here and wait for the fighting to stop. He heard more screaming–a voice that had to be Gaige’s. 

Could be a hero. That’d be worth points. 

He moved along the intact edge–towards the screams, trying to keep track of Flynt. The jet of fire from his flamethrower gave him away on the far side of the ship. 

When he found Gaige she was crouched behind a junk pile, reloading her submachine gun. Her robot was fighting off a bandit on the other side. Another three bandits lay dead nearby. 

“You okay?” he needed to raise his voice to be heard over the battle. She was soaked in sweat and covered in ash but otherwise, she looked okay. 

She gave him a strange look, then turned to finish that last bandit. 

He ducked down next to her. “I–someone was screaming. Was that Maya?” It hadn’t sounded like Maya.

“Oh! Yeah, that was me! Look at this shit.” She stuck out her leg. Her nylon tights had partially burned away, revealing her calf red and blistered beneath it. “Hurt like a bitch!” She’d sounded like she was being murdered. “Right. So you’re not in any immediate trouble?” 

“Nope. You’re bleeding, by the way. Like a lot.” She turned back to the battle. It was quieter now.

“Haha, what?” He looked down, not seeing any blood on him. “No, I’m not.” “Your face.” 

He was so soaked in sweat, it took a moment to find the blood on the right of his face, longer to find the gash starting at his temple and ending just past his ear. He hadn’t felt it until now, but suddenly his body seemed to remember that this was supposed to hurt. “Oh jeez… How…How bad is it?” “I think you just got grazed, dude. You’re fine.” 

“Owwww…” It burned.  

Gaige, put away her gun, getting to her feet. “Anyway, I think we’re done?” 

Clutching his head, he followed her lead. There were dead bandits everywhere. On the far side was Flynt, lying in a heap on the deck. Flames had stopped coming up from the vents. “Huh, wonder if he was like, remotely controlling the fire somehow…”   

“Dunno.” Rhys couldn’t find it in himself to be that curious right now. He couldn’t remember the last time so much blood was coming out of him.  “First time being shot?” Axton joined him and Gaige as they crossed the deck to meet with the others. 

“Kinda hope it’s my last.” Axton laughed. “Good luck with that.” He looked him up and down. “Hell, did you ever get a shield?” 

“Couldn’t find one.” “Why didn’t you say something?” Axton stopped, opening his storage deck holoscreen. He was using his left hand, his right hung at his side, covered in blood. 

“Kind of got the sense that uh, begging would be a bad look?” 

Axton shrugged. “This isn’t Hyperion. And I mean, a little more to the left and you’d be dead.” He’d produced a Tediore shield, handing it to Rhys. 

“Thanks.” He clipped it to his belt.

They passed Salvador, looting a corpse. “Y’all see what happened to Zer0?” he asked. “Cuz if they’re dead, I already called dibs on that gun. The acid one.” 

Rhys glanced at where he’d last seen them, half expecting their mangled corpse. They weren’t there, but between the sheer number of corpses and trash on deck, they could still be dead and he’d just missed them. He didn’t feel like looking so hard, his head hurt. 

Maya and Krieg waited outside the deckhouse, beneath Flynt’s throne. Krieg sat on a still-panic-moded Claptrap. A buzzaxe was half buried in his shoulder, and Maya was trying to calm him enough to pull it out. She scowled when she saw them. “Couldn’t have spent a few minutes trying to coordinate an attack?” 

“Hey, the guy’s dead, right? And we’re alive.” Axton radiated self-satisfaction. 

“Hell yeah, you are!” Claptrap popped out of his panic-mode, almost knocking Krieg over as he rolled out to gloat over Flynt’s corpse. “Take that, Flynt! My minions are certified badasses!” 

Maya ignored Claptrap, grabbing the buzzaxe’s hand with both hands. “Your turret drained Krieg’s shield.” She gritted her teeth as she yanked the blade out. 

“No! I needed that there!” Krieg protested. The wound already began to knit together before Maya jabbed a hypo in the flesh near it. “Augh! How will I find anything now?!” 

She ignored that too. “Not to mention, if I hadn’t made it in time, Salvador would have gotten crushed by that anchor. And, I have no idea where Zer0 went.” 

“Another one into the pit!” That one took her a moment. “Wait, they went over the side?”

Krieg tensed, grabbed his head, and then managed an exaggerated nod. “Anchors aweigh!” Crap.” She looked around at the others. “There’s more hypos inside, get yourselves fixed up. I’m going back for Zer0.” 

Inside the deckhouse was what once was a lounge for the crew, when this was still a functioning corporate cargo ship. Now, maybe it was still a lounge, but hanging from the ceiling were bouquets of human skulls, and staked to the dart board was a man’s corpse, dead at least a few weeks. After the bandit camps, this kind of decor seemed pretty standard. Rhys took a seat on one of the lopsided, threadbare couches opposite the corpse. At least it was cold enough it didn’t smell, much. 

Gaige, Salvador, and Axton were going through the chests and crates that lined that wall, arguing over loot. “I did get the kill, so y’know, I think I should get the shotgun.” “You only got the kill because my turret softened him up!”  

“Oh come on, you guys killed one guy, me and Deathtrap killed like, a gazillion of them while you were fighting him.” 

“Those little guys? I was saving them for after.”

“Yeah, they weren’t exactly our primary objective.”

“So next time I should just let them shoot at you? Cuz I totally will.” 

Rhys tuned them out, absently studying the crude map next to the dartboard corpse as he tried to distract himself from the pain. The map must have been made by one of the bandits, it was an indecipherable mess, there was no way it was to scale. Was that supposed to be the ocean? Then that there would probably be Sanctuary… But what was that thing in the center? It didn’t match up with the maps he studied in his ECHOeye, but maps of border planets tended to be lacking… 

“Oh, right, Rhys!” Axton crossed the room to him, holding out a hypo. There was a bullet hole in his forearm, rapidly closing up as he offered it. “Hate to see a face like that go to necrosis.”

He took it with a “Right, thanks so much,” and a forced smile. It was only once his face started to heal that he realized Axton had probably been flirting with him. He didn’t know what to do with that fact, did it still count as a win for DARGH? Did that mean he was doing a good job winning these people over, or should he just take it as a testament to his looks? 

It was then that Zer0 finally limped into the cabin, just ahead of Maya. They crossed the room without looking at any of the others. “The path is open. / We board Claptrap’s freakin’ boat. / And get out of here.” They sounded pissed. 

“Couldn’t have said it better myself!” Claptrap said as he followed them. “Let's board me mighty vessel and kiss the shelf goodbye!” 

“Woah, wait, Zer0, You alright, dude?” Axton asked. 

“Yes,” they said. 

“Cause I have like, one more insta-health here.” He held up another hypo, smirking. 

“Give me it.” “I dunno. If you’re okay, I might save it for later. Does our untouchable assassin really need some healing?”

Zer0’s hand closed around the hilt of their sword. “You have eyes.” 

“Axton, just give them the damn instahealth.” Maya stepped in. 

Axton sighed, and Zer0 snatched it up. “This feels like enabling their crap, y’know?” 

———

Considering that the boat they were to take belonged to Claptrap, Rhys expected the prize to be some sad little dinghy. He wasn’t well-versed on boats, but it had actually probably been some sort of fishing trawler. He wasn’t sure how a Claptrap would end up with something like that, but it had SS Claptrap spray painted on it. It was a good-sized boat, even with eight passengers there was space to spare. Sturdy, too, though that didn’t make Rhys feel much better as they lowered it into the water from a pair of cranes attached to Flynt’s wreck. He clung to the side as it was slowly lowered into the water, wondering if the shield would save him from falling to his death. Every bump felt like it might be the end, but somehow the ship touched down without incident.  

“So, how long is it to the mainland?” Gaige asked when they finally got moving. 

“Fifteen hours! But don’t worry chums, I’m sure it’ll pass in a flash! I know some great boat trip games!”  

“Ugh. If anyone needs me I’m gonna go over there and tune up Deathtrap.” 

“Yeah, uh, shouldn’t you be steering? Keep us from hitting any icebergs, or something?” Rhys tried.  

“You’re absolutely right! I guess you guys can have fun, I’ll provide the background music. Just gotta load up some sea shanties, and it’ll be a party in no time!” 

Rhys just hoped that Pandora wasn’t home to any horrific sea monsters. Before anything else, he found a tiny little bathroom in the boat’s cabin, a mirror on the door. There was a sink, but no water ran through it. Instead, he was stuck wiping what blood and sweat he could get off with his sleeve–Maybe Sanctuary would have actual laundry machines. 

It was then that Vaughn called him back, the notification lit up in his ECHOeye. He ignored it, no telling what the Vault hunters would do if they caught him communicating with someone on Helios. A moment later he got the voicemail and played it directly into his implants. 

“Holy shit, Rhys. I just saw your message. I’m so glad you’re okay. Or, I hope you’re okay. I’m gonna choose to believe you’re not answering because you are busy actively surviving that hellhole. What happened? Where are you? Can we do anything to help? Yvette can send down supplies? You, uh, you don’t have to worry about us. Get this, Vasquez disappeared, his nameplate’s gone, office cleaned out, no one knows what’s going on. But supposedly, he got called in for a meeting with Jack, and you know… Try to get back up here soon. And don’t drink the water down there! Or eat anything weird. Call me back. If you’re still alive, I mean.” 

Rhys texted a reply, practicing with the ECHOeye functionality he’d used to message Jack: “Still alive. Can’t call you, I’m surrounded by bandits. We’ve reached an understanding though, they trust me. I’m not going to be in mortal danger anytime soon unless I start openly talking to someone on Helios.” 

The text response from Vaughn came a minute later: “Holy shit, dude. Are you sure they’re not planning to eat you? I heard Pandora is chock full of cannibals.” 

“I’m sure.” 

“Okay, still, you should really find a Hyperion base or something.” “I’ll keep an eye out.” A lie, but he wasn’t about to give too much away. 

“I gotta get back to work, Don’t want anyone else up here getting called into Jack’s office. I’ll message later. But seriously, you need anything, let me or Yvette know.” “Yep. See you later.” He had to smile–Vaughn had nothing to worry about up there, Jack had already done him a favor and gotten Vasquez out of the way. He played this right and he could get his friends comfy, safe positions before this was over. 

He passed Axton on his way out of the cabin, already napping on one of the little cots. 

Outside, the rest of them were keeping their distance from each other. Krieg was at the prow of the ship, yelling incoherently at the sea ahead. Maya sat on a crate nearby, somehow ignoring him enough to be reading a book. Gaige worked on her robot, disassembled parts laid out across the deck in front of her. Salvador was cleaning his shotgun. Zer0 was just leaning against the side of the boat, arms crossed, things like “B0R3D”, “...”, and “UGH” occasionally flashing over their helm. 

Claptrap, at least, was too occupied with steering to bother anyone with more than singing.

Everyone still seemed too tense to approach, but he still had a lot of material on the Hyperion database that may or may not come in handy to study. He sat down leaning against the cabin’s outer wall, and pulled up an entry of their destination, Three Horns. 

“Three Horns is a small region named for its three stone crags. Ringed by mountains to the east and precipitous cliffs to the west, the area is…” 

“That should be removed.” Zer0’s voice interrupted his reading. They were kneeling in front of him. “Before we reach the city. / It may get you killed.”

“Wha..?” He closed out of the ECHOeye entry. “What?” 

They poked his chest.  “Oh. Yeah.” It barely peered out under the bandit’s jacket, only the “Hy” visible, but it was undeniably Hyperion’s logo on his vest

“In Sanctuary / I hear they find clever ways / Of killing your kind.” They projected a “;)”. 

“Right…” It was a nice vest. Expensive, hardy. He couldn’t just throw the whole thing out. But he could probably cut through the stitching. “You’ve got a knife or something?” 

“Yes,” they said. 

He waited. They made no move to offer him anything. 

“Can I use it?” 

They cocked their head, seeming to consider for a moment. “No.” They stood and returned to their prior spot. 

After half an hour of fighting with the label, he’d managed to pull it a third of the way off. Hyperion stitching was good. He was considering resorting to using his teeth when a folded pocket knife landed in front of him. He looked up to see Zer0, and took the knife with a “Thanks? Wish you’d given this to me before?” 

The knife was marked “DAHL”. 

“Er…Did…Did you steal this from Axton?” 

“He is still sleeping. / If I were you, I’d work fast. / He will wake angry.” They projected a “:3”. 

[rlyc00l]

an important thing about rhys is that while he is capable of being all blushy and stammer-y (and he can definitely be that way towards Zer0 before he gets to know them and it is definitely funny when he is) he is not remotely a helpless soft sweet doormat

[rlyc00l]

there was plenty of time for rhys to be lovestruck after being whisked away to safety by zer0, just saying

[rlyc00l]

Maybe Rhys is adjusting to his new life as an outlaw. Maybe he can make this work. He hasn't died yet, and he's even getting used to the place's smell. But, on second thought, he wants to go home and never set foot on Pandoran soil again. Getting rich in the process would be a nice bonus.

(Chapter also posted under cut)

— — —

Rhys didn’t move from Knuckle Dragger’s corpse until the Vault hunters finished dispatching the last few bullymong. It took as long for his heart rate to return to normal, and his left hand to stop trembling. 

When it was done, he had to step around dead bullymong, through blood-spattered snow, to reach the others. They’d all been wounded, except maybe for Zer0, who’d walked off as soon as the last bullymong fell. Salvador had been bitten in his forearm, Maya had a gash on one calf, Axton’s face was swelling up after being hit with a hurled chunk of ice, Gaige had a huge bruise on her right arm, and Krieg was so covered in blood it was hard to tell how much of it was his. They were taking a breather to rest and tend to their wounds. 

“Now where’d my eye get to?” The Claptrap had gone into panic mode again during the fighting. Now he’d reemerged and started ping-ponging a path through dead bullymong. 

“Just stay still for the moment, we’ll get it,” Maya called after it, impatiently. She’d taken a seat on a bullymong corpse as she bandaged her leg—wounds like this didn’t warrant wasting precious instahealths.  “Zer0 took it,” Rhys said. “Dunno where they went.” 

She sighed. “Of course they did. I guess they won’t go too far as long as we still have Claptrap… You’re missing a shoe, by the way.”

“Oh, yeah.” The star pattern on his right sock had darkened with melted snow and blood. His blood, he realized. He must have stepped on something as he’d run away, and it sliced through to the bottom of his foot. It was bleeding profusely, but it didn’t hurt yet. 

“Hold on.” Maya dug through her little first aid kid, producing a couple of square-wrapped antiseptic pads and a roll of bandages. “Krieg drank my saline wash, and I wouldn’t trust the snow here. You’ll probably want to clean it better when we get to Liar’s Berg.” 

Rhys knelt, setting the gun down close to him (he needed a better way of carrying that thing around). The snow melted into his pants as he cleaned the wound, he was getting accustomed to that discomfort. Once bandaged, he half-hopped back through the shipping container. He found his shoe half-buried on the other end, wiped it out, and put it on. The stun rod wasn’t far from that, sticking out of the ground, no worse for wear. 

After retrieving his belongings, he searched out Zer0. They’d gone further up the path on their own. An abandoned Hyperion drop barge blocked the way forward. On one side was a steep drop back to Knuckle Dragger’s lair, the other an impassable cliff. Zer0 was looking at the barge’s door, ellipses projected from their helm. 

“Hey, uh, Zer0,” he greeted. This was the part where he was the bigger person, the guy who inspired loyalty in his underlings, the workplace relations guy. 

They turned to him, the ellipses changing into a question mark. “I just wanted to thank you. For before?”

“I needed the space.” They produced another gun from their holster, a black and yellow Dahl pistol. “This one is superior. / And, it’s corrosive.”

“I mean, yeah, thanks for that too, It would have been nice to have that from the start, and all but.... I was trying to thank you for saving me back there.” 

“You disappointed,” they said. “Next time, aim for the beast’s throat. / A more certain kill.” He stared at them. “Have you ever talked to another person, like, ever?” 

“Yes.” They turned back to the barge. There was a door on it with a little digital-optical scanner on the side.   

Hyperion tech like this was easy to open with his ECHOeye, and he guessed he owed Zer0, but it was hard to want to repay that debt. He’d wait for the others to catch up first. 

That wasn’t a long wait. The Claptrap sped ahead of them, chattering. “The road to Liar’s Berg’s on the other side of this barge. What say we cut through it, chums?”

“You’re not gonna be–” The Claptrap rolled right past Rhys, to the scanner. “Aaand OPEN!” 

“Intruders detected. Locking door,” an automated voice replied, predictably. 

“You’re discontinued tech,” Rhys said, activating his ECHOeye. “I can-” 

“Let me get that for you.” An unfamiliar woman’s voice spoke in his head. Projecting from the barge’s scanner was a woman’s face. The same one he’d seen when he’d collapsed. “Executing phase shift.” 

The door opened. 

“Yes! I knew I’d get it eventually.” Claptrap rolled on ahead of them. 

“You’re welcome! Perks of being an artificial Intelligence. I’m networked into almost everything in this planet,” she said.

“Is um, is everyone hearing that?” Rhys asked, still half afraid he had a virus. 

“Yep,” confirmed Maya. “She spoke to us a little after Jack tried to blow us up. You hadn’t caught up by then.” “So… Uh…How exactly..?” “I think she’s eridium powered,” Gaige said. “You put enough eridium into anything and it’ll start breaking the laws of physics. Among other things.” 

“I guess that tracks.” He’d heard plenty of murmurings of “weird Eridium shit” back on Helios, and he’d seen a few E-tech demos. The best summation of eridium he could manage was “It’s basically magic”. Plus, he was standing five feet away from a siren, who was even more “basically magic”. 

It was a downhill trek after the barge. The small town, Liar’s Berg, lay at the bottom. “Town” might be a generous word for what it was. It was more a cluster of frozen little buildings surrounded by a wall made from blocks of ice and scrap. But it did somewhat resemble civilization, Rhys had to give it that much. 

Zer0 had gotten ahead of them again. By the time they reached the ridge overlooking the town,  Zer0 was already set up with a sniper rifle, picking off townsfolk. 

“Bandits,” they explained, before anyone could ask. Rhys decided that was credible enough.  Besides, by Jack’s most conservative estimates, Pandora was ninety-five percent bandits, between Dahl’s former prison labor force, abandoned Crimson Lance soldiers, and the lawless treasure hunters that swarmed the planet like flies. Decent people just didn’t come to this planet. 

The bandits that were foolish enough to peer out of cover to return fire fell quickly, and before long, the town looked lifeless. Zer0 stood, shouldering their gun. “I counted twelve more. / They took shelter in buildings. / I will kill them there.” 

“At this rate, I’m tempted to stand back and let you try that,” Maya said. 

Zer0 was already heading down the incline. And maybe the Vault hunters followed Maya’s leadership in some respects, but they didn’t wait for her orders to advance. Except for Krieg and Rhys. 

Krieg paced like he was barely restraining himself from running down the hill after them. “The shiny one’s innards aren’t suffering yet!” 

“Eh. It might be fun,” Maya allowed with a shrug. “Let’s go.” Rhys had hoped to hang back again, let the others do the fighting. The cut in his foot was starting to hurt. But there were more bullymong holes in the walls here, he didn’t want to get caught alone with another pack of them.

He limped after the two of them, allowing himself to fall behind. 

He walked into the town, holding the gun at his side. The ground here had been trampled by numerous footsteps, revealing the dark stone beneath the snow. He passed a burn barrel still flickering with fire. A dead bandit was slumped over it, his face and shoulders charred. More corpses lay in the street. Many of them had no marks but a single hole through their head, Zer0’s work, but there’d been more deaths since. A lone, dismembered leg. A body sliced open vertically. Another covered in bullet wounds. A huge hole blown out of one’s chest. 

The sounds of combat had moved further into town. Rhys followed the gunfire, not in any hurry. If he timed it right, he’d catch up as they were finishing, without making it obvious that he was intentionally sitting things out. Vaughn’s high school gym class strategy.  

A man stumbled out from behind one building. He wore a mask over a pair of goggles, obscuring his entire face. Acid had eaten away the side of his jacket, revealing the melted flesh underneath. He looked straight at Rhys. Worse, he pointed his shotgun straight at him.

“You also worth a million? Jack’s offering a million for Vault hunters.” 

“Do I look like a Vault hunter?” Could he lift his pistol to shoot the guy before getting shot himself? 

The bandit looked him up and down. 

Oh god, wait, would the pistol even shoot? Was it even loaded? It would be just like Zer0 to empty the gun before giving it to him. 

“You look Hyperion,” the bandit said. “Exactly. I’m important up there. You kill me, you and Handsome Jack are gonna be having a problem.” Wait, did this thing have a safety? Was the safety on? How did he tell? 

“Already have a problem with Jack.”  …Shit, he should’ve tested it earlier. 

The bandit shifted, barely an inch. Rhys lifted the gun and pulled the trigger, again and again until the gun stopped firing, and then some after that. 

The bandit fell, dead. 

Rhys stood, frozen, staring at the corpse. The holes the gun made looked tiny. There didn’t seem to be much blood, considering how many times he’d shot him.  

He’d made it far in Hyperion without ever killing anyone. It wasn’t a moral choice, it just didn’t seem like his style. Now that he had, he didn’t even feel bad about it. Hell, he felt great. He laughed, strangely giddy. And a little shaky. Somewhat nauseous. 

“You have surprised me. / I thought he’d blow your head off. / Congratulations.”  

Rhys turned around to see Zer0, sitting on a dumpster, legs crossed. They projected a smiley face. A bucket of sewer water on his victory. 

“...Were you there the whole time?” “I was after him.” Zer0 gestured to the body. “Coward. Ran when I shot him. / But you found him first.” “I could have used some help.” “He didn’t kill you. / And you proved entertaining. / Hyperion guy.” 

He felt his face heat up. “I had to try something! He was pointing a gun at me! I didn’t know if this thing would work!” 

They stood. “The first shot killed him. / You wasted all that ammo. / You should search the corpse.” They flashed him a “:D” and walked away. 

“Ugh.” At least they hadn’t taken the shotgun. A Jakobs double barrel, old and worn-looking. They probably already had something better. 

The bandit wore a belt with a few pouches slung across his chest. Rhys unbuckled it and checked the pouches. Those netted him a handful of loose bullets and a half-empty box of shells. He wasn’t sure how to reload the pistol–shameful, for a Hyperion employee–but a scan with his ECHOeye gave him the necessary instructions.  

Afterward, he attached the belt to the shotgun, turning it into a makeshift sling. If he was going to be stuck on Pandora for a while, he’d need to get one of those digi-holsters the others had. And if it was gonna be this cold… Nearby lay one of Zer0’s victims, a bandit, lying on his back with half of his brain blown out. He was shorter than Rhys but much broader, and his jacket was far from the most disgusting thing Rhys had seen on this planet. It had a few duct tape repairs, a seam on one shoulder had worn apart, and there were a number of questionable stains, but there was barely any blood on it, and Rhys was tired of being cold. 

He unzipped it, pulled the limp arms through the sleeves as far as he could, then flipped the body to yank it the rest of the way off. 

— — —

Liar’s Berg had one living, ostensibly non-bandit resident, Sir Hammerlock. Hammerlock was a fellow cyborg, and despite his esteemed prefix and general air of class, his robotic parts were even more shoddy than Gaige’s. Still, he gave them a warm enough welcome, offering up his home to the Vault hunters for the night. He even had real food, bullymong-meat-free. Granted, it was all canned stuff, but canned beans on thawed-out toast felt like a luxury.

“Hyperion, are you?” he asked, upon introductions. Rhys had made the mistake of taking off his newfound jacket in the heated house. Betrayed by his uniform again. “I hear it’s not easy to defect from a man like Handsome Jack. At least, not without dying horrifically. Well, good on you, I say.” 

Rhys, for his part, managed an awkward laugh and a, “Yeah… We’re definitely gonna…gonna show him.” He tried not to think too hard about Jack’s earlier ECHOcomm. None of the Vault hunters seemed afraid of Jack, but they all possessed some strange deficiency in the fear center of the brain. And they didn’t know the man. They’d never had their coworkers disappear, only to learn their last known location was Jack’s office. Jack was a fantastic leader, but he was not to be crossed. The best Rhys could hope for, as a “traitor”, was to keep his head down and somehow survive Jack’s scourge of Pandora. He could take it day by day. Now? He’d faced a bullymong and killed a man. That had to be something. 

That night was spent on a couch in Sir Hammerlock’s house. He fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down, his dreams of Helios. He’d shoved Vasquez in the airlock and shot him out into space, and was swiftly promoted to associate vice president of Security Propaganda. Zer0 was ther. Dream logic deemed them his secretary. They wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses over their helmet and carried a clipboard.  

“Next time, I’d recommend not shooting him out the airlock,” they told him in much too long a sentence. “You’ll have more fun if you’re there with him. A knife, perhaps… By the way, you have a meeting at seven with–” 

“So, Rhys was it?” Handsome Jack said, entering his office. 

Rhys perked up. “Yes, sir! Is there something you need? Always glad to be of service, Handsome Jack, sir.” “Are you seriously asleep already?” 

“Wh-what? No, I was just preparing the report on the–” 

“Wake up dipshit!” Rhys jolted up, gasping. Jack had sounded so real, he had to look around the room to reassure himself he wasn’t there. “You up? Good.” Jack’s voice again.  

“J…Jack?” He lifted his right hand. Was it his built-in ECHOcomm? The screen wasn’t on… “I can imagine you’re freaking out, so I’ll spell it out: you’re hearing my voice in your head, dumbshit. Yeah, yeah. Relax. It’s a feature all Hyperion ECHOeyes come with. Fine print stuff. So, about earlier.” “I can explain—I—” “Shh. Don’t talk. You can text me through your ECHOeye, but for right now? Shut up for a second. Obviously, you’re a loyal Hyperion employee who got screwed over, right? I got the whole story out of ol’ Wallethead.” 

“W-wallet—?” he started, before remembering he wasn’t supposed to talk. 

“Anyway, here’s the deal: these idiots think you’re harmless, right? Maybe they even think you’re one of them? You’re gonna use that, help me out a bit here.” “What do I do?” he sent. Using the ECHOeye to send text was new to him, it was harder to control than just using his arm interface. 

“Nothing big. For now? You’re a Vault hunter. Fight alongside them, gain their trust. Once you get into Sanctuary, I have a few things I’ll need you to hack. A little spying, a little sabotage. That kind of thing. Easy, low-risk stuff.”

Rhys nodded, half terrified, realized Jack couldn’t see him nod, and sent him an “Ok.” 

“Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll contact you again when I need you.” “Yes, sir.”  “You let me down? I’ll be sure to personally strangle the life out of you—after reclaiming the Hyperion tech in your skull. Capeesh?” “Yes, sir.” 

“Attaboy. You do good, and I’ll send a shuttle to get you back up to Helios, where there’s a promotion with your name in it. How does President of Security Propaganda sound? Don’t bother answering. Hell, I’ll throw in a couple turbo mansions. Now, get some sleep.”

Sleep was impossible, after that. Part of him was exhilarated, just when he’d lost hope of ever going home, Jack had given him the chance of a lifetime. The kind of chance he could have worked on Helios for the rest of his life without ever getting. And it was the only chance he had at surviving, he knew that now. 

The other part of him was terrified. He didn’t know which would be worse: failing Jack or getting caught by the Vault hunters. The latter was a risk he’d have to take. They already trusted him, Jack had made sure of that by labeling him a traitor. He could be sneaky, he’d already stabbed plenty of backs on Helios. 

There was a third part, too. A small part that kept welling up as much as he tried to push it down. It wasn’t a part worth paying attention to. These people were doomed anyway.

[rlyc00l]

I've edited all the posts with links to Decepti0n to also have a read-more with the chapter there. I will be doing the same for P0is0ned (and I'll make sure they're all tagged as #p0is0ned so they're easy to find) I'll still be posting new chapters to fanfiction.net but this way they should be constantly accessible to everyone :)

Edit: Also it looks like I'm gonna have to post the first like, four chapters of P0is0ned? I apparently never posted them here

[rlyc00l]

fanfiction.net keeps going down so uh, I might start reposting fic chapters right here under read mores? I hope that's not like, annoying. I guess I can stagger it, tag chapters with something you can blacklist, or make another sideblog just for fic? Thoughts?

[rlyc00l]

Decepti0n, Chapter 3 on Fanfiction.net

(For some reason tumblr won't let me link to fanfiction.net the normal way anymore? WELP)

Zer0's an ass, Rhys's entire life is ruined forever, Rhys maybe has a virus, Rhys almost dies again—but hey, he does do one kind of cool thing.

EDIT: Chapter is also under the break :)

———— “Look, I appreciate the extra sleep,” Maya said. Her hair was tousled, she combed it out as she spoke. “But we agreed you’d take first watch and then wake me up.”  

“I didn’t need to.” Zer0 had their storage deck holoscreen up. They scrolled through their guns rather than face Maya. Rhys couldn’t help but notice they had two pistols besides the one they’d stolen from him. “I kept watch throughout the night. / And nothing attacked.” 

“That’s beside the point. We need everyone rested. If Jack figured out that we survived, he might send another ambush–” 

“I require less sleep.” They closed the holoscreen. Unlike the others, they had no camp to pack up, and they’d declined breakfast. The fact they hadn’t gone on alone put their air of self-assurance in question, at least in Rhys’s eyes. “And I am more observant / Than the rest of you.” 

The measured smile on Maya’s face fell. “You understand why I can’t take your word for that?”  “Yeah, I like to think I’m pretty damn observant,” Axton put in as he rolled up his bedroll. “Though, I don’t mind sleeping through the night, thanks, Zer0.” 

“The point is, if we’re going to work as a team, we need to communicate better,” she said.   “I’m not on your team. / We’re traveling the same way. / For the time being.” 

“If that’s the case, why stick around?” 

“Because I need that,” They pointed to the Claptrap, “If I want off this glacier. / Or so I’ve been told.” 

“Then work with us! We have the same goal.” A light went through her tattoos. Rhys was getting the sense that this wasn’t the first time they’d butted heads. He hadn’t paid much mind to the other bandit’s interactions, having assumed they were all in this together from the start. 

“You wanted guarding. / I guarded. What’s the problem? / You are still alive.” 

Whatever Maya was about to say was drowned out by her ECHO device. 

“Hey, kiddos.” The voice was unmistakable. Rhys straightened up on instinct. “Jack here–President of Hyperion. Lemme explain how things work here: Vault Hunters show up. Vault Hunters look for the new Vault. Vault Hunters get killed. By me. You seeing the problem here? You’re still alive. So, if you—hold on, wait, wait wait wait, do you seriously have one of my employees with you? How the hell’d he get down there?” 

And that was it. Rhys was completely, one hundred percent, ruined. He’d be branded a traitor, he could never return to Helios, and if Pandora didn’t kill him, Handsome Jack would.

“Well, okay. Rhys Strongfork. From Security Propaganda? That’s weird.” Jack laughed. “Rogue employee going Vault hunter? That’s a new one. Let me know how it turns out. Anyway, I was gonna just tell you all to kill yourselves but, Rhysie? I really wanna see what happens to a traitorous little code monkey on Pandora.” The comm ended with a click. 

The others were all looking at him. He tried to put on a brave face, cracking a smile. “So uh, we’re definitely killing that guy, yeah?” 

Dunno if it’s a ‘we’, Strongfork.” Axton clapped Rhys on the back. “But hey, I’ll give you front-row seats to my badass Jack kill.” 

Rhys shot him a glare, even as he tried to work out a way to convince Jack he was only a prisoner. Would Jack accept that lie, even if he believed it? The man wasn’t known for tolerating failure. 

“He’ll die by my blade,” Zer0 said simply. An “uwu” projected from their visor. 

“No! I will crack the fingers in my teeth!” Krieg twitched as he yelled, smacking the side of his head a few times. 

“If any of us are going to kill Jack, we need to get off this glacier first,” Maya said before anyone else could make their claim. “I suggest we get moving.” 

She’d apparently taken up leadership of the group, and the others accepted that, aside from Zer0. With a few final preparations, they were on the road again. 

It was still freezing, of course, and Rhys was more sore than he’d ever been in his life, but the walking had become easier. They’d moved past the deeper, loose snow. Now Rhys’s feet only went two inches through the icy crust. And the sun was out. None of that made Rhys any happier about his current situation, but at least it wasn’t worse. 

He tried to ignore the sound of Gaige taking long strides to catch up with him as he walked. Maybe if he didn’t look at her, she wouldn’t try to talk to him. She could not possibly have anything good to say. 

His efforts failed. “So, Jack didn’t set you up to be killed, huh?” 

“What?” 

“Before you were all ‘Jack tried to blow me up! I was subtly undermining Jack! He didn’t want to martyr me!’” She did a voice that must have meant to be Rhys’s, but did not remotely sound like him. “But obviously, Jack didn’t know you were here until, like, literally just now. So?”

Was he being interrogated? “You hear the part where he called me a ‘traitorous code monkey’?”

“Yeah, but like, did you actually do anything cool? Try to smash the system?” 

“I did what I said I did,” Rhys snapped. It was suddenly very important to him that this teenager thought he was cool and not a liar. “Maybe Jack–Maybe he didn’t personally set that up for me, but someone up there wanted me dead for it. There–there’s an entire organizational hierarchy up there, Jack doesn’t handle everything himself.” “Fine, geez. I was just wondering…”

“Well, I’m glad to appease your curiosity, or whatever.” He noticed her eyeing his right arm. “Can I help you with anything else?” “Nope. I’m good.” Gaige said, looking down at her own cybernetic arm like she was comparing the two. It was a good thing hers was on the left, he would not put it past bandits to steal a man’s arm. Of course, maybe he was still in some danger from her. She had to be unstable, to end up here. 

He was about to ask her to stop staring at him like a piece of machinery when a sharp pain struck him. His ECHOeye port seemed to explode into little needles as his vision blurred and flickered. He let out a cry. A dark-haired, pale young woman appeared in front of him, just for an instant, and he fell. Distantly, he heard Salvador’s “I think Hyperion guy died.” before things went dark.  

The next thing Rhys was aware of was snow moving rhythmically below him as he passed over it. Someone’s hand grasped his forearm, another on the back of his thigh. He was being carried, he realized. Groaning, he lifted his head. He made brief eye contact with Salvador, who laughed, shaking his head. “Hey, Axton, the princess is up.” 

“Wha…?” Rhys blinked, rubbing his head. The pain from before had turned into a soft ache. “Let…Let me down…” 

“You gonna pass out again?” Axton asked. 

“No? I don’t think so?” 

Axton slid him off his shoulders and onto the ground. He felt dizzy, but got his bearings after a few stumbled steps. 

“What happened?” He asked. For a second time, he was being stared at. He caught Zer0, once again far from the others, watching him with a “LOL” projected from their helm.

“You went all twitchy and blinky and then fainted.” It was Gaige who answered. 

“Real elegant pose too, ass straight up in the air.” Axton grinned. 

“Great to know, thanks.” At least they hadn’t left him behind. They weren’t complete savages. 

He brought his hand up to his ECHOport, half expecting it to be bleeding or loose. Nothing out of place. Both eyes were functioning. His right arm moved as well as the left. He seemed okay, aside from the residual soreness from yesterday’s bullymong attack. 

Surreptitiously, he felt for his wallet. It was still in his front pocket, only thinner than it had been. Yep, that’s about what he’d expect. Fair enough. Only later, once they started moving again, did he get some real concern, from Maya. “Is something broken? I’m…Inexperienced with cybernetics, but I imagine they were the cause. Your eye was blinking.”

“I must have hit my head harder than I realized, knocked a part loose? It…It should be fine.” He had no idea if that was true, but you weren’t supposed to show weakness around these types, a rule he’d already broken too many times. Maya might seem reasonable, but there had to be a good reason Jack wanted her dead. “I can fix it, once we get somewhere with a mirror and some tools.” He didn’t relish the thought of poking around in his own head. Maybe it was one of those one-off things, some sort of glitch that he wouldn’t run into again. Maybe he could ignore it. 

“Gaige seems to be an experienced mechanic. You could ask her for help.” 

Rhys just looked at her. 

She shrugged. “Understandable. Still, try not to faint again, if possible. Claptrap’s claiming that Knuckle Dragger’s lair isn’t much further. Supposedly, he leads a sizable pack.”

————

They came to the lair nearly an hour later. It was up on a short ridge. The only way up was through a misaimed moonshot shipping container, both ends opened. 

Rhys let the Claptrap and Vault hunters go ahead of him. He knew he’d be useless in this fight, or worse, an outright burden. Better to stand around down here until the shooting ended. 

The Claptrap started screaming immediately, and the first shots were fired. He heard roaring, more cries from the Claptrap, something large slamming into the earth. Strangely, this was starting to feel routine. 

He leaned back against the side of the container and activated his arm’s holographic interface. Should he take this chance to shoot a message to Vaughn and Yvette, let them know he wasn’t dead, or would communicating with them implicate them as traitors? Best not to risk it. There were rumors of Jack airlocking an entire R&D team when he suspected one of betraying him. 

Still, it was strange, even if they’d thought Rhys had died down here, wouldn’t they at least think to ECHO him? Unless something had happened… Vasquez wouldn’t try to off them, too, would he? His throat got tight, thinking about it. 

Something landed on the shipping container above him with a heavy clunk. He looked up to find a bullymong staring back down at him. It was four times the size of the others he’d seen. Fresh bullet wounds covered its pelt. It wore a glowing blue sphere around its neck.

Nearby, he could still hear shooting. 

Slowly, he turned to face it. Just stay calm. Back away. Don’t do anything to upset it. It’ll be more interested in the people who shot it. He grabbed the stun rod, not taking his eyes off of it. 

It was staring at the glow of the hand interface. He deactivated it. Wrong move, the bullymong—Knuckle Dragger, he realized—roared and leapt at him. Scampering to the side, he jabbed out at it, just like last time. Unlike last time, this one swiped the rod out of his grasp, sending it flying.

Rhys turned and ran. 

Knuckle Dragger followed.

He sprinted in a wide circle, bullymong close behind. There was no way he’d outrun it for long. His only chance was the shipping container. Knuckle Dragger was too large to fit through the opening. 

With every stride he was sure he’d be caught, up until he finally leapt into the container. He slipped on the icy metal, fell forward, and felt himself being pulled back out. The bullymong had his shoe. Yelping, Rhys wriggled his foot free. He dragged himself out of reach, into the open on the other side.  

Chaos lay before him. He couldn’t begin to count the bullymong, alive or dead. A sharp-clawed robot—Gaige’s, he realized—raked open one’s chest a few feet in front of him. Somewhere, Salvador was yelling incomprehensibly. Axton was reloading his gun, covered by a turret next to him. He thought he saw Krieg dash past as he got to his feet.  “Help?!” he heard himself cry, to no response. The crate behind him echoed as the bullymong climbed over it. Rhys did the only thing he could think to do: he darted straight through the battlefield, hoping Knuckle Dragger would turn its attention to someone else. 

It didn’t. And once again it was closing in. He came to a sheer ice wall with the thing bearing down on him. To his left was a large pile of remains: an assortment of bone, cloth, and metal. He grabbed at a piece of metal in desperation, pulling it free. It was the twisted remains of a Jakobs rifle. A crude blade was affixed to one end. 

He dodged a blow from the bullymong’s massive fist–and blindly thrust upward with all of his strength. 

The bayonet passed between the detached lower mandibles and stuck fast in the roof of its mouth. Knuckle Dragger pulled away with a choked cry, yanking the makeshift spear out of Rhys’s grasp. Blood flowed down the blade, spattering the ice beneath it. Enraged, it reared up, fists balled. 

Rhys shielded himself against a blow that never came. 

Instead, there was a pitiful groan. Knuckle Dragger stumbled, swayed a little, and fell forward, narrowly missing Rhys. 

 Perched on its back was Zer0, their sword buried between its shoulder blades. They freed their blade, hopped off, and yanked the makeshift Claptrap eye necklace from Knuckle Dragger’s neck. 

“I…Erm…I…” Rhys stammered out, his heart still pounding in his chest. 

They glanced at him, drew a pistol from their digi-holster, and tossed it to him. He fumbled as he caught it. Zer0 was gone again by the time he recognized the gun.  

[rlyc00l]

Rhys gets to know his new "team" as he tries to get a handle on his potentially profitable (but let's be real, most likely fatal) situation. Claptrap is irritating. A certain helmet-wearing asshole seems intent on making things difficult.

Hi guys I had a few chapters basically ready to go (mostly laid out and just needing some editing) and you know what? I'm just gonna post them as they're ready.

EDIT: Chapter also under the break!

———— A few of Rhys’s new bandit companions had taken it upon themselves to haul out the corpses and body parts that littered the place. Rhys would have offered to help, but corpses were pretty gross and he had claimed himself a nice warm spot by the furnace. 

He wasn’t the only one not participating, that first one he’d met–who he’d started mentally referring to with the inventive nickname of “Helmet Asshole”–ignored the corpses in favor of rifling through cabinets, boxes, and shelves, occasionally pocketing ammo or whatever else they found. The big, masked bandit sat beside the fire, holding his hands nearly inside the flames. And the Claptrap rolled around, complaining about his missing eye and bumping into things. 

As the others finally settled in for the night, Rhys found it impossible to fall asleep, lying there on the hard metal floor. Nearby, the fire crackled, the Claptrap whirred, one of the bandits snored, and the big one murmured to himself. Sighing, he rolled onto his back and opened a map on his ECHOeye interface. There had to be a way back to Helios–some Hyperion outpost or something. 

Or, nothing. There was nothing. Nothing in any direction, for miles. Just ice and a few abandoned villages, some marked “Bandit Infested”. Silently, Rhys apologized to Handsome Jack for ever doubting his propaganda. It seemed his only choice was to stick with this pack of bandits who, for now, had decided against killing him. He could figure things out as he went. Every trial was an opportunity in disguise, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that how that motivational poster went? The one with Handsome Jack, standing on the corpse of the Destroyer. 

This was the planet that made Jack the man he was, after all. He could prove himself here. If these bandits were important enough that Jack wanted them dead, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. 

Rhys sat up, confirming everyone was asleep before activating his ECHOeye and scanning the soldier, sleeping a few feet away. Axton. Ex-Dahl commando, dishonorable discharge. War criminal. Five billion reward. Surely Jack would pay a percentage of that for his location. Maybe, Rhys would find a chance to covertly ECHO into Hyperion without alerting the bandits. Jack himself would send down soldiers and a ride back home. If Rhys survived, he’d live a long life as the second richest man on Helios. Next, he scanned the short one–Salvador–who slept propped up against a wall, snoring. Salvador was a Pandoran native with a long list of crimes, cannibalism among them. A 720 billion bounty. If Rhys were a stronger man, this room would practically be an Eridium mine. But there was no fooling himself, he stood no chance in a fight. No, he’d just scan them, one by one. His ECHOeye history would serve to prove to Hyperion that he was in close proximity to them.

Next, Helmet Asshole. He’d seen them situate themself further from the others, on a couch against the wall, or…Wait, where’d they go? He looked around the room. Gone. 

Had they moved on alone? Fine by him, that was one less bandit.

Rhys sat up enough to see the teenager. It was hard to feel good about the prospect of selling out a kid, but sacrifices had to be made.

Gaige. A high school senior right out of Eden-5, tech-wiz, and total nerd, built a killer robot that murdered another student. 

Too bad, she could have made something of herself in Hyperion. Her bounty was 820 billion, leaving Rhys to wonder how they came up with these numbers. If he could take any of these bandits in a fight, it was the teenager. Her crappy, bargain bin cybernetic arm looked homemade. 

Then there was the big guy, still murmuring to himself. He tossed and turned as he slept, the other sleepers had given him a wide berth. 

Krieg. “Property of Hyperion”. That gave Rhys pause. He’d heard the rumors, bandits and incompetent employees alike dragged off to laboratories on Pandora for unethical experiments. The guy looked like the product of that sort of thing. It was hard not to pity him, but listening to the murmurings of “No…flayed her shining jugular…wear your face as a hat…ribcage tied into knots…” Okay, right, whatever he was, probably best off with Hyperion now. A hundred billion.  

Maya. She seemed human, almost normal, despite threatening him. She’d stood up for him and helped him out. Even so–  

“What are you doing?” Helmet Asshole materialized out of previously empty space, looming over him. In a swift motion, they crouched, their eponymous helmet a foot away from his face. 

Rhys shut off the ECHOeye. “Nothing, I–” They grabbed his chin, forcibly turning his head to face them as they leaned closer. “An ECHOeye. No surprise. / You were scanning them.” 

He glanced sideways. Everyone was still sleeping, Helmet Asshole had been keeping their voice down. “And what the hell were you doing?” he hissed. 

“Doesn’t concern you. / You’re the Hyperion stooge. / Will you sell us out?” 

Rhys hesitated. “Look, I-I’m just trying to get my bearings here. They pointed guns at me. I needed to find out who I’m dealing with.” 

They considered for a moment, releasing his face. It ached where they’d held him. “Understandable. / Was there anything of note? / I would like to know.” 

He looked at them, doubting he’d heard right. “I mean, they’re all dangerous wanted murderers? I-I don’t know what you’re looking for. No entries saying ‘they’ll kill you in your sleep’ but…” 

“Nothing useful?” “Depends on your definition of useful.”

They sighed and projected something blindingly bright in his face, Rhys turned away from the glare. 

“It’s of no matter,” they said, standing. “I will warn you. Sell me out, / And I’ll have your head.” 

“Right. I will definitely not do that.” Red light was still dancing in his vision. 

They stood and returned to their couch, lying down with their legs hanging over the end. There’d be no way of knowing when they fell asleep. No more scanning, then. He lay back, closing his eyes. 

———

“Wake up, my loyal minions! You have a bullymong to kill and a fearless leader to avenge!” It was still dim when the Claptrap began zipping around again, running into anyone too slow to get out of the way, occasionally letting out an “oof” or “ow.” The others woke with groggy protests and threats. “Knuckle-Dragger won’t know what hit him! It’ll be bullets and lots of them! Presumably! I guess it could also be swords, or fists, or a hatchet, or a really big stick, or…” Rhys was sore, hungry, and tired. Never had he wanted to murder anything so bad as he wanted to murder that stupid loud robot. He half-expected one of the bandits to do him a favor in that regard, impulsive as bandits were known to be, but none of them stepped up to the task. 

They were soon all out the door, and onto the bright, icy tundra. Helmet Asshole quickly got ahead of them, as did the blinded Claptrap. Sometimes, someone would warn it before it fell off a ledge or ran into something, but more often, they just let it happen. 

Before long Krieg was rushing after the robot, kicking up snow and laughing with his buzzaxe raised high, never bringing it down to smash the thing’s head in.  

“Wait! I found your larynx putrefying on the rocks! Why aren’t you suffocating?!” 

His movements were as erratic. Every once in a while he’d stop suddenly, twitching or smacking himself, sometimes delivering an intense one-eyed stare to one of the others. Rhys was on the receiving end of most of those. 

“Hey, uh, aren’t guys like him kind of murder-happy and extremely unpredictable?” Rhys asked Maya, keeping his voice low after the third murderous-looking glare in the past half hour. 

“Like your boss?” 

“I…I guess. Former boss, for the record.” Rhys ignored the urge to defend Jack’s decisions regarding murder. “But I mean, is it safe having him around?” 

“I think everyone’s wondering the same thing about you.” “I’m not waving around a buzzaxe and yelling about larynxes.” “Fair, but Krieg seems to be pretty in control of everything but his mouth. More or less.” 

“He keeps looking at me like he wants to rip out my spine.”

Maya shrugged. “From what I can gauge, Hyperion did that to him. Can you blame him? He helped me out earlier, and he was the first one to decide not to kill you. Perhaps you should be more open-minded?” 

“No, I think maybe you’re being too open-minded,” Axton cut in from behind, stepping in beside Rhys. “That guy’s been filled chock full of eridium. People like that? Ticking time bombs. He’s second place on the list of guys who’ll probably kill us in our sleep. You’re third, by the way, Reeze.” He grinned as he said it.

“It’s Rhys, and uh…” He gave a choked chuckle, trying to figure out if the guy was joking or not. “I’m not planning to? Uh, who’s first? On that list.” 

“That would be Zer0.” He gestured to Helmet Asshole, walking alone, far out of earshot. They seemed to glide across the snow while the rest trudged through it. “If I were Jack, I would have hired them to finish us off. Creepy bastard.” Rhys watched them. They were near the Claptrap. The robot was chattering at them, giving the others a blessed break from its voice. “I mean, to be fair, they had ample opportunity to kill me after the train crashed.” He said it half to reassure himself. 

Axton laughed. “Huh, wonder why not, Hyperion.” 

“Hey, if Jack meant for me to play double agent, he wouldn’t have tried to blow me up.” 

“Yeah, I don’t get that. Why not kill you normally?” It was the first time Gaige had bothered acknowledging Rhys since their first encounter–until now she’d just been giving him quick, suspicious looks. “You don’t look hard to kill.”

“Make it look like an accident, I guess? He didn’t want to martyr me. My whole division might have rebelled.”  It was a good question, now that he considered it. Maybe Vasquez’s traditional airlock method would get him in trouble unless he tore out all of Rhys’s cybernetics. Vasquez wasn’t patient enough for those surgical procedures. “I was speaking out against what Jack’s been doing here, on Pandora. And subtly influencing things, y’know? Di-diverting shipments, sabotaging production, stuff like that.” That sounded pretty good.

“Wow, that’s almost respectable. I mean, not as much as you know, not working for Hyperion in the first place, but good on you, I guess?” Gaige said. 

 “Hey, I had to make a living somehow, and I’m not exactly Dahl-soldier material.”

“You shoulda killed someone,” Salvador caught him by surprise from below his field of vision. The man was a little over five feet tall and nearly as wide–all of it muscle. Something about him was more intimidating than even Krieg. “I woulda killed someone. Preferably Jack.” 

“I uh, yeah, I guess I should have… To be fair, I didn’t get a chan–” 

He was interrupted by the Claptrap’s shrill cry. Up ahead, the bot was in its panic mode, its limbs retracted as it shuddered in simulated terror. A bullymong, near the same size as Salvador, was charging toward it. At least a dozen more were climbing out of burrows in the nearby ice wall.

The bandits had drawn their weapons before Rhys processed what was happening. Backing away, he glimpsed Zer0, appearing in the first bullymong’s path. Salvador wielded a pair of guns, laughing and firing both with little regard for Krieg, who ran straight through the line of fire without slowing. 

“Ah! The meat delivery is here!” Krieg shouted, swinging his buzzaxe into the nearest foe.  

Rhys didn’t see where Gaige or Axton had gone to, nor did he know how everyone got so far from him so fast, but he found himself alone in the open. 

One of the bullymongs, repelled by Salvador’s gunfire, chose him as an easier target. Remembering the stun rod, he yanked it from his belt, barely managing to activate it before the creature reached him. He jabbed at it, unleashing a jolt of electricity into its shoulder. It let out a pained roar, but didn’t let up. It began to circle him from a distance, testing for an opening. Turning, he kept the stun rod between him and the bullymong. It stepped forward, he jabbed in its direction, it backed away, then tried again. Rhys was feeling good about this, he’d just keep it up until–

Something crashed into him from behind, knocking him face-first into the snow. A second bullymong. It stood on his back, one oversized hand clamped around his arm, another pushed his head down. He turned the stun rod in his hand and jabbed backward. Empty air. The creature roared. Rhys felt its breath on his scalp, saliva dribbling into his hair. 

Oh shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shitshitshitshitshit–

All at once, the weight lifted from him. He rolled over in time to see the bullymong floating above him, surrounded by a strange energy. Then Krieg drove his buzzaxe into it, spattering both himself and Rhys in hot gore. The bullymong’s limp body was thrown off to the side. 

Sitting up and looking around, he saw the other bullymong lying already dead in front of him, Maya standing over it. Her tattoos seemed to glow. Elsewhere the gunfire had ceased, the fighting had finished. 

He shakily got to his feet, heart still pounding. “You gonna be alright?” Maya asked. The glow had already faded.  

He gave a weak nod, forcing a smile. “Yeah, yeah, I’m great. I’m just… I’m great.” He thought he might throw up, but he’d try to hold off on that for now. Nothing felt broken, at least. He wiped his face on his sleeve and brushed loose snow from his clothes. Some of it had melted into the fabric when he’d fallen, and some of that had already frozen again. Hopefully, they’d find somewhere warm soon.

“Ah! Sweet treats from the flesh pinata!” Krieg was absolutely riddled with bullet holes, but he gave Rhys the happiest look a single visible eye could muster. 

“Is he gonna be okay?”

Maya looked Krieg up and down, a hand on her hip. “He doesn’t seem to be dying anytime soon. How you feeling, big guy?” 

“Ten thousand decapitations!”

“Sounds good to me.” 

“Looks like we walked right into a nest,” he heard Axton say. “I’m like, ninety percent sure these are human bones…Oh yeah, that’s definitely someone’s skull.” 

There were little scattered piles of bullymong refuse, mostly bones, sometimes a bit of fur. Something shiny and yellow gleamed in a nearby pile. A halfway-decent Hyperion pistol. Exactly what Rhys needed–next time he could defend himself. 

He approached, only to have Zer0 once again materialize in front of him. They bent over, picked up the gun, and turned it in their hands with a “Hmm…” Their helm projected an ellipses. 

“Hey uh, can I have that? I’m feeling a little vulnerable here, with just this.” He raised the deactivated stun rod. 

“You know how to shoot?” they asked. 

“It’s Hyperion, it’s made so anyone can pick it up and shoot.” That was one of their advertising lines, at least. It didn’t seem that hard to figure out. “It’s as good a time as any to learn, right?” 

They looked at him and back at the gun. “Next time, you should move faster.” The pistol evaporated into particles as they deconstructed it into their storage deck. A slashed zero projected from their helmet. “If you live that long.” They turned away, leaving Rhys scrambling for an insult he couldn’t find. “Oh, come on!” he shouted after them. “You didn’t even want that!” 

———

Somehow, Rhys survived the rest of the day’s trek. The group encountered two smaller packs of bullymongs before it ended. Absurdly, the value of Rhys’s life seemed to be a rung lower than the Claptrap’s, but if he stayed close to the bot he was equally protected.The tactic struck him as pathetic when everyone else was more than capable of defending themselves. Worse, it gave the Claptrap the opportunity to bother him, and that stupid little bot had exceptional hearing. 

“Wimping out, eh? Don’t feel too bad, chum, we all gotta start somewhere! Except me, I was built with the courage of ten men! But as for you, I’m sure you’ll find your courage if you don’t die horribly. Which probably won’t happen–or wait, what temperature do humans freeze to death at? Ah, well, nothing you can do if that happens. I guess you also have to worry about all the bullets, and the…” 

Rhys fought the temptation to try his ECHOeye on the thing, see if he could mute it. Who knew what malware a defunct idiot robot had on it? At least the blindness allowed him to sneak away as soon as the danger subsided. It made him wonder why they were even bothering to hunt down the thing’s eye. Was a blind Claptrap so bad? Besides the being-a-Claptrap part? 

When they stopped for the night to make camp, Zer0 rejoined the group. 

“I’ve spotted its tracks. / It has passed through recently. / We’ll need to keep watch.” 

“You wanna give us any specific details, or do ya gotta stick to seventeen syllables?” Axton asked. “Like, you know, where’s it headed, how long ago, that kind of thing?” 

They gave him a look that seemed meant as a glare before sitting near the fire. “Is there food?” they more demanded than asked. 

“Salvador’s working on it,” Gaige said. 

Dinner was to be the meaty arms of a bullymong that Krieg had buzzsawed off. It didn’t look edible, but both Krieg and Salvador insisted it was good. Or, in the former’s case, that it “Hole punches your bloodied tongue!” said with the kind of enthusiasm that made it sound positive.The latter was cooking one of the limbs over the fire. It smelled like pork with a trace of burnt plastic. Rhys hadn’t eaten for the better part of two days. He was hungry enough to risk…toxins, or whatever.

When it was cooked, though, he found himself almost equally concerned with watching Zer0 as he was with chewing the tough, strange meat. He wasn’t alone in this, he realized. Everyone but Krieg and the Claptrap were snatching glances, apparently wondering if they’d see what was underneath the helmet. But Zer0 only walked away with their portion, vanishing behind a jagged chunk of ice. 

“Anyone up to following them?” Axton asked. 

“I suspect they’re the type to kill you if you see their face,” Maya gave a shrug, her attention returning to her meal. 

“The curiosity is gonna kill me on its own. I mean, what if they’re a robot or something, and we’re wasting food?” 

“They were bleeding, before,” Rhys put in. “After the train blew up.”  

“Puncture the skinsuit! Make it pop!” Krieg was shoving bits of meat up through the bottom of his mask, also denying the others a view of his face. He was at least clearly human, mutated as he may be. 

“Eh. Probably just super ugly,” Salvador said through a mouth full of bullymong. 

———

Rhys was spared from keeping watch that night. Maybe there was something to being a weak Hyperion stooge, it meant a few hours’ extra rest. 

It was still dark when he woke shivering. Somewhere, something howled raucously. He sat up, looking around. Thankfully, the Claptrap was in sleep-mode, and the others were asleep. Except for Zer0. They stopped pacing the camp to look at him. He gave them a slight wave. They went back to pacing without so much as a second glance. They reminded Rhys of a big cat at a zoo, waiting to be fed. 

His ECHOeye told him it was 12:22 AM. Zer0 should have ended their watch and woken Maya hours ago. He hadn’t seen them sleep at all.  

“Are those more bullymong?” he asked when Zer0 was near again. “They sound really close.” 

They stopped, gave a nod. He noticed they were shivering. They were so lanky, even compared to him. How well insulated from the cold could they possibly be? He’d feel bad for them if they hadn’t been such an asshole. 

“Should we be worried?” “I never worry. / If they venture near enough, / My blade will find them.” 

“Right...” Geez, edgelord much?

They cocked their head, thoughtfully. “Though, perhaps you should. / If you fall a second time. / You may not be saved.” 

“You could have let me have the gun.” “I could have.”  

He lay back down. “Your watch is up, you know?” Rhys had years of experience dealing with assholes, he’d learned to be professional about this sort of thing. 

“Yes.” 

“You should probably sleep, right?” 

“I need little sleep. / The others will miss something. / I will stay awake.” 

That seemed slightly insulting to the other’s abilities, but at least Zer0 wasn’t only a condescending dick to Rhys. He considered pointing out their place on Axton’s “Most likely to kill us in our sleep” list, but thought better of it. Might give them ideas. 

[rlyc00l]

Please do not say anything about the siren tattoos I am not gonna recreate them enjoy the scribbles also don’t ask me about worldbuilding I just wanted there to be mermaids

[rlyc00l]

If I ever post a chapter with an extremely weird typo or error or just like "[Krieg dialogue]" somewhere it's because every time I actually post a chapter it's me going "I have GOT to stop looking at this" and then I immediately post it and hope for the best I haven't posted any big mistake like that yet but I always feel like I'm going to do it

[rlyc00l]

BL2 AU: Rhys travels to Pandora for a simple job: take a train to Lynchwood, pick up an artifact, return to Helios. Only, he finds himself unwittingly caught in a trap that wasn't meant for him. Now stranded on Pandora alongside six Vault hunters, he has the choice between fighting Hyperion alongside them or dying horribly. Lucky for him, Handsome Jack is always looking for opportunities. All Rhys needs to do is a little bit of spying, maybe a teensy bit of sabotage, and then he's home free with a huge promotion and maybe like ten turbo-mansions. The Crimson Raider cause is doomed anyway, and Rhys is a pro at ignoring his conscience. Not that there's much conscience to ignore when you're betraying a group of murdering Vault hunters. At least, he's confident he won't have any internal conflict about screwing over that selfish jackass of an assassin.

Hey guys I went ahead and uploaded the first chapter of a fic I've also been writing alongside P0is0ned. This is one where I try to be CONFIDENT and not be a perfectionist. So I might update it a little more frequently? I mentioned this idea before but I think it would be interesting to have these two meet when they are both at their worst. Zer0 before discovering the magic of friendship and a Rhys who totally buys into Hyperion bullshit. (Also, I like writing the BL2 Vault hunters in general and IDK I just wanted to write about BL2 I have a lot of thoughts and headcanons.)

EDIT: As ff.net is perpetually broken, the chapter's also under the break!

———— The train was mostly empty when Rhys boarded, aside from the Hyperion soldiers that boarded at the same time as him. Rhys had offered them a cheery greeting, and been mostly ignored as the soldiers filed back into another car, somewhere behind them. One had stopped, asked him “You sure you’re in the right place?”

“This is the train headed to Lynchwood, right? Jack sent me on a job down there.”

“Yeah, well, keep your head down. Stay out of the other cars,” the soldier said, before following the others.

Technically, Jack hadn’t sent him, Vasquez had. But it was always better to invoke Jack’s name, and Jack had given Vasquez the job. Vasquez had simply passed it down to Rhys, and no one outside of Security Propaganda knew who the hell Vasquez was. If you said a job came from Jack, no one questioned it. No one except Vaughn and Yvette. 

“Are you sure Vasquez isn’t just sending you down to die on Pandora?” Yvette had asked as the three took their lunch break the day before. 

“It’s a peace offering! He knows I’m a threat, so he gives me the prestigious-yet-inconvenient job so I feel like I owe him. If he wanted me dead, he’d throw me out an airlock.” 

“I dunno, Rhys,” Vaughn said, mouth still half-full of hamburger. He swallowed. “He’s thrown a LOT of people out of airlocks, they say at a certain level you reach your allotted murder-limit. Now, send a guy down to the death-planet…” 

“Yeah, seriously, Rhys, you know there’s a war going on down there? And the entire planet is populated by bandits? And man-eating monsters?” Yvette gestured with her fork as she spoke. “Is he even giving you a gun or something?” 

“No, Yvette, because I won’t need a gun. I looked up the route, it’s extremely safe. I’ll mostly be on a Hyperion train, there will be soldiers guarding it, it’s fine.” 

Now, watching Pandora pass out the train window, he was feeling pretty confident that his reasoning had been accurate. He’d boarded at a Hyperion military post in the Highlands, its lush green landscapes a far call from the wastelands heaped with trash featured in propaganda videos. By now that green had given way to barren desert, but still not a single bandit in sight. At one point the train passed a pack of oversized skags, and later he was pretty sure he saw a body, but maybe it had been a weird rock. Ocassionally there were remnants of Atlas and Dahl’s failed attempts to colonize the planet. Broken-down buildings, being retaken by the elements. Obviously those two hadn’t thrown enough resources at the place. Jack was going all the way. Yvette would probably note that he’d be safer if he shuttered the window, but hey, it wasn’t often he got to see an undeveloped alien planet, and the glass was probably bulletproof. Rhys was starting to get the sense that Handsome Jack had ensured that Hyperion’s propaganda greatly exaggerated Pandora’s general awfulness–not that he blamed him. How else was he supposed to convince the investors? Not to mention it was a fantastic motivator for the workforce. Still, Rhys was almost disappointed. He’d wanted to see something impressive, have some good stories for when he got back to Helios. This place was just a lot of empty desert, ripe for development. At some point, the monotony lulled him to sleep, head propped against the window. The glass was cold when he woke suddenly. Outside, the desert was gone, replaced by ice and snow. It took Rhys a moment to realize that the sound he was hearing wasn’t the train, but nearby gunshots. Gunshots that didn’t fade out at the train moved. Well, shit. 

He shuttered the window, hunkering down between the seats. It had to be a bandit attack, bandits were no match for Hyperion soldiers. Just had to wait it out. 

Yvette had given him a stun rod before he’d gotten on the shuttle. “It’s better than nothing,” she’d said. He clutched it now, wishing she’d hooked him up with something more powerful. 

Minutes passed, and the shooting went on, accompanied by indistinct yelling. Still, no one boarded his car. He wondered what bandits would do to him if they found him. They didn’t have a reputation for letting people live, except to torture them. Maybe, if Rhys stayed here, waited to unleash the stun rod until the last second, he could catch them by surprise. Then it was a matter of getting a gun from one of them, diving back behind the seats (Were those bulletproof, too?), and taking down the rest of them. They’d be lined up, it had to be easy, right? He hadn’t ever touched a gun, but they didn’t seem that complicated. Right?

His planning was interrupted by a deafening boom, and the next he knew he was flying through the air. He hit the ceiling, hard, and he knew nothing more. 

It was dark when he woke, cold, hurting all over, and tasting blood. Part of him was afraid to flick on his palm flashlight, so he first tried to take stock mentally. He could only hear his own breathing, now. The gunshots had stopped. He wasn’t sure what that meant for him, but he was starting to realize that the train had crashed, or been derailed, or something. Which, maybe meant he didn’t have to worry about bandits anymore? Or, they’d be in at least as bad a shape as he was. Hopefully.

That led to the question of how bad a shape he was actually in. Okay, first, the blood taste. He ran his tongue around his mouth, finding the place he’d bitten the fleshy side, hard. Well, at least that wasn’t gonna kill him. His face stung, but in the carpet burn way, not the “there’s shrapnel imbedded in your cheeks” way. He had an agonizing headache, but maybe this was one of those times where you’d worry more if it didn’t hurt. His ECHOeye seemed alright, at least. 

Fingers checked out, both flesh and cybernetic, though when he tried to make a fist on the flesh side he found himself letting out a string of profanity. Fine, okay, he hurt his wrist. No big deal. His cybernetic arm was fine aside from an ache at the connection point, he wouldn’t be helpless. His legs were good, at least. And his torso…Well, it sort of hurt to breathe, which wasn’t ideal. 

Better get it over with, then. He turned on the flashlight and sat up with a groan to get a better look at himself. Sure enough, his wrist was swelling, and bruises were starting to form all over, but there wasn’t even close to as much blood as he’d expected. So, yeah, he probably wasn’t in immediate mortal peril. 

He turned his attention to his surroundings. In front of him were the rows of seating, the entire car had fallen sideways and he was sitting on what had been the wall. Snow drifted in from some broken windows above him. He realized how cold he was, now. He hadn’t packed much of anything, it was supposed to be one night, he’d counted on there being a Quick-Change machine.

Okay, fine, Rhys had seen all those border planet survival shows, you had to be proactive in these kinds of situations. First, figure out where he was, maybe find one of those soldiers, if they’d survived. He rose, broken glass crunching under his feet as he walked unsteadily across the car until he found the roof hatch. It only opened part way when he turned the handle, getting caught on the snow bank the car was half-buried in. It was a little brighter outside the car, a combination of Elpis’s light and a number of small fires revealed silhouettes of the train wreckage.  

He had to wriggle and clamber his way out, managing to get snow up his sleeves and down his shirt before tumbling down the bank into a foot of snow. 

As he pushed himself up, he found himself facing a…glowing blue line? His eyes followed it up to the hand that held it, and the strangely featureless owner of that hand. He blinked, taking a moment to put it together. 

Oh. A sword. A bandit holding him at swordpoint. 

He barely managed a “D-don’t.”, knowing he should probably beg for his life. He was finding he didn’t have the energy for begging, though. Snow was already melting through his pants.

The bandit leaned in closer, not taking the sword from his neck. The light of the blade reflected on the dark surface that should have been their face. A helmet with a dark visor, Rhys realized—or maybe they were a robot, but they seemed to be shivering too, just a little. 

“You are no soldier.” Their voice was deep, nearly monotone. “But you are Hyperion. / You have ten seconds.” “Ten…? F-for what?” He started to rise without thinking, only to be prodded by the point of the sword. 

“To explain yourself. / Jack had someone set this up. / You’re the last one here.” “Look, I…I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s freezing, my head’s killing me, can we just…Not do this?”

They prodded him again. 

“I-I mean, I was here for a business deal. I didn’t…” 

The figure lowered their sword. A red, glowing “:\” appeared in front of where their face should have been, and Rhys found himself wondering if he was hallucinating this entire thing. “You got on the train / Meant as a place of slaughter, / Just by accident?” 

Slowly, things were coming together. God, if he survived this, he was gonna never live it down. “I swear, I-I had nothing to do with this, I was told to get on this train, take it to Lynchwood. I was supposed to buy an artifact.” 

The emoticon was replaced by a question mark, but they lowered the sword. Rhys didn’t move, lest he provoke them. “Get up, or you’ll freeze,” they said, turning away. They limped as they walked. 

By the time he was on his feet, they were gone, only leaving footprints and an occasional spot of blood. He hesitated. Helios hung indifferently above him, framed with curtains of green auroras. He could just find one of these little fires and sit down next to it for however long it lasted, and hope for rescue. Except, a middle manager didn’t warrant a rescue, once the fire was out he’d just freeze to death. That, or Pandoran wildlife would get to him first. 

Following that stranger might mean being stabbed, but maybe they knew where to find shelter. He got up, and followed their prints with his palm flashlight, hoping the snow wouldn’t bury the trail before he caught up. 

He passed smoking wreckage and the corpses of soldiers. Wind bit at him as he walked, and he held his vest close, for whatever difference it made. Snow clumped up on his socks and the bottom of his pants, even as he tried to step in their prints. He tripped and stumbled a few times, there was trash everywhere, much of it hidden beneath the snow. 

Just when he was starting to resign himself to a cold death in a frozen trash heap, he saw distant lights. As he neared the word “Welcome” lit up one letter at a time, over and over. Again he wondered if he was hallucinating. Was that a symptom of hypothermia? But the footprints continued in that direction, joined by more tracks. Other survivors. 

As he got closer, he found that the sign was outside a structure built of snow and defunct Claptrap units. He opened the door. There was a short hallway, built of ice and more dead claptraps, and ending in a warm glow. Fire. 

He came out into a low-ceilinged room with six people and a broken–but still functioning–Claptrap. Before he could process exactly what he was looking at, five of them were pointing guns at him. 

He held his hands up, trying to inch towards the blazing furnace. “Please—Please don’t kill me. I-I-I–just, I’m trying not to free-freeze to death.” 

His eyes found the one who’d threatened him earlier, they were the only one who wasn’t pointing a gun at him now. But they didn’t come to his defense, either. They only watched him, arms crossed. Or, he assumed they were watching him, they could have just as easily been intently ignoring him. 

When nothing happened for a moment, he took the last few steps to put himself near the fire. It was hard to care about getting shot when you were so goddamn cold. There were at least six dead bodies already beside the fire, but he couldn’t make himself care about that either.

“That’s a Hyperion uniform.” The speaker was a Dahl soldier–marked by metal implants in his brow. He cocked his gun.  

“I uh, I’ve got nothing against Dahl,” Rhys tried.

That earned him a snort. 

Right, yeah, they’d all arrived at the same conclusion as the first one. “I had nothing to do with that, with the train, I-I was being set up to die back there, just like you.”  

“What’s happening?” The eyeless claptrap demanded. “I can’t see–!” A high-pitched bleep censored out the last word.  

“The mortar meat is too stringy! Where’s your pain stick?!” The masked man who looked straight out of Jack’s anti-bandit propaganda waved his gun as he spoke, then lowered it suddenly and gave a shrug. 

“Big guy’s right, he’s obviously not a soldier,” the blue-haired woman said, following his lead. Her tattoos matched her hair, and his first thought was “siren”, which almost seemed too absurd, out of six in the universe, why would one be here, in this weird corpse-shack? 

“Neither is Jack, and I mean, look at him,” said the pigtailed redhead, making a wide gesture at Rhys with her robotic arm– a much more primitive model than his. She looked too young to be here, he was pretty sure that was a high school uniform. 

“I uh, I don’t have the kind of power Jack does, even if I wanted to kill you? Could-could you at least put down the guns, for a second?” His head hurt too much to be dealing with this, he just wanted to sit down and relax for a minute or two. “That Claptrap is a Hyperion robot, right? Arguably more Hyperion than I am. And considerably more annoying.” 

“FORMER Hyperion robot!” the Claptrap addressed the wall. “Jack discontinued and destroyed my product line! I am a free robot now!” 

“I saw we kill ‘im already. The guy, not the robot.” The short, weirdly muscular man spoke up. “Then get this bullymong.” 

“You’re actually going to kill an unarmed man just for a label on his shirt?” the maybe-siren asked. 

“Yeah, really? I-I have… several broken bones, too, I think. If that makes any difference. And, if I uh, if I had anything to do with this, I definitely would have avoided hurting myself this bad.” He looked to the one with the helmet, pleading. They’d seen him in the snow, they’d judged him innocent.

“Hurry and decide,” they said, not even turning their head to look at him. “I am eager to move out. / And kill Handsome Jack.” There was something strange about how they talked, Rhys was realizing. Measured, concise, short… 

“What, you wanna freeze to death out there?” the soldier asked. “I’m not heading out until morning.”

They crossed their arms, a  red “:\” passing over their visor. “Fine.” 

“Oh come on, you already decided not to kill me, earlier! Could you at least back me up?” 

This time they did look at him. “I have no stake, here. / And you are clearly dead weight. / You’re doomed regardless.” 

“Your bones are made of toothpicks and my molars are SPOTLESS!” 

“Yeah, alright, good point, I think?” the soldier said.  We can always shoot him later, right? Once he’s earned it.”

The short man shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.” 

“Fine,” the redhead said with a yawn. “If he kills any of you in our sleep, that’s not on me.” 

At that, the group dispersed throughout the shack, finding comfortable spots, as if Rhys were suddenly of no more importance than one of the corpses by the fire. The maybe-siren hung back for a moment. 

 “Here,” she said, handing him an insta-health. “If you try to screw us over, I will liquidate your brain with my powers.” Okay, definitely-siren, then. “But for now, I’m not big on killing unarmed men.” 

“Thanks.” He took the syringe, feeling strange about using a random needle on Pandora, insta-health or not. Still, he was in enough pain to jam it into his arm, gritting his teeth as bones realigned. “So, uh, hi. I’m Rhys.” He offered his freshly healed hand and his most charming smile–he’d better ingratiate himself with these people, fast. “I guess we kind of got off on the wrong foot, thanks for uh, sticking up for me.”

She looked at him, then at the hand, but didn’t take it. “Maya,” she said. “And I can’t say the others were entirely out of line, considering who you work for.” “Worked for. I think trying to blow me up was Jack’s way of firing me.” Always better to invoke Jack’s name. “Might have been a little too vocal in criticizing his policies on Pandora.” He’d heard of people who criticized Jack’s policies, Jack dealt with those hands-on, but bandits didn’t know that. 

She raised her eyebrows. “Well, good to hear. Perhaps you can do something worthwhile, now.” 

“Worthwhile, like?” 

“Tomorrow, we hunt down the bullymong that tore Claptrap’s eye out. Supposedly, he can get us into Sanctuary. We’re going to kill Handsome Jack.” 

[rlyc00l]

@pinetreeparadoxx Sure!

Once I assumed "Zer0 wouldn't translate well to plush form" but I find this goofy little thing extremely charming and I wish they had come out with more stuff like it

Edit: For anyone wondering these are sold as like "Borderlands 3 Plush Collector clips", they were like a blind bag thing, if you search on Ebay you can usually find listings that let you pick which character you want for like ~$8 USD