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Mordecai lives on the rooftops of New Haven, climbing poles and towers for uninterrupted three-sixty vistas of the surroundings. He's seen more of the city than anyone else, but he keeps quiet about the numerous secrets he finds there. His little stories, his little sights.
They never technically re-build New Haven, just add to what lacks. Mordecai insists on connecting the rooftops, and he himself clambers up there, clinging to the bars and hauling planks and nails with him. Bloodwing sweeps down once in a while, bringing up more materials if he bribes the bird with enough meat. Coming down after a full day always unsteadies his perspective, and the ground is… Dull. The closer to the sky, the closer to the highs.
Of course, he sometimes gets fed up – with Brick laughing so loud it wakes him up too early in the morning, with Lilith borrowing his pistols and forgetting to bring them back until three weeks later with burn marks on the trigger, with Roland commenting on his hangovers like they’re a problem. Sometimes, he just wants to leave. Mordecai says, fuck it, when we're done, I'm leaving this planet and Lilith pokes him, asking "why haven't you? What's keeping you?”. Then she cracks up in a wide smile because they both know exactly what has made them both stay. That which binds them, that unspeakable bond that has made them all pause in their haphazard planet-to-planet day-by-day life.
They all try to describe it and fail, worrying over how fragile it is. Fragile, a funny word in their mouths: they’re steel and gunpowder, the rattle of empty shell casings and dead bodies, of cash and vending machines and above all, victorious laughter. Pandora is a funny world, it does things to a man – lifts him up, lets him soar, and then…
Besides, ’done’ suggests there is an end to good things.
And there is, but that doesn’t mean he can bring himself to leave.
He will always wonder about that moment: if he was too slow, if his reaction speed was dimmed by the misty cloud of disruptive feelings or the alcoholic haze. Once in a while he calls Moxxi a bitch outright, screaming it out into the night, and then calls himself a fucking idiot. Cursing others won’t help, nor make him feel better. Beating himself up, however, that hurts so good it almost feels like the justified punishment he’s longing for.
The sidelines are an easier place to be. The perfect place to mull over mistakes.
His information is nothing more than simple intel to be used or discarded as someone else sees fit, and the pay is good enough to keep him and Bloodwing and his alcoholic habits alive. He lives in what Lilith calls abysmal places, and she always comments on it when she visits. They share a bottle of moonshine he steals from the Hodunks and they say nothing. Silence is hard enough in their mouths, but speaking of defeat sours their blood past all saving.
Bloodwing circles the sky, and if nothing else, he can take care of her. She’s easy – raw bloody meat, a preening, and keeping her claws sharp and clean. Lilith watches as the bird crushes some bones in her beak.
”Is this the way to live?”
”It’s a way.”
”Yeah.” Not much more, but it’s a way he has lived before, just… He never thought it’d be so hard to go back to it, because it feels off this time. Maybe because he lost more this time around, maybe because he can’t bring himself to leave – maybe because despite what over twenty years alone has taught him, he cares about them.
Fire is an element that is part of Lilith’s blood, more or less – she needs flame-proof bedsheets or she wakes up to the smell of ashes, which is homely to her, but Roland burns his hands more than once just holding on to her in the night. Her being hot isn’t just a compliment, it’s a fact: on particularly bad days, touching her skin gives others blisters, and Roland’s hands are the ultimate proof of that. She can’t wrap a bandage, partially because she doesn’t know how to make it tight enough and partially because she keeps making it worse, but Brick knows, smiling and shaking his head as he fixes up what she damages.
”You gotta be more careful,” Brick says, finishing off the bandages on Roland.
”Hey, fire solves a lot of things!” she replies defensively, but after Brick leaves she puts an ice-cube to her lips before kissing Roland. Just to be on the safe side.
It takes a few weeks before she stops setting fire to their house. By the time she learns how to handle things (and always keep water nearby) things come crashing down too fast.
Domestic bliss is just one of the things she will miss, but it’s the one that hits closest to home. The bliss of knowing that Roland doesn’t mind her tacky and oftentimes gruesome collection of bandit masks lined up above the bookshelf, or that every book she borrows is put back with a few burn marks here and there. That Brick cooks for them all, to the point where all that’s in their fridge is spillovers from Brick’s kitchen and dry snacks in the cupboards. That Mordecai will sleep on their couch when it rains, the way he pounds the walls when they get too loud.
All the little things, which, as Roland once said, are the ones that make life worth living.
All the little things are the first ones to go, it seems.
She doesn’t tell them in advance – it is a spur of the moment idea, a realization when she hears the shouted orders "get the siren but get her alive!" and she feels the familiar sting returning, the alertness that her freedom hangs in the balance again. It’s instinct making her go for the knee-jerk reaction: a burst of fire so intense that it incinerates everything within the blast radius. A scream perfected to throw off corporate bounty hunters for years. A female Hyperion soldier, torn out of her armor, burnt hard enough, shares an eerie resemblance to Lilith.
Then she just has to stay away, which is the worst part.
Phased into the other dimension, she sees their grief up close, following them and keeping watch without being able to make her presence known. She wants to just drop out, cheer them up, let them know that there’s no need to grieve because she’s alright and she always will be, she’s better than a quick battlefield defeat – but they’re still vulnerable and being watched as they travel to the new safe place.
And then, as the gates of Sanctuary opens, she finally blasts back into existence, panting and exhausted but very, very alive.
She wishes someone wrote a manual in how to fake your own death, because she could use some guidance. Not in the technical stuff – that’s easy enough, especially with her powers, no – the issue is that she doesn’t know what to say to the boys as they stand there, slack-jawed and with bloodshot eyes fixed upon her like she’s an apparition.
”Hey,” she says, raising the burnt hand. ”I, uh… Wow, so, today huh?” It’s so tasteless she wants to apologize immediately, but have no chance for that.
”You died.”
”I, uh, I faked it. Surprise.”
She never can handle people as well as she wants to. It’s a problem.
Roland doesn’t talk to her, and Mordecai’s mouth becomes a thin sharp line whenever he looks at her. Though she guesses that Brick would react in a much happier manner, he’s not there, and they have no idea where to find him. If he is even alive. It’s hard to rally around the possibility of breaking in and finding him tortured to death, even harder when they don’t know where to run with their broken arms and shattered small bones, courtesy of Wilhelm.
Lilith stays cooped up on the upper floor of the headquarters, missing the endless blue sky and scarred moon and breezes. Though the fans work overtime she’s still too warm, the ice cubes she puts on her body melting in a few seconds. It’s too small, too cramped and cluttered, not just with things but with the heavy unsaid words hanging in the air.
She leaves in the middle of the night, having waited as long as she can stand. Nothing suits her until she finds a frozen valley south of Sanctuary, not too far – she can still run over and rescue them if they pull down all hell on top of themselves – but she feels her head clear up. It’s not the first time she has plunged herself into icy places to calm the raging fires, but this time it doesn’t feel as fulfilling since she has no chance of returning. The practical details, as Roland said one night in Sanctuary, are these: you’re meant to be dead. And this… This is now a war. We have to fight on different fronts. And… He can meander a long time when he wants to say something that means a whole lot, because being direct while giving cover fire? No problem. Directness when she’s staring at him, sweaty and miserable and anxious? Impossible.
As if their break-up wasn’t shitty enough, Roland comes to visit, because he always finds her. He picks at the corpses hanging over her entrance, stepping over the thickening blood puddles. ”This looks… It looks alright. Bit gruesome.”
”It’s effective.” She tries to be cheerful, but Roland looks like a man facing war, and he only nods because he’s a practical man now. No, not practical, a general. A hero. Something that he wasn’t. Something that circumstance has forced him into.
Nothing is like how it used to be, but Wilhelm pulled the ground out from under them and she never thought it’d be like this, and now that it is – the once invulnerable band of four riding and shooting together as if it was the only life they could live… She doesn’t always know what to think of the three men that she’s saved and who have saved her more than any of them can count, but right then, staring at the man who won’t accept her kisses anymore, she outright misses them.
At night, she stands outside Sanctuary, pacing around like a lovelorn teenager, almost to the point where she considers throwing a rock over the wall, hoping it’ll hit his window. She lets the rocks lay where they are, comfortable and cold and dead, and if she didn’t love burning so much she might envy them.
Brick distracts himself with thoughts of New Haven – not of how it looked when being destroyed by Hyperion, but before. Of his house, that only consisted of a tiny bedroom he could barely fit himself and Dusty into at once, and a huge kitchen with five fridges overflowing with all the things he cooked. Of getting up early to walk his dog and check up where Mordecai passed out the previous night, to carry him to a better place to sleep. Of Lilith going hunting with him, smiling with blood all over hands; of Roland and him taking care of the orphaned girl Tina who show up outside New Haven’s gates one day.
It works. For a while.
Then the pain of having his fingers broken thrice over drag him back, but he won’t scream – he breaks his molars biting down against it, but he refuses them the satisfaction of showing the pain.
”Where are they?”
He stares past the torturer.
”Come on, give us something, and we’ll go easier on you.” She taps her shoe against the cold floor. ”You know, this loyalty you have for them will end up getting you killed, and for what? They’re not worth it.” She hisses the last words out, leaving him alone as he sags down and presses his cheek against the cool tiles, spitting out a piece of his shattered teeth.
He’s hard enough to take whatever she got.
He is the toughest of them, though that only seems to give them more to break. First Wilhelm takes his time snapping Brick’s limbs, then the female torturer takes her time unravelling his psyche. She has an unnatural ability to figure out where to strike, and he hasn’t suffered so much under another’s hand ever before in his life. It’s all something he can cope with, until she brings in Dusty, whose fur is caked with mud and whimpering until catching sight of Brick, at which point the tail starts wagging excitedly.
”How cute,” the torturer says, putting one of her gloved hands on the puppy’s neck. ”Seems the dog is as loyal as you.” She squeezes, and Dusty whimpers, then outright howls, tail between the hind legs.
”Don’t!” he says, and she pauses, surprised.
”So the beast can talk.”
”Dusty’s just a puppy!”
She grins. ”A loyal little puppy, at that. And look what that loyalty does. It walked here. It sniffed its way here, looking for you, and well…” Dusty’s terrified noises are abruptly cut short.
His mother not only taught him to throw punches until it became second nature, like breathing, but also taught him to always stay honest to himself and his emotions, because ’emotions make you the best fighter, don’t you ever forget that’, sweeping a hand over his shaved head before giving him a hug.
So he cries. Only he can’t fight back, because his hands are broken and swollen, and the torturer laughs outright at him. ”You’re pathetic.”
He doesn’t care. He cries. Big, wet tears and snot and loud sobbing. Only it doesn’t get better. Sorrow is a thing he doesn't know what to do with: it's crippling and debilitating, deflating any sense of rage or justified anger. It's wet and it chokes out everything else and it’s the worst, objectively, subjectively, he doesn’t care but it takes more than it deserves to. The sound of Dusty's neck snapping haunts him, echoing in his head and growing louder with each passing hour.
They keep pushing their pins and needles into his skin, keep smashing his fingers with hammers, but he won’t give them anything. Loyalty is the one thing in him that will break when he’s dead. He memorizes her face, her voice, each little particular mannerism she has, and swears that she will pay. As he breaks out of the prison, he curses when he can’t find her anywhere – it takes the joy out of the small victory.
It’s why he smiles as he holds Shep Sanders’ head in his healing hands, once back in Sanctuary. ”It’s just you and me now,” he says, locking the door to the holding cells in the makeshift sheriff office. ”And I’m going to let my fists do the talking.” Nothing has given him such infinite calm as pushing his thumbs against the eyeballs and feeling them give way to the pressure he's applying. It’s not enough – but it’s something. The screaming, the pain for the betrayal, the cracked skull…
”I had to do it,” Brick says as Roland confronts him, angry and frustrated. He shrugs his massive shoulders, wishes he could be eloquent and well-spoken and talk his way out of this situation like the others can, but all he can do is punch. And he’s not about to do that to his friends. ”I can’t let a traitor live.”
”You gouged his eyes out. You cracked his skull. A bullet to the head is one thing, we’ve all done that–”
”But this is different.” He grins.
”You’re a psychotic killer, Brick! I can’t have that here in Sanctuary!”
”I know. I get that. But first…” It’s an old promise. He never did find the perfect gift to give back to Roland, but it’s the least he can do for the man. Though he fumbles with the pen, he eventually manages to scratch it out. IOU: one world saved. -B. Brick folds the note then hands it over to Roland, sighing as he looks around. "These doorways were too low for me anyway."
"Get out, Brick," Roland repeats, squeezing the note in his hands, voice wavering.
”And you take care of Tina now. She needs some good guidance in her life.” The gates of Sanctuary close, and Brick starts down the road, alone, whistling a tune to himself.
A man sits alone in his city of refugees and while it sounds like the start of a tasteless joke, there's no amusing punchline like the ones Lilith delivered. She’s gone, Mordecai works on commission and only reports in via radio, and Brick has left as well. It’s just a single man now, caring for a bunch of rag-tag strangers, in a crumbling city being bombarded day and night.
The claustrophobia creeps into the mind of many, anxiety eating away at their stomach linings. Ulcers become the most common medical problem, and all he has to help with that is a hack whose medical procedures border on the insane.
He himself isn’t the best shape he used to be: when he breathes too deep, the ribs ache from where Wilhelm cracked them like toothpicks. They never healed right.
A lonely man overlooks his city and thinks that he somehow, somewhat, can keep them together. For a while, at least. Money will eventually run out. He does the calculations and barring any huge expenses (but there always are) the stack of riches he accumulated will last five to six years (his own food expenses not included). He organizes the resistance as well as he can; he counts, he shoots, he goes to bed, and his city waits for the salvation he cannot bring them. He becomes the symbol for a hope he breathes life into anew each morning, watching it flicker a bit worse each day.
Then comes the day he has to ask Tina to leave – grudgingly, apologetically, but her latest ’toy’ blew up half a block. She understands, hugs him tight, and then Lilith picks her up in the dead of night to take her to a new home not too far from where she is. Lilith talks of all the fun they’ll have together, blowing up bandits, and Roland shakes his head. ”She’s just a kid,” he says.
”I’m eleven!” Tina says with an angry snarl, stomping off.
Lilith sighs. ”You know she hates that.”
”But it is what she is.”
”Yeah, but…” Lilith shifts her weight from one foot to another, beads of sweat gathering in the hollows above her collarbones. ”So. How you’ve been?”
There’s the truthful answer: as good as can be. There’s the answer he gives: ”Good. We’re doing fine.” She stares at him with her amber eyes and he knows what she wants – it’s what he wants too – but he can’t forget, he can’t just put himself above the needs of so many others, there’s duties and obligations, morals of a general trying to bring peace… ”I told you. We’re fine.”
He waves to a grumpy Tina as Lilith struggles with the gears on the runner – he stands there, watching them go until they’re just a spot on the horizon, and he ends the day as the next will begin: alone in a city he’s worrying himself sick over. His stomach churns, the ulcer growing worse. He’ll keep the line tomorrow, for the next month, waiting for something – anything – to change. Until then… He’s just one man, playing repeat with himself: count shoot sleep, count shoot sleep. And Sanctuary shakes from another lunar bombardment, dust falling into his bed as the cracks in the ceiling grow even longer.