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Maya sits down on the top step of the basement stairs, careful not to make a noise. Below, she can hear Handsome Jack ranting and raving at Angel, cursing her name and rattling the chains around his wrists.
”You betrayed me! Sold me out! And what’s it gotten you in return?” He lowers his voice, trying for a sweet and caring intonation, reminiscent of how brother Sophis used to talk to Maya when she wanted more than he desired to give her. ”Huh? They’re starving you! Little by little, you’re wasting away, and they’re sipping drinks and laughing at you behind your back. They know you for the fool you are.”
”I’m the most intelligent person on Pandora, dad.”
”But you don’t know people, Angel. You never did.”
It’s the same, every night. He uses everything he’s got, trying his hardest to make Angel cry, to force her viewpoint until she renounces the vault hunters. And each night, Maya hears the strain in Angel’s breathing, hears the triumphant childish joy making Jack’s voice rise – and that’s the point where Angel leaves. She’s not sure who Angel is toying with, but it’s making Maya sleepless.
”Hey!” Jack slams his hands against the iron bars which rattle loudly. ”Don’t you turn your back on me! Don’t you do this again, you’ll be dead to me, you hear? Dead!”
Angel ascends the stairs slowly, weak hand clinging to the support as she pulls herself up. ”Don’t,” Angel wheezes, leaning heavily against the cold concrete wall as she stops briefly by Maya’s side, catching her breath.
”He doesn’t know you.”
”I said, ’don’t’.”
”I don’t know you either. These games…” Maya rises, brushing off her pants. ”They’re going to get on someone’s nerves.”
Angel smiles. ”Is that a threat?”
”A fact.” Maya stares Angel in the eye for as long as she dares, but there’s something unnerving about the younger woman that makes her skin crawl in ways she doesn’t know what to make of.
As Angel ushers her out of the basement, Maya decides she’s going to push the stale-mate into action.
Angel swivels in the chair, pushing it around with her blackened toes. Zed keeps saying how she should have them cut off, but being limited to her own body, she feels a great attachment to them… Or rather, having lost her ability to travel through the Pandora infosphere, to trip along the intricate webs of the ECHOnet, she has grown attached to what she has. And looking at the charred skin of her feet and the stumpy fingers with chewed-up cuticles, she hates to admit it isn’t much.
So she swivels in her chair, glaring at her mirror image. Brick stands behind her, combing through her hair. The ends, last cut by a scientist for convenience’s sake, hang jagged and disproportionate, and the tufts of hair growing out around the implants look awkward to say the least.
”What’chu want?” he says cheerfully. His idea and his burden – he’s got two sirens going through eridium withdrawal to watch, and he’s decided to have a beauty day, of all things.
Eridium. Liquid. Dripping into my mouth. A bathtub of it, so I can soak it. Eridium eridium eridium. ”Something.” She shrugs.
He’s already filed Lilith’s nails down to the skin so she can’t claw at her tattoos, but in the corner, when he’s not looking, she’s gnawing on her skin like an animal. Angel watches in the mirror and she feels the same urge, the same ridiculous thoughts passing through her head at times – if she can just carve out the marks, denounce her abilities, she’ll be free. If she can just scratch hard enough she’ll make it through the day and feel better at the end of it.
”Shorter?” He holds up the split ends between his thick fingers, studying them. ”Definitely shorter.”
”Do what you want.” She doesn’t care. She’s tired of being babysat alongside Lilith every day, Lilith who’s sneaking eridium from anywhere she can, trying to prolong the shakes and shivers and gnawing at her stomach. It’s still going to kill her.
She wants to turn around and say, we’re going to die together. They should bury us together, a monument to the price we pay for what we are. She wants to look Lilith deep in her fiery eyes and tell her how death is going to be nothing and how it’s going to swallow them both in its gaping maw. She wants to break her, just a little, or a whole lot.
Boredom’s destroying her more than anything else.
She leans back as Brick combs through her hair, parting and pinning up sections, the freshly sharpened razor slicing through the frayed tips, the matted lengths falling to the floor around her. He works while humming a tune, only pausing to glance at Lilith once in a while. As he puts the razor to clean up the jagged stubble around her implant ports, a loud and clear gunshot rings out from downstairs.
”What was that?” Angel asks, jerking forward so suddenly Brick cuts her scalp.
”It came from the basement,” Lilith says, a string of saliva dangling between her arm and lip, fresh red bite-marks on her skin.
”Where’s Maya?” Angel asks, her eyelids fluttering as she touches at the portable communicator she has at the hip. ”No, no no no…” She stumbles out of the seat and crashes down the stairs, something wild and cold burning in her eyes.
”How could you do this?” Angel’s voice is devoid of warmth, of care, slicing like a cruel knife. She holds Jack’s face together, his blood spilling over her hands as he clutches at her desperately, sputtering and coughing.
”Because he doesn’t deserve to live!” Maya stares at the Jacobs revolver in her hands and throws it into the corner. She only had one bullet in it anyway. She didn’t think she’d hit. She didn’t think he’d goad her far enough for her to actually do it.
Did she even think it through at all? (Of course. A part of her is even pleased, however terrible Angel appears to her in the present moment, she’s pleased that her bullet went through his mouth and brought out so much blood.)
He smiled when she shot him. Do whatever you want, siren. You’re just going to give me my daughter back.
”He’s mine. My choice. My murder to commit.” Angel glares at Maya. ”And now you’re taking that away from me too.”
”I’m not… Angel! He’s ruining your life and you’re letting him. You’re better off with him dead.”
”That’s not your choice.”
”For…” Maya punches the wall so hard she cracks her knuckles and screams out loud. ”Why won’t you let him go?”
”Get out, Maya. Get out.”
”This isn’t your home. You can’t order me around!”
”So you do still think I’m a prisoner?” Angel lets go of her father and blood gushes forth in a torrent. ”Then do it already. Lock me up with him. Starve me to death. Let me die with him. Put me in shackles and be done with it.”
Maya covers her face, breathing hard, her voice taking on a sharp edge. ”Don’t, please.”
”It’s good to see your true self, Maya. It’s good to know who you really are. For a moment, I thought you were someone worth something.”
Maya’s hands fall to her side, and she simply stands there, staring silently at Angel’s hands. Angel ignores her presence, pressing tightly against her father’s face, trying to keep the shredded pieces together as she waits for doctor Zed to come and patch him up.
If Maya didn’t know better, if Maya hadn’t aimed straight at his mouth hoping to wipe that terrible smirk of his face, she’d be certain Jack’s smiling at her.
Angel’s vengeance comes swift and cruel, leaving no doubt about how she feels.
”I think Angel’s trying to kill me,” Maya says as she slumps over the table, dark circles heavy under her eyes. She hasn’t slept, a dark and churning sensation tearing at her insides for days on end now – and traps staged in her path wherever she goes. Near-lethal, enough to push Maya to the brink and haver her dangle over it, but never enough to outright kill her – as long as she steps carefully and navigates gently.
The mental strain, however, has begun to make her slip up.
”You think?” Brick picks up one of her guns, a Maliwan SMG she’s been carrying around for months, and with careful angling fires a round. It goes out through the back, hitting right where she’d have it aligned against her chest. ”She definitely is.”
”Fuck.” Maya sags further, covering her head with her arms. ”I fucked up.”
”You did something we’ve all been thinking of,” Lilith says, not very comforting. Feet up on the table, she prods Maya with the toe of her boot. ”Hey. You know she won’t actually kill you.”
”Are you sure?” Maya mutters against the wooden surface.
Lilith looks at the sizzling gun in Brick’s hand that’s slowly decaying from the corrosive rounds melting inside it. ”She’s… Just confused? And angry?”
”She’s a murderous little one.” Brick throws the gun into a corner where it continues sizzling.
Maya curls her arms over her head, pushing herself against the hard surface. ”I fucked up bad.”
Brick’s heavy hand lands on her back with such force that Maya suspects he cracked a rib of hers. ”Don’t worry, slab. She won’t get you.”
”Yeah.” Lilith’s burning hot hand rubs at Maya’s shoulder. ”If it comes down to between her and you, I’d be up for melting her brain in an instant.”
Moxxi ignores Angel as she sits down by the bar, prompting Angel to roll her eyes as she turns to scan the cramped, sweaty establishment that only marginally manages to smell more of smoke than piss, scanning the premises for a man she can sway enough to buy her a beer.
No one meets her eye. She smiles bitterly, turning around to come face-to-face with Moxxi.
”You’re not getting served here, sugar,” Moxxi says tensely, her plump lips pressed tight together.
”You dated Jack for months,” Angel replies, ”and you never even cared about me.”
”I didn’t know.”
”I left signs out. You chose not to see.” She didn’t, but the way Moxxi’s expression contorts in pain eases Angel’s frustration a little as she slips off the bar stool and leaves.
The shoulders have all turned cold in Sanctuary, one by one, and Angel knows it’s because of her campaign against Maya – but she’s too far gone into it to care. Her view of everything has narrowed in focus to see only Maya and all the ways in which she loves and loathes her.
It’s hard not to love other sirens. They’re not sisters, like Lilith sometimes say, and they’re not automatically friends or enemies. They’re just sirens. Each of them an isolated island, doomed to die alone nowhere near the full realization of their potentials, because that’s how cruel life is.
And she loves them all, all the ones she’s seen, because they carry the heavy weight of dark futures with the snarling and wild grace of an animal fighting until they’re torn apart.
She kicks a wall and feels nothing, the majority of nerves in her feet dead by now.
She’s such a fucking burn-out, as her dad would say. Literally.
Except her dad has no tongue anymore because Maya’s bullet shredded it to nothing and he’s wheezing in a dirty operating room, strapped down with a dozen tubes and IV lines strung to his body. It’s almost satisfying to go and stare at him, but each minute she spends sitting there watching his chest rise in fitful bursts, she gets angrier and angrier. Angry that it wasn’t her bullet. Angry that she didn’t pull the trigger.
There’s only one person she can turn her fury onto, and she does so with all the force she has left. However weak she has grown, however much of her former strength has atrophied away, what still lingers gets put to use.
A small explosion comes from the Crimson Raiders headquarters as she turns down the street, and Maya’s scream bounces out from the open windows. She smiles broadly – seems Maya triggered the re-wiring she’s done of the archaic computer systems – but this time, something doesn’t go according to plan.
A flash of purple appears in front of Angel and then she’s tugged through to another side.
It’s the first time she’s phased by Lilith and the strange feeling in her stomach makes her fingers tingle, her head buzz, it’s something she wants more of – the sensation of another siren’s powers engulfing her is head-dizzying delicious. They drop out on the second floor of the headquarters, the world coming back to Angel in a vivid bright haze. Air comes back too, filling her lungs, and she gasps desperately for it. How Lilith can hold her breath for so long in that other dimension is beyond her.
”That’s it!” Lilith says loudly, her hair in wild disarray, her stale breath hitting against Angel’s face. She wonders if she smells as terrible.
Lilith finds Maya in the kitchen, sleep-deprived and jittery, but she doesn’t flinch when she sees Angel, drawing upon what strength she has to remain rigid as steel.
Angel admires her, Angel hates her. It’s hard to tell where one feeling ends and the other begins.
”I’m done with you two being like this! Apologize! I’m not having two grown women sulking like puppies in here!”
Angel meets Maya’s eyes, but neither make a move to open their mouths. It’s oddly pleasing to Angel – she’s missed stubborn silences, missed the tension of a fight lingering on for days on end.
Lilith grumbles. ”Nothing? No words? You’re not even going to try, are you?”
”She tried to kill my dad.”
”She’s trying to kill me,” Maya spits back – even though her body reads as nervous and tense, there’s still that ever-present anger, the silent fury simmering under the surface, her tongue sharpened by defiance and twenty-seven years of obedience.
Angel adores her and envies her and Angel thinks a whole lot about Maya, but most of all she wants Maya to pay for what she tried to take from her. Or… She tries to cling to that feeling, staring hard at the tips of that blue hair she’s thought of running her fingers through. Of pulling on, tugging, getting her fingers caught in.
It’s hard. Maya muddles any clarity anger used to give Angel.
Lilith’s head snaps between the two, her chest rising more and more. ”You two need to work it out on your own. And you’re going to have to do it outside of Sanctuary.”
”What?” Maya protests.
”You heard me. And don’t you dare use the fast travel network to get back. Don’t even think about it.”
”How am I meant to survive?” Angel asks, exhaustion in her voice.
”Do you think anyone cares?”
”I…” It never struck her that they’d actually want her dead. Jack threatened, of course, but he’d never act on it, because she remained useful and she remained his daughter, but… Of course they don’t care. She’s not useful to them. More than anything, she’s a drain on their resources.
She never understood what burning bridges meant until these idiots came into her life, and ever since, that’s all she’s done with them, over and over.
Only this is the first time she feels a tinge of regret over it.
At the door, the other vault hunters stand, crowding together trying to look as innocent as possibly. They all meet her gaze at first, hard and determined, but they all end up yielding – Axton, Salvador, Gaige. Krieg, who usually always stares at her, averts his face. It’s hard to tell with Zer0, but… None of them wants to look at her directly after a while.
”Et tu, Brick?” Angel says with a sad smile, having saved him for last.
He scratches at his neck. ”I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but Angel knows he’s smarter than that. It’s just easier to play stupid sometimes.
”Enough goodbyes,” Lilith growls, taking Maya by one arm and Angel by the other. This time Angel closes her eyes and when she opens them again, she’s standing knee-deep in snow.
Maya sighs at her side. ”For fuck’s sake, Lilith, a mountain?”
Angel glares at Maya sullenly, pulling a ragged blanket around her shoulders that Maya found in an abandoned ramshackle cabin they passed traversing down the mountain side. Angel’s wearing Maya’s socks, three sizes too big, the toes flopping helplessly – Maya threw them at her after she noticed the bare blackened feet in the dim moonlight. Maya’s teeth have been chattering for an hour now, but the snow starts thinning out around them.
Angel pauses, her mouth opening for the first time during their mountain journey. ”A Catch-A-Ride down there.” Then she turns sharply to Maya. ”You can leave me here.”
”What?” Maya’s frustration makes her snarl.
”Leave me. That’s what you want.” She plops down on the snowy ground, letting out a small whimper.
”Don’t presume to know what I want.” Maya trudges back up and grabs Angel by the wrist, dragging her to her feet. ”Now come on.”
Digging her heels into the ground, Angel leans back enough to counter Maya’s momentum, but when she slips they both go tumbling down. Their backs hit against the rocky slope as they slip and slide a good ten meters, only coming to a stop when they hit against a solid boulder in their path.
Maya hears something break and she sags down on top of Angel who’s landed in her lap. ”Are you happy now?” Maya asks, feeling the stinging contusions groan in protest as she pushes the younger woman off her.
”No,” Angel says, then louder when she rolls over onto her back and a loud plastic crack follows, ”this is your fault!”
”Okay.” Maya whirls around. ”Fine. It is my fault. And you know what? I’m okay with that! If I got to do it all over again, I’d still shoot him. You didn’t know, what it was like, all those months of his voice, of his mocking, of the things he did…”
”Try years.”
”I know!” Maya licks her lips, hands at her hips. ”I know, I know, I know. And I’m being insensitive and I’m fucking up again and I’m sorry, Angel. I really want to kill your dad because he gets under my skin, he just… He’s toxic.”
Angel’s shaking visibly, but Maya can’t tell if it’s from anger or exhaustion or a chill. She doesn’t respond, and Maya keeps going down the muddy hill but slips, the soft grass giving way, and she tumbles down a few good meters before clawing herself to a stop. She’s dirty and wet and glares up at Angel, who’s actually smirking at her misery.
”Why won’t you just kill him?” Maya screams. ”You begged me to kill him, once, you begged me. What’s changed? What’s the difference?”
”Because then it’s just going to be me! All the pain, all the fault, it’s going to be all on me!” She runs her hands through her hair, more distraught than angry now. ”Everything I’ve ever done, all these terrible things, not all of them are his. When he’s dead, you’re going to realize he’s not the only toxic one. He and I, we ruin everything we touch, and that’s… That’s all we do.”
Maya deflates as suddenly as she burst out. ”You… You can’t think that about yourself.” She tries her best to imitate Brick but Angel only sneers.
”It’s the truth. He hurt me, and I, very knowingly, hurt him back. I hurt you because I wanted to see you squirm. If you were an insect, I’d have pulled your wings off.” She laughs, cruel and sharp and edging close to something wild and dangerous. ”For a while, you were an insect. All of you were! I could pry and tear and make you scream and it didn’t bother me.”
”But it does bother you now.”
”And it’s so stupid and inconvenient! Why should it? I’m dying! I won’t be here long enough to care what happens later!” Angel stops, wheezing, and sags down onto the ground.
Maya climbs back up, mud clots in her hands and on her knees, and picks up Angel – she weighs so little, like she’s a hollow copy of a human – and takes the long way down the hill. Angel’s head rests against her breast, wisps of hair tickling her skin. She looks so harmless and tiny and sad, the sunken skin around her eyes still discolored in blue-black shades.
”Hey… Do you still bleed purple?”
She doesn’t open her eyes, muttering a reply against the swell of Maya’s breast. ”A little, yes.”
Maya curses under her breath, putting Angel down on the asphalt by the Catch-a-Ride station as she thumbs through the digistruct choices. Her preferences lean towards big technicals with metallic finish, but before she’s even found her combo Angel puts her fingertips to the side of the computer. It buzzes but instantly begins constructing the car.
”Truce?” Maya asks as she leans down over Angel again, extending a hand in a helpful offer.
Angel takes her hand, their cold and callous fingers brushing. ”For now.”
”We can talk it over when we’re not freezing our asses off.” Maya pulls her up and guides her into the passenger seat.
If Angel keeps her eyes on the road ahead, she gets motion sickness. If she rolls her head back, the night sky only shows her the Hyperion station against the illuminated moon. Neither state one she desires, so she shifts in the big leather seat, turning towards Maya. Maya’s hands are high on the steering wheel, her brow furrowed deep in thought as she scans the road ahead, avoiding the wide cracks hitting the booster to jump over any gaps.
”You love driving,” Angel notes.
”It’s terrifying.”
”And that’s why you like it. I’ve watched you, and you love how much Pandora thrills you.” They hit a bump in the road and Angel lurches forward in the seat, steadying her hands against the dashboard. ”You drive terribly, though.”
Maya gives her a quick and short glare, changing the subject abruptly. ”You never said you were dying.”
”Isn’t it obvious?” She pulls the blanket up to her chin, pressing her knees close to her chest. ”Did you think I’d actually survive?”
”I…”
”You did.” Angel closes her eyes. ”That’s kind of sweet and mostly idiotic.”
”It’s optimistic.”
”Which isn’t a realistic thing to be.” She stretches her neck. ”Right here. Down into the valley.”
They drive on in silence, Maya taking the turn so hard Angel pales a bit and swallows hard several times, her eyelids fluttering. ”Why…” She coughs, tries again. ”Why won’t you take eridium?”
”That’s an idiotic question.”
”I know, but Brick told me to talk to you. Directly. Instead of assuming.”
”Whatever your assumptions are, they’re correct.”
”If it was my choice, I wouldn’t quit. The power, the limits dissolving one by one… You can’t even begin to imagine.”
”I’ve known different kinds of power.”
”Being a false goddess doesn’t begin to compare to what Pandora can do to you.”
Maya slows the car down to a crawl as they hit a muddy riverbank. ”Lilith’s so addicted she can’t even think clearly before she’s stolen eridium from one of us. She used to ask, but now she’s too ashamed to admit she still needs it, and tries to hide her hunger.”
”She doesn’t want to disappoint you all.”
”We’re not disappointed. We’d never be. But she’s too determined to not take our help.”
Angel shifts in the seat, looking out over the side of the car. ”What help can you actually give a siren about to die?”
”They turned on you because of what you were trying to do to me.” Maya sighs, picking up on the truth of the matter immediately. ”Why do you hate me?”
”I don’t. I never did.”
”Bullshit. You wanted me to kill you, that time in the core. All of this fighting between us. Don’t tell me this is your screwed-up way of showing me affection.”
Angel doesn’t reply, words thick in her throat. Maya starts giggling, loud and ungracious, her snorts making Angel’s heart ache.
A screen flickers to life as they materialize in a sealed pressure room. Maya presses herself against the wall while Angel touches both hands to the glass, angling her eye to meet a camera. The screen flashes green, followed by a short message. Welcome, Specimen A. Clearance Alpha, clearance Omega.
”Specimen?”
”Official designation in the Hyperion files. Jack liked doing that to me.” Angel clears her throat. ”Initiate sequence Omega, password: six four, dash six.” The screen reads Secondary Password. Angel grimaces. ”I love you.”
Maya shivers involuntarily, remembering when she spoke the same words with Jack’s voice modulator to unlock the gates to Angel’s prison. Then she makes a note to never say it to Angel, and immediately wonders why she’d even care to think about that. (She knows why, though, and she feels like laughing at herself again.) ”What’ll we find here?”
”Nothing of value. But I… I have to see it.”
The doors open with a low hiss, revealing an empty corridor, lined with boxes and papers, glass vials broken and intact. Maya bends down to pick up a handful of employee ID cards, flipping through them as she trails behind Angel. They pass by empty labs and offices, not all of them left in a haste – some barely look like they’ve been used at all, others neatly picked through before departure. Others like someone was there just a minute ago.
”Are there any employees left?”
”No. I killed them all.”
”What?”
”Sequence Omega. Jack was paranoid, and had fifty different ways to eliminate all the staff in the turn of a hand. They all had chips implanted into them, chips I could overload in a microsecond, fry all their nerves dead.” Angel drags her hand along the dirty windows. ”I don’t know how to shoot a man, but I knew how to sunder their minds.”
”You scare me.”
”Good.”
In a fleeting second, Maya sees a flicker of light, of white wings spreading to fill up the entire width of the corridor… And then the moment passes, Maya rubs at her eyes. She doesn’t remember when she last slept, it’s just her imagination playing tricks on her.
They move deeper into the station, and they start finding bodies. All of them look like they just laid down to sleep on the floor, resting peacefully except for the small detail that they’re not breathing, that their skins are slowly losing that living luster. Neither of them cares, but the claustrophobic environment starts getting to Maya. She’s used to the open sky, to wide-stretched plains – even in the abbey on Athenas, which was built in that ancient style, rooms opening up to courtyards without rooftops and with the native flora crawling all over. Being in enclosed environments – especially in space – makes sweat bead on the back of her neck.
”Where are we going?” Maya asks, trying not to sound stressed.
”There’s an anomaly up here,” Angel replies, hand against the wall, electric sparks jumping between her fingers and the white plastic.
”Anomaly?”
”This entire station is wired for me to travel through it when phaseshifting. But there’s this big, empty space ahead.”
”An empty room?”
”No. A room I can’t phaseshift into. I want to investigate.”
Another pair of heavy airlock doors opened to let them through, and the corridor tapered off to a single lonesome door. Angel hurries her step and flings the door open, frozen on the threshold.
Peeking over her shoulder, Maya sees something she’s only ever known in films, described in novels she read – a bedroom, decorated with faded things and posters and a bed with a ruffled duster.
”He… He brought my room here.” Angel steps inside, hesitant, mouth agape.
Maya touches the faded purple covers of the bed, sitting down on it – the springs groan, the soft mattress dipping low. She leans back and studies the wallpaper, faded yellow with dark golden flowers on it. The pillows smell old and stale, but there’s a vague hint of teenage skin there, of synthetic perfumes and artificial bubblegum.
It’s something Maya never had. She slept in lavish quarters as long as she knew, everything old and carved, creaking when she moved. The only decorations she had were in gold and all the fabrics were heavy brocades. With Angel’s back turned, Maya discreetly buries her nose into the sheets and draws in a deep breath. Nothing smells of clinical procedures or sterilizing alcohol, and yet… It’s so very Angel.
”He never let me come here. I mean, I saw this station, I was in it while phaseshifting through the networks, but this…” Turning, Angel puts her hands against the wall, feeling the smooth wallpaper with a floral pattern. ”There’s nothing electronic in here. Why did he do this?”
”He couldn’t let go.”
Angel swallows, hands grabbing at things, fingers clenching around small porcelain figurines and letting go, moving on to the next childhood trinket with an expression on her face that says she’d rather have forgotten everything in here. ”Why?”
”Maybe he thought that one day, you’d just revert back to who you were. And you’d be his little girl again.”
”All he had to do was exercise the demon in my blood. For all he did, he never understood my powers. Never tried to. He rationalized me to be a computer program, only talking to me through screens and microphones. This…” Angel sweeps her hand along the shelf, sending all the figurines flying onto the floor where they shatter into dusty pieces. ”I haven’t been this little girl in years.”
”He couldn’t let go.” Maya repeats herself, at a loss for words.
Lower lip trembling, Angel falls onto the bed, her back shaking. ”Why won’t you just say it?”
”What?” Maya sits up, cautiously touching one hand to Angel’s wrist.
”He and I deserved each other.”
”Is that what you think?” Maya cups her face. ”You deserved so much more and so much better than him. That’s what I believe.”
Angel jolts forward, pressing her lips to Maya’s. She’s not sure how to kiss but she tries, pushing herself closer, lips parting, tongue sliding into Maya’s mouth. Then she’s out of air and withdraws suddenly, gasping, eyes wide open.
Maya blinks once, twice, then her hand is at the back of Angel’s neck pulling her close for another, deeper one.
”Don’t say nice things if you don’t mean them,” Angel says when she breaks away, whispering it against Maya’s mouth.
”I like you.” Maya falls back onto the bed, dragging Angel along with her. ”Come here.” Their legs intertwine, lips meeting over and over, Maya’s arms folded around Angel’s tiny frame while Angel clings to Maya’s neck.
As they kiss, Angel starts crying, and Maya kisses the tears, licks up them from her cheeks, then kisses Angel full on the mouth again. She repeats it over and over until Angel’s sobbing quiets down, until Angel pushes her face against the nook between shoulder and neck on Maya, her hot breath and salty tears making Maya’s skin tingle. Still, she holds on, stroking Angel’s hair, kissing her forehead, until she too falls asleep.
When Angel wakes up and disentangles herself from Maya, her body stiff and sore. One hand clamped over her mouth, she sneaks out and closes the door before she starts dry-heaving and coughing – a part of her morning routine ever since being taken to Sanctuary.
When her throat stops convulsing, she gets up and makes her way to the central control chamber. By the time she gets there, the cameras show Maya in the white corridor, and Angel resists the urge to plug herself into the station’s mainframe – she’d be unable to let go this time – and instead lights up a path that’ll lead Maya to her. Meanwhile, she sits down in the chair Jack used to occupy and adjusts the settings to be comfortable to her frame. There’s junk food bags scattered all over the floor, crumbs stuck to the bottoms of her feet, greasy stains on the keyboards and salt between the keys.
”Hey,” Maya says, leaning on the back of the seat as she studies the screens – some dead, others filled with old footage, but a good half of them all show live-feeds from different parts of Pandora. ”I trashed your room a little.”
”Thank you,” Angel says, feeling suddenly relieved.
”No problem. It creeped me out anyway.” She yawns. ”So, what now?”
”What I came to see.”
All the screens shift, becoming recordings of Jack – some intentional, of him addressing the camera, smiling to it, others more candid. Jack alone in a bathroom, pulling off his mask and shaving; of Jack throwing a violent tantrum before shooting a man and laughing; Jack in Angel’s core, plugging the cords in one by one as she shudders and claws at his arms. Then they get older, go back further – as far back as Angel started recording and filing things away onto whatever memory she could find, saving them for purposes she never understood then. Even now, they seem so useless – prepubescent Angel with her dad at a restaurant, his sharp and cruel smile as she pokes around in the food without eating, their mother hiding her face in shame.
”He wasn’t always Jack, was he?” Maya asks, uncertain.
Angel’s lips tighten. ”He used to be John, but Jack? Jack was always there. He just wanted to reinvent himself, become someone new. Become the man he thought he deserved to be. I delivered him unto himself.”
”And you?”
Angel simply touches the screen, bringing up another archive of recordings. ”I filed them all away onto his computer. All the horrible things he said, all the cruelty he inflicted, I never let him forget. I wanted it to drive him over the edge. I made him watch all of this, over and over, whenever I could.” She deletes all the recordings at once. ”I created Handsome Jack. He had a template, a bad one scratched on the back of a napkin from his dive bar, and I refined it with cruelty, twisting the knife.”
”But you also destroyed him.”
”Does that absolve my sins?”
”I don’t believe in sins. I don’t believe in gods.”
Angel snorts ungraciously. ”There are no gods on Pandora, only goddesses.”
It’s hard to tell time on the space station, but Angel, after having gone through all the files and documents her father kept, having tallied all the resources still available, all the eridium in stores across Pandora – refined and raw alike – she goes back to her room and finds Maya on the bed, reading one of her teen romance novels. On the cover there’s two girls holding hands behind their backs, their thighs pressed together, dirt and scars covering their intertwined fingers.
Everything but the bed in the room’s been torn and broken, something she finds fitting.
”Productive day?” Maya asks, glancing up above the pages.
Angel nods, pausing. ”I could live here.”
Maya closes the book, putting it down on her chest. ”Do you want to?”
”I… I’d like to live. There’s enough equipment here to keep me alive. It’s sterile, clean, the medical bay outfitted with robots and…” She glances at Maya. ”You don’t think it’s worthwhile.”
”I’d rather watch this place burn. It feels tainted.”
”Purity is a luxury we can’t afford to strive for.”
Maya shrugs, looking uncomfortable. ”If this is what you want, then… Take it.”
”I should take you back to Sanctuary before anything else though.” Angel extends her hand, the other on a small teleportation device strapped to her thigh.
”You mean you’ve forgiven me?” Maya takes her hand, and in the next instant, they’re standing on the hard floor of the fast-travel station, reeking of everything that Sanctuary contains, amplified by the hot sun hanging directly above them.
Lilith appears in a flash of purple, her hair wet and smoothed back, clothes haphazardly thrown on in a hurry, her eyes narrowed. ”So. Did you two make up?”
”Yeah,” they say in unison, still holding hands. Guiltily, Angel lets go and Maya coughs, strapping the novel to her belt, cover turned to her hip.
Lilith eyes them, then nods, accepting their word. ”Come on. You look like you need a shower.”
That night, they all eat dinner together, everyone crowding around a table as Brick carries in pots and pans that make the wood creak under the combined weight. Maya sits on one side of Angel with Brick on the other, his massive arms constantly bumping into her as he plops more food onto everyone’s plates, and whenever he laughs it spreads to Angel who tries to hide her smiles behind a napkin.
And once in a while, Maya reaches under the table and puts a hand on her leg, squeezing gently.
It’s strange, and she still doesn’t think they see in any value in her. It’s hard to enjoy the warm exuberance of being amongst them, and she keeps silent.
After desert, it’s just the three sirens left at the table, Brick coming in now and again to pick up another set of plates or pots to wash. Maya keeps eating at the cake with a spoon.
Lilith loosens the top button on her tight jeans and stretches out. ”Jack’s worse off,” she says, trying to pass it off conversationally, but Angel sees the light shimmering in the hands folded behind her head.
Angel pauses, fingertips skimming the table. Just a few days ago, she may have leapt at Lilith with a fork. ”How long?”
”I’m surprised he’s still alive.” Lilith brings her hands down on top of her stomach. ”You can go down and see him.”
Angel pushes out her chair but stops, putting one hand over Maya’s. ”Should I?”
She shrugs, stuffing another mouthful of soft crumbling cake into her mouth. ”It’s your choice.”
Lilith winks at Maya, shameless and relaxed. Angel wonders how much eridium she’s pilfered while they’ve been gone. ”So it did work?”
Putting her spoon down, Maya scratches nonchalantly at her neck. ”Yeah.”
Angel blinks. ”You… You plotted this.” Spoken only as a suggestive assumption, but from the look on Maya’s face she knows it’s the truth.
”I decided to play at your game. A little.” Maya turns stern. ”Not as far as you think.”
”That…” Angel smiles, giggles like a child, claps a hand over her mouth. ”Oh, that’s so…” And she leans forward, kissing Maya’s cheek. ”You’re very sweet.”
”I don’t want to play games with you.”
”You did it, though.”
”Careful,” Lilith says, ”she might never want you to stop.”
Angel laughs again, flinging her arms around Maya’s neck as she clumsily climbs onto Maya’s lap, peppering her face with feather-light kisses before tasting the cake on her tongue. She feels as if she’s floating, Maya’s hands trying to hold her still, carefully skimming along the plates fused to her vertebrae.
The moment she stops kissing Maya, she’s going to have to go down and watch her father die.
Finally.
The moment she stops kissing Maya, she’s going to watch the first twenty years of her life die, and she’s going to have to start something new. She’s terrified and clings harder, laughing desperately, drawing in as much air as she can through her nose. Her fingers curl in the short buzz at Maya’s neck, holding on to the one person that matters.
And the kiss ends, Lilith muttering a ’finally’ under her breath, and Angel prepares to die a little.
Again.
This is where it ends, dad. This is where we part forever.
Maya wakes up from her slumber when an arm slides around her waist from behind, a familiar whisper in her ear – like the one that greeted her welcome to Pandora, that called Sanctuary her home, the voice that guided her across a continent and through dangers untold. ”Thank you for killing my dad.”
And Maya, tired and comfortable, doesn’t know if it’s a genuine thing or not, but it feels genuine. As if she cares. As if she’s actually pleased by what’s been ruined.
She rolls around and faces Angel, who reeks of blood and something sharper, even more familiar. Her sleepy brain takes a few moments to put the pieces together. ”Do you feel better?”
”Not in the least.” She grins, her teeth glimmering as they catch the light from a lamp. ”I should leave.”
”Why?” Maya hooks a finger in the loose lining of Angel’s pants. ”Stay.”
”The more I look at you, the more I want to hurt you. It’s a genetic flaw.”
”Stay.” She presses her body against Angel’s, feeling the sticky warm blood smeared onto her abs by Angel’s wandering fingers.
”I’ll keep watch,” Angel says, reassuring, sounding like she’s leaving even when she hooks a leg over Maya. ”But I can’t stay here. I need to survive. I need to…”
”I know, and I’m still going to ask you to stay.” She smiles against Angel’s neck. ”Leave when I’m asleep. It’ll hurt.”
In the morning, Maya has dried blood on her chest and thighs, there’s a dead man in the basement and one half of her bed is crumpled and cold. But in her ear, there’s a whisper – the voice of Pandora – and on her retinas, a pair of blue eyes flicker, a sweet smile flashing by.