Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Athena was born with a dearth of ambition.

That’s what Steele tells her, anyway. It’s what makes her such an efficient assassin. Sure, it’s possible to cultivate a reputation as a contract killer—but everyone in her line of work, from the Crimson Lance’s elite to garden-variety mercenaries, shares one thing in common. They take orders from someone else.

“And you could be taking orders from me,” Steele says.

Athena thinks for a moment, the cloth in her hand stilling against her shield. The smell of bleach in the air now mingles with gunpowder, which Athena has come to recognise as Steele’s signature scent.

It isn’t oppressive, nor comforting. It just is.

“High Command might have a thing or two to say about that,” Athena replies.

“Let us pretend the decision to reassign you does not rest with High Command,” Steele says. “What would you do then?”

Athena can’t help feeling that such a thought experiment seems counter-productive. It’s Steele who keeps reminding her that she’s a good little soldier, after all. Athena doesn’t disagree, but there is an unnecessary cruelty in now being asked to think outside the box. She is familiar with the box. She knows the box.

Sighing, she stoops to set down her shield, resting it against the bench with a clatter. When she lifts her head again, she finds Steele now standing in front of her—above her, over her. Steele extends an arm, curling her hand beneath Athena’s chin, and tips Athena’s head back further, far enough to lock their gazes.

Steele by name, cold hard metal by nature. The commandant smiles, but it falls far short of reaching her eyes.

“Well?” Steele asks, expectantly. “Pretend the decision rests with you.”

“It would never,” Athena says, just so they’re clear. “But… I wouldn’t be opposed.”

“Of course not,” Steele says. Even if it was apparently the answer she’d expected all along, she still sounds pleased with it. “I think I would like you there. Once I reclaim Pandora for the Crimson Lance, I will appreciate a reliable right-hand to depend on. Perhaps that could be you.”

It’s a pipe dream. Athena knows that the moment it leaves Steele’s mouth, yet that doesn’t stop her heart from thudding just a little harder on the next beat. Her sister is on Pandora, but she suspects Atlas won’t allow their touching reunion to go ahead without a catch. Settling there without having to negotiate her way out of the Lance would save time and bullets. And settling with Steele, well…

The Commandant’s hand begins stroking her cheek. Athena covers it with her own, feeling an inexplicable sense of urgency, like she’s running out of chances to do so.

Steele’s smile only ever reaches her eyes when she speaks of owning Pandora, like it does now—and she is beautiful, Athena thinks, when she’s so euphorically convinced of things which will never happen.

Maybe it’s for the best that Athena follows orders. Ambition looks a lot like lunacy.

Chapter Text

“Between the racket of the jukebox,” Tannis grumbles, “and the incoherent whooping of your vulgar clientele, there is no room left for me to hear myself think.”

Moxxi is holding a tray of shimmering cocktails that have yet to make their way to the table that ordered them, but there is so much wrong with what Tannis just said that she feels compelled to stop dead in her tracks and set the record straight.

“This is one of my favourite songs,” she says, jutting out her hip to place her free hand upon it. “And I don’t suppose I need to remind you, Patricia, that you’re sitting at my bar.” Still, Moxxi reconsiders, raising a brow thoughtfully. “Most of my regulars are, I’ll grant you, disgusting.”

Tannis makes a face like she’d just decided to take a bite out of the lime slice in her ice water. Because that’s all Tannis ever orders. “I fail to see how the nature of your establishment is relevant.”

Moxxi smiles in spite of herself: not the coquettish crescent she puts on for customers, but a bemused one that is almost exclusively reserved for Tannis. Because Tannis, for such an insufferable brainbox, can’t half be dense sometimes.

So Moxxi helpfully gestures to the journal lying open in front of the doctor. “The whole point of a roaring nightclub is that people come here when they don’t want to think. You can’t honestly expect to get any work done during happy hour.”

“Yes, well. I did suspect that I might struggle to achieve much in the way of scientific progress tonight.”

“Yet you keep trying,” Moxxi says, as she finally begins making her way out from behind the counter. She has to pass Tannis in the process, and a quick peek over the doctor’s shoulder confirms there is nothing on the page yet.

Tannis straightens her back a little. “I tip you handsomely, do I not? And you can’t tell me you would rather see the stool at the end of your bar occupied by a stray drunkard who’d openly leer at you.”

Moxxi stands beside Tannis, now, tipping her head in a playful show of curiosity. “Are you suggesting you come here to leer at me discreetly?”

It’s always a delight to make Sanctuary’s fussiest resident flush a pretty pink. The tips of Patricia’s ears match the pair of neon lips blinking above them.

But Moxxi remembers a time when Tannis would have responded to any suggestion of leaving her laboratory by projectile vomiting. So Tannis is right: Moxxi would rather see her at the end of the bar with an ice water than anyone else.

And Moxxi could say all that, but she is not a woman of substance when she’s on the clock and she doubts Tannis would appreciate it, anyway.

So instead, she presses a real pair of ruby lips to Tannis’s cheek. Takes care to leave a stain.

“If you liked the view, sugar, that’s all you had to say.”

Chapter Text

Jack was dead, and there was still so much work to do.

Lilith could hardly wrap her head around the scale of it. Leading an army to glorious victory had been one thing, but now Pandora was a planet with mundane aspirations of becoming a real-boy civilisation, and it was looking to Lilith for guidance.

She understood it was because they didn’t have anyone else. A substitute for Roland who would do in a pinch.

When she said as much to Maya, it was merely a statement of fact—so the gentle punch to her shoulder took her by surprise.

Lilith rubbed her arm, though it hadn’t hurt. “What was that for?”

“Stop that,” Maya said. “Doubting yourself. People here respect you for you.”

“Sure they might, but I’m not a natural at calling the shots.” Lilith gripped the balcony with one hand, then the other. She could always draw a modicum of comfort from watching Sanctuary bustle below. “I never wanted to be.”

Maya moved to stand beside her. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“What, my healthy suspicion of authority and how much of a hypocrite I am for becoming it?” Lilith scoffed. “That isn’t a recipe for lasting leadership.”

“Hard disagree,” Maya said. Lilith didn’t need to look to know Maya was smiling. “If anything, I think that makes you the perfect candidate for running this place.”

“And why's that?”

“C’mon, Lil. We didn’t just fight a whole war for you to miss the moral of the story. People who want power the most probably shouldn’t have it.”

Lilith finally turned her head, and found that Maya’s smile wasn’t the amused, smug little smirk she’d subconsciously expected to see. When had she started assuming people would automatically talk down to her? Probably after Jack placed her in captivity to do just that.

The look on Maya’s face was calm, collected. But she was always weirdly serene. Lilith, usually suspicious of just about everyone, trusted her judgement, knowing on some primal level that Maya would always land on her feet.

“You have everything figured out,” Lilith said. “All the time. Maybe I should be deferring to you.”

“Me? No way. I don’t have the image.”

Lilith looked down at herself, thinking vaguely of her critics—not those in the resistance, but the earliest she’d ever had. Mean girls in middle school who’d ragged on her wardrobe.

Then she stared at Maya incredulously. “And I do?”

Maya laughed. “Hey, I’ve been a goddess and a fugitive, but nobody’s ever given me a name like the Firehawk.”

As tempting as it was to keep brooding, Lilith caved in and smiled, too. “I’m never gonna shirk that, am I?”

“Not a chance.” Maya reached out, chucking Lilith under the chin like it was the most natural thing in the world. From her, Lilith felt like maybe it might be: that Maya’s touch alone was grounding. “You have a follower in me. All you gotta do is carry the torch.”

Chapter Text

Of all the gin joints in all the world, the sexy pirate captain had to walk into Moxxi’s.

Not that Gaige can comment on the quality of the gin. She’s never been much of a lush, even if she is now nineteen years above Pandora’s recommended drinking age of six months.

But Scarlett must like it. She’d been attempting to order a bottle of the stuff before Gaige tapped her on the shoulder and chased her into the cold night air.

“You left me for dead,” Gaige says, though she isn’t torn up about it. She just reckons Scarlett could do with the reminder.

Scarlett has the decency to look faintly apologetic. She glances down at the pistol Gaige is holding against her belly, to where the muzzle is obscured by a crease in her shirt, then looks up.

Their eyes meet. It’s kind of awkward.

“I suppose I did do that, didn’t I? What am I like! Let me take this opportunity to say, from the bottom of my heart—my bad.”

“You remember me,” Gaige says, genuinely surprised.

“Of course I do,” Scarlett replies, smiling with half of her mouth. “It’s not every day I hoodwink the prodigy who brought down Handsome Jack. Sort of proud of myself for that one, actually.” Gaige watches regret flicker across Scarlett’s face in real time. “Not very proud, though. Obviously.”

“I get it,” Gaige reassures her. “I guess I'd be proud, too. And you gave me ample warning.”

“Aren’t you going to kill me?”

“No.” Gaige withdraws her gun and holsters it. “I just had to make sure you wouldn’t run away.”

“Thank heavens for that.” Scarlett smiles again, this time pleasantly. “I take it this still means you want something.”

“Just the answer to a question! You’re probably gonna lie to my face, though.”

Scarlett says nothing, but the way she lifts one brow betrays that whether or not she lies very much depends on the question.

It makes Gaige reluctant to come out and say it. She’d wanted to ask a year ago, when they’d been hunting treasure with a real-life pirate ship. It had been fun and stupid in equal parts, but what Gaige liked especially was being part of a crew—one that didn’t have to split up once the party was over. They’d just sail off in search of a new map, a new adventure.

All under the direction of a sexy pirate captain.

“Say I wanted to come with you,” is what Gaige settles on. “What if I wanted to join your crew?”

Scarlett purses her lips with apparent surprise. She presses her left hand to her cheek—a new mechanical one that resembles Gaige’s own. Gaige had thought Scarlett’s prosthetics were cool at the time. Still does.

“I’d say… you’re still a kid.” Disappointing, but not unexpected. Yet Gaige draws hope from from the gleam in Scarlett's eye and her smirk as she goes on, “And I’d much rather see you running your own.”

Chapter Text

The bridge is quiet enough tonight that Tannis’s voice echoes ominously when she speaks.

“Do you truly believe that one day, you shall die?”

The question comes so matter-of-factly that Lilith would be tempted to ask if she heard it correctly, had it not been for how frighteningly well she knows the doctor. Twelve years have passed since they met, and not once has one of Patricia’s morbid questions turned out to be a case of misunderstanding.

So Lilith does what she always does—stares at her. Tannis gets the message that she should elaborate.

“I’m sure you understand it on a logical level,” she says. “Eventually your heart will stop beating, the neurons in your brain will cease to fire… But have you really come to terms with the fact you won’t be able to cheat it when the time comes?”

“You’re asking if I’ve accepted it emotionally,” Lilith supplies.

Tannis’s silence answers in the affirmative, so Lilith thinks about it for a moment, though she already knows her conclusion. Of course she hasn’t accepted it. She’s emerged relatively unscathed from so many dangerous situations that she’d only be able to face the next one by telling herself she’s invincible.

A fiction it might be, but it works. She clings to it all the more urgently now that she doesn’t have ink on her arm that tells the universe she’s special.

“I guess I don’t like thinking about it,” she says.

Tannis sniffs, disappointed in the answer and determined Lilith should know about it. But that’s nothing new.

“What about you?” Lilith goes on, raising an eyebrow.

Though Tannis might not be one for combat, she still has a habit of wandering into places populated by danger. She’s got a habit of surviving them, too. Death, and the interruption it would pose to their work, can’t be far from the doctor’s mind either.

“I, too, don’t like thinking about it,” Tannis says, quieter than before. At least, her voice doesn’t bounce off the walls this time. She fixes her gaze to the window behind the console, on the brilliant view of outer space that has become tediously familiar. “I’ve considered the possibilities available to us that would allow us to prevent it. Preserving you sounds gauche, of course… but constructing some sort of artificial intelligence would be inadequate. I will continue to ponder the question.”

Lilith contemplates correcting Tannis—on how that wasn’t quite what she meant, that she hadn’t for a second expected Tannis to take Lilith’s survival onto her shoulders.

Maybe it’s selfish that she keeps quiet. But it’s a comfort of the best kind that Tannis cares enough to worry. Even if Tannis would bite her head off—perhaps literally—should she hear Lilith describe it as worrying.

The corner of Lilith’s mouth twitches with a smile she’s too tired to commit to. She rests her head on Tannis’s shoulder instead, and the doctor doesn't object, nor does she move away.

They stare out into nothing.