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Maya stands in the corner of the spacious living room, about as inconspicuous as the tattoos covering her bare arm.
Years of living in near-isolation back on Athenas prepared her for the grueling battles on Pandora. But here, on Sanctus, she feels just as out of place as she did during the celebration on Wam Bam Island. On the battlefield, with a gun in her hand, she was in her element. But this? Nothing the monks or the Raiders taught her had prepared her for this.
Ten different conversations take place around her, the sound so overwhelming she almost can't hear any of them. On the couch to her left, Brick, Salvador, Mordecai, and two men Maya doesn't know sit on couches and recliners watching a sport Maya can only assume, from what little she knows about sports that don't involve blood and fire-breathing mechanical dinosaurs, is soccer. In the kitchen, Janey is making cocktails from the several liquor and mixer bottles sitting atop the counter. From the way Athena is standing behind her, leaning against her back, cheek resting on her shoulder, Janey must have mixed her something strong and something tasty.
Across the room, Lilith catches Maya's eye, and gives her a look Maya has seen a few times before, one that seems to ask are you going to stand in that corner all night?
Maya turns her attention to the group Lilith is talking to: Gaige and an older man and woman. Maya had been introduced to both of them as she arrived. The woman, of course, would have needed no introduction anyway. Gaige is the spitting image of her mother, albeit her mother wears her hair up in a loose bun rather than Gaige with her wild pigtails. Even their eyes match, the same striking emerald. Were her mother twenty years younger, they might be mistaken as twins, though her mother's face is softer, her chin rounder, her nose more pointed. And while Gaige doesn't bear much of a resemblance to her father, she clearly takes more after his personality. While her mother was more reserved about meeting all of Gaige's new friends (particularly meeting Lilith and herself, though Maya isn't sure if that's due to the fear of what they're both capable of, or the shock of learning Sirens are real in the first place), her father was always the first one to introduce himself and strike up a conversation. His laugh and his daughter's seem to have a way of carrying through the room.
In all her focus on Gaige's family, Maya nearly overlooks the woman on Gaige's right arm, arms folded across her body as if holding herself, jet black hair spilling out from under the navy blue beanie on her head. Angel stands rigid with her chin dipped down, her left shoulder barely touching Gaige's right.
“Thought you could use this.”
Maya flinches, torn from her train of thought, as Janey appears by her side, a glass full of blue liquid and two ice cubes floating in it.
“What's in it?” Maya asks, taking the glass (as if she cared about the answer).
“Just try it,” Janey says, with a smile that quickly falters. “Eh, sorry. Forgot. Guess you didn't hear that one from your mum growing up.”
“Don't worry about it,” Maya says, shaking her head and taking a sip. The taste reminds her of something Lilith bought her back on Wam Bam Island, only with less of a burning aftertaste. “Thanks. Is she gonna be alright?” Maya looks pointedly at Athena, who is once again resting against Janey's back.
“I can hear you, you know.” To her credit, Athena doesn't sound nearly as drunk as she looks.
“Oh, she's fine. We went out before this and we... well, we got... warmed up. For the night.” Janey and Athena both laugh over something that completely goes over Maya's head.
“Maybe I should've gone with you,” Maya mutters into her drink. Athena straightens up and coughs into her arm.
“Maya!” Janey says, her eyes widening. “Who knew you were down to party? We'll, ah, keep that in mind for the next house party.” Janey looks Maya up and down and bites her bottom lip.
Athena hums to herself and steps to Janey's side, between the two of them, and leans into Janey. “Who says we have to wait until the next one?”
“'Thena!” Janey laughs into her hand. “Do I need to cut you off already?”
Maya lets out an affirmative hum, sipping away at her drink as she looks back across the room at Gaige, still with her parents, still talking to Lilith, still with her arm around Angel, who is glancing back over her shoulder. No doubt Gaige is regaling them of Lilith's heroics back in the rebellion against Jack, same as she did about all the times Maya had saved her when she was standing where Lilith is now. Even though the stories Gaige was telling were true (or at least mostly so; Gaige did have a habit of creative embellishment), it felt no more phony than her rare interactions with the citizens of Athenas. Being fawned over and revered as some messianic savior. Maya was certainly no hero. Any decent person with powers like hers would have done the same.
Across the room, Gaige's laugh punches through the conversation, and she takes her hand from Angel's waist and gestures towards Lilith, but Maya's attention is taken by Angel, who, as soon as Gaige lets go of her, quietly steps back and heads towards the kitchen counter, grabs a glass and a bottle of Aquatorean plum wine, and heads to the back door.
Maya finishes what's left of her drink and sets the empty glass on a nearby table. “If you'll excuse me,” she says to Janey and Athena as she walks off to follow Angel. The two of them bid her a half-interested goodbye as Maya weaves her way through the various clusters of guests and opens the sliding glass door leading out back. She catches a glimpse of Angel walking past the strung up lantern lights surrounding the picnic tables by the patio, out towards where the backyard ends at the lake.
Tearing the beanie off her head and tossing it aside into the grass, Angel sits down at the edge of a wooden dock. As Maya approaches, Angel scoffs and asks, “It's all so perfect, isn't it?”
Maya shakes her head, even though Angel isn't looking at her. “Guess I wouldn't know.”
Angel laughs. “You of all people should know. The Order tried to elevate you to perfection in the eyes of their disciples. I'd say they succeeded.”
Maya narrows her eyes, trying to tease out Angel's train of thought. “So you're saying this house, this party is a facade? Just as bogus as my godhood?”
Rubbing her forehead, Angel sighs. “No, that's not... it's real. Obviously. If anything it's too real.”
Maya glances back towards the house, lights spilling out of its windows, the distant buzz of the guests still audible through the open kitchen window. “I agree.” She steps up to the edge of the dock and sits to Angel's left.
Her gaze lost somewhere below the still surface of the water, Angel shakes her head and asks, “How is it that I knew it'd be you to come out here, and not my girlfriend?”
“You say that, yet you only brought one glass.”
A weak chuckle spills from Angel's lips. She fills the glass halfway, then hands it over to Maya. “I don't need one,” she says, then takes a drink straight from the bottle.
Maya sniffs at her glass: sweet, fruity, and slightly floral. Much more to her liking than Janey's creation. “I think it's 'cause you know as well as I do that, out of everybody back there, we're the ones who belong here the least.”
Angel lets out a breath and bows her head, one that could either be a quiet laugh or a sob, but Maya is almost certain it's the former. “How sad is that?” Angel asks, shaking her head.
Nodding, Maya sighs. “Yeah.”
A few moments pass, and Maya is content to take in the calm of the night. A reflection of the moon in the water catches her eye, and she stares up into the sky, tracing over constellations twinkling in the night. Angel keeps her focus down at the water as she skims her feet over its surface, sending tiny ripples out across its surface that fade into nothing before they even approach the opposite bank.
“I grew up in a house like this,” Angel says, turning her gaze up. “Smaller backyard, but the house, it was... well. Split-level, very open spaces. Upstairs bedrooms and downstairs nook. It's.... strange to see a house so much like the one I lived in with a family so... so much like hers.”
Maya looks over at Angel, whose eyes are focused somewhere far beyond the trees lining the opposite shore.
“I don't understand how she fell back into it so easily. In a house she didn't even grow up in, and after having to leave Eden-5 like she did, never knowing if she'd see any of her family again, I...” Angel sighs and runs a hand back through her hair, uncovering her eye. “It just seems so normal to her.”
“So you thought you'd come out here alone? Feel sorry for yourself?”
Angel lets out a snort. She stammers slightly over her words. “W-well I've spent my whole life trying not to feel sorry for myself.”
The defensive tone to her voice makes Maya's chest ache with guilt. “Sorry. I didn't—”
“Did I ever tell you about my mother?” Angel asks, turning to look Maya in the eye.
Maya holds Angel's gaze as long as she can before looking down at Angel's tattooed hand, clutching tightly to her knee. “I know she died when you were young. I... it sounded like you were involved, somehow.”
Angel blinks slowly before turning her unfocused gaze back out in front of her. “My mother was the leading neurologist in Hyperion's bio-med division. She was... brilliant. And competitive. Jack always said that was what drew him to her in the first place. After she had me, well... you can't keep your Siren daughter a secret from the universe's second-most powerful corporation for very long.
Angel takes a slow pull from the wine bottle. “I don't know how they initially convinced her. Jack said they both fought against it, and Mom only agreed to it under the condition that she would be the one to oversee every second I was in their labs. Maybe they appealed to the young, ambitious researcher she started out as, maybe they just blackmailed and threatened them into submission. Maybe they didn't have to try hard at all. Guess it doesn't really matter. I have more memories of her in a suit watching me from the other side of a plate of glass than I do of her holding me in her arms. I don't remember what color my bedroom carpet was, but I could give you a detailed sketch of exactly how they decorated observation room eighteen. As if the plush dragons and paintings of mountains and forests on the wall would somehow make me feel like I was at home.”
Maya folds her hands in her lap and stares down at the once more still surface of the water, at a loss for any words, much less something that could comfort Angel.
Sighing softly, Angel picks at the rose paper label glued to the wine bottle. She bites her bottom lip, closes her eyes, and swallows hard. “I don't remember much about the day she died. I remember two men wheeling me on a stretcher into a room with different machines in it.” She raises her right hand and runs it over the side of her head, down the back of her neck. “I remember the buzz of the clippers grazing past my ear. I remember Mom shouting and them hooking me up to some kind of machine...”
Maya pinches the bridge of her nose and shuts her eyes. Sophis may have taken the better part of thirty years from her, but his despotism was no betrayal. Even before uncovering the ugly truth of the Order's tyranny over the people of Athenas, she never would have mistaken Sophis as a parent. He governed her life less like a father and more like a commanding officer. A part of Maya had hoped that Angel's mother had been the only thing protecting her from Hyperion's exploitation, but to learn she not only knew about it, but was complicit? Poor Angel never stood a chance.
“When I woke up, Mom was gone and Jack was there. For a while, the tests stopped. Then maybe Hyperion got to him. Or maybe he just realized that if they stopped running tests on me, then Mom would've died for nothing. The next time he took me back to the labs...” Angel turns her head towards Maya, keeping her eyes on the wooden grain of the dock, and gestures to the two metal ports in the side of her head. She takes in a slow, unsteady breath. “I woke up with these.”
From the reflection of moonlight, Maya can see the tears welling in Angel's eyes. From the quavering of her voice, Maya can't help but wonder if Angel has ever told this to anyone else.
Angel sighs and faces forward again. She and Maya take a slow drink in unison. The chirping of crickets and the lonely wail of a distant crane accompany the lazy sloshing of the water as Angel sways her legs forwards and back. “He was never the same after she died. He never said it, obviously, but... I truly believe that if Jack could've turned back time, and had me die instead of Mom, he would've done it without hesitation.”
Maya chews on the side of her tongue, another familiar feeling rising up to accompany the stinging at the corners of her eyes. Now, Maya is sure she is the first person Angel has told about this. Gaige, as caring and patient as she can be with Angel, wouldn't know how to relate. But Maya saw shades of Sophis in Jack and his self-aggrandizement, of his claims that all he wanted was to protect Angel. He can even picture Jack's smarmy voice echoing Sophis's last words: Angel, you have so much left to learn.
A trembling inhale from Angel tears Maya from her thoughts. She sniffles, then says in a shaky voice, “They were my parents. They were my parents, and they were supposed to protect me, but they didn't, Maya!” She punctuates the emphasis by slamming her fist on the dock with a heavy thump. “See, my, my fear, my pain? That was their inconvenience! It-it was like whatever they were doing to me wasn't real to them! It's like I wasn't real to them! I wasn't their daughter. I wasn't even a PERSON!”
She spits out the last word, as if it tasted as bitter as it sounded.
Its echo rolls out across the lake's surface, indifferent and calm.
Angel draws her knees up to her chest, folds her arms across her knees, and rests her forehead on her arms as her shoulders begin to shudder. Maya briefly racks her brain for something comforting to say, but the thought dawns on her that Angel doesn't need - or even want her to say anything. Angel's mother died years ago, and her father no doubt was dead to her long before he drew his final breath. Maya scoots up next to Angel and puts her right arm around Angel's shoulders, using her left to pull Angel's legs across her lap. Angel, now openly sobbing, throws her arms around Maya and buries her head in the crook of Maya's neck.
Maya sits there in silence, rubbing Angel's shoulder and soothing her hair. She can feel the echoes of her own past spilling out of Angel. The anger and emptiness that Sophis's lies and manipulation left inside of her. Maya is sure she wouldn't have been able to bring herself to shed a tear even for her own sake after realizing the first twenty-seven years of her life were nothing but a carefully constructed lie to ensure the Order's control over Athenas's people and their money. But she didn't have anyone on that lonely interplanetary trek to Pandora. Just six more weeks of complete solitude, an aloneness that somehow felt different to the one she'd grown accustomed to when living in the Abbey.
Only now, as Angel's sobs die down into quiet crying, does she realize how sorely she could've used somebody to cry to, somebody to feel sorry for herself with, somebody to listen to her shout out all her frustrations.
But having already missed out on that, she realizes, as she holds Angel tighter and whispers a quiet reassurance in her ear, that the only thing she can do now is be that person for somebody else.