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Published:
2019-09-26
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2019-10-19
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2/?
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Destiny For Two

Summary:

When Rhys and Fiona passed through the Vault, they received the greatest gift imaginable: the chance to undo every mistake.

Every gift is a curse from a different angle.

OR

What happened after the Vault: Rhys and Fiona are flung into the past

Notes:

hey im probably never gonna finish this but. oh well. may as well post

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

“Rhys! C’mon, get up. First day of work! Man, I thought you’d be up waaaaay before me—you’ve been glued to that JackSpotter app for weeks, bro. Anyway, I’m gonna get changed. Don’t forget your lanyard.”

Rhys groaned and screwed his eyes shut. His head was pounding.

“What the fuck,” he moaned. “Vaughn, okay, good, you’re here. Where’s Fiona? What happened? Whaddya mean, first day of work?”

“You okay? Hy-pee-ree-awn. The company. Where we work now. You didn’t go out drinking without me, did you? Is Fiona someone you made out with?”

Rhys pushed himself into a sitting position, noting as he did so that he was laying in a twin bed. Which was decidedly not where he had gone to sleep or where he had been last.

“Not funny,” Rhys muttered, looking around the room. He knew its every detail intimately—his and Vaughn’s quarters on Helios. It was far smaller than he remembered. He was surprised it had surprised the fall, and even more surprised that Vaughn hadn’t pointed it out on his tour. “Seriously, bro, what happened? I feel like I got hit in the head with a jackhammer. What was in the Vault?”

“What?” Vaughn yelled from the bathroom.

“What do you mean, what?” Rhys yelled back. “Dude! You can stop the jokes, we went through hell! Where the fuck is everyone?”

“Uh…it’s just you and me, bro. I’m getting a little concerned. You gotta sober up before we start work.”

“Haha, last I checked, you were a shirtless bandit and I was a goddamn CEO! We can take a day off!”

“Last I checked,” Vaughn started running the sink, “we just got out of college. Wash your face in cold water or something.”

Rhys froze.

“Ah, so, this might sound crazy but…” he began.

“Crazier than whatever you’ve been rambling so far?”

“Uh.” Rhys swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “What year is it?”

Vaughn paused, then told him. Four years ago. Rhys hissed through his teeth like he’d been punched.

He looked down at his feet. They were clad in bright yellow patterned socks.

“So, I’m from the future, and I travelled through a Vault to get here and now I’m not quite sure what to do.”

“Yeah, okay.” Vaughn’s voice was barely discernible through his toothbrush. “How much did you drink, bro? Before an important work day?” He peeked his head out of the bathroom. “You high or something? Because if so, not cutting me in was a dick move.”

Rhys groaned and put his head in his hands—his flesh hands, neither of them yellow metal. He was less sure of himself with every passing second, especially as his body ached more. He felt like a stuffed animal with all the stuffing pulled out and replaced with nettles.

Rhys sighed, got out of bed, and pulled on the business outfit arranged tidily in a chair by the bed, just how he arranged it every night. Even once he’d changed to an Atlas suit rather than a Hyperion button-up.

He examined himself in the mirror. Two flesh hands, two brown eyes, a messy college-style haircut, and a face that looked incongruously young compared to the haunted and weary expression it bore. He ran a hand through his hair, and was almost shocked as his mirror image—a thing that was decidedly not Rhys—did the same.

“They’re serving breakfast in the North Cafeteria,” Vaughn said, emerging from the bathroom. “C’mon. We gotta meet our coworkers.”

It would have been himself, Rhys realized, dragging Vaughn out of the room to face their first day. If he weren’t stuck gazing in the mirror, paralyzed with the sheer oddness of the situation. The little tight helplessness in his chest felt horribly familiar.

This was a dream, it had to be. But mirrors didn’t work in dreams. So some sort of vision, something the Vault had sent him. He couldn’t think of anything to do except act natural.

“I’m coming,” Rhys replied, putting on his best corporate face—a face that had gotten far more convincing now that he had experience running the meetings.

The hairs on the back of Rhys’s neck stood on end as they exited their room and merged into the stream of workers headed for breakfast. In four years, most of them would be dead—the fall would kill them if their bosses didn’t first. Some passages were blocked off, of course—Helios was still under construction on Rhys’s first day at Hyperion.

“This is all wrong,” Rhys muttered as they passed a poster of Handsome Jack, hands on hips, looking confidently over a sea of faceless workers.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Rhys automatically replied.

Vaughn shrugged and continued talking. Rhys realized a bit guiltily that Vaughn had actually been talking since they left the room, but it was impossible to pay attention to his friend. He was back at his first day at Hyperion. Back in the shark pool, where the slightest scent of blood would get him torn to shreds.

The timeline of Rhys’s time at Hyperion stretched out before him like the hallway. He could see, almost as if they were posters on the wall, milestones that had led, eventually, to Helios’s fall. The argument that led to his rivalry with Vasquez. His first time seeing Jack in person. The time Jack spit on him. Signing up for a prototype cybernetic. Closing that Eridium mining deal. Hoping for a promotion. Being demoted to a job that would surely kill him. Leaving with an ill-advised plan and ten million dollars. His first time seeing Jack inside his head. Stabbing Helios in the heart. His own cold metal fingers against his neck.

Really, that was what the whole thing came down to. The whole station—the whole company—was a fist wrapped around his throat. After all, he was in the past now. What was a situation if not its results?

Rhys had difficulty swallowing as they passed another picture of Jack. His shoulder ached, which was ridiculous, because nothing had happened to it yet. The headache got worse.

“This is all a hallucination, right?” Rhys breathed. “None of this is real. Just a vision.”

“I know, right?” Vaughn laughed. “Feels unreal. But you better believe it—we’re finally here, bro! Hyperion!”

Rhys pressed his thumbnail into the side of his finger, noting the intimately real pressure against his skin. He could hear the buzz of the lights, barely audible above the chatter of the employees. He licked his lips and tasted sleep on his tongue.

“Here we are!” Vaughn announced as they reached the cafeteria. Rhys got a funny feeling as he looked over the room. Last time he’d been here, he’d won a gunfight and pulled a con gone wrong. Now he was just here for breakfast.

The waiter robots that had always seemed so slow delivered their breakfast in the blink of an eye, and Rhys suddenly had a bagel he didn’t want to eat and a glass of orange juice he didn’t want to drink.

“Where should we sit?” Vaughn asked anxiously.

Rhys understood his nervousness. Hyperion was like high school all over again, especially now that everyone seemed so much younger. Rhys had seen so much more than them. None of them had ever gotten soaked in skag blood or eaten roasted scythid, and he felt irrationally angry at them.

He could do this. He knew more, he had done more, he was a goddamn CEO. Time to put on the Hyperion face.

Rhys tapped Vaughn’s arm and made a beeline for a woman in orange—her favorite color—sipping a mimosa at a corner table while looking over everyone else with a disdainful eye.

“You sure?” Vaughn asked. “She looks…mean.”

“Trust me, bro,” Rhys said, and that was that, because of course his bro trusted him. Rhys impatiently shoved aside the guilty little voice in his head. He wasn’t lying to Vaughn. He’d tried his best to tell the truth.

“Hey,” Rhys said, sitting down across from Yvette. Vaughn pulled a chair over to the table. Yvette peered at Rhys with one eyebrow raised.

“Who are you, exactly?” She glanced down at Rhys’s ID card on his lanyard. “Ah. Fresh meat. You’re not exactly subtle about getting a big fish to protect you. Nice try, boys. I’m not interested in being a part of the feeding frenzy.”

“I’m not looking for protection. I don’t need it.” Rhys tapped an order into the screen in front of him—lemon parfait with three slices of crispy bacon. Her favorite. “Just thought I’d buy you breakfast.”

Yvette examined him with more interest. The corners of her mouth twitched.

“I’m Vaughn.” Vaughn offered his hand, and Yvette shook it.

“Rhys,” Rhys supplied. He didn’t offer his hand—CEOs didn’t do handshakes, and he was a CEO. Even if he didn’t have the deed yet.

With a start, Rhys realized that, if this was real, Helios didn’t have to fall if he didn’t want it to. Hyperion was a totally different arena now that he held all the cards. And if Helios didn’t fall, he didn’t get Atlas.

If he didn’t rise to Vasquez’s taunts, he got a promotion. If he got a promotion, he never left Helios. He never met Sasha and Fiona. Or Gortys, LB, Athena…all the others. AI Jack stayed stuffed away in Prosperity Junction. Helios didn’t fall.

He never met the others.

Rhys wanted to put his head in his hands, but he was uncomfortably aware of the twin beams of attention boring into his skin.

------

“Fiona. This is a disgraceful hour to still be asleep.”

Fiona frowned. That was Felix’s voice. Why the hell was he here? She tried to stir, but her body felt weighted down by stones. All she could ascertain was that she was in a moving vehicle.

“Yeah, Fi,” Sasha said absentmindedly. “Wake up.”

Sasha was agreeing with Felix after everything that happened. Which meant that either they’d had a hell of a cathartic conversation, or something was seriously wrong.

Fiona opened her heavy eyelids only to find her hat pulled over her eyes.

“What happened?” she mumbled. Her memory was crystal clear up until the moment they touched the treasure box, and then—nothing.

“Uh, you stayed up late, genius,” Sasha snorted.

“Really, Fiona,” Felix admonished. “I did tell you not to imbibe any of the available liquors. You can drink all you want once I give you your share of the cash.”

“I’m not hungover!” Fiona insisted.

She struggled into a sitting position, and her hat slid off her face, revealing a rather baffling situation. She was sitting in their caravan—the caravan that had definitely been reduced to a steaming pile of junk. Sasha was leaning against the kitchen cabinets, sewing a piece of brightly colored fabric to a different piece of brightly colored fabric. Fiona turned her head and saw Felix at the drivers seat.

“Why the hell’d you wake me up?” she grunted. “Something happening?” She looked around again to make sure she hadn’t missed any passengers. “Where are the others?”

“We gave them their cash and split to lay low in Triggerlock for a few days,” Sasha answered.

“I wasn’t entirely fond of working with hired muscle on this job,” Felix added, “but hopefully we’ll never see them again.”

“What were their names?” Sasha’s voice was muffled by a pin in her mouth. “Ugg and Thugg or something?”

“Cut the crap, you two,” Fiona ordered. “I meant…uh…”

“What?” Sasha asked.

Fiona had just watched Sasha flip her hair over her shoulder in frustration. Thing was, Sasha’s hair was short, not in long dreads. And the clothes she was wearing were relics of a style Sasha had long since abandoned.

Fiona gave the caravan another once-over, cursing herself for not noticing sooner. Little details that she had previously missed screamed out at her now that she knew something was awry. A Boy Garden poster on the wall. A leather jacket on the dressmaker’s mannequin. Cobbled-together kitchenware that they’d had before cast iron. Felix was wearing a black hat he’d lost in an alleyway chase.

Fiona looked down at herself. She was dressed in a button-up and trench coat. She felt her hair brush her collarbone and realized it was far longer than she remembered.

“Did I just pull a Rip Van Winkle?” she muttered. “What the fuck?”

The Vault. It must have been that goddamn Vault. Fiona searched her memory for a job where they’d hired muscle but drew a blank—she’d run so many cons and didn’t really bother to keep track of them. Now she wished she had.

“Aw, you’re nervous,” Sasha cooed, completely misreading the situation. Or, okay, maybe she was on track a little bit. “Don’t worry. That Hyperion asshole didn’t even see our faces.”

For a moment, Fiona’s heart skipped a beat as her brain provided the irrational thought that maybe this was a world where the Vault Key con had succeeded, and the “Hyperion asshole” was Rhys.

Pull yourself together, she chided herself. This was obviously long before that job. And anyway, would it be so bad to lose Rhys? Damn, that man was annoying. A thorn in her side when he was there and a lump in her throat when he wasn’t.

Fiona pulled her ECHO out of her pocket and checked the year. Four years ago. She groaned and slammed her head against the back of the couch.

“This blows,” she announced to the room at large.

“What are you talking about?” Sasha demanded. “We pulled in enough cash to feed ourselves for once. Maybe get some nice cookware or something.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re just mad we didn’t go with your idea.”

The gentle sisterly teasing hit a raw nerve next to Fiona’s heart, because she’d almost lost it forever. She felt an intense wave of remorse—why the hell had she rushed to the Vault like that, when she could have helped her sister? She’d almost died, for crissakes, and it was hard for Fiona not to see blood leaking from 20-year-old Sasha’s mouth.

“Hey Sasha?”

“Hm?”

Fiona bit back her response. Sasha was pragmatic and Felix even more so. What would she tell them?

Who would believe her?

The answer came to her like a lightning bolt. After all, she hadn’t been the only person to pass through that arch. If she could just find Rhys—

Aaaaaand he was definitely on Helios. Right. Fiona’s last visit to Helios had been nearly impossible to orchestrate and even harder to survive, and she was fairly sure that any correspondence to the station was monitored by Jack’s goons.

If Rhys had his station back, would he even think twice about who might be stranded on Pandora? Fiona couldn’t count on it.

She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. She would think of something. She always thought of something.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Their plans move forward. Someone is watching.

Notes:

so i wasn't really planning on continuing this anytime soon and i had nothing planned but then yall left such sweet comments that I simply had to write more! enjoy 1.8k more of my bullshit

Chapter Text

The morning of his second—well, not second, but second in this timeline—day on Helios, Rhys had a plan.

He knew the drill. He was coming in with years of experience in the company. He knew all the unpredictable stock crashes and bosses one needed to suck up to. Within a year, he’d undoubtably have Henderson’s job. With all that power, it would be a piece of cake to snag Gortys, find Fiona, and open the Vault, hopefully taking them back to the future.

By lunch, Rhys had thrown the entire plan out the window and was considering jumping after it.

His first day at work was, theoretically, excellent. It wasn’t the tedious first-day introductions and orientations—he passed those with flying colors and felt quite smug at the impressed looks from the bored woman assigned to show him his workstation. It wasn’t the work itself—he finished his first week of work in two hours, finding it easy yet invigorating as he found a puzzle in this second run-through of his career. No, it was the job itself. The insidious, crawling, oppressive feeling of being watched, catalogued, and used. The knowledge that what he was doing was to be used to hurt people—his numbers may as well have been typed in blood.

Sasha had showed him a scar on her elbow that she’d received from a thug protecting a Hyperion drill site she’d wandered too near.

It was her blood on the page. It was Vaughn’s blood, knife dug in his side. It was Fiona’s blood, shot through the hand. It was Athena’s blood, her face beat and bruised. If Gortys and Loader Bot could bleed, they would do so on Rhys’s spreadsheets.

People looked at Handsome Jack’s posters with awe and fear. He was a god to them, a legend that still walked and breathed, even though it had barely been months since he’d taken over the company. Rhys could do little more than glance at the posters without feeling fingers around his neck.

On his way to run some papers down to accounting, he saw two employees dragging another employee towards the in-development toxic plant containment for some hazing, and he nearly threw up. He and Vaughn had laughed about it the first time around.

But that had been before Helios had gotten to them. It was only day two. What kind of men had they been to apply to Hyperion in the first place.

He had no idea how the hell he’d tolerated the place for so long. It was only lunchtime, and already he was about ready to flip his lid.

He had to get out of there.

He wasn’t sure if his inability to tolerate Helios made him a hero or a coward. He suspected the latter; Rhys had never been a brave man.

He wouldn’t be able to convince Vaughn. No way. Vaughn’s loyalty, though blossoming in college, had been cemented through years of Rhys reciprocating it in an environment that did its best to split up friendships. He’d only just met Yvette, and she wouldn’t have the authority to grab him a car anyway. In any case, he wasn’t sure he wanted their help—he sure as hell didn’t want the help of first-year Helios employee Rhys. What kind of people signed up to work at Hyperion? No, Rhys’s only option was an escape pod.

He’d gotten lucky on Pandora once before. Hopefully experience would make him luckier. There was some Handsome Jack quote about that—“Luck is for men with small dicks.”

Rhys remembered with some chagrin that he didn’t have his DataSlicer. That was no small inconvenience, but it did mean no danger of rogue AI.

Which reminded him. Professor Nakayama was still alive. Which meant the Handsome Jack AI was out there somewhere, or in development, or—

He cut himself off. His plan—plan B, where the B stood for Bullshit That I Improvise On The Spot—didn’t involve changing the past beyond what it would take to get back home. He’d drive himself mad if he went down that route. If anything, it was a blessing. He’d had enough of that blue bastard for a lifetime.

He packed up all of his stuff in a standard-issue gearchip. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he’d had the first time. No stun baton, but it wasn’t hard to get his hands on a pistol and some bullets. Weapons and ammo just seemed to be stashed all around the damn space station. He took an elemental SMG for good measure—it was far too unwieldy for him, with all sorts of bells and whistles he didn’t understand, but it looked like something Sasha might like, and he figured he might need to get on her good side.

As the last minute of his lunch break ticked away, Rhys jumped into an escape pod and programmed in the coordinates for Hollow Point. Hopefully he’d get close enough.

And as he soared through the air, his head pressed to the seat back in an all-too-familiar way, his ECHO pinged with a message from an unknown number.

You’re not supposed to be here, are you?

———

Fiona had pulled plenty of cons before, but never on her own family.

It was heartbreaking how much easier lying to them was—they didn’t have any reason to suspect she was lying, so they didn’t search for lies. It was simple, really. She told herself over and over again that it was for the best, that they’d never believe her and then she’d never get back to the versions of them that belonged to her.

Fiona had mostly figured out what she needed to do. The Vault had taken them to the past, so maybe the Vault would take her back to the future. Or maybe it would just fling her further back. It had been one day, and the stress beaded on her back like a thousand little knives. There was no way she could find Rhys. She couldn’t get to the space station with her current resources, and he’d mentioned that many communications from Pandora to Helios were monitored. As much as she hated relying on Rhys, she’d have to wait for him to find her. It shouldn’t be hard, he had that snazzy hacking arm—oh, no, wait, he probably didn’t yet. Dammit.

She remembered what happened in about two days. The Hyperion man realized his newly acquired antique sculpture had been stolen, he bullied some fences, some rat named Flick gave them up, Fiona ended up with a bullet in her leg and yet another unusable cover identity. Sasha had been terrified, and not just because of her own broken wrist—it was the first time Fiona had been hurt that badly on a job where Sasha played a leading role. Fiona had passed it off as a flesh wound, but she wasn’t that good of a liar. Sasha blamed herself. Fiona recalled Sasha spending weeks pulling odd jobs to buy Fiona a downmarket flak vest.

It seemed like a touching gift, but Fiona would gladly give up the vest to erase that suffering and guilt from Sasha’s mind.

After all, it wasn’t a very nice vest.

That hadn’t happened yet for this Sasha. This Sasha was carefree, bold, even more reckless than she would be in four years.

With a lump in her throat, Fiona remembered Sasha throwing herself into the maw of a beast at the culmination of a job that had been her idea. Would she have done that, Fiona wondered, if she didn’t falsely believe she had something to atone for?

The life of a grifter was full of nasty surprises. But, for the next four years, it didn’t have to be. At least until Rhys found her, she’d keep her family safe.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” she told Felix. “Someone’s gonna talk.”

“No need to worry, Fiona,” Felix assured her smoothly. “Everyone’s received their share.”

“Hollow Point’s full of sewer rats. One of them’s gonna talk, and then we’ll have Hyperion after us.”

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. We’ll take it as it comes.”

“We need to go further. Where no one can find us for a bit.”

Fiona realized the danger in what she’d said as soon as the words left her mouth, because she needed a certain someone to find her. But if they didn’t become unfindable, they’d get hurt.

Screw it. Rhys was an idiot, but he wasn’t a total buffoon. He’d figure it out. They’d figure something out.

It was with a pang in her heart that she realized that, well, of course they’d figure something out. They always did.

God, was she actually getting sentimental over Rhys of all people? That was a job for her sister.

“How about New Haven,” she suggested. “It’s a bit of a drive, but no one knows us there.”

Felix nodded pensively. “Sasha, what do you think.”

Sasha was staring moodily out of the window. The sudden vacation had pulled her away from the radio station, a job Fiona knew she adored. Why had she quit again?

Oh. Right. Fiona told her to.

“I don’t care,” Sasha sighed, not lacking emotion but full of it. She was so young only four years ago.

“New Haven it is,” Fiona insisted.

Sasha’s ECHO buzzed. She frowned, and for good reason: the only people who had a number for her that wasn’t a burner were Felix and Fiona.

“Secret boyfriend?” Fiona asked drily.

Sasha stuck out her tongue and checked her ECHO. Her face turned pale.

“Uh. It’s for you.”

She turned the screen of the ECHO towards Fiona.

Unknown Frequency: May I speak to your sister? I don’t know her frequency, I’m afraid

Fiona snatched the ECHO. Rhys. It had to be. She sent the unknown number her ECHO frequency, then deleted the conversation. She passed the ECHO back to Sasha.

“Probably spam mail from DAHL or something. Definitely nothing to worry about.

Fiona’s own ECHO dinged a few seconds later.

Unknown Frequency: You’re not supposed to be here, are you?

It was appropriately cryptic and batshit for a sort-of-Hyperion jerk who fancied himself a business hotshot.

Rhys, thank god. We’re heading to New Haven, get your ass down here.

Unknown Frequency: You shouldn’t go to New Haven. I can’t explain, but it’s a bad place to be right now, and I would like to learn more from you.

Uh.

Wait. You’re not Rhys, are you?

Unfortunately, no. Rhys is headed to Hollow Point.

Fiona blocked the unknown frequency and scowled. She had no idea what that was about, but she sure wasn’t about to go back to too-hot Hollow Point on the word of some cryptic asshat.