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When Jack appeared in Control Core Angel, revenge in his eyes and murder in his hands, it was the first time that the Vault Hunters tasked with stopping him had encountered him face-to-face. In that moment, he became something more than a chiseled face on Hyperion-branded banners or a taunting voice on the ECHO – the first time for all of them, less one.
Axton, in the back of the room, his reflexes heavy from the fight and his turret recharging in his SDU, watched helplessly as Jack dealt death and stole hope, and felt the secret he’d been carrying grow even heavier in his gut. It weighed him down with a guilt that he knew was undeserved, but still felt anyways. He’d never have thought it would come to this.
Or he could tell himself that, but he knew it was a lie. The second he’d stepped foot on Pandora, greeted by a billboard bearing an uncannily familiar yet markedly changed face that welcomed him with a wide smile and open arms – he’d known. He’d felt the lead settle in his stomach and he knew that this could never end well, no matter what twists he could take or engineer into the path set before him. He knew it now, and regretted fiercely and bitterly that he had not somehow known it then. His mouth tasted like blood. He wondered whose it was.
Axton had met Jack, in the flesh, once before – years ago, on a military training planet called Heracles.
~~~
The smoke that permeated the air of the dimly-lit room stung Axton’s eyes, but he just blinked and resisted the urge to rub them. He’d begged for weeks to get a night’s leave off the base, and he was going to damn well enjoy it, even if the only place he felt secure enough to not be sought out was at what had to be the shittiest dive bar on the whole fucking planet. The lights were low (possibly broken), the clientele was shady (possibly criminal), and the bartender was wearing an honest-to-god eyepatch and speaking monosyllabically (in a language that was possibly not English). But the booze was good and cheap, and no officer that might possibly have the clout to get Axton in trouble for some real or imagined transgression would ever dare step foot in here.
He sipped his whisky, relishing the taste and the icy burn it left in his mouth. He was already three deep, and had probably gotten there a little too fast, but again, going to enjoy it, et cetera. He sipped again, then gave up on being tough and scrubbed at one smoke-burned eye with the heel of his hand. It’s not like anyone he cared about was here to judge him. That was the entire point of this night off base. Sarah wasn’t here to condescend him, or polish her new shiny fucking insignia in his face. He scrunched up his eyes and rubbed harder, blurring them with tears.
As a result, he felt more than saw someone take the stool next to him, his soldier’s senses detecting the presence of another person in his vicinity. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and the person in question came into focus – male, average height, average build, wearing a slightly worn-looking white button-up shirt. He was leaning forward across the bar, earnest, but his shoulders were high and tight with hesitation, straining the seams of his shirt.
“Er, excuse me,” the man said, waving slightly to get the bartender’s attention – difficult, considering he only had one functioning eye. “Yes, uh, could I just get a beer? Whatever’s on tap…and, uh, not too expensive, if you don’t mind.” He shifted his weight, leaning back his seat, and suddenly noticed that Axton was looking at him.
“Oh, geez, sorry,” the man said. “Should have asked if anyone was sitting here, uh… this seat wasn’t taken, was it?” He had a long, chiseled face and thick brown hair, cut short and pushed back off his forehead in an inelegant tangle. He was older than Axton by a few good years, but time had clearly done more good than harm to his features; that much was clear even in the dim lighting conditions.
“Nah, you’re fine. Just me, myself, and I tonight, and we only need one chair.” Axton chuckled tipsily at his own humor and took a pull of his whisky. “I do like to know the name of whomever winds up next to me, though. Case it becomes relevant later.” Not exactly true, but Axton just didn’t let good-looking strangers pass him by, especially not when he was in the market for a distraction. He stuck out a broad hand, scarred lightly across the knuckles. “People call me Axe.” Stupid nickname, really, but people had been calling him that ever since he was a kid, and he wasn’t quite sure how to go about getting that to change. Sarah was the only one who ever called him “Axton.”
“Axe, okay. Well, I’m John…” He took Axton’s hand, and though his grip was uncalloused it was far from weak. “But people call me Jack.”
Axton grinned, and gave Jack’s whole arm a few solid, enthusiastic shakes, throwing him off balance. “Jack. Man, that’s a good name. Solid name.”
Jack laughed, a little uncertainly, and extracted his fingers from Axton’s overeager grip. “Less people call me by it than I’d like. I made the mistake of introducing myself to my boss as John, and now that’s all he’ll call me.”
“Well, he needs he fuckin’ learn himself what to call people, then, cause that’s just rude, calling someone something other than what they want.” Axton squinted. “You don’t look military, though, and that’s all there is on this planet. Who the heck is bossing you, then?”
“Oh, no no, I’m not from here. Just stopping through, on my way to Olympus for a conference – my fourth layover, if you’d believe it. I work for Hyperion.” The bartender returned with Jack’s beer, and he thanked him before taking a deep draft.
“Ha! I’m an enlisted Dahl man, myself. But I think we can get along for one night.” Axton clapped Jack on the back – making him choke into his beer – and caught the bartender’s attention before he walked away. “Another whisky, but no rush.” The bartender made a guttural noise that sounded vaguely affirmative, but for all Axton knew it was Truxican for “get fucked.”
Jack coughed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “You hardly look old enough to be enlisted,” he said in a slightly strained voice. A few strands of hair had fallen across his face, and he pushed them back, combing them into the tangle with his fingers.
Axton shrugged. “I’m just a private, still, but nineteen’s old enough, and Dahl likes to pick up their recruits young anyways. Catch us while we still want to travel and see the universe.”
“I always thought that you young military types always hung out in groups, er, troops, or whatever. Especially when there’s drinking to be done.”
“Nah, sometimes it’s good to get away from it all for a night. My squad’s got my back, but sometimes I’m just tired of them looking over my shoulder, y’know?”
Jack laughed, a little ruefully. “Yes, yes I do.”
Axton waggled an eyebrow. “Wife and kids drive you up the wall? Conference probably feels like a vacation, in that light.” Jack wasn’t wearing a ring – he’d checked, sue him for being curious – but he just exuded that domestic-exhaustion vibe that a few of Axton’s married squadmates tended to have.
Jack cleared his throat. “Well, no wife. Not anymore, at least.” He took another drink of his beer, face somber, and Axton suddenly felt like a bit of a dick. “But I do have a daughter. Sweet girl, but she does cause her fair share of trouble.” He gave Axton a wry side-eye, mouth twisting into a grin. “Is it even worth asking if you have kids?”
Axton grinned. “I really, sincerely hope not, cause I sure as hell wouldn’t be winning any father of the year awards.”
Jack smiled back, then started digging into his back pocket. “Here, look,” he said, extracting a photo from his wallet. “This is my daughter. She’s my little angel.”
Axton took the photo gently; it was well-loved, faded at the corners and stained with age, depicting a young girl with coal-black hair and bright blue eyes who was looking into the camera with a joyous expression. She couldn’t have been more than six years old.
Axton handed the photo back. “She’s beautiful, man, really. Gonna break a thousand hearts, I’m sure.” He grinned crookedly.
Jack tucked the photo away carefully. “I can only hope.”
The bartender brought Axton his fourth whisky, and he quickly finished the remnants of the one still in his hand before setting the empty glass on the bar. He turned back to Jack, meaning to ask how old the girl was, what her name was, if she was a princess or a tomboy, something, but a door opened behind the bar just as he made eye contact, and a beam of bright light cut through the dim smoke and fell across Jack’s face. It revealed the defined cut of his features, and the color of his eyes – one was a vivid green, the other a bright, pure blue.
Unbidden, Axton imagined those mismatched eyes looking up from between his thighs, and immediately felt a flush creep up the back of his neck. He mentally slapped himself and turned away before Jack could read what had to be written clearly on his face, desperately thankful that Sarah wasn’t here, and that she couldn’t read minds.
He knocked back half of his new whisky in one swallow, grimacing at the burn and trying not to choke. “So, Hyperion,” he said, avoiding eye contact, looking at Jack’s rumpled shirt collar instead, “you management up there?”
“I imagine management could afford a direct flight to Olympus, instead of hopping from planet to planet with overnight layovers on each one.” The tendons in Jack’s neck shifted as he laughed. “I’m in engineering and programming – working on sustainable space station tech right now, though I’ve been dabbling in laser weapon technology, as well as large-scale ballistic weaponry. Um…are you okay?”
“M’fine,” Axton said, rubbing his eyes furiously. “Just, so damn smoky in here. Hurts my eyes.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely a little…suffocating.”
“So, uh, lasers, huh?” Axton blinked, clearing the fuzziness from his vision and settling his gaze on Jack’s temple instead. “Thought those weren’t stable in oxygen-rich atmospheres.”
Jack took a drink. “That’s why I’m working on it.”
Axton nodded, his eyes wandering back down to meet Jack’s. Damn his good manners. Luckily the bright light was gone, the door once again closed. “Gotta say this for Hyperion – you guys don’t make military-grade weapons, but they’re still some damn good guns. My old man had a couple Hyperion pieces knocking around, and they just felt nice in your hand. Learned to shoot with them.”
Jack smiled, genuinely, and god, the man was good-looking, and even though Axton couldn’t clearly see the colors of his eyes anymore the knowledge of them was still killing him. “Glad to hear that someone appreciates the work we’ve done,” he said, leaning forward, and Axton was suddenly aware of a hand on his upper thigh.
He blinked, and the color suddenly drained from Jack’s face. “Oh, g-geez,” he stammered, snatching his hand back like he’d accidentally stuck it in a pile of hot shell casings. “I didn’t mean – that was – I’m sorry.” He laced his fingers together and turned away, placing his interlocked hands firmly on the bar. He tucked his chin down into his chest and stared into his beer like it contained all the secrets of the universe within it.
“No, man,” Axton heard himself say, slowly, not as suavely as he would have hoped but still smooth enough to get the message across. “It’s fine. Totally fine.” He managed to gather himself enough to shoot a direct, loaded look at Jack. Totally, one-hundred-percent fine, you might as well put that hand back where it came from because I’m getting myself in trouble either way.
Jack lifted his head, and gave Axton a long, stunned stare before picking up his beer and draining it without taking a breath, his throat working steadily until the glass was empty. He ordered another with a gesture, received it, and drank half of it in the same way before he spoke. “When I’ve finished with this,” he said slowly as he set the glass down on the bar, “I really would appreciate a military escort back to my hotel. If you’re free to give it, of course.”
Axton thought of Sarah – headstrong, organized Sarah, with the soft curve of her hip and the shiny new insignia glinting on her chest. How absolutely insufferable she’d been since her promotion.
And here he was, away from her, on a night dedicated to just that, and it was like Jack’s mismatched eyes were the options he had lain out before him – green, blue. Pick your poison. Pick your escape.
“Well, I can’t let a brilliant mind such as yourself take a chance at any trouble. You let me know when you’re ready to leave.”
Later, in a dark, shabby motel room, as Axton tugged down Jack’s zipper with his teeth and bruised the man’s hipbones with his thumbs, he wondered who he was really doing wrong by – if there was some future part of him that might look back and wish he’d made another choice. But there was a hand fisted in his hair and two jewel-bright fragments glinting in the half-light, and a hoarse, promising whisper was filling up his ears, and there wasn’t room or time to care anymore. There wasn’t time to care about anything.
~~~
Axton closed on Jack as the shield drone shattered with a burst of electricity, the orange dome that surrounded the Hyperion tyrant breaking apart. He tried to get up in his face, but Jack kept dancing backwards, that furious, maddened grin twisting his features. He didn’t know how it had ended up this way – how a man in a bar with a photo in his pocket had turned into a dead girl and dead friends and destroyed cities and god knows how many innocents slaughtered in the name of some delusional greater good.
He wondered if Jack recognized him, if he realized that Axe the Dahl recruit had become Axton the Vault Hunter, if he could reconcile the nineteen-year-old drunk in a bar and naked in his bed with the turret-wielding, highly trained, and heavily scarred veteran in front of him. The years had treated Axton with much the same hand they had Jack, with more kindness than cruelty, but Sarah’s ring still shifted beneath his shirt, the diamond leaving lines of fire as it scraped across his chest.
He wondered, because he could hardly reconcile the masked face and coiffed hair of Handsome Jack with John-call-me-Jack, a man who loved his daughter and did his best at what he could, slightly timid and tempting and gone before noon the following day. But the eyes were the same – one green, one blue, vivid and captivating.
He closed again, reached out a hand, tried to grab the collar of Jack’s shirt, but he was too fast, dodging away and flickering into invisibility before Axton could find purchase. But in the moment between dodge and disappearance, a moment less than an agitated heartbeat, they locked eyes, and Axton saw nothing of himself in them – no recognition, no familiarity. Nothing but madness, made clear in the fiery light of the lava that surrounded them, filling the heart of the volcano.
If the Jack he’d known so briefly had ever really existed, he was gone now, and Axton realized that he could have done nothing on that distant night to change a thing. He’d seen the path as twisting, impossible, but as he stood in Control Core Angel with blood in his mouth and secrets in his heart he’d realized that honesty meant nothing, betrayal meant less, and the only thing left to do that could possibly make things right was to stride forward and make that path his battlefield. Maybe fate didn’t exist, but if it did then this meeting was part of its design. This was a chance to atone for his mistakes, to maybe finally wash away the stain on his name that he’d been wearing as a badge of honor. An opportunity to make something good for himself in the shape of all the bad, by giving payment in full for what the man before him had done to the universe.
And so Axton looked Jack in the eye and killed him.