Chapter Text
It was difficult to feel abject terror with the chair pumping a steady drizzle of dopamine into him, but Rhys managed. He yanked at the restraints, metal clanking against metal, and kicked his feet and arched out of the chair and screamed through his teeth, but none of his thrashing got him any more than a bloodied wrist and a lot of scuff marks on the floor.
"Rhysie, Rhys!" Jack chuckled, his voice coming from everywhere and rolling around the room like a shell casing. "C'mon. That's no way for the new president of Hyperion to act. Ya gotta calm down, take it easy. Here, lemme—lemme help you."
"Let—me—go!" Rhys cried. The chair prickled at his back and legs, suffusing him with a floating numbness. The panic clawing at his chest ratcheted up another notch.
"What—what are you doing? What are you doing?"
"Hey, calm, cupcake. Just sit back, let it happen."
"Stop it," Rhys snarled. He was tired, his struggles were getting weaker by the second, and he was trying his damnedest to be frightened and angry but everything just felt so goddamn good.
"Nah, nah, see, that's not how this is gonna work. What happens is, I tell you to do something, and you do it. And if you don't do it, I pick one of your friends to do trapdoor maintenance. If, heh, if you see what I'm saying."
"Yeah, I get it," he snapped, although the venom was diluted. He was more fidgeting than struggling now, and his eyes didn't want to stay open. His organic hand could pick out each soft fiber of the chair, and simply breathing was bordering on a spiritual experience.
"Good, 'cause I hate repeating myself. Hey, is it possible to overdose on dopamine? Never really checked. Ah, well, never hurt me, you'll be fine. Used to crank up the chair real high whenever stuff got stressful. Or annoying. Or boring. How's it workin' for ya?"
I hate you, he tried to say, but all that came out was a fluttering whine as his head tipped back against the chair. Movement was unthinkable, both because his bones had been filled with lead and because he couldn't come up with a single thing that would feel better than this, right here, now.
"Yeah, it's workin' real good," Jack said. His face flickered on the big screen, and Rhys watched it through half-lidded eyes. The expression on the giant face was absolutely smug. "I mean, you're gonna wake up with the worst hangover of your life in the morning, but eh, what do I care."
"Mmn lenmn," said Rhys, and immediately forgot what he'd been trying to say. It couldn't possibly have mattered.
"Whazzat? Yeah, I probably should get somebody up here to haul your ass to bed. No offense, but you still don't look like president material. Kinda . . . droopy for that. You got a preference? Nah, never mind, you don't care."
Jack vanished off of the screen, and Rhys let his eyes drift closed. He was floating, just like in the caravan, only the air was soft and warm and holy shit he felt so good.
It could have been five minutes or five years later, but someone touched his shoulder. The contact sent electric sparks shooting under his skin, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth, shuddering.
"Oh no, oh no, what'd he do to you?"
Sasha's voice was distant, muffled, as though Rhys's head were under water. He wanted to open his eyes, but it seemed a Herculean task from the other side of the floating fog. He was vaguely aware that the restraints had gone—somehow, sometime—but he couldn't remember why that was significant or how he was supposed to feel about it.
Sasha was talking again, but Rhys couldn't pick out the words, because there were hands on his sides and then a shoulder in his stomach, and it probably should have hurt but it only sent more of those skittering sparks zooming around his body. For a minute, he forgot how to breathe, draped over Sasha's shoulder with the blood rushing to his head. She had one arm around his waist, and it scattered more sparks through him with every step, building a slow heat in his chest.
Time passed—there was no telling how much—and suddenly he was dumped onto his back, bouncing on soft cushions and a silken duvet. It wasn't painful, but he cried out anyway—it was too much sensation all at once, so that he felt like his body was going to come apart around him. He sucked in a breath that whistled in his throat and clenched his hands on the duvet.
"Holy shit," Fiona said.
"Yeah," Sasha agreed.
"I mean, holy shit."
"Yep."
"Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse. What the hell happened in there?"
"I don't know. I guess we'll just have to wait for him to, uh, come around." There was a fidgety silence, and then she asked. "Is he . . . hurt? Is it hurting him?"
There was a whole chord of disgust in Fiona's voice when she said, "No, I think it's pretty much the opposite of that. Eugh."
"Oh. Oh. Uh, that's. . . ."
"Yeah, I'm voting we just leave him until that—that stops happening."
Rhys attempted another mumble, but it slipped out of his head halfway through because the movement of his own lips was overwhelming.
"Heeeey," Fiona said, in a voice usually reserved for growling mutant dogs. "We're uh, we're just gonna toss a blanket over you and, uh, leave you to it. Okay? Yeah, okay. You'll be fine."
There was something important he was supposed to say to them. He was sure of it. Slogging through his own mind was enough to leave him gasping for breath, but he finally managed something like intelligible speech.
"Jack," he breathed. "'S . . . Jack. . . ."
"Yeah," Fiona said. "We heard."
"Nn m'faul. . . ."
Sasha laid a hand on his shoulder and he shuddered. There was a sharp slapping sound, and the touch was withdrawn.
"Don't touch him," Fiona scolded. "You'll just make it worse!"
The whole room was spinning, more in an ocean-eddy kind of way than a wacky carnival-ride kind of way. It was soothing, and it occurred to Rhys how nice it would be to sleep like this, how soft and lovely his dreams would be, how peaceful.
"I carried him all the way here, didn't I?"
"Yeah, but I didn't have to see that."
"Well excuse me for trying to provide a little comfort."
"If anybody in this room needs comforting, it's me. Eugh. Yeuch. That is not something I ever wanted to see. Or think about. Ever."
"Okay, okay, I get it. So what do we do?"
"Grab Gortys and run for the caravan?"
"I mean that doesn't involve getting killed by Hyperion goons."
"We wouldn't necessarily—okay, well, so it's a long shot, but it's . . . still better than sitting around in here!" She made another noise of disgust. "Although I'm pretty sure wading through chest-deep sewage would be better than sitting around here."
"Y'know, somehow I get the feeling that the Megalomaniac From Beyond the Grave isn't going to just let us walk out of here."
"Yeah? Why not? Why would we matter at all to him?"
"Well, I mean . . . obviously whatever happened in there, it had to do with Rhys. Otherwise he wouldn't be . . . yeah. And Jack knew we were here. He knew who I was. Talked to me like—almost like he knew me. It was . . . really creepy, actually."
There was a beat of silence.
"You don't think . . . Rhys. . . ?" There was just a hint of disappointment in Fiona's voice.
"Nnn," he slurred emphatically. Sasha patted his shoulder again, and he let out a much less dignified noise.
"Would you stop touching him?" Fiona snapped. "Look, just, put a blanket on him and let's go find somewhere else to talk. Okay? Can we do that?"
Time got slippery again, and then there was a gentle weight over his whole body, a settling sensation of security, just heavy enough to keep him from floating away.
His brain, relieved of the burden of that one last concern, went dark.
Rhys suddenly went still and limp as a ragdoll, and Fiona had a brief but startling conviction that he had just died, just burned out like a lightbulb, snap, gone forever.
Then a familiar—and annoying, God it was annoying—snore rattled out of his lips, and something that was a lot like relief—but wasn't, of course—flooded through her. She sank into one of the too-cushy, ergonomically-designed-to-be-secretly-uncomfortable Hyperion chairs, and rested her elbows on her knees. Sasha, perched on the bed at Rhys's side, mimicked her posture.
"Great," Fiona said. "Now what."
"Coffee would be nice," Sasha offered.
"I'm not drinking any of their damn coffee. It's probably got . . . weird chemicals in it, or something."
"I drank some of it earlier, I don't feel weird."
"Yeah, no. Still don't trust it."
They sat in silence for a moment, the sound of Rhys's snores breaking around them like waves against a rocky shore.
"This . . . is really bad," Sasha murmured eventually, staring at her hands. "Isn't it."
"Uh, the fact that the insane guy who ruined everything on Pandora is back in control of all of—this—or the fact that we're right in the middle of the hornet's nest? Yeah, I'd say it's pretty bad."
Sasha glanced over her shoulder at Rhys, and pain flicked across her features.
"Fi, he was . . . when I went to get him, he was. . . ."
"He was what, Sasha?"
She swallowed, turning her eyes back to her clasped hands.
"He was sitting in the chair," she said.
"That little cretin," Fiona spat, shooting to her feet. The little pistol was in her hand, easy as breathing. "I knew he was up to something. I knew he was gonna double-cross us!"
"Oh, sit down," Sasha sighed, and the resignation in her voice gave Fiona pause. "Even if you kill him, it's not gonna help."
"Well I don't see much benefit in keeping him alive," she retorted through gritted teeth. She did stuff the gun back into her sleeve, though.
"I—I don't know. Maybe it's not what it looks like. I mean, Rhys wouldn't . . . really. . . ."
"But he did."
"What if it wasn't on purpose?" Sasha appealed. "What if—what if Handsome Jack was—was, I dunno, forcing him to do it, somehow? I mean, he did this to him, what else. . . ?"
Fiona shook her head and started pacing the small room. It only took her four steps to get from one wall to the other, but it was the spirit of the thing that counted.
"Okay," she sighed eventually. "First thing's first, we figure a way to get out of here. Preferably with Gortys, but if not—Pandora's a big planet, we might be able to keep Vallory off our asses. For the rest of our lives." She shook her head. "We'll worry about that later. Escape first."
"What's the point, Fi?"
"The point is to not die on this ugly-ass . . . space-trashcan. Okay? I'm not saying we can fix everything, because—well, because we can't, but there's no way I'm dying up here. And neither are you. So we survive until we can get out, and then we—we just, keep on surviving. Right? For the rest of our lives." She sighed. "Yeah."
"Uh-huh. Great plan. Hey, while you're making up vague, hopeless plans that'll never work, could you go ahead and think up a story about us not going back to Pandora? Ooh, and becoming space-millionaires, let's add that impossible goal in there, too."
"I'm trying, here!" Fiona snarled, throwing up her hands in exasperation. "Which is a hell of a lot more than I see you doing!"
"It's over, Fiona," Sasha declared, her voice thick. "Just—just stop. Okay? Just . . . stop."
Rhys moaned in his sleep, and Fiona's lip curled. She rolled her eyes and went back to pacing when Sasha put her hand over Rhys's—or at least, the lump under the blankets where Rhys's hand probably was.
"So what, you're just—giving up? Just like that?"
"What if I am?" Sasha asked. "What if I'm done fighting and lying and cheating and scrambling around in the dust just to survive?"
"Then there really was something in that coffee," Fiona said. "What's gotten into you?"
She shook her head. "Just tired, I guess."
Fiona paused, then sighed and resumed her seat.
"You know," she said, "if there's anything you need to talk about, I'm here."
Sasha wrinkled her nose. "I don't think you'd wanna hear about it."
"Is it about him?" She gestured to Rhys, who was starting to drool. "Because, believe me, I'd noticed. Everybody on Pandora's noticed."
She blinked, startled. "Wait—really?"
"Uh, yeah. It was pretty obvious."
"But—why didn't you say anything?"
Fiona made a noncommittal noise. "Didn't seem polite."
"I guess I just . . . didn't want to believe it. Y'know? It was easier just to think he was crazy and let it go. But now. . . ."
"Wait," Fiona said, holding up a hand. "Wait wait wait wait wait. What are you talking about?"
"Uh," said Sasha, eyes darting. "What are you talking about?"
"I was talking about the mondo-giant dorky crush he has on you."
It was difficult to tell, in the sickly Hyperion lighting, but Sasha might have been blushing.
"O-oh. I mean, yeah, but that's not. . . . You remember, way back at the death race, when he first started, y'know, going nuts?"
Fiona snorted. "Yeah, when he fell off the catwalk and said he . . . saw. . . ." Her eyes got very wide, and her stomach dropped into her boots. "Oh."
"I mean, it's possible, isn't it? That—that some digi-Jack, or something, got into his head, and started. . . ."
"Making him look skag-shit crazy?"
"Y-yeah, well, yeah. It's like, what if, all those times he was talking to himself, he . . . wasn't."
She nodded. "He was talking to Jack." She pushed her hair back off of her cheek. "You think we were supposed to end up here? This was a setup?"
Sasha chewed her lip. "I don't think Vallory would want Handsome Jack back in charge. Nobody on Pandora would. Odds are, she didn't know. She couldn't've set us up."
"Yeah, but . . . come on, it seems like a pretty big coincidence. Rhys just happens to end up with Handsome Jack in his head, we just happen to get sent to Helios where the last Gortys piece just happens to be in Jack's office. . . . I dunno, Sasha, it's kind of a lot to have happened by accident."
"I mean, a lot of those Hyperion goons really wanted Rhys's head. Maybe they arranged for this. Maybe they knew about digi-Jack and decided they wanted him back, no matter what it took."
Fiona snorted and sat back, folding her arms. "Well, they got him."
"I think it's more like, he got them."
"Oh yeah. Got 'em real good. I hope they all go out the airlock."
"That . . . would probably include us going out the airlock, too."
Fiona shrugged a shoulder. "Eh. Worth it."
Sasha very nearly smiled.