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Once they’re done talking through the plan and everyone wanders off to take care of their own thing, Rhys slips into the control room, picking a drakefruit seed out of his teeth, and starts poking around in the computers.
There’s not much information, about anything, even less about what he’s looking for, but after a few minutes of digging he finds the directory for Helios’ security footage. Just to make sure. Just to check. He’s not trying to hide anything, not really. He’d just like to know how many of his mistakes got preserved for posterity, that’s all.
“Huh,” he mutters, scrolling through the archive.
They’ve all been erased. Hacked into and erased, actually. He leans closer to the screen, frowning, trying to decide why he almost recognises the code, why it feels—
“Hey, bro,” Vaughn says, sounding tired as he drops into a chair next to Rhys. “You all settled in?”
Rhys tries to hide the way he jumps, hurriedly shutting down the terminal. “Hey, buddy. Yeah, it’s great,” he says carefully. Someone Rhys doesn’t know comes in, starts to walk over to Vaughn, but he makes a later kind of gesture and she shrugs and wanders off again. “Everything, uh, okay in the bandit kingdom?”
Vaughn snorts. “It’s funny,” he says. “Back in Accounting, I used to work so hard to make sure they never promoted me. I was good at my job, obviously, I mean I didn’t want them to fire me or anything like that. Just never too good. I had weekly nightmares about being given a manager’s position. You know what they used to do with managers when their teams didn’t meet quotas? Cutbacks. Literal, messy cutbacks.” He shudders. “But hey, here we are, and I’m—” He waves a hand at everything around them, then down at himself, scratching at his beard with the other one.
“You’re the king,” Rhys says, like he can actually spite Jack at this point, retroactively. Vaughn just laughs.
“God, no. Kings get beheaded. I’m just the guy who finally forgot to be scared. Don’t know when that happened.”
Rhys nudges him with an elbow. “I never doubted you had it in you, bro.”
“Really?” Vaughn asks, looking at him, one eyebrow sliding up, small smile playing across his mouth. “'Cause if so, I think you were the only one.”
“Aw c’mon. You stole ten million dollars,” Rhys points out. “From Hyperion. In like, three seconds. That takes some serious guts.”
Vaughn shakes his head. “That was different.”
“I don’t really see how, dude,” Rhys huffs. It’s amazing how fast they slipped back into this, like nothing’s happened, like neither of them have changed. The relief makes him dizzy.
He gets a long look from Vaughn that makes him want to look away, move away, run away, before he does something he can’t—
“That was for you,” Vaughn says quietly, shrugging a shoulder.
Rhys swallows and rubs a hand over the back of his neck. His cheeks are heating, the skin prickling. Something inflates sharply in his chest. It’s way too easy to imagine the mocking laugh, the blue flicker in his peripheral vision.
“Well, anyway,” Vaughn says, like he’s got no clue, none at all, just how screwed up Rhys is. Or like he just doesn’t care. Rhys doesn’t know which would be worse, honestly. “You’ve got your own company now. Mr Atlas. Holding up the world and all that.” He bumps Rhys’ knee with a fist.
“I think Atlas held up the sky,” Rhys says, and forces out a choked laugh that even tastes bitter. “Which is pretty ironic, considering…” He copies Vaughn’s gesture, taking in the space around them, not looking at Vaughn’s face, too afraid of seeing judgement. More afraid of seeing forgiveness.
He doesn’t bother pointing out that in the myth, Atlas was being punished.
“Hey, come over here a sec,” Vaughn says, snapping him out of it as he hops to his feet. “I got something I wanna show you.”
“More?” Rhys asks, smiling as he gets up. “Wait, lemme guess. You… found a cure for the common cold. You rescued a bunch of kittens. They named an orphanage after you.”
Vaughn laughs, walking through the control room. Rhys can’t help noticing the way he holds himself now, firmer, less hunkered down. “Kittens? On Pandora?”
“Well,” Rhys shrugs, “they’d probably be man-eating kittens. Fire-breathing kittens. Kittens made of acid.”
“One of the Human Resources guys did try and keep a baby stalker as a pet,” Vaughn tells him. “He lost two fingers. I had to officially declare a no-pets policy, which was only the third most ridiculous thing I had to decide that week, actually.”
“Human Resources,” Rhys sighs, shaking his head. Vaughn flashes him a bright grin over his shoulder. Rhys bangs his knee off the edge of a console.
“Right?” Vaughn laughs as Rhys hops around behind him rubbing his knee. “Give ‘em something other than paperwork or organ harvesting to do and look what happens. We never found one of those fingers, by the way, so keep a lookout. Hey, you know who never loses track of their digits?”
“Accountants,” Rhys says, groaning loudly. “That’s a really lame pun, buddy.”
“Eh, says you,” Vaughn scoffs. “And gimme a break, okay? I don’t get to use those jokes much anymore.”
Rhys moves to stand next to Vaughn as he taps a few keys, and a panel in the wall clicks open and spins around to show a small storage locker with—
With—
“I sent a salvage team out to comb the wreckage for anything we could use, back in the early days,” Vaughn says. Rhys barely hears him. Rhys can barely breathe. “They found this in what used to be Handsome Jack’s office.”
“I—Yeah,” Rhys croaks. He startles badly when Vaughn’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder.
“I didn’t really know what to do with it,” Vaughn says, too soft, way too—too everything. Rhys doesn’t want to look at him, but it’s better than looking at his arm – what used to be his arm, faded and dirty, the fingers curled inward like a dead spider, cables dangling from the other end where he’d—
He manages to nod. Vaughn smiles sadly up at him.
“I had people scouring the place for days after they found it, picking through everything,” Vaughn says quietly, voice gone low in a different way, breath catching. He’s looking at the arm now too. “I couldn’t—I kept thinking you’d want it back, when you—” He breathes out hard. His grip is tight on Rhys’ shoulder. “And then when we never found anything else, some of the guys thought we should have, like, a memorial service. Bury it or something, since it was all we—I told them no. They ended up doing that statue thing instead.”
“You should have burned it,” Rhys says, the words scraping on their way out. “Smashed it until there was nothing left.”
“I couldn’t,” Vaughn says. “You know I couldn’t, bro. It was yours. It was part of you.”
“I ripped it out,” Rhys says, barely loud enough to hear. He reaches for the old arm with his new one, the dulled yellow reflecting across the back of his hand, stops before he makes contact. “After the crash. I did it to myself. The port and the eye, too. It was the only way to—I had to.”
“Yeah,” Vaughn sighs, “I know. I’ve known for a while.”
Rhys drags his eyes back to Vaughn’s face, to his understanding eyes, to the familiarity of him that’s so comforting Rhys wants to shut out everything else and just cling to it. “You knew?” he repeats dumbly, holding himself still. “How could—” he blinks. “The security footage. That was you.”
No wonder the hack felt so familiar. He never thought Vaughn was paying that much attention.
“We found a backup data drive a little later, further out,” Vaughn tells him, tone turned flat. “It was pretty badly corrupted, but… there was enough there to piece together most of what happened, almost till the end. I watched it before anyone else could, then I wiped it; it didn’t feel right, people seeing what you had to do, y’know? They would’ve treated it like…well. The statue was enough all by itself.”
He fights off the mental image of Vaughn watching that, any of it, hunched over a screen in an empty room watching Rhys pick up a shard of glass. He swallows. “You knew and you still kept that?” You knew and you still let me get near you?
Vaughn sighs again, heavier, breaking the eye contact. “Like I said, it was part of you. And honestly I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again, so. Yeah.” He drops his hand from Rhys’ shoulder, lowers his head, and Rhys can hear him measuring out his breathing, watches Vaughn push his fingers against his eyes. He feels unbalanced now without the weight of Vaughn’s palm, Vaughn’s fingers on his collarbone.
“Vaughn,” Rhys starts roughly, wanting to reach out, to say something, wanting wanting wanting. It shouldn’t be possible to be so full of wanting and still feel this hollow.
“It’s okay,” Vaughn says, jerking into motion, tapping keys. The panel spins back into place, and the arm is hidden again. “Doesn’t matter now. You’re here. It’s fine. It’s… it’s fine now. It just felt wrong, not telling you, that’s all.”
“After I holed up in the Atlas base,” Rhys starts, pushing through the sick, sour lump in his throat, “I was… kind of messed up. Obviously. I was the only one there, so I—” He clears his throat, fingers clenching and unclenching. “I just talked to myself mostly, at first, but it turns out that gets pretty boring after a while.” He doesn’t mention the way he’d imagine Jack talking back, how he’d jerk awake slumped over a work station thinking he could hear faint, cruel laughter, the way his airway would close up when he accidentally called himself Rhysie. The crying jags, the shapeless anger. The loneliness like something chewing him up alive. He tries to smile. “So I started imagining you were there, like everything was the way it used to be. Like you were just in the next room or something. It was stupid, but it… it made me feel better.”
When he looks up, away from his hands, Vaughn’s watching him again, focusing on him the way Rhys wishes he wouldn’t, the way Rhys wishes he could keep.
“I get it, is what I’m trying to say,” he adds, trying to sound lighter for it. “We’re even on the whole ‘missed my best bud’ thing.” He hates himself for playing it off, but it’s a grain of sand in the desert, really. “It’s all good, right?” he says, holding out a fist.
Vaughn huffs and knocks it with his own. Then he steps in and catches Rhys’ wrist before he drops his hand back to his side. Vaughn’s eyes are really bright. His fingers are really warm. The pulse in Rhys’ wrist heaves underneath them.
“Yeah, bro,” Vaughn says, “of course we are. But see, the thing is, we could all die in like, a few hours? I mean, we might not, stranger things have happened, but y’know. Giant alien monster. Mass destruction. Crappy odds. Allies who might rob us or kill us or do both of those things in some unpredictable order. So…”
He’s almost standing on Rhys’ feet, and then he’s standing between them, and then he’s tugging Rhys down and Rhys almost falls over before Vaughn catches him with his other arm around Rhys’ waist. It registers somewhere in Rhys’ brain that there are a lot of gaps in Vaughn’s outfit.
“Wait, really?” he asks, and then Vaughn kisses him, just lightly, just enough to make Rhys’ skin tingle all over. It takes him a second to get control of himself, but then he kisses back, too hard, overeager, their teeth clicking, and Vaughn laughs into his mouth as he lets go of Rhys’ wrist to tilt his head at just the right angle. Rhys doesn’t really know what happens after that, it’s all just close and warm and Vaughn.
“Really?” he asks again as he leans up a little, blinking. His back is aching from the angle, but he doesn’t care. His cheeks are rubbed a little raw from Vaughn’s beard, which is even softer than it looks somehow. He can feel how fast his heart is beating in his swollen lips, and he wants to kiss Vaughn again, just to ask him if he can feel it too.
“Yeah, really,” Vaughn says, smiling, like he’s just decided now. The feeling winding its way all through Rhys like a river is bigger than he is, stronger than he is. He smiles back as it breaks its banks, carries him along.
He presses his lips against Vaughn’s again, for no reason and more reasons than he can hold at once. “Because we could die?”
Vaughn’s grin gets wider, eyes crinkling a little at the corners. Rhys blames the tremble in his knees on the way he’s crouching. “Well, other reasons too, I guess. I really did miss you. And did I say yet that I like your new look? ‘Cause I do.”
“Right,” Rhys nods quickly, not totally steady. “Me too, y’know. A lot. All of it. I’m just saying, we almost die pretty much all the time.”
“Pandora,” Vaughn shrugs with a kind of played-up confidence that does things to Rhys’ equilibrium he’s not going to admit to. “I’ve gotten used to it. Keeps things interesting.”
“So if we don’t die,” Rhys says, “but we keep almost dying. We can just… keep kissing?”
He’s not used to this. Hoping. It doesn’t seem like something that’s going to get old.
Vaughn’s arm slides more securely around Rhys’ middle. Heat spreads from everywhere they’re touching. “It’s a plan,” he says, fingers stroking along Rhys’ neck until a shiver runs down Rhys’ spine.
“It’s a great plan,” Rhys tells him fervently, more than a little breathless as Vaughn backs him up against a nearby table. He puts his hands on Vaughn’s sides. “We are so not dying today,” he swears, because it’s easier to say than other things. “We’re gonna beat the monster, get the treasure, and we’re gonna keep almost dying for the rest of our lives.”
Vaughn’s laugh lasts for the whole next kiss, and the one after that, and then Rhys stops counting.