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“I’m Jack,” Timothy Lawrence tells his reflection.
The dingy motel bathroom is dim, and he can hear Aurelia shouting at the poor innkeeper somewhere outside. There’s dozens of outposts like this scattered across Elpis, habitable pockets of air in the dismal landscape, and none of them are ever up to Aurelia’s standards.
“I’m Jack,” he says, again, watches the still-too-new facial muscles flex and contort themselves like they haven’t quite mastered the art yet.
Outside, a monster roars, and Timothy’s mind drifts to another, even more dangerous one that still looms at the edges of his vision.
“The Destroyer,” Jack had yelled, his arms flung wide. His grandeur was terrifying up against something that looks like it ripped the universe in half, his confidence so totally unfounded, that even Nisha had looked wan.
His grand master plan to conquer the universe (for its own good) backfired, because of course it had, and Jack took that tremendous slight to his own vanity out on Timothy, because of course he did.
Now, in this overly warm room with condensation lining the walls, he stares down his new burns in his new face. They had to be a perfect match for Jack’s own, but Jack had taken his time with Timothy’s, carved them out himself instead of letting a machine from times gone by stamp them in. No, that experience and his lasting scars of it are painful reminders that Timothy’s playing so far out of his league that every swing was doomed to be a miss.
He’s out of his league, but the people playing here are ones he’s realizing he actually likes. They’re not the best people he could have fallen in line with, but, well — he appreciates knowing any gun to his back is going to get knocked away by a precise throw of Athena’s shield, or frozen right through by Aurelia, or shot away with varying degrees of accuracy by Nisha and Wilhelm, or even haphazardly sent flying with a full-body slam of a desperate and kind Claptrap.
When he finally pokes his head out of the bathroom, stepping uncomfortably over the dead innkeeper’s body, Wilhelm is waiting for him. He claps Timothy on the back and slings an arm around his shoulders, and it’s nice.
♫
The now-Handsome Jack moves Timothy to Opportunity like a chess player hoarding his bishop, his group of Vault Hunters for hire falls apart, and Timothy doesn’t see his friends for a long while.
It’s not until blurry photos of Nisha start to flood the ECHOnet, her body crumpled at the feet of a lanky Siren with blue hair, that Timothy realizes he’s living on borrowed time. Wilhelm’s circuits have already been scrapped, recycled and reused into fifty Loaderbots that get gunned down and repurposed into five hundred more. The only trace of Wilhelm’s booming laugh or Nisha’s sly jabs are stashed away in the ECHOs he hides under a pair of extra pants at the back of his closet, just in case anyone would care enough to go looking.
They might have been bad people, he thinks, as he scours through endless feeds on the ECHOnet to understand as much as he can about what happened (a bloody shootout) and who’d done it (new Vault Hunters). But his compass for good people and better decisions has never been fine-tuned to the right direction, and anyway, they’d pulled him back up and put him back together so readily that he can’t really bring himself to care.
He can’t count on them to save him after this, he knows. Timothy’s face (Jack’s face) feels damp, sticky and warm, and he scrubs away the evidence with the back of his hand before he hauls himself up onto unsteady feet.
Athena is still out there, with the rebels, and so is Claptrap. It’s possible he’s made the wrong choice and they’ve picked the side of this cage match where they’d sleep better at night, but neither of them have to see Jack’s face in every passing mirror.
So it’s different, Timothy tells himself.
The common area is icy when he shuffles out into it, and he wonders if any of the other body doubles even thought about turning the heat on. Timothy scours around for them, breath huffing gentle clouds into the cold air, and finds it completely empty. He’s not surprised; it’s only been a week since another body double (Tango, his brain supplies, the one who liked bad movies and taking photos of everything in Opportunity) got ripped in half by the new Vault Hunters, Jack-approved face torn clean off and worn by the little girl in their ranks like a badge of honor, and they’re all still a little freaked out.
But until now, Timothy’s thought he would always have somewhere to run to. He’d counted on that combat-ready unbreakable frame and Lynchwood’s tightly-patrolled streets as safe havens, Wilhelm and Nisha as people who knew him as him instead of Body Double A, and then they’d gone and fallen apart so badly he could never have a hope of helping them.
Scum-sucking bandits, he thinks Handsome Jack would call those Vault Hunters, and tries to muster up the hate to fling names at them in his head. Vermin. Life-ruining murderers. But for all he can slot together the Hyperion-standard insults, the anger doesn’t come.
Timothy leans his head back on the edge of the couch, counts to ten, and then gets up to make himself something to eat.
♫
By the time it happens, Timothy doesn’t see Jack die.
He sees candid photos, later, another Siren towered over his corpse like her sister had loomed over Nisha’s. They’re nearly mirror images, Lilith watching the lifeless remains of her own big bad enemy as warily as that other Siren (Maya) had stared down Nisha’s unsmiling face. Timothy compares them, looks them back and forth until he knows he’ll see them all in his nightmares, stares at them to make up for all those times he couldn’t bring himself to see the same pictures of Wilhelm.
But that comes much later.
When Jack dies, Timothy is burying Angel.
He figures he owes her that much. A kind burial, someone who wouldn’t just leave her body on an abandoned floor and run, the safety of a grave where nobody would be likely to disturb her rest any time soon.
So he carries her body, and he walks, and he passes through some Hyperion-friendly settlements where they offer him rides, and he says no, and then he walks some more.
It isn’t until he stumbles onto the dry, dusty lands of the Arid Nexus and sees a shack, dingy and isolated, that he finally stops. The cracks of the fake walkway gravel under his shoes feel right, and he stops, lays Angel down on the crumbling dirt before drawing his pistol and heading inside.
A figure turns, heels clacking against the stone floor.
“Hello, darling,” Aurelia says.
♫
So he lives there for a while.
He scours the ECHOnet and counts the days, watches Hyperion struggle to keep itself whole until it falls as explosively as Jack himself had, takes up desert gardening and leaves flowers on Angel’s grave.
Aurelia visits, always having to stoop a little bit to get inside the door and always ready to berate him for his living conditions, no matter how much he cleans. He likes the company; her wit cuts deeper than Nisha’s, and her laugh is less kind than Wilhelm’s, but she keeps coming by every Thursday without fail. It gets to the point where he knows just the right amount to turn the temperature up to counterbalance her permanent chill, and his kitchen always has her favorite brand of tea stocked to the brim.
He stops counting the days so much. The posts on the ECHOnet die down.
And then, one Thursday, Aurelia brings company.
“Looks nicer than I thought it would,” says one of the people tagging along in Aurelia’s frosted wake, her voice a little awed.
Timothy runs a hand through his hair as he listens to them through the bugs he’s planted everywhere outside his house as an extra security measure. His hair has gotten even shaggier, he absently notes; he doesn’t have to cut it anymore, and it’s starting to grow out to where it used to be, before everything in his life went to hell and back again.
(The small things he can take back for himself are what he wakes up for.)
“Are you sure this the right guy?” asks her companion, rubbing an unused port for a prosthetic arm where his right shoulder probably used to be. There’s a small scuffle of boots on pavement Timothy laid himself, and the headphones are filled with the reassuringly familiar sound of Aurelia scoffing.
“Trust me, he’s who you want,” she tells them, and he can practically hear her sneer.
When he opens the door to let them in, both of the strangers jump. Aurelia huffs, pushes past him, and makes herself comfortable in his living room.
“I’m not Jack,” Timothy tells them, drawing a hand over the marks Jack had left on the face he’d stuck Timothy with.
“I know,” the man says, too quickly, his eye darting around the open area to look at anything but Timothy. It’s almost exhausting to watch him tremble like a chihuahua in human skin at the sight of Jack’s face on someone who’s alive and (passably) well, but anything less would probably be even more worrying.
His companion sighs, rolls her shoulders, and extends a hand.
“I’m Fiona,” she says. “Vault Hunter. That’s Rhys, also a Vault Hunter. Handsome Jack used to live in his brain.”
Timothy’s lips shake for a couple of seconds until he’s smiling, and he offers his hand back. The smile seems to melt some of the tension from Rhys’s shoulders, and it occurs to Timothy that once upon a time, Wilhelm had mentioned he could always tell Timothy apart from Jack when they smiled.
I just know, he’d said, grinning back. You’re completely different when you smile.
“I’m Timothy,” he tells the new Vault Hunters, and it finally sounds true again. “Trust me, I know how that feels.”