Chapter Text
Everything hurts.
This is the first coherent thought at the forefront of Rhys’ mind when he opens his eye, bleary gaze running over the destroyed remains that crackle and burn around him. Helios is gone. Hyperion, too, is as good as gone. Jack is gone.
Rhys might have felt happy about this, were the consequences of their downfalls not littered around his unmoving body. Mere weeks ago, he would have felt nothing but horror at the idea of Hyperion collapsing. Now it’s here, and all he can think about is the unending pain.
He doesn’t move for several minutes, assessing his injuries. His cheek is bruised. His clavicle feels fractured. He’s no doctor, but there’s something wrong with his ribs. His ankle is twisted. His palm is bleeding from gripping the glass shard. His temple throbs from the removal of the head port. There’s a still-bleeding hole where his cybernetic arm should be.
Rhys coughs, and more blood dribbles over his lip, so he guesses he might be bleeding internally too.
Not dead, he thinks to himself. That’s an achievement. Dragging his arm up, Rhys presses his palm to the ground and heaves himself onto his knees, wobbling from the lack of balance. “Right,” he mumbles. “No arm.” Eyelid remaining closed over his empty eye, he pushes himself to his feet, wobbling uncertainly as a dizzy spell sweeps over him. If the blood soaked into his shirt and pooled on the floor where he laid is any clue, then he’s probably going to pass out soon. A health kit would be good.
The weight of his ECHO-eye implant is heavy in his pocket as he strides to Jack’s crushed desk, leaning on it as he makes his way round. The exhaustion in his muscles brings fear, and fear brings adrenaline… or something. But he’s using up every piece of energy he has left.
Having limped over there to open drawers, check for anything worth taking, Rhys finds the desk too ruined to wrench open. The chair lays on the pile of rubble, the executive override port hanging in the air on its spindly arm. Rhys snaps it off impulsively. Maybe he imagines it, but it feels like the pain in his temple recedes slightly as he crushes it under his heel.
Next, his staggering steps lead him to the trophy case, partially intact even after its descent from orbit. He gingerly lifts the Conference Call from its bracket, bloodied palm pressing against the barrel, but soon replaces it back on the shelf, his weak arm trembling at the weight. It’s too heavy. He doesn’t even know if it has any ammunition loaded in it. A smaller gun that he recognises as having been in the case before is on the floor, not far away, but Rhys soon finds it has no ammunition either. So much for taking a weapon with him.
Then his eyes catch the sword.
It’s lighter than he expects it to be when he picks it up, examining it with a furrowed brow. It’s no gun, but it’s better than nothing, and Rhys only hesitates for a moment before adjusting his grip on it with a stance that seemed less afraid. Of course, that soon adjusts again to have him leaning the blade on the ground, resting some weight on the hilt like a crutch. He feels like he’s preparing to go somewhere, but he doesn’t know just where that is. Not yet.
First, he has to figure out where he is right now.
A groan slips past his lips as he tries to walk away from the case, the blade he’s leaning on skidding unhelpfully against the ground and sending him stumbling. Sharp pain shoots through his ankle, and Rhys looks down quickly, wondering if the sword went through his leg – but there’s nothing there. The ankle is only twisted. “Knew that,” he mutters.
He glances back round the office as he turns to leave, half expecting to see the desk standing proudly in the center, Jack’s electric blue figure draped over it. Rhys can’t even lift his eye to the huge window for fear that he’ll see the bust of his nemesis on the screen, alive, animated, echoes of laughter reverberating round a vast, empty room –
Jack’s dead. And this time, he’s not coming back.
Rhys shakes his head to himself, and it’s then that something else catches his eye, also from the trophy case. The Atlas certificate. He looks around once again, almost as if someone’s going to stop him, before he leans the sword against a pile of debris and reaches out, smearing blood from his palm on the glass of the frame. It hits him, then, just how important this certificate could be. The glass is cracked; he only has to hit it against the wall twice for it to fully shatter, and he carefully tugs the paper from the edges of the frame, before bending slightly and rolling it up against his thigh to tuck into his pocket.
He wouldn’t have been able to carry it in the frame. Not with only one arm, and not with his… sword. Rhys reaches for it and picks it up again, held facing down for him to use to propel him along. It reminds him of a walking stick; he thinks if Vaughn were here, he’d crack a joke about how Rhys is only 27 years old.
With gritted teeth and a heavy sigh to whistle between them, Rhys begins to navigate his way out of the labyrinthine ruins of Helios, steeling himself for the lengthy journey ahead.
The remains of Helios sit as some precariously-balanced city skyline in the distance, smoke continuing to billow into the pale sky above, smudging what would be a beautiful horizon with inky black dust. Rhys merely tightens his grip around the hilt of the sword, and turns away from the sight. He has to keep walking; after surviving everything, there’s almost no point in dying now. His path leads him through the scattering of escape pods, and he pretends he can’t see the harsh skid marks against the rocks, or smell the gagging scent of burning flesh. Once or twice, his eye strays towards a pod, and he finds himself trying to scan it for life before catching himself. Perhaps it’s for the best that he doesn’t know.
After all, what could he offer the Hyperion refugees? He’s broken, lost, and helpless – even if they didn’t kill him on sight, he can’t give them anything. Some of these people are probably in more urgent need of a health kit than he is. Most of them probably deserve it more.
They’ll wake up, he thinks to himself, and they’ll find each other. Maybe they’ll band together, build a way to survive. He can’t convince himself for long, and a voice in the back of his mind corrects him bitterly: they’ll be skag food before the sky changes colour. It sounds like Sasha.
He presses his hand to his face, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he continues to stumble in some direction. It hurts to think of her. Before he knows it, his traitorous brain is running through memories of all his friends – he last saw Sasha when he got out of the caravan as Vasquez; Fiona, holding the lever as he climbed up to the trapdoor; Gortys’ upbeat voice on the ECHOcomm, (see ya soon!), trusting Rhys entirely; Loader Bot, pressing a bro-fist to the glass before Kroger shot him down. An uneasy glance turns back to the ever-distant sea of debris that Rhys crawled from, and he realises any of those bodies could have been his friends. Maybe they were.
“You’re way better at killing people than I am,” Jack told him. Rhys almost believes it.
He passes a pod that’s already open, and his fingers hold onto the sword tighter. Something’s happened in the distance – past Helios, behind him, a huge cloud of dust lingers in the air, blanketing something. Despite that, the air seems eerily still, the vast desert plane emptier even with the wreckage strewn across it. Rhys thinks, for a moment, that he remembers seeing a brilliant beam of light towering to the sky before he passed out… but even if he isn’t imagining it, the light is gone now, and he doesn’t have the energy to turn and seek out the source of the disruption.
Swallowing with a dry throat, he continues to walk.
Time passes slowly and his feet drag over cracked earth even slower. The scattered pods thin out eventually, and Rhys considers ditching the sword altogether (hours had passed and he hadn’t seen a single other living person). But he diligently keeps hold of it, pressing the edge against the dusty ground to take weight off his twisted ankle.
The Pandoran sky is a hazy purple when he looks up, Elpis shadowed as the lilacs blend into something deeper, indigo, on the horizon. Rhys looks away from the towering moon, uncomfortable with the lack of Helios’ authoritative silhouette. He’d only been on Pandora for weeks, but it was enough to leave him with a sense of familiarity within the rapidly-changing colours of the atmosphere and the landscape he’d driven through.
Having spent so long looking up, he forgets to look down, and trips over the raised edge of –
A road.
Eyes slowly, almost comically following along the tar to look at where the road leads, Rhys stands up straight at the sight of the vehicle. More so, at the body slumped half-out of the driver’s seat. He approaches tentatively, raising his sword and masking his limp as he makes his way over to the open door. It becomes clearer as he gets nearer that the vehicle is in some state of disrepair, the glass of the windscreen shattered onto the body of the former driver. The driver himself is riddled with bullet holes.
Rhys takes a deep breath, glancing round to check that the passenger seat, and then the entire road, is empty, before he sets down the sword and tugs the body from where it’s already hanging out. A sickening thud follows the movement as the dead bandit collides with the ground headfirst, but Rhys wastes no time in picking up the sword, tossing it onto the passenger side, and climbing in.
The car’s mechanics is similar to any other Rhys has driven, and despite the difficulty of operating one-handed, it doesn’t take long before he’s leaving the desert in the rearview mirror.