a/n: hi. This idea came from a request I got in February from agianthaus. At first I thought the idea was crazy, but as I thought about it, the more I thought it was just crazy enough to work. Also, since this was in development before the Pre-Sequel was even announced, the Sheriff's characterization may be quite a bit different from what you're used to.
When Sanctuary would next wake up, Gaige would already be long gone. She knows she probably owes the others a proper goodbye, but the best she could do was a note. Handwritten, thanking them for taking her in, and most importantly, telling them not to worry. She was never very good at saying goodbye.
The creatures, she could handle killing. They wouldn't hesitate to do the same to her if she let them. The various bandit clans, she could rationalize, as vengeance for killing Reiss and kidnapping Roland. Even if it was only to protect their homes, they were usually the ones who fired first. Hyperion employees, she wasn't sure how to feel about that. Jack had almost certainly coerced them into fighting for him, maybe even brainwashed them. But they couldn't get to the man responsible without killing them first. And the robots, well, they were never alive to begin with, were they?
When she joined the Vault Hunters, she assumed they would stand for everything Jack wasn't. She assumed any mission they undertook was for the greater good. They fulfilled their mission, upheld Roland's promise and avenged his death. When Jack was dead, it would all be over. So she had thought. But the killing hadn't stopped. The feeling she got that she was making the universe a better place died in the volcano along with Jack. Now, there's just violence for the sake of violence. She isn't going to be a part of that anymore.
A loud squealing signals the train pulling to a stop. She hops off, walks through the dimly-lit train station, along the quiet, dusty streets into an old wooden building.
"I believe you're looking for me," she says, holding her hands up in surrender.
"Open on three!"
The heavy metal door rumbles open and clangs against the wall. Gaige, nearly on the verge of falling asleep, bolts up in her cot. For a split second, she wonders if the Vault Hunters already found her and were trying to spring her, but she quickly realizes it can't be them: there's no gunfire. Only the echoing of bootsteps along the cement walls.
The strides are long and deliberate. Between the heavy thuds of the boots are the tiny thumps of long, slender fingers tapping from bar to bar on the cell. Gaige looks up from the boots and catches a glimpse of the brunette woman's orange eyes. She walks up beside the cot, adjusts her hat, and frowns.
"Get off your ass, prisoner." Her voice is cold and sharp.
Gaige doesn't need to be told twice: she pops up to her feet and looks the woman up and down.
The first thing she notices is how tall the woman is. The high-heeled boots certainly add a few inches, but even so, Gaige barely comes up to the woman's chin. Gaige looks up at her face. Most of the details are obscured in shadow from her wide-brimmed purple cowboy hat, but she can make out a pair of full hot-pink lips and a sharp, pointed chin. The woman stares at Gaige's left shoulder, or more specifically, at the lack of an arm attached to it.
"Who the fuck are you?" she says, narrowing her eyes.
"I could ask you the same question," she blurts without thinking.
"I'm the law here. That's all you need to know. Now. Start talking."
Gaige bites her bottom lip and drops her chin to her chest. "I'm... I'm here to confess."
For a second, she thought she could see a spark in the woman's eyes, but it might have just been a glare of light shining off her well-polished sheriff's badge. "This ain't a church. Stop wasting my time."
Gaige closes her eyes as the Sheriff turns to leave. This has to end, right here, right now. "I want to confess to murder!"
The woman stops dead in her tracks, then looks over her shoulder at Gaige. "What did you say?"
"Murder. Terrorism. Arson. Possession of unauthorized technology. Stop me if you've heard enough." The woman folds her arms over her chest and remains silent, which Gaige wasn't prepared for, but after a brief pause to think, she keeps going. "Poaching. Possession of and intent to use weapons of mass destruction. Assassination-"
"Alright, alright." She holds up a hand, and Gaige falls quiet. "Quite an impressive rap sheet there. Where's the evidence?"
"Evi- evidence?" Gaige lets out a disbelieving laugh. "Alright, how about the smoldering ruins of the Hodunk camp out in the Dust? That was me."
The woman narrows her eyes at Gaige, and for a good five seconds, the only sound to be heard is the faint buzzing of the lightbulb above their heads. After a while, the woman smirks.
"Why are you smiling? Did you just miss the part where I confessed to murder? And like half a dozen other felonies?"
"Honey..." She pulls her shoulders back, and the glare off of her badge shines directly into Gaige's eye in a way that Gaige is sure was intentional. "Do you have any idea what we do to felons around here?"
Gaige looks up into her eyes, then spits out, "I know exactly what you do."
The Sheriff exhales slowly as they stare each other down. Then, she does something Gaige wasn't expecting.
She laughs.
Gaige feels her jaw drop as the Sheriff folds her arms over her chest. "You've got ovaries, honey," she says, a hint of a smile playing over her full lips.
Gaige lets out a disbelieving scoff. "You..." She blinks, stammering for something to say. "You can't... we killed innocent people in cold blood! I- I watched their trailers burn to the ground!"
The Sheriff throws her head back and lets out a short, cutting laugh. "Pah! Innocent? That group of wife-beating, kidnapping, drug-running pieces of shit? Those Hodunks have given me nothing but hell since I took over this town. If you're telling me you took them out, then you did me a favor."
She stares up at her, dumbfounded. "That- that's not all, though, we killed more than them! People that didn't deserve it!"
Gaige shrinks back as the Sheriff narrows her eyes at her again. "There's that word again: 'we'." She studies Gaige's face for a moment, then stiffens up. "I recognize you. You're a Vault Hunter. With those Crimson Raiders."
She shakes her head. "Was," she says, turning her gaze down to her sneakers.
"So the Vault Hunters wiped out the Hodunks..." The Sheriff laughs, stroking a fingertip along her jaw. "Makes sense. They were gettin' along with the Zafords fine enough for a while there. Pretty smart: get 'em at each others' throats and reap the spoils."
"You..." Gaige frowns. "You knew about that?"
"Don't act like you're so transparent. I'm sure your pal Roland told you that you were fighting for the good of Pandora, but you Vault Hunters are no different from any other two-bit merc or bandit slummin' out in the wastes. Only concerned with what you can get out of a deal."
She grits her teeth and shakes her head. "I told you, I'm not a Vault Hunter anymore. I'm done choking on their lies."
The Sheriff smirks. "I figured you'd either be crazy or stupid to come in here lookin' for a one-way ticket to the gallows. But seeing as how you got the hell away from your Vault huntin' pals, I'm pretty sure it's not the latter."
She lowers her eyebrows. "I'm not crazy."
She folds her arms over her chest and looks down her nose at Gaige. "That remains to be seen. You came into my town asking for an execution."
Gaige grits her teeth. "Because I've massacred people! I've done unspeakable things-"
The Sheriff raises a hand, silencing her. "And I can tell you still wanna do some good for this planet. You can't do that swinging from the end of a rope."
"Oh..." Gaige snorts, then bites her lip. "So that's it. 'Join me, or I kill you.'"
The Sheriff exhales slowly, then shakes her head. "No. You can still leave town. I won't stop you."
Scoffing, Gaige rolls her eyes. "If you think I'd join up with the police-"
The Sheriff shoves Gaige down onto the cot. Caught off guard, Gaige hurriedly scoots back until she feels her shoulders pressing up against the brick wall.
"Why do you think crime is so damn low in my town, huh?" The Sheriff puts her right boot on the cot beside Gaige's left hip, and leans down, her orange eyes piercing straight into her. "You're not from around here, so let me clue you in on how shit works in Lynchwood: I'm the only thing keeping those people out there from ending up exactly like the Hodunks, and the Zafords, and all the other sad bastards that got in the way of Jack or your precious Vault Hunters. You don't like me. I get it. But if I'm not out there locking up all those dangerous people, they become animals. With all the shit you've done, with the size of the bounty on your head, did you not stop to think why nobody in this town tried to kill you as soon as you set foot inside? It's because they knew I would kick their teeth in so hard they'd have to swallow their food whole and chew it in their small intestine."
Gaige draws her knees up to her chest, wraps her right arm around her legs, and trembles as the Sheriff exhales sharply through her nose.
"You wanna die? Then go back out there. Take a stand. Find something worth dying over. But don't think I'm gonna throw your life away for you."
After a beat, the woman in purple stands back and walks to the cell door, pausing just before stepping out.
"If you're looking for justice on this planet, you won't find it. You can go back to your Vault Huntin' pals and take their blood money. I'm sure it's a sweet gig." She steps out of the cell, then glances over her shoulder and stares Gaige down. "But you're of a rare kind around here. I don't know about you, but I sleep at night knowing I'm doing my part to make one tiny corner of this shit-hole planet a little more hospitable."
Gaige slowly looks down at her sneakers, listening to the Sheriff's footfalls grow quieter and quieter. Can she even bring herself to go back? The Vault Hunters weren't anything like she thought they would be. Killing Jack was one thing, that was just fighting a greater evil that threatened the entire planet. But now he was out of the picture, and nothing had changed. If anything, the Vault Hunters had only become more dangerous without an obvious threat to work against.
Did Brick need to eradicate the Sawteeth? How much easier would it have been to take Hyperion down if the two bandit clans managed to work together? Jack was a threat to them all, and yet they wasted time, money, resources, and lives fighting each other instead of taking out a common, and much more dangerous, enemy.
Lilith was a goddess to the Incinerators. Sure, they were killing other bandits, but she could have used her seemingly divine powers to guide them in the war against Jack, and they would have accepted her word without a thought. And while brainwashing them by using Lilith would have been morally gray in itself, it still would have been preferable to letting them kill innocent people only to wipe them out later. And for that matter, since when has Lilith, or any of the others, been uncomfortable with acts under the category of "morally gray"?
Krieg always made her uneasy. She wasn't the only one who was never sure Krieg could be trusted, but Maya insisted he seemed to have a very rigid sense of right and wrong. To Gaige, that only meant one of two things: either Krieg was always dangerously close to snapping and trying to kill them all, or the other psychos they killed were just the same as him, trying to kill the bad guys (what was it he called them? The Deserving?). Quite frankly, neither alternative sounded good.
Salvador, of all people, backed Maya up in defending the resident Psycho, but Gaige wasn't sure she ever trusted him either. His rap sheet was longer than the list of things she couldn't stand about Marcie Holloway. And on a more personal level, he was wanted for cannibalism. He friggin' eats people. That's not exactly the kind of person she'd call morally upstanding.
Zero was a little tougher. Politicians make enemies all the time, and sure, sometimes even ones that want them dead. Again, that seemed like the kind of thing that fell into the morally shady category, but the people Zero killed probably did things more contemptible than killing a single person. Zero had only come to Pandora for a greater challenge, and Gaige had never made out what that meant exactly, but she never got the impression that, for the sake of it, Zero enjoyed killing.
Axton wasn't nearly as dangerous as the others, she thought, or at least not in the traditional sense, but recklessness could be dangerous in itself. He was a glory hound, through and through, and it wasn't unheard of for him to do increasingly reckless things that put their lives in jeopardy. The time he tried to blow up the W4R-D3N with a rocket launcher while it still had Roland trapped came to mind, among other things.
Mordecai seemed to be one of the more level-headed among them. She understood his rage. She's always thought animals were cute, and when she saw what Jack did to Bloodwing, she knew there was no excuse good enough to justify what he had done to the planet and its people. It wasn't Mordecai's morality that got to her, it was what the Sheriff said about how she slept at night. She wasn't the only one who noticed him drinking more after the deaths of Bloodwing and Roland, and while the others seemed worried, they all seemed reluctant to step in and say something. She would have said something herself if she didn't think she'd get laughed out of the room. He'd just ask her, what would a girl who only touched her first drop of alcohol a week after she arrived on Pandora know about how he dealt with grief?
Maya was the only one with some sort of moral direction out of any of them, but even then, her own quest to find out more about Sirens seemed to be more important to her than anybody else. Gaige would have gladly joined her in that quest, if the Siren had ever trusted her enough to ask her to join it in the first place, but Maya seemed to keep everybody at arm's length. It was probably for that same reason that Gaige had noticed Maya reacting in disgust to some of the more morally-questionable acts that the others committed, but yet not once did Maya actually speak out against them.
The more she thinks about this group of Vault Hunters, the more she realizes it was an alliance of convenience more than anything else. Jack wasn't just a common enemy to focus on, he was the only thing stopping her from seeing the kind of people the Vault Hunters were.
She won't sink to his level.
Gaige paces back and forth along the platform of the Lynchwood train station, checking the clock on her ECHO every few minutes. The 3:10 to Wyndingham was due in just a few minutes. From there, she wasn't sure where she'd go. Maybe she could stow away on an interstellar shuttle, or maybe she could just find a nice, deserted town out in the tundra where she could find a somewhat quiet spot to hunker down. Or maybe-
She turns her head at the sound of a few pairs of boots walking at the top of the metallic stairwell. Three men and a woman, all of them dressed in dingy brown clothes – or maybe that's just a fine coating of Pandoran dust – look down at her, all with confident grins on their faces.
Or maybe she'd just be dealing with bounty hunters for the rest of her life. No matter how short it may end up being.
The man standing at the front of their diamond formation speaks up first. "Eight-hundred twenty billion dollars." He laughs and spits down on the tracks below. "I can't believe someone with a bounty like that on their head would be stupid enough to roll into a town like this."
Instinctively, she considers how stupid it is of him to announce his plan to capture or kill her on the spot – her warrant didn't specify alive. But as the apparent leader of the group cocks his revolver, she wonders if it wouldn't be a bad idea to just go down fighting, considering how ready she was to hand herself over to the Sheriff.
"I should thank you," he says. "You're about to make us all very rich."
The woman standing to his right takes a step forward. "Sorry," she says. "Can't take it with you where you're going."
Before he can even turn around, she puts her pistol to the back of the leader's head and fires. The gunshot reverberates throughout the station, and his head jerks violently forward, a massive spray of blood shooting out in front of him, leaving a gaping red hole the size of a tennis ball on the left side of his head, just above his cheekbone.
The deep-brown-haired woman shoves his limp body over the rail, onto the tracks below. The contemptuous snarl on her face is only exacerbated by the deep, wide scar running from the middle of her right eyebrow, diagonally down over the bridge of her nose and ending at the left corner of her mouth. Her eyes lock onto Gaige, the left colored like fine cognac, the right, underneath the scar, with a pupil glowing a bright red. She smirks. "Take her down."
The other two men, apparently expecting her betrayal, immediately take aim at Gaige and start firing. One of them, with a gray ski mask pulled over his head, jumps down to the lower level and takes cover behind a wall jutting out into the station, while the other draws a pair of SMGs from inside his leather duster and camps out upstairs.
As quick as she reacts, she isn't fast enough to find cover before her shield is knocked down and a bullet grazes her right arm. She dives down behind a few storage crates and groans, gritting her teeth against the burning hot pain ripping through her tricep. When she hears a brief break in gunfire, she risks a glance around the crate. In her rush to find safety, she's lost sight of the woman with the bionic eye.
She takes a few deep breaths, her vision flashing red. The irony of dashing for cover after having willingly walked into the Sheriff's station to surrender herself not an hour before is not lost on her, but there's nothing like searing, agonizing pain to remind her of what she has to live for. Painful as it is, she's not about to let a damn flesh wound stop her from making her final stand. She wonders if she might have even started taking the Sheriff's words to heart.
She can't summon Deathtrap without creating a diversion, first: he's especially vulnerable while being digistructed. She flicks her wrist, and a small round mirror on the end of a metal rod pops out of her arm. Breathing heavily, she holds it out in front of her, scoping the surroundings. For the moment, the bounty hunters seem to have taken cover, but a row of large, fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling catches her interest. Pressing herself closer to the floor, she lifts the mirror up as far as she dares, then reaches for her storage deck and takes out a submachine gun.
She takes a few deep breaths. Showtime.
Twisting herself around, she pops up and fires off a few bursts at a fuel tank across the room. The acidic rounds start eating into the metal, and the liquid inside starts pouring out and spreading over the ground. She ducks down as the bounty hunters start firing on her from three different directions. She reloads, the adrenaline rush still powerful enough for her to nearly ignore the wound in her arm. They were smart enough to spread out, which at least puts them one rung above the usual fare she had to face off against with the Vault Hunters.
She swaps out her Dahl Scorpion for an electric pistol. After taking a deep breath, she pops out of cover long enough to get a few shots at the tube-shaped lights hanging above them. The bulbs explode in a shower of glass shards and sparks that ignite the pooling gasoline on the ground below. As the fuel erupts into flames, she takes the opportunity to raise her left arm and digistruct Deathtrap.
Not long after he's fully materialized, her robot's shields eat a few rounds that were intended for her. He starts floating in a beeline towards Leather Duster, long metallic claws at the ready. Gaige focuses her attention on Gray Mask, tossing out a grenade to flush him out of cover, then easily whittling down his shields with her pistol. He ducks behind a dumpster as Gaige reloads.
Leather Duster fires off a few bursts at Deathtrap, but the shots don't even slow down the advancing hunk of metal. Panicked, he throws both of his submachine guns at the robot; they both explode and re-materialize in his hands just as Deathtrap bears down on him and leaves three parallel gashes in his left arm with a swipe of his long claws.
Gaige ducks back down as her target blindly fires off a few shots around the corner of the dumpster. She takes a deep breath, counting off his shots, then pops back up, gun at the ready once there's a break in his fire. She vaults over the crates and substitutes her pistol for a shotgun as she stalks closer to the dumpster.
Upstairs, Leather Duster sprints away from her robot, popping off a few shots behind him as he makes his way towards the station's exit. Just as he reaches the outside of the station, Deathtrap snags onto the tails of his coat and pulls his screaming victim back towards him.
Gaige lowers herself as close to the ground as possible next to the dumpster. Gray Mask pops out from behind it a moment later, but she pulls the trigger before he can get a shot off, her shotgun blast launching him back as the pellets slam into his chest, shredding his light armor to pieces. She lets out a delirious chuckle. "Noob!"
Taking a deep breath and turning around, she suddenly remembers the backstabber is still somewhere in the station. Or, at least, she assumes she is, since she didn't hear any feminine screaming coming from where Deathtrap-
The very air curls and bends in front of her, but before she can even ready her shotgun, an unseen force connects hard with her solar plexus. Then, the shotgun is knocked clean out of her hands and sent skidding on the floor behind her, not far from the fire she had started with the fuel tank and overhead lights. A blast of hot electricity washes over her body, ionizing her digistruct holster and, more importantly, the module in her arm.
As she falls back to the ground, muscles twitching and spasming, she hears the telltale sparking sounds of Deathtrap digistructing out of existence. Dammit. That's just unfair.
The woman's cloaking device deactivates, and she appears in front of Gaige, her black-painted lips spread in an impossibly wide grin. "We were content to split the cash three ways. But I guess I won't mind taking it all for myself."
"Bring it!" Gaige says, mentally kicking herself for not coming up with a snappier retort as she rolls to the side and onto her feet.
Red Eye laughs and puts her right hand on a metal rail. She snarls and pulls at it. The metal squeals and groans until a piece roughly the length of her arm breaks off in her bare hand. Gaige's jaw drops.
The woman swings the metal bar at her. Gaige jumps back, the wind from the swing rippling her shirt. She should've paid more attention when Maya tried to teach her hand-to-hand techniques, but it's obvious enough that the last position she wants to be in is with her back to a wall of flames. She needs to flip the field, fast.
A glint of red to her left catches her eye. A box hanging on the wall, the placard beside it reading "in case of emergency, break glass". Inside it is an axe with a long pick opposite the cutting edge, its yellow handle sticking out against the red metal of its case.
The woman swings the metal bar at her again. In one swift move, Gaige leaps to her left, punches out the glass with her metallic arm, and snatches the axe from the two brackets holding it to the wall. Behind her, the woman grunts again, and Gaige scrambles to her right, the bar slamming into the wall, missing her by inches.
She turns to face Red Eye, now standing directly between her and the fire. Gaige takes the handle of the axe in both hands, getting a feel for its balance. Red Eye takes another swing at her, and she holds the axe vertically, parrying the blow. The woman recoils, and Gaige swings the handle end of the axe up. The knob at the end of the grip connects with Red Eye's chin. She stumbles, dropping the metal bar as she falls onto her back.
Gaige steps forward, brings the axe back over her shoulder, then swings it in a sweeping arc high over her head. Red Eye pushes herself back just as the blade smashes down through the grated walkway, between her legs. Screaming out in frustration, Gaige pulls hard at the axe, but the ground won't let it go.
She sees Red Eye reaching for the broken-off handrail and charges at her. As she lunges forward, Red Eye brings the bar across her shoulders. Gaige feels the woman's boot press against her stomach, and she rolls back with Gaige's momentum while pushing her boot into her stomach. Gaige's feet leave the ground and swing up into the air as the woman flips her over herself. Gaige lets out a grunt as she lands hard on her back.
When she sits up, she feels two strong hands grabbing onto her shoulders. The woman starts leaning into her back, pushing Gaige closer to the roaring flames. She pushes back, struggling against Red Eye's strong grip.
"You're a real handful, aren't you?" she hisses in Gaige's ear. "But... you're gonna be... so worth it..."
Gaige grits her teeth, droplets of sweat beading on her face as the flames draw closer. "We'll see about that," she growls. She leans her head forward, then snaps it back, smashing into the woman's nose.
Red Eye screams and falls back, releasing her hold. Gaige catches a familiar glimpse of silver out of the corner of her right eye: her shotgun. She starts crawling for it, when a heavy weight slams down onto her back, sending jolts of pain shooting down through her legs and knocking her flat onto her stomach.
Gaige grits her teeth and tries to get to her knees, but Red Eye steps beside her, swings her leg back, and delivers a powerful kick to Gaige's face. She collapses onto her stomach, the room spinning and fading in and out of blackness in front of her.
Groaning, Gaige spits out some blood. The entire right side of her face throbs in pain as she slowly props herself up onto her elbows.
"You could've just done this the EASY way!" Red Eye punctuates 'easy' by stomping down on Gaige's ribcage. "You were out-numbered and out-gunned, even with that shitty little robot..."
She keeps talking, but Gaige can't make out what she's saying. She picks her head up just enough to see her shotgun, just an arm's length away.
Nobody calls Deathtrap "shitty".
She quickly shoots her right hand out for the gun just as Red Eye pushes it out of reach with a nudge from her toe.
Red Eye clicks her tongue. "Not this time."
Before Gaige can do anything else, Red Eye stomps down on her hand, and Gaige's anguished scream does little to drown out the cracking of her crushed fingers. She groans, curling into the fetal position and clutching her flesh hand with her metallic one. Her blood pumps heavy in her ears, but beyond that, everything sounds as if it's being muffled by cotton.
A hand closes around her neck and pulls her up clean off her feet and slams her into the wall. Gaige blinks heavily, her head thudding hard against the bricks behind her. Her right bicep is absolutely on fire from the gunshot, her hand is useless, but she's still got some fight in her cybernetic limb. She grits her teeth and tries to pry the fingers off her throat, but they don't even budge. Behind the blood gushing down from both nostrils, Red Eye's scar twitches as her black-painted lips curl into a sinister grin. She lifts her left leg and pulls a gun from the holster on her ankle, then presses the muzzle underneath Gaige's chin. Gaige curses herself for not noticing it before.
She closes her eyes and takes one final gasp of air. The gun fires, and Gaige lands on her feet. The pressure releases from her neck.
Confused, Gaige opens her eyes. The woman lies on her back, arms splayed out to her sides, blood pooled around her head, her left eye socket replaced by a large, hemorrhaging hole.
Gaige's knees buckle. She leans back against the wall and starts sliding down. Slowly, she turns her head to the left. There stands the Sheriff casting a scrutinizing stare back at her, smoke billowing from the barrel of her revolver.
The smell that assails Gaige's nostrils can only be described as a mix between burnt tires and rotten fish. Her eyes begin to water before she even gets the chance to open them, which would make finding out where she is a difficulty, if somebody didn't tell her outright.
"The clinic?" she says, turning her head in the direction of the man's voice, who she assumes to be the doctor. "What clinic?"
"I haven't given you that many painkillers," the doctor says. "You're in Lynchwood."
She blinks slowly, her vision clearing up. That was right. The Sheriff, the train, the mercs...
She wipes the tears from her eyes with her left hand and looks down at her right arm. There's no trace of the gunshot wound in her tricep, but her hand is heavily bandaged.
"Sheriff Kadam demanded that I use some of my insta-healths on you. Don't get me wrong, you were in bad shape when she brought you in, but it wasn't anything I couldn't fix."
Gaige looks up at the doctor for the first time, and studies the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin, then the short black hair on his head.
"She must really want you back on your feet," he says, focusing his deep brown eyes on her.
She exhales slowly, then nods. "Thanks, Doctor, uh...?"
"Morvan."
"Morvan," she repeats, putting her right hand gingerly to her side, where the black-lipped woman had stomped on her ribs. She recoils slightly from the pressure, but the pain isn't nearly as intense as she thought it'd be: more from a nasty bruise rather than a compound fracture.
"Yeah, that bitch did a number on you," he says, watching her wince. "Like I said, you didn't need it, but I'm sure you're damn glad the Sheriff made me give you that insta-health. It should heal that broken hand in a couple days."
She brings her left hand up to touch her right cheek and winces involuntarily as she feels the sole of the woman's boot connecting with her jaw again. Her fingers twitch in their cast.
"I'll go let her know you're awake," he says, excusing himself from the room.
She takes the opportunity to whip the small mirror out of her metal arm and investigate her face. She smiles at her reflection – she's sure that bitch's boot must have left a nasty shiner on her, but the insta-health must have taken care of it. She snaps the mirror back into her arm.
A few slow, heavy bootfalls draw Gaige's eyes to the door. The Sheriff stands leaning against the doorway, arms folded over her chest, a smirk painted on her lips.
"You're looking better," she says, giving a quick upward tilt of her chin.
"Implying I ever look bad?" Gaige says, managing to get a smug grin to spread across her face.
The Sheriff chuckles and glances to the side, hooking a thumb into her pocket. "Take it you're feeling better, too."
Gaige nods slowly. If the Sheriff hadn't shown up when she did, the best case scenario is that she'd be dead. Worst case? Well... she stops herself from thinking about it. "I thought you kept the streets clean of people like them," she says, flashing a dry smirk up at the older woman before looking down at her own feet sticking up underneath the sheet at the far end of the bed.
"Don't get smart," the Sheriff says, slowly stepping beside the bed. "You couldn't expect a bounty like that would go unnoticed for long. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear you were trying to get yourself killed."
Gaige stays silent, her hands fidgeting in her lap. The Sheriff knew about the bounty, then. Of course she did. She could've just let her die in that train station. Hell, she could turn her in now, if she were so inclined. If she were interested in the reward.
The Sheriff continues, snapping Gaige from her thoughts. "But like I said, I can tell you still wanna do some good around here. You did fight back, after all. And I saw that robot of yours in action. That's an impressive piece of machinery."
Gaige finds herself sitting up straighter. She looks up eagerly at the Sheriff. "You saw DT?"
"Handled Burton pretty easily." The Sheriff rests her hands on the mattress and leans forward. "I imagine that bot might've saved your ass from Silvestri too, if she hadn't hit you with that ion blast. Though I gotta say, you held your own pretty well against her. Maybe she didn't stop to consider why your bounty is so damn high..."
Gaige closes her eyes, unable to ignore the throbbing in her right hand. "She was so strong."
"Cyborg augmentations," the Sheriff says. "I'm sure you saw her eye. She could've snapped your neck with a twitch of her wrist. Frankly, I'm surprised she didn't."
Frowning, Gaige opens her eyes to look up at the badge on the Sheriff's lapel. "Cyborg augmentations? How do you know that, did you tangle with her before?"
The Sheriff arches her left brow. "Who do you think gave her that scar?"
Gaige focuses on the Sheriff's orange eyes for a moment. "You killed her."
Without missing a beat, the Sheriff says, "I saw her about to kill an unarmed civilian. I took action."
The unexpected conviction in the Sheriff's eyes gives Gaige pause. She looks back down at the foot of the bed and chews on her bottom lip.
"I'm not gonna lie to you." The Sheriff rests her elbow on the bed, leaning in to talk more quietly into Gaige's ear. "I've seen what you can do. It's a rare pleasure to see my officers doing their job around here, and I think you could do a lot of good for this town. Especially with that robot of yours. There are some real pieces of shit out there. Especially on this planet."
Gaige lies back and stares up at the ceiling. Reassuring as the praise is, she knows what kind of person the Sheriff is.
...or, at least, she knows what kind of person the others told her the Sheriff is. The woman did just save her life, after all.
And at least she was smart enough to recognize a damn fine engineer when she saw one.
"The Vault Hunters let you go," the Sheriff says, "and that's their loss. It's not that I think I could use somebody like you by my side. I want you by my side."
Closing her eyes, Gaige does her best to fight off the smile threatening to play across her lips.
"I'll understand if you get your ass out of town as soon as you're out of that bed. But..." The Sheriff straightens up and pats her on the shoulder. "Think about it. Hmm?"
The Sheriff starts to walk out of the room, but Gaige speaks up, stopping her at the doorway.
"Sheriff Kadam?"
The older woman steps back into the doorway, her left eyebrow raised. Gaige looks into her eyes and clears her throat.
"Thank-... thank you."
The Sheriff smirks. "Maybe you'll pay me back someday," she says, before walking out.
Lying back against the stiff mattress, Gaige laces her fingers together and puts her hands on the back of her head. She stares up at the flickering light above her bed, at the crack in the ceiling, lost deep in thought.
Back when she lived on Eden-5, she would've laughed at the thought. But now, seeing the way the bandits – the former family men, workers, and scientists, as Tannis called them – turned on each other, seeing how indiscriminately the Vault Hunters killed in their own interests, seeing how Hyperion had either kept civilians living in fear or imprisoned and tortured them, she finds herself wondering if the Sheriff has a point.
Her hand fully healed, Gaige buttons up her denim vest and sits down on her foot locker at the end of her bed.
Well, not her bed, just the one in her room in the Lynchwood motel.
She picks up one of her sneakers and is about to put it on when the glint of gold on its side catches her eye. She brings it up to her lap and looks at the Vault symbol decal on the ankle.
It has been four days since she left Sanctuary. The concerned messages were starting to pile up. Maya, Moxxi, Axton, Lilith, Brick, Mordecai, Zero had all left her messages. Hell, even Marcus and Claptrap had contacted her. She's sure Marcus is only worried about the impact her not bringing in her usual haul of guns might have on his sales, and who the hell knew what Claptrap wanted.
As much as it pains her, she knows it's easiest to cut contact completely. Even if she'd grown to call that old group her friends, she knows she can't be a part of what they were doing anymore.
No, not even that. It's not that she can't be a part of it. She won't.
She slips her shoes on and stares down at her foot locker. After a moment, she lets out an exasperated sigh and kicks it.
She was ready to run again. She was so close. Grab the next train out of town and find another interstellar shuttle that could take her to some other remote world. But eight-hundred twenty billion dollars is a lot of money. How long could she expect to run with that price on her head? How long until she ran into another Silvestri?
Gaige looks at herself in the full-length mirror hanging on the closet door.
She couldn't keep running. Running is no way to live. For better or worse, she's learned how to survive on Pandora.
Maybe she owed the Sheriff a chance. Maybe she owed it to herself.