Chapter 23
Angel
Jack had told Angel she would not be involved in his quest for the Elpis Vault. Having been forced to reveal a little more about the Control Core to his superiors, Jack felt that there were too many eyes on him now, and that meant too many eyes on Control Core Angel.
She had to be good.
She had to be quiet.
She had to be bored senseless.
Only two of those statements needed to be true, however, when one was a Siren with infinite digital eyes across the galaxy. So, she silently watched the play perform across Elpis, a familiar scene in an unfamiliar setting — four Vault Hunters moonwalking across the silvery dust of Elpis in search of a Vault for her father. She was chuckling as she watched the Claptrap unit soar through the air on a jump panel when an alert flashed across the network — the door to the Core was opening.
Angel hurriedly returned to her physical body in time to see her father tear into the room. Everything was off about him: his face was pale, eyes wide in fear. Disconcertingly, however, he was smiling.
"W-what happened?" Angel asked as he stumbled into the room. Jack just shook his head, swallowed, and cleared his throat.
"Get to Concordia," he ordered. "Jump the…the Merriff's network."
Jack spat the name like poison, but Angel noticed how his eyes sparked up at the mention of the Merriff. Angel vaguely knew the man — he used to work here on Helios but had since been outposted to Elpis as part of Hyperion's growing interest in the Vaults. Or, more accurately, as part of Jack's growing interest in the Vaults and his strengthening influence over Hyperion.
"Um, o-okay, yeah. What am I doing?" Angel stepped back from the force-field, markings on her arms glowing as she began to search for the Merriff's network.
"I need you to keep an eye on things. Be a silent acting Merriff on Concordia. Just…keep everything ticking over for those nice people, m'kay darling?"
"Sure, I can do that. But…where's the M—"
Angel stopped mid-sentence as she loaded into one of the security cameras in the Merriff's office. The lavish room held a gorgeous carved desk, a glittering aquarium wall…and a deep red pool inching out from behind the Merriff's desk.
Angel yelped and recoiled, losing control of her ability momentarily and falling back into her physical form. The shock of it reverberated through her body, bringing her to her knees.
"Angel?! Sweetheart, what's wrong?" Jack's voice was taut with concern, all urgency for the task at hand disappearing in his words. In the corner of her eye, she could just about make out her father crouching near the force-field. "Angel?"
"Th-the-the Merriff, he's…he's…" Angel tried to talk around the lump in her throat. "S-someone…"
"Oh…oh yeah, sorry, I shoulda told you," Jack relaxed, straightening up again. "Turns out that useless, ungrateful pile of jiggling idiot sold us out to Dahl's old war dog. Y'know, the one trying to blow up the moon. Did I fill you in on that bit? Yeah so anyway, I confronted the dumb bastard about it, I forgave him and you know what he did? As soon as I turned my back, he shot at me! He tried to kill me, Angel!"
He wouldn't… Angel's brain tried to reassure her numbly. My father wouldn't actually…kill someone…
"S-so did…did Wilhelm…?" Angel stammered. Surely it was his mercenary Vault Hunter, right?
"…No. No, er…I shot him," her father admittedly matter-of-factly. "He shot me first, Angel! He was trying to kill me! After I forgave him for betraying me! What was I supposed to do, forgive him again? Twice in a row, and expect he won't try and kill me a third time? It was self-defence!"
"Oh," was all Angel could manage. "Oh. R-right. Okay. Well. I'm gonna just…go check on…Concordia now…"
"Wait-wait-wait, you think I shoulda let him live?" Jack demanded, irritation fraying his tone. "I did! And he thanked me by shooting at me! I nearly died!"
"I know. I get it."
Angel couldn't look at him. She couldn't confront this awful truth. So, for now, she ran from it. She ran up through the stars, away from the Control Core, away from Pandora, and away from her father…
Angel spent as much time away from the Control Core as she could. In truth, watching the Vault Hunters on Elpis had become one of the highlights of her day. It was almost like living. It was almost like being able to run from her wretched existence, and all the awful things swirling around her back at the Control Core.
"Angel? What are you doing?" Jack's voice crackled over the network. He never said hello anymore. Just what are you doing? It was one of the few things she couldn't entirely hold against her father. He had always been a little bit paranoid by nature, his heightened nerves firing at every small threat. But just as Angel had feared, this second Vault mission had been as bad of an idea as the first.
Perhaps worse.
What had happened between the Merriff and Jack had only served to confirm her father's paranoia to him. And no one would be able to convince him otherwise.
"Just…Merriffing," Angel lied, hopping down from the network to her own eyes once more. Jack was scowling at her, distrusting her along with everyone else now.
Once, she had dreamed of closing the painful chasm between them. She had thought she could heal that rift, and snatch Jack back from the edge. To be a silent hero and save him from this fall he could not see before him. But now, the distance between them had never felt wider. Jack always thought he was climbing upwards and refused to realise his world had turned upside-down the day Megan had died, changing his course entirely.
Jack's arms were folded, his weight on one leg as he considered Angel for a moment.
"Well, less Merriffing for now. I need your thoughts on something."
Jack stooped down and pulled a DigiPad from his bag, tapping the screen to life. After a few swipes and presses, the force-field around Angel dulled. Jack jerked his head back, a silent beckon for Angel to try and move forward.
Gingerly, she took a single step, arm outstretched. As her fingers came closer, the light brightened — as ever, the force-field pressed against her fingers as a solid wall. Her interest in its change deflated then, until her father stepped forward. He swiped his bag up as he walked through the shimmering field, and, for the first time in years, Jack was standing next to his daughter.
He lifted the DigiPad up and shook it.
"Biometric scanner! Lets anyone with one very specific genetic make up bypass the forcefield," he smiled, setting the DigiPad back into his bag. He rifled through its contents, leaving Angel to glare daggers at the force-field. When he straightened up again, he was holding a small purple shard in his palm.
Eridium, Angel told herself, recognising the alien substance.
"After we opened the Vault, this little rarity became a helluva lot less rare. Veins of it have been cropping up all over Pandora," Jack said, tossing the crystal up and catching it again. "Coupla whispers to my favourite shareholders and Hyperion is finally looking at the planet and has started mining up this stuff. Refining it, using it, selling it, and raking it in. But…I just had a little run-in with our friend Lilith on Elpis. Remember her? Siren we used to find the first Vault?"
"Yeah…?" Angel said, flicking her gaze from the Eridium in her father's hand up to his face.
"Turns out? I was right. Big shock," Jack drawled with a smirk. "Eridium and Sirens are connected. She's been scrounging up this stuff herself. This stuff is crazy powerful, like pure energy for a Siren. Honestly, some of the nerds in the lab are even saying it's like a living entity."
Angel eyed the crystal nervously, wrapping one arm around her torso and stepping back.
"I…can't control my power enough as it is," Angel said. "I don't think I need a burst of energy…"
Jack recoiled, insult shattering his relaxed expression.
"Yo, what the hell Angel? I'm not tryin' to dope you up, what kind of father would that make me?" he retorted. "Nah nah, you got it all wrong. I'm not asking you to snort it, jeezus…I'm wondering if you feel anything from it. Y'know. Vault-wise, and Siren-power whispers or instinctive know-how or something?"
He held the crystal out again, and Angel backed away again. This time, she felt irritation boiling up from her stomach, twisting her face into anger. Yet again, it was all about connecting it all to his precious Vaults. Any interest he took in the Sirens was not for her.
The crystal's light brightened just a little. The air felt heavier, as though electricity began to dance over Angel's skin. Her eyes were drawn back to the Eridium, pulled by some unseen call. Something crackled in her blood, emboldening her.
"That's…all it ever is to you," Angel muttered, the sudden breath of energy building in her limbs, making them itch to strike out and be free. The Eridium grew brighter, though if Jack saw it, he didn't react. Angel's voice rose, and she struck out one arm to slap the Eridium from her father's hand. "All about Vaults and never about letting me out!"
The moment the Eridium touched her skin it burned impossibly bright, shattering into dust. The particles settled over her skin, and the markings on her arm seared, silvery-light mixing with a purple hue.
Jack fell backwards with a yelp, half-drowned out by Angel's own scream: energy flooded her thin frame, tearing through her limbs and contracting every muscle, every fibre in her body. It erupted over her vision, a momentary burst of a memory that was not her own — a woman, a Siren, a million dead bodies around her, Eridians she realised, not knowing how she knew those fallen forms were the ancient race. Energy bursting from the Siren in the vision, a machine, a mantle of purple crystal encasing a writhing monster, Eridium forming from the very life force of a civilisation…
She had nowhere to direct this impossible surge of energy. It rattled her bones, shredded her muscles, scalded her blood. In her panic, Angel looked up, up to the stars, the network all around. She shoved everything upwards, pouring the Eridium's energy through Hyperion's network. It blasted outwards, activating every system, every camera, every computer, every turret, every satellite, just for a second.
Then…the energy burned away. The tiny shard fizzled from her body, and Angel collapsed to the ground.
"A-Angel?"
Angel was vaguely aware of arms pulling her up from the floor, cradling her. Her brain swam, exhausted and staggered, confused and lost. Where was she? Here, or out across every machine on Pandora?
She let her head tilt to the side, resting against her father's chest.
Cigarettes and amber. Her handful of happy memories smelt like that too.
Somewhere far away, Angel could just make out the sound of her father's ECHO-device.
"Sir! Sir, the Control Core Angel has malfunctioned! The energy surge…sir, six people…"
Something shifted near Angel's leg, the voice drew a little closer. "The…the turrets sparked up for a second and…sir, six people are d—"
"It'll be seven if you don't shut up and reset the damn relays!" Jack barked down the ECHO-device, voice uncomfortable loud against her ear. "Shut down the network for 30 minutes. If Tassiter asks, Dahl's crippled it, or ask him very nicely to touch his toes so you can ram the nearest clipboard sideways up his shrivelled ass!"
"But sir, the Core is unsta—"
"It'll be stable! Give me 30 minutes, Moorin, 30 goddamn minutes, so I can do what you couldn't do in 30 years, got it?!"
"…Sir."
Physically, Angel was fine. The Eridium had not done any lasting damage to her body. Everything within her genetic make up appeared to be designed to draw out and channel the immense energy trapped within Eridium crystals.
But those six people echoed in her mind, faceless and nameless.
More blood on her hands. For the first time in a long time, Angel had no desire to escape the Control Core. For the first time ever, she wondered if her father's decision to place her there had been right after all. If Pandora was now rich with Eridium, maybe she was safer in here.
Not that she could discuss it with Jack right now. Angel was floating in his personal computer, watching as her furious father tore around his office, uprooting furniture and flinging it at windows, other furniture, or employees who hadn't been smart enough to leave the room when their manager started rearranging his office with gusto.
"Stupid, piece of shit, back-stabbing, scum-sucking pissing BANDITS!" Jack screamed, kicking a chair at the last employee left in the room. They yelped and turned tail, no doubt hoping being the last one brave enough to stick around might resonate with Jack.
"Sir?" Angel called out. It was a welcome distraction from her own turmoil if nothing else. "What's happened?"
"What's happened? I'll tell ya what's happened," Jack growled, storming around the desk. He slammed both hands on the table, leering down over his computer screen. His left eye was twitching, lip curled and teeth bared. "My slimy ex-girlfriend just tried to kill me!"
Angel blinked. Not that she had been very invested in her father's search for true love when it came to Moxxi, but he hadn't mentioned that they'd broken up. She must have broken up with him then. She idly wondered how long ago that had happened then.
Jack continued to rage about Moxxi's betrayal: "She was supposed to be helping me, and she tried to freaking kill me! Her and those dumbass Vault Hunters from before! After all I did for them! I saved their ungrateful asses from being lasered off the surface of the moon, and how do they repay me? They try and chuck me into a blackhole and destroy my freaking Vault treasure! The Destroyer's Eye, rrrrngh! The things I coulda done with that!"
Jack swiped across the desk, knocking what little was left there onto the floor. Breathing heavily, he rounded on the computer, pointing at Angel.
"Go to Concordia. I want you to vent the freaking oxygen from that damn hub! I wanna see Moxxi's pretty lips turn blue!"
"Everyone's lips would turn blue," Angel reasoned.
"I don't care, fricking kill her before she can try again, dammit!" Jack struck down on the desk with a balled fist, almost frothing from the mouth. "Ya let your enemies live, and they shoot you in the back, Angel! Or they try and kick you back-first into a black-freaking-hole!"
"…Moxxi's not on Concordia," Angel lied. She watched through the security cameras as the woman darted about her bar, packing her belongings into boxes. Smart woman — she knew she hadn't succeeded in killing Jack, and clearly realised that something had broken the man's last few restraints. "She's moved on, Jack."
"Rrrrngh, for the love of—! Don't these morons see what I'm trying to do here?! I'm standing here saying, 'Hey, let's make a nice place', and they're laughing and pouring freaking gasoline all over the damn place and flicking matches at it! Why?! What is wrong with these people?!" Jack continued, flopping down in his chair. He glared off to the side, one finger curling around his chin.
"So…what now?" Angel asked. She hoped Jack would give up. He had lost his 'treasure' from the Vault, the Vault he had been so sure the planet wanted him to find. The Vault that would help him build paradise. It was gone, so surely they could go back to—
"We open the Vault on Elpis, obviously," Jack snapped at her, casting a sideward glance at the monitor. "It's gotta have something I can use instead. This can't all have been for nothing. Pandora chose me to save it, and I'm gonna freakin' save it, Angel. I just don't get why it's not helping me out a bit here. Why lead me to the Vault on Pandora if that was all gonna be for nothing? There's gotta be a reason it's all led here…"
Angel had heard enough.
She crashed out of the network and back into her lonely form inside the Control Core. Tears were already pouring down her face before her consciousness snapped back into her body. She staggered to her feet, calling her powers to her side with careless abandon. Her rage set every VR system sparking to life too quickly, heating up and spluttering with the demand of the Siren.
Lights danced, masking the metal walls with a haphazard recreation of Angel's family home. The walls were not straight, but it didn't matter. The colours of the furniture were a little off, but she didn't care. The size of the living room was all wrong, the kitchen far too small, but none of it mattered.
Angel rounded on the digital ghost she knew would be standing in the living room.
"What about me?!" She yelled at the stunned face of her father's virtual copy, hitting her hands against her chest in anguish. "What about me, goddammit?! You said you'd help me!"
Angel's voice was torn to ribbons by her grief, her frustration, her pain. Of course, the digital apparition of her father could do nothing. Not without her command. It just stood before her, an expression of commanded heartbreak to try and make Angel feel better.
It didn't.
It never made her feel better.
None of this make-believe made her feel better.
"Angel…" the digital Jack started to speak, stepping forward to embrace her as some small part of her mind had asked. Angel backed away, shaking her head.
"No! No, I can't…this isn't real. This isn't you anymore. You said you'd find a way to let me out of here! S-screw the Vaults! Screw Hyperion! I'm your daughter! Help me!"
Angel's whole body wracked with grief, doubling over as she screamed the final two words of her outburst. Her eyes scrunched shut, her hands balled into fist, and she screamed. She screamed until her throat burned, screamed until the memories shattered around her. She screamed until it all went away, the walls crumbling to digits and code, the digital world she had created fracturing and splintering to nothingness. The empty copy of her father glitched, contorted violently, then abruptly disappeared as Angel tore it all down, deleting the sad haven she had built for herself.
Her emotions spluttering to an exhausted void, the Siren fell to her knees, great heaving sobs wracking her slender form.
Whether by sheer exhaustion or simple defeat, Angel found herself sleeping through the days that followed. Numb. Barely aware. Stumbling through the small window of waking hours afforded to her.
It was only after the cloud began to lift ever-so-slightly that she realised she had not seen or heard from her father. It was unlikely that he would have left her to sleep if he needed her power for anything.
Idle curiosity dragged her from her chair and up into the Hyperion network again. He wasn't in his office, so Angel moved across the stars to Elpis, searching across the scarred moon. There was no sign of him there either, though the satellite felt — odd. Hollow. As though something were missing, but Angel could not quite put her finger on what.
Confused, the Siren began to hop between the Elpis Vault Hunters' ECHO-devices. The shield-bearer was speaking to a blonde woman about the Vault, the monster within. Across with Claptrap, the tiny robot was saying absolutely nothing of use to anyone at all. Angel made her way to the gunslinger — she was sitting in the hub at Hyperion, Angel noted with some surprise, nursing a coffee. She didn't have to go far to find Wilhelm, as the hulking goliath of a man crashed down to sit by Nisha.
"Doctor says there's no lasting damage. 'Cept being half-blind. And the massive brand on his face, that's a keeper," Wilhelm gruffed. "The psychiatrist disagreed. So, Jackie's tryna strangle him."
Nisha smirked, raising her coffee cup up in toast.
"Glad to hear it."
Doctor? Angel frowned, before gliding through the network to Helios' medical bay. The place brought back awful memories for her, and if she could, she would rather avoid the place. But despite everything, Jack was still her father, and he had been hurt in her absence.
She had to know what had happened.
Angel settled into one of the machines lining the first medical bay, glancing out the small monitor in search of Jack. She jumped to the next bay, then the next, until finally she found him. Angel gasped, her hands covering her mouth even though she knew no one could hear her.
Wilhelm had been right on all counts. Her father was half-in-half-out of bed, his face covered in swathes of bandages. They covered his left eye completely, and a large gauze was stretched awkwardly along his right eye, whatever wound was there having missed blinding him entirely by mere millimetres. Jack was currently attempting to twist out of the doctor's grip, frothing insults at the cowering psychiatrist who was lying on the floor, clutching his neck and dragging slow, ragged breaths into starved lungs.
"What the hell is this, huh? This jumped-up little shit-iot wants to go around saying I'm crazy? What, did Tassiter promise to give you a raise, you boot-licking, dirt-shitting worm!" Jack began fighting with the doctor, trying to get the other man to let go of him. "Let! Go! Of! Me! Asshole!"
"See?!" The psychiatrist stumbled to his feet, shaking hands smoothing over his black suit and loosening the tie Jack must have grabbed and tightened. "He's clearly not unscathed, doctor."
"You know, he's absolutely right," Jack said, his voice suddenly even-keeled as he stopped writhing under the doctor's pinned-down grip. "No no, he's totally right. I think…god, yeah, you know what? That th-thing in the Vault? I-I touched it, okay? I touched it and it was alien technology, I think it musta…musta done something to my head…" Jack began to crumble, sinking into the pillows and bring one trembling hand up to his face to tentatively graze over the bandages. His right eye welled with tears, and the doctor stepped back, relinquishing his grip on the sobbing man. Jack turned his tear-sparkled blue eye to the psychiatrist. "I-I'm so sorry. I don't know…I don't know why I did that…please…please help me."
Angel didn't realise until then that she was trembling. It was awful to see Jack like this, so vulnerable, so…broken. What had been in the Vault that had wounded him so badly?
The psychiatrist's face pulled with pinched irritation, though his pride seemed soothed by the other man's apology. He huffed through flared nostrils, then did a grand display of being the bigger, more professional man and approached Jack again.
"Alright, let's try again. Mister Bryant, as I was trying to say before you assaulted me, this is just a routine psychiatric examination that Hyp—gak!"
His words got stuck in his throat, thanks to Jack's hands crushing his windpipe and stopping their escape. The doctor lunged forward, trying to tear Jack off the psychiatrist, but it was too late — limbs flailed, shoes scuffling across the tiled floor as the poor man tried to wrest himself from Jack's grip, croaking gasps for air filled the room, and then — the psychiatrist's arms flopped to the side.
Jack smiled and let go, allowing the man's body to crash to the floor.
Shaking, the doctor backed away, inching towards the door.
"Say doc," Jack said, resting back on his pillows with a sigh. "Did I pass my psyche exam?"
"Wh-what?"
"My psssyyyche eeeexxaaammmuh," Jack drawled, saying the words slowly and casting an annoyed look at the doctor, as though he were painfully dull. "Did. I. Pass?" Jack brought his hands together, pushing the knuckles of his right hand till they popped, eyes still locked with the doctor.
"Y-y-yes. Yes, o-of course you did," the doctor whined, looking from the psychiatrist's fallen form to Jack and back again. "Um…yes. J-just er…r-r-rest up and…er…I'll be…right back!"
The doctor scrambled from the room then, falling over himself in a bid to put as much distance between Jack and his own throat. Jack rolled an eye, then hooked his legs over the edge of the bed to sit up. He kicked the dead man away to make space, then got to his feet with a groan.
"Moron…" he grumbled to himself, bare feet slapping over the stark white tiles as he made his way over to where his jacket was hanging on a hook on the wall. He fished his ECHO-device out of its pocket, and Angel made her move. She darted over to its screen, stopping Jack in his tracks. He jumped to see her, but just tilted his head to the side and asked: "What?"
"You just killed that guy! He was doing his job and you killed him!" Angel exclaimed, more confident for screen between them. "The Merriff, I get, but this? What's going on? What happened in the Vault, Jack?"
Jack was jabbing at the screen, sending loud thuds through Angel's ears.
"Get out of my ECHO-device, Angel, I gotta speak to Wilhelm," he growled, pacing back to his bed and nearly tripping over the psychiatrist on the way there. "That doctor's gonna make a bee-line for Tassiter. They're all the same."
He sat himself down on the edge of the bed, still scowling at the ECHO-device. Angel didn't budge and scowled right back.
"I'm not gonna let you do that," she said stubbornly. "What was in the Vault? What happened to your face? Was it like the Destroyer?"
Jack growled, chucking the ECHO-device to the side. It bounced on the mattress and landed in his tangled quilt, leaving Angel with a boring view of the clinical white ceiling.
"There was a…thing," he relented, and Angel could hear the mattress creak as Jack shifted his weight to lie down on it. He didn't retrieve the ECHO-device though, so Angel could only stay put and listen to him regale the events to her. "Another Vault symbol, floating in the air. Nothing else. No weapon, no nothing. Look, if I tell you all this, can I have my ECHO-device back?"
"…Yes," Angel lied. Jack huffed but continued.
"Good. Where was I? Oh, okay, yeah, floaty-rock thing. So, I went to pick it up and it — well, I don't know what it did, but I saw everything, Angel. Everything! There's another Vault on Pandora. I got it all wrong! Pandora wanted me to open the first Vault to let the Eridium out. It showed me I'm gonna need it for this Vault. And hooo boy, is this a Vault, sweetheart. This one? I already know what's inside it. And it's a weapon that can be controlled by whoever opens the Vault. It's exactly what I thought the first Vault was gonna be! A power I can control to make Pandora a better place! Y'know, it just…took me a bit of a scenic route.
"But it showed me so much more, Angel. It showed me how wrong I was. About paradise. About that mural."
Angel sceptically tugged on that tiny thread of hope, one that whispered of her father still being somewhat sane.
"You…were?"
"Yeah I was. I can admit it. See, I wanted to make Pandora a paradise and I thought that would solve all the problems. People would want to be good, wouldn't they, in paradise? BZZZT, wrong! Totally got it the wrong way round! See, I can't build paradise to fix Pandora's problems. I have to fix Pandora's problems to build paradise, see? Y'can't just build something awesome on top of something rotten. It'll collapse. Nah…see, Angel, I'm the hero. That means I have to make some difficult choices. Ones other people can't bear the burden of. Choices like…getting rid of the bad people in the world."
Angel's blood ran cold.
This…what Jack was talking about was…
"You mean mass-murder?" Angel retorted.
"Tch, gimme a break… the few to save the many, Angel! A tough choice! It's not one I wanna make, but obviously I can't get through to these bandits! I give 'em an inch and they take a mile to get a good long run-up to stab me in the back!" Jack yelled back, and a thump off to Angel's right told her he'd dropped a fist against the mattress in frustration. "Remember the Merriff? He was a bad person. I helped him build a nice life and look what he did. He chose to continue to be an asshole. People like him choose not to be compatible with a good society. So, it's up to me to create a good, strong foundation for a new Pandora to be built on. It can't have bad people in it, waiting to tear it all up."
"So, you're gonna decide who's good and who's bad?" Angel asked, starting to look through the Hyperion network. There had to be something. Anything to stop this madness.
"Oh, shut up! I'm not gonna be check-listing people against my own personal idea of good and bad. Like, yo, you like baloney, weirdo, off you go! No no, it's the obvious stuff. You destroy lives? Bad person. You got offered something better and chose to keep being an asshole? Bad person. That's why they're bad people, Angel — these people just want to laugh as they hurt everyone else and take what they want to make their own lives better, instead of working towards a better life for everyone.
"And good people? They're the sort of people who chose to be good even in hard times, like right now. Those are the salt of the earth and totally deserve a hero to save 'em and build 'em a paradise to live in. They're gonna be rewarded for being good people! People who choose to be scum and make a hard time harder, well, they're not comin' along. People liiiiiike…Tassiter! He's not worth saving, right? He's just as bad as any bandit, taking what he wants, not listening to people, just build his own life and not trying to progress anything. He's taking everything and doing nothing to help people."
Never before had Angel felt quite so trapped. There was nothing. Nothing in the whole network afforded to her to stop this chaos before it began. She dropped back down into the ECHO-device, her body numb with fear.
"I thought you wanted to save everyone?" she attempted to counter meekly.
"I did," Jack admitted, his voice steady. "But I understand everything now. I had it wrong. I can't save everyone. I want to, obviously. But that's not how the world works. It's not what I'm meant to do. I'm meant to save people who deserve it. Who deserve paradise. Think about it. What do you see when you go flyin' over Pandora, Angel? These slobbering bandits, do they deserve to live in paradise? After everything they've done, the people they've hurt?"
Angel wanted to point out the dead man at Jack's bedside, though she knew he would just ignore that logic. Instead, she opted for a different example. A person she hoped Jack still cared about.
"What about me?" she asked. "I…killed my mother. Am I a bad person too?"
The pressure of the silence that fell between them almost creaked with its own weight.
"…You're a good person, darling," Jack finally said in a hushed voice, something a little closer to the warm tone she used to hear so many years ago. "You didn't choose to do that. And you're working towards a better place for everyone. That's gotta count for something."
There it was. The shackle that would keep her working towards Jack's dream, working off a debt of guilt she never intended, spoken with words that masqueraded as forgiveness.
"Speaking of, we got work to do," Jack declared, sitting up in the bed and picking up the ECHO-device. His bandaged face came into view, a smirk tugging his lips. "Take a trip over to Hyperion power network on Eden-6 for me, would ya? I need you to do something for me."
A thought occurred to Angel in that moment. She wasn't sure if Jack had noticed when she had stopped calling him Dad. But she was sure of one thing now: what little was left of her dad had died in the Vault on Elpis.
And he wasn't going to save her anymore.