AUTHOR'S NOTE

Been a while, huh?

Yeah, so, sorry for leaving you guys on that massive cliffhanger for two years. I know there's no excuse for that, but I'm going to give you all one anyway. So I had the final chapter about ninety percent done on a notepad file. I noticed my laptop was acting a bit slower than usual, so I did a factory reset to clean up the hard drive. I was one hundred percent certain that I had saved that chapter on my SSD. Turns out I didn't, so I lost roughly three thousand words. Whoops! After that happened, I pretty much lost all motivation to continue writing the story. But I recently got a new PC, and I decided to play Borderlands 3 again. I had forgotten how dog-piss that game's story was. Watching Maya get spanked and ashed on Prometheus reminded me of that one story I wrote like two years ago and how I totally dropped the ball. So here I am, rewriting that story.

For those of you who haven't read this story yet, I started writing this story about two weeks after the BL3 launch day. If you recall, Axton was not in the game at all back then, except for like a skin on Moze's Titanfall ripoff suit. We did not know what Axton had been doing the whole time, so I took it upon myself to explore the idea. Canonically now he's running like a stupid game show thing with Salvador, but that's dumb and sucks and wasn't around when I started writing, and I am not going to put that stupid shit in this story. Arms race bad.

Good news, though. If you're reading this, that means that I have completely re-written every chapter in the story AND put up the final chapter. After I went back and re-read it, I realized that I'm a much better writer now than I was then, so I went back and cut some stuff here, changed a bit there, and improved my prose in general. So go back and reread it! NOW!

But seriously, thank you for coming back and giving this story a second chance. I owe it to you all to finish what I started. As always, reviews and critiques and PMs are more than welcome.

Regards,

organicorbust

The building was rough and worn-down, full of seedy customers and cheap booze. The bar was dirty and unpolished. The air was filled with the pungent odor of sweat and cigarette smoke. There was a fine layer of dirt and cigarette ash on the floor, accumulated over time from the boots of its patrons. The bartender wasn't much cleaner. He looked over at Axton from behind a bushy brown mustache and the commando nodded. The bartender, a portly man suffering from below-average height and male-pattern baldness, slid Axton another dirty mug of perhaps the worst tasting beer Axton had ever tried. But it was something, he thought.

"After that, you're done. Finish the drink and get the hell out." said the barman, and Axton said nothing. He hated this bar. He hated the way it looked, the way it smelled, the way the beer tasted. But it wasn't far from the starport, and he had a job lined up. The pay wasn't good, and it didn't sound exciting to him at all. He was supposed to be guarding a shipment of Vladof guns with a few other no-name goons, and he dreaded it. But it was money, and money was what Axton needed. After the death of Hector, he and the others had gone their own way. Salvador and Krieg stayed behind on Pandora with the Raiders. Zer0 was a bodyguard to some bigwig, last Axton heard, and Gaige was making a killing selling her bionic digistruct tech. As for Axton, he stayed in the business. For the first few years he'd been hunting bandits and pirates across the borderworlds, and had done a few interviews and marketing gigs on the side to make some extra cash, but those had dried up after awhile. His jobs got smaller and smaller, his wallet slimmer and slimmer, as the Hyperion Six slowly faded from the limelight. Maya was the only one of them to go back home. She'd returned to Athenas to act as its protector, and the last time he had seen her, she seemed happy. She was part of the reason he was here, in this run-down bar, choking down beer and memories. Thinking about her always reminded him of a movie he'd seen so long ago.

He remembered watching the grainy footage on Jubael III, projected up onto a dirty bedsheet by a modified Echo his unit had scrambled together. The movie's plot was simple, which was why they picked it. Guy meets girl, girl gets killed, guy takes revenge on the guys who killed girl for the rest of the film. He didn't really like the movie, Axtod remembered. He thought it was too cheesy. They were elite commandos, soldiers deployed to deal with serious threats to the Dahl corporation every day. On-screen gunplay wasn't very exciting to a man who faced real and constant danger at almost every waking moment. But every time he thought of Maya, he thought of that cheesy movie. He was the guy, she was the girl, but there wasn't anybody for him to get revenge on.

It had been a year since the Calypsos had tried to become gods, a year since the Vault Thieves had stopped them, a year since Maya had died. At first he didn't believe it. He'd seen the broadcast, but he wouldn't believe, couldn't believe, she was gone. She was a Siren. A warrior goddess. She was the greatest of the warriors who'd killed Jack. She wasn't as sneaky as Zer0, not as gung-ho as Salvador, not as spunky as Gaige, and definitely not as bloodthirsty as Krieg, but when the Vault Hunters sparred, it was usually Maya who won, and she never had to use her powers. Of course she wasn't dead, he thought. How could some half-Siren psycho kid kill one of the most powerful women in the galaxy?

He'd looked for her for six months before he realized she was really gone. He went to every planet he could think of, every place she'd ever mentioned, just in case she had somehow miraculously survived. There was a place on Athenas she had told him about once, a tomb for Sirens. He went there to look, and as his eyes scanned the graves of a dozen dead Sirens, he saw her name and an empty grave, and he realized that she was truly gone. She was gone, and the only thing left he had of her was a tattoo on his arm, a mark of a fist clutching a ball of energy.

He set his empty glass down on the bar and ran a hand through greasy, unkempt hair. He couldn't even recognize himself in the mirror anymore. He had a rat's nest of a beard, long hair that touched his neck. Before her death, he never would have allowed that. Something from his Dahl days, some vestige of military discipline, wouldn't let him. Now, staring into the grimy reflection the beer glass offered him, he just looked pathetic.

Then his Echo dinged as it received a message.

"Who the hell is Brother Mendel?" Axton muttered aloud.

"Erm, hello?" came a voice through his Echo. "I am Brother Mendel, of the Order of the Impending Storm. I knew your, hmm, friend, Maya. I recently discovered this message hidden in one of the Order's archives here on Athenas. It was, hmm, directed to you."

The monk had hardly finished his message before Axton was up and out of the bar. He remembered the last time he heard Maya's voice, a few months before the Calypsos had come into power. He had been in-system, hunting a spacefaring pirate warlord who'd hijacked a Tediore gunship, but had decided to make a pit-stop on Athenas to see her again. She had given him a tour of the planet while they reminisced about the good old days on Pandora. It was raining and cold out here, but he didn't care. His boots crunched on the wet gravel path and he found an awning to lean under, protecting his Echo unit from the rain. He looked at the device, seeing an attached file that the monk had sent him. He went to tap on it and noticed his finger was shaking. Somehow he found the nerve to open the message.

"Hey, Ax. Remember me?" he heard her say. "If you're getting this message, it means I'm not around anymore. Maybe you knew already, maybe you didn't, it doesn't matter...I figured I needed to do this. It's not weird that I'm doing this, right? I mean, I'm sure you've done the same thing. The whole 'message from beyond the grave' thing. I know Gaige did. I heard her recording some the first night at Sanctuary. Not sure about the others, though. Can you imagine Zer0's? Maybe he'd finally tell us what his whole deal is." He heard her sigh over the message. "Anyway...right now, I'm watching your piece-of-crap ship take off from Bluesong Spaceport, out to find some pirate nutjob, and it makes me wonder when we'll see each other again. I hope we do, but if we don't...I wanted to say thank you, Ax. For being the best friend I've ever had. I really appreciated every second I spent with you."

Axton suddenly realized his throat was dry. His eyes were misty, and when he pressed his hand to his cheek, his fingers came away wet.

"It's been lonely up here on Athenas. I have Ava, and I have the monks, but...I miss it. Pandora, I mean. The bandits, the skags, even Hyperion. All this...'enlightenment' stuff, it's just not comparable. I miss the Raiders. I miss Sanctuary, I miss the old gang. I miss you, Ax, and I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this until after I was gone."

He heard her voice waver a little bit. This message was just as hard for her to write as it was for him to hear.

"Try not to take this too hard, alright? I don't want you to feel bad. And if anybody asks...I went out in a blaze of glory. Big explosions, tons of dead bad guys, that sort of thing."

He tried not to think about how she would react if she saw him now. He saw his reflection in a nearby puddle of rainwater. He doubted she'd even recognize him anymore. The message continued.

"I guess I better get going. It's late. Can't have the rest of the monks thinking I broke my vow of chastity." She laughed a bit. "I may be gone, but don't feel too bad. I'm still watching your back, from wherever I am. You know what they say. Sirens never die."

There was a few seconds of silence in the message. She was trying to summon up the strength to end the recording.

"Goodbye, Ax." she said as the message ended.

Slumped against the wall of some ammo shop, in the middle of the night, with rain falling all around him as hot tears stung his cheeks, he looked nothing like the hero he once was. He sobbed once, then wiped his eyes. He swallowed, fighting back the urge to weep. But her last words to him had brought back some strange memory that he'd long since forgotten.

Sirens never die, he heard again in his mind.

He remembered those same words from his childhood back on Hieronymous, from a story that parents told to get excited children to go to sleep. A story about a Siren queen who used an Eridian device to come back from the dead. He hadn't thought about it in years. But...he'd seen enough insanity in the galaxy. Extradimensional monsters, ancient godlike alien civilizations...compared to sealing away things like the Destroyer, coming back from the dead would be easy. He put away his Echo, wiping his face off and stepping out into the rain.

He would bring her back. He had to.

The next morning, the security guard at Altan IV spaceport stared at Axton, his jaw dropped and arms limp as his side.

"Holy shit! You...you're Axton! You killed Handsome Jack!" the guard said.

Axton looked at him and smiled.

"Yeah. I did." he said. "Got any old ships I can borrow? I need to go somewhere. Got an old friend I need to see." Axton replied.

Twenty minutes later, Axton the Commando, Hero of Pandora, blasted out of the spaceport's holding garage, admiring himself in the reflection of the ship's window, his hands on the controls and a Dahl assault rifle at his side. He ran a hand over his clean-shaven face, smiling as he passed a blue nebula. He could almost see her in it, smiling back at him.

"I'm comin' for ya, gorgeous. See you soon." he said to himself.