Rating: M
Warnings: Violence, some gore, and one Spanish curse word I think.

"Is it cold enough for you bandits yet?" A slurp of liquid sounds obscenely from Gaige's pocket and nearly everyone groans.

"Too early por ese mamao," Salvador grunts up from his guns. The man sleeps with them, I've noticed. Not sure if it's out of paranoia, but I guess I can't talk. Being parted from our buzz axe is like being parted from our arm. It's not gonna happen without some bloodshed and it wouldn't all be ours.

Maya murmurs an agreement as she checks her remaining ammo supply. She had been the first one up and I woke to the sight of her playing a recording quietly in front of the fireplace. The words were faint, but it sounded like her own voice until she deleted it with a sigh. Wanted to ask her what was on her mind. Maybe go out and hunt bullymongs together and get to know her better without the distractions of the team, but my other half just pricked each fingertip on the axe to check its edge. He'll want to kill again, and soon.

Maya glances up briefly from her gun."Sal, got a clip to spare?"

"Always," he tosses one over and she catches it easily over their heads.

Gaige impatiently hushes them to fish out her ECHO and turns the volume up. "Here I am… oh, and I don't mean to rub it in or anything –" the chuckle in his voice proved differently "– but here I am, sipping an amazing cup of hot cocoa right now and it breaks my heart thinking of you guys rubbing two sticks together out there to keep warm!"

Handsome Jack had constantly checked in yesterday like a lonely fussy mother and most have turned theirs off, all except Gaige who kept trying to track down his ECHO signature for 'pranking reasons'. While the thought of having a thousand pizzas delivered to the man might look like a small victory, knowing he could likely pay for it all doesn't sound all that satisfying. But this is Gaige, a teenager who chopped her arm off for a science project and I'm a shirtless mad man and no room to convince her otherwise.

Tell her not to forget the anchovies. "Let bile CHOKE HIS THROAT HOLE with the salty defeat of fish meats!"

"Fish meats?" Gaige flips open a panel on her arm and furrows her brows at me through the holographic screen that appears. That thing is like a Swiss army knife and I'm starting to think sawing off an arm for it wasn't such a bad idea after all. "Oh! No, sheesh, you'd think I was twelve or something if I just wanted to prank him with anchovy pizzas." She snorts a little laugh nonetheless as she swipes past a menu screen of her robot and taps out a few keys before hurriedly connecting it to her ECHO.

"So what are you gonna do if it works?" Axton yawns loudly as he ties up his boot laces. Earlier in the night, I resisted the temptation to hide one of his boots in the several mailboxes around town when I got up to piss. Regret it now, woulda been a laugh to see him stomp around on one foot in the snow looking for it after I'd tell him it's in the mail. All my idea; claiming insanity has its perks.

"Try to find out where he's broadcasting from for a start," Gaige doesn't look up from her screen, talking over Jack's ramblings. "If it works…" Gaige grins and the shimmering red of her screen throws her face in a devilish light. "... I'll subscribe him to some of the weirdest porncasts I know. Then I'll order pizzas. Allll of the anchovies!"

Kinky porn then pizza. Good to know some things don't change much past twelve. Zer0 seemed to find it just as amusing because something of a short laugh comes from his helmet and his faceplate flashes a bold symbol that looks suspiciously like tits.

"I'm curious now," Zer0 says as the symbols shift into a coy winkey face. Looks like he'd fixed whatever was making it glitch without their noticing. Unsurprising there, leaving a double would making slinking away easy. We've yet to see him eat. "Are you subscribed to them too? Promise I won't tell."

"Yeah, Gaige," Axton snickers. "Share with the group."

"I am a grown woman with many, many uh… appetites," Gaige says shamelessly with just a hint of a blush on her cheeks. "None I'll ever share with you." Her screen flashes after a few seconds and she slaps the panel down on her arm with a bite of annoyance. "Ugh, I keep getting rerouted! How is it that this guy can find us anywhere without leaving a trace?"

"Now you're changing the subject."

"Axton –"

"Being president of Hyperion helps," Maya points out, ignoring their banter. She had made it clear yesterday she didn't care for what Jack had to say and didn't agree with Gaige's insistence to harass him back via ECHO. "He's got the best security money can buy. You're wasting your time."

"You're right, I just..." Gaige slumps down on the threadbare sofa, dust puffing up all around her from the impact. "I just want to do something. Anything! He almost killed us all and I want to pay him back."

"Aren't we?" Salvador frowns up at her. "I thought we were going to join this Crimson Raiders thing."

When the town was finally free of danger, Hammerlock had invited them all for a chat in his cabin. He mentioned a small rebellion group settled up in an old Dahl mining town after they evacuated from Liar's Burg. For the past several years, their numbers had swelled and a whole community lives there now. Most were refugees that gathered there for protection after Handsome Jack labeled them bandits, destroying their homes and lives with a word. Others were remnants of the Crimson Lance abandoned by Atlas a few years back and now 'fight the good fight' as Hammerlock put it. They want freedom, they want the right to live without fear, they want their lives back.

A man in hell wants ice water but that don't mean he'll get it. Handsome Jack has the money and man power to cut all of them down and they're just six against the world. Revenge can only take you so far. Mysterious angels and funny robots be dammed; the choice is theirs. In the end, none of them made any promises other than sleeping on it and no one's brought up the subject again until now.

"I didn't come to this planet to be its savior," Maya says, her words slow and careful, but final. "I'll go to Sanctuary because that's my plan. If what I find there leads me to the Vault, then Handsome Jack can't stop me." If. So, Vault Hunting isn't what motivates her and I realize for the first time how little I know about her.

"And I didn't leave one army to join another," Axton nods. "But whatever's in the Vault could maybe float me a few years and I need the cash. I'm with her, this ain't my war."

"Oh, c'mon you guys!" Gaige stands, outwardly excited. "This is bigger than some Vault. Bigger than us! We could help save the planet. You heard Hammerlock, we're the only ones that faced Handsome Jack and lived. Don't you think we should at least try?"

"Yeah, I heard him," Axton snorts. "And by the sound of it, Jack's got whole armies with their sights set on these Crimson Raiders. Been in enough wars to know the smell when things turn sour and I dunno about you, but my grave won't read 'here lies Axton – he tried'."

"You can't know that unless we check it out," Gaige turns to Salvador and Zer0 for backup. "What do you guys think?"

"I came to hunt Vaults," Zer0 says evenly. "But Jack's the greater challenge. I am with you, Gaige."

Salvador just shrugs. "Eh, I just want to kill bad guys."

"You're quiet over there," Maya shoots me a look, her brows knit together in thought. "What do you want?"

If I could smile, I would. Leave it to her to want the opinion of a lunatic.

There's something dehumanizing about being in a roomful of people and every one of them thinks you're insane. You become this thing in the background; sometimes talked to, even talked about like a pet or someone who doesn't fully grasp English. The staff in the experimental facility treated all the prisoners that way and worse. The psycho in me either doesn't notice or doesn't care and I guess I can't blame them. They've probably killed dozens of the raving maniacs that roam Pandora without a second thought and having one among them is a hard thing to adapt to.

Before the train, nothing mattered but surviving one day at a time and tripping over the hurdles of my insanity. There was no plan, no set destination. Just blood and carnage until I stay down and rot. All I've ever done is kill in a weak excuse to kill the past without having to kill myself. The moment I saw Maya, something changed in me. In us. I feel the churning madness crashing against the walls of my mind like a constant twitch under my eye and he feels it too. Nothing will ever be the same again now that we've taken the first step on the road towards sanity.

I wanna tell her I don't want glory, or revenge, or money. I'm just a broken man who wants to be whole again. But I can't. Instead, I feel myself shrug. "I want the blood in my eyes and a FISTFUL of livers!"

"We'll pick some up on the way," Maya smiles briefly. "We all need to go to Sanctuary so we should worry about getting off this glacier first. We'll check out the Crimson Raiders from there and we'll see what happens."

Gaige lets out a frustrated sigh. "But Handsome Jack –"

"Will wait," Maya argues patiently. "You're no good to the rebellion here and Axton won't find directions to the Vault in the ice. For now, we all want the same thing. Let's take down this Captain Flynt guy and get a ship out of here. Who knows? Maybe I'll find what I'm looking for with the Crimson Raiders and they'll know where the Vault is too. We all win."

"And what are you looking for?" Gaige asks, no longer annoyed. It looks like she understood Maya's reasoning and grudgingly accepted it, even if she didn't agree.

"Answers."

"So that's a psycho, huh?" Maya murmurs softly as her sights land on one in the small cluster of shacks ahead of them. They had dropped down the side of the icy path and snuck around them not thirty feet away. The way the psycho stalks around reminds her of a caged animal; restlessly searching for a way out and hissing at any sudden noise. Mindless. Unaware. Maya drops her sights and thinks that Krieg is nothing like him.

Despite the mask and the blood thirsty ravings he screams in the heat of battle, there's a glimmer of awareness beneath the surface, she thinks. Calculating and drinking in everything said and done around him, weighing it all in his mind. There are moments when he looks at her she almost forgets about the chaos simmering there until he opens his mouth and reminds her. Even with these differences, the cynical part of her chalks it up as romanticizing it all since he had saved her life – twice – but she can't deny what she sees. No, he is different. Briefly, she wonders what he thinks about killing his psycho cousins.

She spares him a quick glance crouched next to her and finds him gripping his buzz axe tightly in one hand, focused on the several enemies ahead and impatient with their ambush approach. He seems to have felt her gaze because when he looks down at her and meets her eyes, there's a sense of restraint about him. Like a shaken up pop bottle and he's waiting for the command to fall from her lips before the chaos explodes around them. Having the power of a death sentence with a simple word is a discomforting thought. And yet... no point making him wait.

"The others will catch up," she says with a slow grin. They were sent to go scouting ahead of the team to gauge the strength of what they were going to face on their way to the ship while they escorted Claptrap, but she's getting impatient too. "Let's kill things."

Apparently, that's all he needed to hear because he spares her an appreciative hum of pleasure before vaulting the dumpster, slipping a stick of dynamite out from his pocket as he goes. "It's a meatpie, I SWEAR it's a meatpie!"

The psycho turns, confused. "Mommy? You've come home! YOU'VE COME HOME!"

Krieg starts to welcome the charging psycho with open arms until he lifts him by the throat and shoves a lit stick of dynamite down the front of his pants. "Don't touch it – YOU'LL GO BLIND!"

Maya ducks before the gore could explode across her face. A panicked scream followed by a wet splatter beats heavily against the dumpster a second later and as the return fire of the alerted bandits start to pepper the air, she's glad Krieg's on her side.

Yesterday while cleaning out Liar's Berg of the bandits infesting the town, she'd almost forgotten the carnage he leaves behind in his wake. When everyone works as a team, it's easy to tune out what they do. There's so much action going on all around her, it's all a blur. All she knows is the enemy under her aim and the warmth of her power surging through her fingertips as she pulls someone up into the air. Nothing else matters. Alone with just Krieg, it's like the train station all over again and she hasn't gotten used to standing unflinching under the spray of blood yet.

Stepping over the remains of what used to be human, Maya takes care not to think about what she's standing in and chides herself for expecting anything different. He's a psycho. It's what they do. Trying to fit him into a category of his own isn't going to change it. So suck it up, take aim, and fire. And so she does. A confused bandit rushes out of the shack to her right and Maya doesn't give him the chance to pull out his gun. He's the first to go down before she phaselocks another trying to flank Krieg as he kicks someone down to cleave their head wide open.

In training, combat felt like a graceful dance, her heartbeat a steady tempo as she counts the bullets left in her clip like dance steps. Testing the limits of her power and feeling the weight of a gun in her hands was the only kind of comfort she ever had in the Abbey. Here and now, she doesn't have the luxury of shooting blanks and it's hard to get that old feeling back. There's no thought. No dance. She's nothing but the gun in her hands that determines whether she lives or takes a bullet to the eye. The tempo turns into a rapid beating in her throat as she lines up her shot and her life hinges on the moment she fires. Everything is chaos and it's hard to know how well her aim is or how much it's going to kick back into her shoulder and she can't remember how many shots she's fired until the hollow click of the chamber tells her she's empty and corpses litter the floor.

Real combat isn't graceful and it's far from comforting. It's something different and raw and she's not all sure what she's feeling, but when she takes in a ragged breath and realizes she's still standing, it's hard to dislike it. Krieg looks up from prying his buzz axe out of a bandit's ribcage with that same sheepish sort of look to his eye she remembers from the train station, and somehow she thinks this new feeling might be freedom. The slight shock of exploding bone fragments and flesh is still there, but it's easier to deal with now that it's over.

"We make a good team," she says when she finds her breath. "But if you're going to blow someone in half, give me some warning. It's not easy washing out blood stains."

"But you look so shiny in red," Krieg chuckles and reaches out to rub a broad finger through a smear of blood on her bare shoulder.

Maya bites her lip, unsure if she should feel flattered about looking good covered in blood. "I think it's more your color."

And it's true, she thinks. Gore suits him. With all the distractions of the rest of the team and the non-stop conflict they've been through since they met, this is the fist time she's seriously looked at him. Blood stains up his forearms and splatters across his chest and mask in casual flicks. Several large scars pucker the skin over his tightly muscled body, some from bullets or blades, and she catches herself wondering what he looks like under the mask. The most she's seen is the line of his jaw and bottom lip when he pried it up just enough this morning to eat their meager breakfast.

"Your scars," she points out and reloads her gun to have something to do with her hands. Whatever he's hiding under the mask, it's not her place to ask so this will have to do. Maya knows next to nothing about the man so it's a good place to start. "How did you get them?"

"My body was a canvas and his scalpel was the brush and he. Was. An ARTIST!" Krieg perhaps unconsciously soothes a particularly large scar across his chest, smearing the fresh blood over it like it's wounded anew. "We were best friends."

A part of her can't tell if this friend of his is an imagined symptom of his psychosis or if what he's implying is real, but the idea of either them being true is a scary thought. "Where's your friend now?"

"Showed him I can finger paint too," he says quietly after a moment and there was a strange sort of innocence to the word choice that made it all the more disturbing.

Maya tries to force herself to picture it then: Krieg crouched over a faceless body, wrist deep in gore and using all the different shades of blood as an artists palette. She needs to get used to this image in all of its bare details because this is what he is. Suddenly, the unwelcome image of Sophis' head snapping back when the bullet bore into his skull invades her thoughts and she shivers against the cold.

"Good," she says, and she means it. Real or imagined, everyone deserves their freedom.

Their little dysfunctional family killed well together. It took them most of the day to murder a path towards the good captain's ship, but no one caught a bullet in the teeth for their efforts and all the captain's pyrotechnics and bullets couldn't stop Krieg from opening his throat. He claimed the captain's gun then, the first he's held in a long time, and thought to drop it aside until the commando made an offhand remark about how it wouldn't be a good idea to give the psycho a fire weapon on a boat.

"Might go rakkshit crazy and light himself on fire," he had said and the Siren gave him a withering look. "C'mon, I ain't trying to be the bad guy here. When the boat goes up in flames and we're dog paddling to the mainland, don't say I didn't warn ya."

"Then we'll use that inflated head of yours as a flotation device," the teenager elbowed him playfully with a laugh. "We'll be fine, Ax."

"Your FLESHY EARS will be my steering wheel," Krieg agreed and kept the gun on the off-chance he'll do just that. Pretty boy kept wanting to make a psycho out of him, the cold was making his nipples sore, and a fire might be exactly what he needs to warm up.

And so, he started the fifteen hour boat ride to the mainland meticulously taking apart the gun. It wasn't bad for a pistol, although he thinks a shotgun would be more his flavor since nothing says 'head shot' like exploding brain matter. The only good part was the Dahl barrel it was scavenged from, but the elemental tech should be simpler than most Maliwan guns. With the right kind of sabotage, it'll backfire. He should thank the Ken doll, Krieg decides. Without his smart mouth, he wouldn't have thought to manipulate the gun this way.

You're not gonna prove anything with this stunt, the little man says as Krieg fumbles the screw to the trigger guard and it rolls off somewhere down the deck. There is no point to prove. Only the passionate indignity of chaffed nipples and oh sweet bacon is he gonna be warm tonight! You'll end up blowing my hand off, the voice nags, but Krieg's perfected the art of tuning such things out and ignores him when he finally removes the magazine spring. Let me, and his fingers clench without his command, closing over the borrowed screw driver and Krieg seethes at the nerve of this carrot stick as he mentally rips it away.

"This is MY kill stick," he spits and buries the screwdriver into the deck. "Not yours. Get your tiny thought fingers OUT OF MY HEAD." Fine – blow it off, what do I care? I'm not using that hand anyway.

Satisfied he won't be bothered again, Krieg goes back to work on the pistol until a screw rolls back to him like a long-lost son. He glances up and finds the Siren looking down at him with equal parts curiosity and confusion written across her features.

She picks up the screw and sits on the crate at his side. "Lost something?"

Yup, my sanity, the little man supplies sardonically, but Krieg accepts the offered screw without a word. He likes the Siren, but she has a knack for making him feel something like a sharp pain under the rib-cage. Specifically, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and years and might be nothing at all or might mean he's slowly dying of something mundane and humiliating like heart burn. It itches at him from somewhere too deep to scratch and it's another thing to add to his growing list of annoyances and he's already on edge from the boredom.

For a long while, she doesn't offer any conversation and he's grateful. The bob of the boat over the water makes another maybe not so important screw roll off down the deck and he relaxes in their shared silence. She looks off over the prow of the boat, eyes on the glacier slowly shrinking away. From this distance, it reminds him of an island from some old Earth drama full of sweaty people chased by ratchet spinning smoke monsters. Another day or two and he would've taken up people snatching and joined the natives if it meant getting off the glacier. Man, did that show need midgets.

"Looks smaller than it felt," she says after a while. Krieg thinks it felt cold, but doesn't bother to correct her and keeps his attention focused on manipulating the elemental mod. "I had this… this one thing to do and everything crashed into a bigger mess than I could have imagined." She clarifies and he wonders why she's telling him this.

She wants someone to talk to, the nag explains but that don't mean it's gotta be him. There's a roomful of people down below playing cards she could talk to and that awkward not-quite reachable pain is back and Krieg just wants to get lost somewhere so he can light himself on fire in peace. Talk to her.

"NnnNG talk at me," Krieg parrots just to get both of them to shut up.

"There's not much to say. I'm..." she pauses as a slow breeze teases her hair across her face and she brushes it away. "Tired." She nods and lets out a doubtful little laugh that's more like a sigh. "Yeah, tired and worried it'll all be for nothing."

The things we do to ourselves can't be all for nothing, the little man says quietly and Krieg agrees for a change. He thinks of the doctor's glassy eyes and surgical smile, of her hand streaking red against the glass and telling him to run. If it was all for nothing, breathing would lose all meaning and he won't accept that. Krieg tightens the last screw on the pistol, hoping the module will leak out as intended. He points it off over the prow towards the shrinking glacier, gives the trigger a pull, and Maya startles slightly as the fire envelopes his hand in warm kisses.

Krieg admires the flames inching up his arm before waving them away. In a dull way, it hurts like probing a loose tooth before the pull. But in a blood blistering rapturous way, it's fire and every argument against it is hollow noise. "We're nothing together."

"Together," she agrees and smiles. It's small, just a tilt of her lips breaking through her doubts but it's for him, and nothing burns sweeter than this moment. Not even his heart burn.

A/N: I wanna thank everyone who's reviewing so far, and for those who don't, your silent numbers keeps me writing. So, thanks a lot! All the encouragement I've received over the past four chapters really (really) surprised me and kept me going through all the times I wanted to shoot midgets instead. You are all beautiful people.