Axton knocked on the door frame of the Sanctuary Archive's meeting room. "Hey. Can I come in yet, or are you going to throw another wrench at me?"

Gaige spared him a glance laced with amused irritation. Given that most of her left arm seemed to be laid out on the holo-table in front of her, that seemed almost overly courteous. "I only threw that because you bugged me three times in the first half hour, you know."

"So, can I-"

"Yes, you can come in now." Gaige pushed his ECHO unit across the holotable. "I finished disentangling our respective digistruct partners a little bit ago."

Axton practically collapsed into a chair with relief. "Oh, good. I was starting to get worried." The biggest weight off his mind, he ran his eyes over the dismantled pieces of Gaige's prosthetic. The forearm plating had been removed, along with a number of small components he didn't recognize. Everything apparently undamaged was laid out carefully across the table. A smaller pile of clearly destroyed pieces were set apart from the rest. "How about your arm? Will it still function?"

Gaige shrugged and probed at a small component in her unshielded forearm. "It functions as an arm, at least. I'm still checking the full extent of the digistruct circuitry damage. Did Zero get back yet?"

"You'd think after five hours he would've given up and come home, but no, he's still at the Terminus looking for his sword." Axton shook his head with a rueful smile. "I never knew a man so attached to his weapons."

"Says the man who calls his turrets 'honey,'" Gaige pointed out.

"She earned it," Axton insisted.

"So has Zero's sword."

"Well, when you put it that way," Axton conceded with a shrug. "What's with your hair?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why are you wearing it down for once? Get tired of looking a six year old?"

Gaige smirked sarcastically and stopped tweaking her arm long enough to pick up one of the metal ties that usually kept her red mop in its distinctive pigtails. "Simple dexterity test. I wanted to see if the motor control was still fine enough to handle the small stuff. If I hadn't been able unscrew my hair clamps, I'd know I had a problem with motive systems and digistruct capability."

"Makes sense." Axton picked up his ECHO unit and started pulling up his turret settings. "So, what's the prognosis for Deathtrap? When can you get him back on the battlefield?"

"Eh, not too long. I need to replace a few minor parts, re-solder a few pathways." She snorted. "I'm just glad the shot went through this part of my arm. It would've been a whole other problem if it went through my upper section."

"Why's that?"

"The forearm is where I keep most of the materialization stuff for Deathtrap. It's basically the equivalent to your turret deck."

"The part that actually 'projects' Deathtrap," Axton said.

"Yeah. But up here..." Gaige tapped just below her shoulder. "That's the actual brains."

Axton grinned a little. "Brains of your arm?"

She shot him a glare without much force. "If I didn't need to make sure I didn't lose anything, I'd throw a bolt at you. Anyway, yes. It's the part of the system that actually determines how Deathtrap gets put together. It organizes the data from my ECHO to make sure he doesn't materialize with an arm where his head should be, or something like that. I can replace all the stuff in my forearm with parts from just about anywhere, but for the shoulder..." Gaige shuddered. "Ugh. It'd be almost impossible to find a replacement Hecker circuit reintegrator out here, and I don't even wanna think what it'd cost. Or who I'd have to kill for it."

Axton's brow creased. "Isn't that what you were arguing about with Tannis the other night? Heckler circuits?"

"Hecker, and yes."

"What does that do?"

Gaige looked up, a massive grin on her face. "They are the final word in digistruct technology. They can organize and stream data thousands of times faster and more efficiently than anything else out there, meaning you can store and summon something infinitely more complicated than with any other circuit. They're the reason Deathtrap works. If I hadn't been able to get my hands on any while I was building Deathtrap, I couldn't have built him the way he is now."

"So what's Tannis' problem with 'em?"

Gaige rolled her eyes, picked up a small gear, and started work on her arm again. "I believe her exact words were, 'they are a brute force, inelegant approach to the fine art of digital construction.' Gah. Let the woman design one little obstacle course, and you'd think she was the Rembrandt of digistructing. She's completely off base!" Gaige slammed her screwdriver on the table and started pacing around the room, waving her arms and raving. "I mean, never mind that Hecker circuits are as advanced against other circuits as quantum transistors are against freakin' vacuum tubes! Never mind that you can actually build a damn starship in half the time if you use just one! Noooo, just 'cause they get a teeeeeeny tiny bit unstable if you're a total idiot-"

"Whoa, whoa!" Axton laughed. "Little heated much?"

"Sorry." Gaige plopped back in her seat with a huff. "I do that sometimes. I can't count how many times my dad had to tell me to watch the volume." She squinted at her arm. "I hope I didn't just throw a part I needed across the room."

"Uh-huh." Axton stopped browsing his turret specs. "Did you say they get 'unstable'?"

"Only if you put 'em in the circuit wrong," Gaige said absently. She was mostly focused on her arm again, the brief spurt of anger gone as fast as it had come. "If you put too few into a unit, they can make the construct unstable and prone to, um..." she scratched her head. "Let's call it 'rapid photonic dispersal'."

"The construct blows up," Axton translated.

Gaige nodded. "On the other hand, if you put too many into a system, and they start drawing power uncontrollably until the circuit itself overheats and blows up. Used correctly, though..." she grinned ferally. "You get Deathtrap."

"And you want to use these things to build our ship up at Digistruct Peak?"

Gaige laughed. "That's the stupid thing. Tannis just blew up at the mention of it. Then I started defending the circuits, and it kinda escalated. I don't even know if we could get enough of them to pull it off. As far I know, there's only five on the planet, and three of them are in my arm."

Axton looked up from his ECHO unit. "No joke? You've got three of these ultra-rare, high performance, impossible to replace circuits in there?"

"How else do you think I got Deathtrap to manifest in half a second when Hyperion needs at least five seconds to finish a much less complicated unit?"

"Huh." He frowned slightly. "What about the other two? Where are they?"

Gaige looked at him in surprise. "You're kidding. You don't know?"

"Should I?"

"Well... yes. They're in your turrets."

Axton stared at her. "Now you're kidding. Dahl put unstable circuitry into a mass produced weapon system?"

"No," Gaige stressed. "Dahl put the most advanced circuitry into a field support unit that, in countless campaigns, has never failed to assist its infantry and tip the balance into their mercenaries' favor." She started to put another component back into place. "You should be glad they did. I couldn't have linked up your turrets to Deathtrap without them. And we both know your turrets have saved your life more times than either of us can count."

"Yeah." He shrugged and started to get up. "Whatever. I just hope we don't have to do that again."

"It'll be easier if we ever do."

He froze. "What does that mean?"

"The fusion worked so well, I made it a permanent option. We can link up Deathtrap and your turrets at will."

"I'm... not sure how I feel about that," Axton said hesitantly. "We only did it once, under extreme conditions. Are you sure it's safe to do again?"

"Sure. It's murder on energy requirements, so we can't do it for long." She grinned, an expression tinged with power lust. "But with that much firepower..."

"...we might not need long," Axton finished. "Ok, I can see some advantages there. Just so long as it doesn't make my turrets explode."

"Won't happen," Gaige assured him. "I also set up a secondary option. Your turrets can link up to Deathtrap's targeting systems now. You can deploy your turrets on their own, but they'll be able to piggyback their target lock-ons off of Deathtrap's, or vice versa. In theory, they should all be able to hit the exact same spot from anywhere on the battlefield."

Axton raised an eyebrow, intrigued. "Really? The exact same spot?"

"Within a thousandth of an inch of it," Gaige replied. "We may never need that kind of precision, but it'll be good to have if we ever do."

Axton sat back down. "Lemme get this straight. You performed a force merging of two completely different systems, in the field, during combat, then manage to separate them perfectly and end up making lasting improvements to both systems?" He shook his head in amazement. "How the hell did you end up with just third place in that science fair back home?"

"Pretty sure I told you that story," Gaige said dryly. She paused. "Maybe you can tell me one."

"Oh?"

"This afternoon, when you said you'd seen worse than that pile of bodies." She stared at him intently. "Tell me about it."

Axton leaned back, sighing deeply. "Oof. Heavy subject. Why do you want to hear about that?"

Gaige sighed. "We're a tough group of people. We've killed our way across Pandora. We've probably racked up a body count that exceeds what was in that clearing. But at the end of the day, it made three of us lose it over a cliff, and I have a feeling it would've been four if Zero didn't have air filtration in his helmet. Salvador gave us his reason for not puking." She leaned forward, chin resting in her hands. "I wanna know yours."

Axton folded his arms. "It won't help you sleep any better. Might even give you more nightmares."

"I had a girl explode on me once, and today was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," Gaige said sarcastically. "My life outstripped my nightmares a long time ago. Spill."

"Ok, but don't say I didn't warn you." He leaned back and sighed. "It was, oh, eight or nine years back. My unit had been dispatched to some little border planet- I don't even remember its name. The local government had been trying to put down a civilian uprising for over a year, and they were running out of... well, everything."

"So they contracted Dahl to end the conflict in their favor?" Gaige asked, continuing her arm reassembly.

"Yeah." Axton rubbed his face. "I wasn't exactly a rookie at that point, but I hadn't seen anything like the amount of combat time I would over the years. Most of the campaigns I'd been in were quick jobs, things that needed a few extra guns for a few months, and then it was over. This was the first planet I came to that had been through large scale, continuous warfare. When my drop ship landed and the gangway opened, I learned the difference.

"The first big one was the smell."

Gaige's face twisted a little. "Let me guess. Something like the clearing today?"

"Times infinity."

"Did it make you puke?" she asked, sounding a little embarrassed.

"No, but probably only because I hadn't eaten and clenched my jaw hard enough to crack a molar." Axton sighed again, fingers tracing the rank insignia tattooed over his eye. "You've got to understand, this planet had been fighting nonstop for a year. The insurgency was incredibly widespread. Practically every person that could hold a weapon steady had been pressed into service by the government, or co-opted by the rebels. Cities were outright destroyed, neighborhoods turned into armed outposts, everything totally absorbed by the civil war. Basic services had completely broken down... including corpse disposal. Bodies everywhere, just laying where they'd been shot. There were a few places that had tried some kind of clean up, but that mostly consisted of piling the dead and burning them."

"Which didn't help the smell, I'm sure," Gaige remarked grimly. She was staring very intently at the tiny screws in her arm.

"I ended up burning every piece of clothing I brought planetside," Axton admitted. "And trading in all my gear. I couldn't get the stink out."

"How long were you there?"

"The longest three months of my entire career."

She frowned. "Really? I figured a Dahl commando unit would've ended the war in a week."

"Dahl ended up running into bureaucratic interference," Axton said darkly. "Half the time we made a tactical suggestion, it was shot down because the government leaders thought we might damage something they considered 'important'," he growled. "These idiots had been holed up in secure underground bunkers for the entire conflict. They had no idea what the situation was like topside. Everything was destroyed. All they did was keep us from ending the war.

"And that wasn't even the worst of it. They were riding out the war in relative luxury compared to outside. They complained about poor quality food rations that were better than our own supplies, to say nothing of their own forces and civilians. People outside those bunkers would've given anything for just one of those ration packs.

"And the rebels weren't any better. They'd take whatever they could find from anybody, then claim they had the right to it because they were fighting 'for the people'. Never mind that they might've just taken a starving family's last meal." He gave a dry, harsh laugh. "And the worst part? Both sides blamed the other for all the dead, and tried to use it as a recruiting tool for their cause."

"So what happened?"

Axton smirked grimly. "Dahl corporate policy kicked in. Standing orders are that when a field commander feels the mission is going to end in a net loss for Headquarters, they're authorized to take any action they see fit to end the engagement, without fear of repercussion from Central Command. After ninety days of holding actions and being hamstrung by idiotic leaders that wouldn't let us make any real tactical gains, our general decided to invoke those orders."

Gaige stopped working on her arm long enough to glance at Axton suspiciously. "And where were you when that got decided?"

"As a young NCO, my duty rotation had just landed me back at the official government headquarters," Axton said. His tone was dangerously light. "Along with the rest of my squad. Thirty soldiers that had just spent eighty-eight days on the front lines, seeing the war firsthand. Imagine how glad we were to be back at the safe, warm, comfortable headquarters of the official government that was doing everything it could for its people."

Gaige winced. "Oooooh boy."

"By morning, the official government had fallen," Axton went on. "By amazing coincidence, one of our mechanized heavy infantry units had managed to find and take out all the rebel leaders in the same night. The only people left to run the war were the field commanders on both sides, the men who were out there day in and day out, sending more and more men to die, and usually dying with them." He gave a laugh that was entirely without humor. "Within an hour of word coming down that the leaders of both sides were dead, the on-scene commanders had called a ceasefire. Within two days, a truce. Within a week, they had adopted the standard issue Dahl constitution, and opted to join the corporate coalition. Fifteen days after the old government and rebel leaders were dead, Dahl had sent ships to begin reconstruction of the world, and my mercenary unit was being recalled."

Gaige frowned. "Wait. The government hired you, then your superiors had you kill them all and took over the planet?"

"Yep."

"And everyone was okay with that?!"

Axton shrugged. "The civilians were. Their planet was being rebuilt, there was more than enough food and medical care to go around, they had a chance to sign on with Dahl if they wanted to leave the planet, and, oh yeah, no one was trying to kill them anymore. As for us soldier types, we were just glad to be off that stinking hellhole of a world."

"You realize that's profoundly messed up, right?" Gaige pointed out. "Your superiors betrayed and murdered their employers, then seized control on their own. What if the people hadn't wanted to be absorbed by Dahl?"

"We would've left," Axton said shortly. "Every soldier, gone the instant they said so. And they would've been on their own, on a destroyed planet with no hope of rebuilding." He sighed. "I realize everything you're pointing out, Gaige; I've lived with it a long time. I know it's morally questionable at best, and downright evil at worst. I've even heard conspiracy theories that Dahl engineered the whole thing, from start to finish." Axton rubbed his eyes tiredly. "I did warn you it was worse than a mound of bodies in a clearing."

"You did do that," Gaige admitted. She sighed and laid down her screwdriver. "I've done as much as I can with this thing tonight," she commented, flexing her fingers and twisting her hand. "I'll finish with the digistruct circuitry tomorrow." She stood and stretched her arms over her head, cracking her back, groaning in satisfaction.

"Not putting the plating back on?" Axton asked, holding up one of the armored pieces. While Gaige's forearm did look considerably better, it was also very exposed. Axton could see the various circuit boards she'd described, fitted snugly between the metal bones of the limb.

"They've still got bullet holes in 'em," Gaige pointed out. "I need to weld patches over those, and I'm not doing it with them attached to my arm."

"Fair enough," he admitted. "So what, then? Going to sleep?"

"Not after that little bed-time story," Gaige said. "Thought I'd go over to Moxxi's and show Hammerlock that claw we brought back, maybe drink a few with him. Wanna come?"

"Think I'd rather go drink under the moon for a while," Axton sighed. "Remind myself of some the relative good I've done."

She smirked. "Fair enough." Gaige headed down the stairs. "I'm going to enjoy drinking under neon lights with a great white hunter a lot more, though."

"When are you going to accept you're not going to turn him?" Axton teased, walking beside her.

"Eh, I've accepted that since day one," she replied. "I guess I just like older men, even when they don't like me the same way. And he does enjoy my company. I think I remind him of the daughter he never had." She picked up the Mongzilla claw from where they had left it, beside the main door into the building. "On the other hand, one shouldn't underestimate the charms of a beautiful girl carrying a trophy from a mighty kill. You never know what might happen."

Axton just shook his head as Gaige walked into the night air. "Soooooo messed up."

[It's half true, anyway. Thank you for reading!]