#@phasewalkin

The psycho is mumbling to himself as he walks through Sanctuary. The usual stares don’t bother him anymore, and it’s just as expected that he talks to himself, it seems. Krieg scratches the back of his head in thought, eyes cast down at the idea. So many years were spent in that facility that his birthday meant nothing but needles and pain. The math played out in his head, and he blinked at the realization that he was now 33 years old.

He rounded into the bar and took a seat at the back in the corner in his usual space, watching the people like a fly on the wall. Curves came and went, and Moxxi had bought his drink without a work, knowing he loves Absinthe more than most things. He lifted his mask just enough to take a sip, dwelling on the thought. 

The bullets whizzed past Krieg with small terrifying sounds that brought a rise from the more manic half currently in control. The psycho was in the midst of a firefight just outside of Sanctuary with a group of blood shots, only they had the bullets and he had an axe, naturally. He never was a fan of using a gun unless absolutely necessary. And the horrifying part (besides the fact that there was a vicious bloodbath going on just outside the city walls, on a holiday no less) was that he was winning.

“StAnD STILL!” He growls, hurling his axe into a group of bandits in the distance. The grenade that was strapped to the steel handle exploded, shredding the bandits and, naturally, leaving his trusty weapon intact. As usual. The damn thing was nearly indestructible. But through the explosions of the grenade, Krieg didn’t hear the bandit cruiser roaring up behind him.

“SaLT THE WOUND!” He cries out again, grabbing another unfortunate, smaller psycho by the throat. He snaps his neck mercilessly with one hand, cackling at the crackling of bones beneath his fingers. The blood of others ran down his front in rivets. He lived for this violence. To feel the last breath of others, in ragged screams, leave beneath his influence.

“I--” There was a crunching of a very sturdy body under tires.

Everything went dark.

**************************************

“Jesus...my head..” A slow, pained grunt from the psycho escaped his lips as he materialized in front of the NEW-U machine, pixel by pixel like some sort of manufactured psychopath. Krieg fell to the ground and took a moment to recover, gripping at his axe.

But something was wrong. It was quiet. Painfully quiet. This immediately raised alarm, and in a moment’s notice, he was standing again with his rusty, trusty weapon raised. He gives a low growl that lacks its normal gusto, looking for what could be wrong. A few sleeping skags in the distance. No...That can’t be it No sign of Hyperion. The corpses of the blood shots from before litter the ground, dead as a doornail. What could it be--

The silence, he noted, was internal.

“I’m...free.” It was more of a statement than a question. He turned, finding his reflection in a semi-broken window of a vehicle deployment post just next to the NEW-U station. His eyes were not as wide as they normally were. He studied himself to find that there were no twitches. No spasms, no outbursts of violence. On the small screen of the NEW-U, there was a red error code message:

Error 5168242: Full code restore failed. 

He pondered for a moment what this meant. But...did it matter? Could it truly be? He sat in silence for a long moment, waiting for..anything. The screams. The violence. But nothing came. Tears welled up in his eyes, and Krieg sank slowly to his knees, trying to process the newfound freedom. The first and only thing that came to mind to do next, he did. He removed his ECHO from his pocket, and pressed down the button.

“JiNGle bELLs, SkaG Sh*T SmELLs, gUNs wErE MeaNT To sLAY--”

Krieg stacks the bones meticulously in his tiny shack next to the farthest wall from the door. A very particular pile of rakk wing bones that all jut out in haphazard directions; the closest thing to a Christmas Tree that Krieg was going to manage. There were broken, half-glimmering lights strung amongst the bones, which seemed to be held together by a mix of glue, paste, blood and...something that definitely didn’t smell very good. The ornaments were bionic eyes ripped from hyperion drones, still bright blue and iridescent in the dim light.

“MiDgeT BoNER, oUT oF TonER, JACK IS REALLY GA--.....hmm...RuDe.”

Krieg sits atop the headquarters in Sanctuary, perched on the roof and staring at the moon. His buzz axe lays at his side, and he is lost in thought. The large H in the sky is glaring back down at him, obstructing an otherwise beautiful view. The stars are shining, and a beautiful blue glow falls over the town in the darkness, bathing everything in the night.

I’ll never say that everything’s alright. 

Krieg sighed. It had been 10 years today. 10 years since...the experiments had begun. That day marked the end of any sort of normal life he may ever have. He had lost his family to the slag testing, first. His father burned from the inside out in front of his eyes, and his mother died in his arms, a broken and fragile shadow of her former self. He had to bury them himself under a pile of dead, post-experiment Skag corpses to hide the bodies from the Hyperion scientists, should they be exhumed for further research.

His sanity came next. As soon as Hyperion had realized his biological chemistry was a perfect match for the testing, the needles came. The surgeries. The experiments. The...the slag. The nasty, toxic, volatile, burning slag. There wasn’t much more on Pandora that was detested more than the by product of Eridium, or the junkies that thrived on it. And Krieg was both; his blood pumped with the chemicals, and he could barely function without it. He had no choice. Hyperion had done this, as well.

As the pain progressed, his mind was stripped away. Molded into something else entirely. Another psyche developed. A disgusting, violent individual. One that could hardly keep his hands out of blood. Born of a violent rage against those who wronged him, and whose sole purpose was murder.

And here he sat. A Psycho of large proportions, sitting inside a resistance that he was barely welcomed in to. The citizens of the town feared him. The other Vault Hunters barely understood him. Even here, he did not truly fit in. There would be no difference if he was gone. No one would notice.

No one but her.

Krieg peered over the edge of the roof, and down towards the balcony of the Headquarters building. Bright red hair shown in sharp contrast against the dull blue backdrop of the town. He smiled beneath his mask, remembering how they met. How she helped him. How she cares...Lilith had always been there. She had always listened, helped with his dependency, been there when the others left him behind.

“FiRe LaDy.” He murmured softly to himself. But it didn’t last.

She can never be yours.

That voice. No, stop it. Don’t start this again.

She will never love you.

Please don’t.

You are unlovable. You are a junkie. You are madness. You are blood.

Stop.

You will never. Ever. Be free.

Krieg drew back to his seat on the roof top, and ripped his mask from his face. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he stifled back any kind of sound he may make. He slammed his fist down onto the roofing of Sanctuary, before kicking his  Axe over the side and into an alley. He looked down to the beaten, weathered mask in his hand with hatred.

That’s right.

He couldn’t stop it. A sob ripped from his lips as he dropped the mask. It slid down the roof to the balcony, where it fell with a clatter. He sat with his heads in his hands, body shivering from the truth.

Alone.

It has been months.

Dirt crunches beneath the boots of the weathered psycho. The sun beats down on his skull worse than his own consciousness, and sweat falls in rivets down his chiseled frame, mingling with the rusted blood staining his skin. 

And naturally, the blood wasn’t his own.

He grips the wrapped handle of his axe, swinging it back and forth lazily as he walks. From head to toe, Krieg was covered in new scars. Marks from forceful IV needle entries. Burns. The imprisonment within Hyperion had not been kind to him. More than ever, his Eridium dependency was eating at his patience, and there was that voice in the back of his mind speaking incessantly.

“Find her. You have to find her. You have to warn her.”

Krieg’s head twitched so hard his neck gave a nasty crack, and he stopped on a cliff facing to stare into the valley below. There was Sanctuary, laid out before him. Home. Or, what was left of it, and the closest thing he had ever had to a home. He was weak and exhausted, but he only had a short while left to travel. He grumbled lowly, before breaking into a trot towards the gates, breathing hard and heavy from the journey.  Only two words were coherent, falling from his tired lips into the ECHO.

“FiRE LadY...”