#timnisha

Everything’s bleary in her last few moments of consciousness; Winger is nowhere to be seen, the bodies of her henchmen lay bloody and mangled all over the town. She feels herself being dragged across the dry earth by her upper arms. The enormous psycho has her left in a death grip, threatening to break it with the slightest shift of his hand. She faintly recalls him knocking her off balance with a spray of bullets, and can feel the searing pain on the back of her neck where the blunt end of his buzzsaw met the base of her skull.

“We’ll have to get her back to Sanctuary and heal her quickly,” says a faint female voice on her right. Nisha wants to snap at her, tell her they aren’t taking her anywhere, but between the massive psycho’s hold on her left arm and the pressure behind her eyes, she can barely form a coherent thought. “And we’ll have to do it without Brick knowing; he’ll try to break her spine before we can get a decent answer out of her.”

The psycho exhales heavily, seeming slightly enthused at the mention of spines breaking. The sheriff can’t even bring herself to fully process the situation as her vision grows hazier by the second. She shuts her eyes with a soft groan, letting her head roll forward, chin pressing to her chest as everything goes dark.

She wakes up in bonds, overlooking Three Horns Divide as the sun begins to rise. Immediately, she catches sight of the gladiator beside her, making a pointed effort to avoid meeting Nisha’s eyes. Even so, Nisha leans forward a bit to get a better look at her.

“Long time, no see, Athena.” Athena closes her eyes in exasperation.

“Good to see everyone up and awake.” The sound of rough boots on cement interrupts the one-sided conversation. Nisha narrows her eyes at the red-haired siren, who raises her eyebrows in return. “I hope the two of you are feeling talkative today. Seems you are, lawbringer.”

Nisha sneers at her.

“Yeah,” she says. “Just raring to go.”

“Good,” says the siren. “Now I’ve only got a few questions for the two of you, and if I don’t like your answers--”

“I’ll take care a’ the sheriff, Lilith!” bellows the hulking man to her left. Nisha raises an eyebrow.

“Do we know each other?” she scoffs. He flares his nostrils and cracks his knuckles, only to be held back by a spindly man in goggles.

“Easy, amigo,” his companion mutters.

“You can deal with her if she doesn’t cooperate, Brick,” Lilith sighs.

It’s then that Nisha sees him, hands clasped behind his back, led up to the pole beside her by a soldier and an assassin. His hands aren’t tied, and he allows them to tug his arms around the pole behind him and tether his wrists together.

Nisha doesn’t bother to turn to get a better look at him; there’s no need with a profile like that. Even with the ragged hood over his head, his visible features are unmistakable. She opts to glance at him from the corner of her eye as Lilith continues.

“Aim at the prisoners!” she calls to the armed guards behind here.

“H-hold on!” the third prisoner shouts, raising his head quickly. “I thought we were here to be questioned, not shot to death!”

“Looks like someone missed the introduction,” Nisha quips. He turns to her, mismatched eyes frantic. “Answer correctly and you live, kid. ‘S like a game show.”

“You’re a surprisingly good listener,” Lilith remarks. “Nisha is right, Mister Lawrence. Choose your words wisely. More wisely than you did your friends, anyway.”

“Friends…” he repeats incredulously, turning to stare back at the ground.

“Five years ago,” Lilith states. “The three of you...helped Handsome Jack in his rise to power. All I have to ask at this point is...why?”

Nisha shrugged as best she could.

“I got an invitation,” she says simply.

“We all did, technically,” Athena sighs. “It was a job from a low-level Hyperion programmer to hunt a vault of Elpis; I was in desperate need of money, so I went along with it.”

“Aren’t we all,” Nisha remarks. Athena glares at her, shifting her eyes emphatically towards the guards’ pistols raised in their direction.

Lilith, while no less sullen, seemed relatively satisfied with their answers for the moment. She turned to the doppelganger, who still stared at the concrete beneath his feet.

“What about you?” she asked sternly. “You were pretty hard to track down for someone with Jack’s face plastered onto his own, scar and all. How did you factor into all this?”

Tim looks back up, biting his lip. His eyes dart from Lilith’s face to the ground, and over to the other two prisoners. He utters something incomprehensible under his breath.

“Speak up,” Lilith says. He looks up at her woefully and licks his chapped lips.

“Student loans,” he groans. Nisha can’t help but let out a short, dry bark of laughter at that. “I had no...no other way to pay them off.”

“So you got surgery to look like a complete madman and agreed to search for a vault on Elpis.”

Tim nods curtly and the edge of his hood falls further down his face. Nisha tilts her head at his relatively brief responses. It seems uncharacteristically stoic of him, and quite frankly she’s surprised he’s not in a frenzy over having guns pointed at his head.

Lilith stares at him for a minute or so, seemingly prompting him to elaborate. When he averts his eyes once again, she gestures to the nearest soldier, who shuffles forward and angles her gun towards Tim’s leg. Her finger tenses on the trigger, firing a single bullet into the doppelganger’s thigh. He shrieks in pain as the searing metal pierces his skin and lodges itself in his leg, leaving blood seeping from the wound and soaking through the leg of his trousers.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Nisha murmurs to Athena. “I kind of expected it to go right through the back of his leg, at that kind of distance.”

“I would shut up if I were you, unless you want that to happen to you.”

Tim whimpers, teeth digging into his bottom lip, likely hard enough to draw more blood. Lilith clenches her fists and moves back towards Athena.

“I want the full story,” she says. “Since these two don’t seem to want to talk.”