"There are no good girls gone wrong – just bad girls found out." — Mae West

Being good is overrated, she thinks.

She's tried to be good her whole life, and it's amounted to this. This cold, empty chamber: one that's become more of a prison to her since it was built.

Show me Jack.

And there's her warden.

One of the screens hanging on the walls flickers for a moment before displaying a feed from a security camera in Opportunity. Jack keeps an eye on her every movement. It's only fair that she do the same to him.

The feed switches as Jack walks out of view of the camera, and into the range of another. There's no hiding from Hyperion in Opportunity.

Her father's new girlfriend is with him. She looks so out of place in a city with such sharp and precise angles as Opportunity. An icthid out of water. Why is he with her, anyway? Damned hypocrite. Always going on about how everyone on this planet without their last name is bandit scum. And here he is, schmoozing one of them up. What does he see in her?

Of course, Angel knows what he sees in her. What he sees in her is on prominent display on the camera feed from security camera 6B.

Maybe they're not so different though, her father and his new girlfriend. Maybe he's found somebody as vain as he is. She clearly puts a lot of effort into her appearance.

Zoom in.

They're both peacocking. Does she always wear that much makeup? And he doesn't wear that suit very often anymore. He used to. She remembers from when she was younger, when her parents would go out on dates together. He'd wear that dark blue blazer and that sharp, pinstriped shirt, with that embroidered pocket square peeking out of the jacket pocket. Mom would usually wear her long, purple satin dress.

"How do I look, Angel?" her mother asks, turning away from the mirror to look at her six-year-old daughter sitting on top of the desk by the wall.

"You look like a queen, mommy!"

The girlfriend's dress is purple too, Angel notices. It's eye-catching too, but not in the same way her mother's dress was. Her mother exuded grace in that purple dress. Her mother was classy, and elegant, and beautiful in a very modest way that Angel always wanted to be. The girlfriend... it doesn't look like the word subtle is even in this woman's vocabulary, from her overdone makeup, to the spats on her shoes and the mismatched leggings, the generous amount of skin on display on her chest and her thighs, to the top hat resting askew on her chestnut hair.

Still, Angel supposes she might be beautiful, underneath all that. Angel isn't naïve. She knows there's more to beauty than just grace and class.

She does get the sneaking suspicion that her father isn't concerned with such intricacies, though. The girlfriend, for her part, doesn't seem to mind.

But Angel has seen this enough times to know how it will turn out.

Her father is used to getting what he wants. They'll go along with it at first, because he can give them what they want, too. He's got the power, the money, and the means. But what then, when the novelty of that wears off? What about when the girlfriend wants more? Or what if she realizes he isn't interested in her for her?

What will she do then?

"I love you."

Angel hears the familiar, distant grinding of gears, signaling the opening of the doors to her chamber. She can hear her father's footsteps echoing through the ventilation shafts. Twelve steps to the elevator. He's walking a bit quicker than usual. Must have been a good date. Angel wouldn't know. She didn't watch the whole thing.

The elevator takes exactly forty seconds to descend into the Control Core. Angel always spends it reflecting on the passcode, because that's as long as she can think of those three words before she starts to get angry at him again. It's been so long since somebody other than Jack said those words to her that she can't even imagine the words in anybody else's voice but his.

The elevator only takes forty seconds to complete its descent, but her father has the annoying habit of making that forty seconds seem like hours. She can picture the smirk that will be plastered onto that Hyperion-issued dermaform mask once those doors open, and that staged, pretentious air to his voice.

She pinches the bridge of her nose as she hears the elevator slowly quieting down. Sometimes just waiting for him to get down there is more painful than the conversations they have once he does.

She takes a deep breath, mentally steeling herself for whatever task he has in mind for her today. She hasn't slept in over 30 hours. She isn't in the most cooperative of moods.

Angel lets out a sigh and lets the emotion drain out of her face as the doors slowly open.

"How are we doing, Angel?" he asks jovially, rubbing his hands together and walking inside. The doors slowly close behind him. There is a certain bounce to his step today. Her ears weren't deceiving her. Her senses rarely do, thanks to the eridium.

He's not actually interested in how she's doing, of course, and she won't insult herself by pretending he is. She gets right down to business. "Seven prospective Vault hunters died in one of your train stations today," she states, without a shred of emotion in her voice.

Jack chuckles. "You know, I thought I'd have to keep thinking up new ways to kill these treasure-hunting chumps, but they keep falling for the same trap, over and over again."

Angel doesn't respond, choosing just to wait for him to finish praising himself for his brilliance. As if he was the one that orchestrated all of this. As if he is the one networked into the entire corporation's infrastructure. She bites the inside of her cheek.

"But what about people we can actually use? Have you found any that aren't complete idiots yet?"

"Not yet. But that reminds me, I've been looking into some reports from the Aeschylus lab-"

"Angel, you know I don't like you listening to those," Jack chides her.

Angel barely suppresses a dry laugh. The gall he has, to say that to her face and act as if he's trying to protect her. As if she hasn't already gone through the nausea and the hallucinations and the insomnia that result from eridium injections. No, of course, he's just trying to protect her from that reality, because it's too horrifying for her to even see it.

"As I was saying, it sounds like one of the... experiments," she says, making her distaste for her father's euphemism for 'human beings' quite apparent, "...has been causing quite a bit of … trouble."

"Wha, what do you mean, 'trouble'? What's going on?"

"Well, three of your scientists are dead."

Angel's voice is so flat, Jack can't even tell that she was happy to hear the news. She has become quite adept at sounding detached of emotion over the years. Showing emotion is a sign of weakness. Or so he taught her.

Jack scratches his chin. "Huh," he mutters, a hint of mild interest to his voice, as if he's just learned that bladeflowers aren't technically flowers.

"Last I checked, they were isolating the subject. The sedatives they used on him had no effect."

He glances around, then examines the fingernails on his left hand. "Keep an eye on it."

"Yes, sir."

Jack nods and strokes the chin on his mask. Angel realizes he didn't just come here to check on how their mission was going. For a second, she wonders just what he is there for, but it strikes her like a brick to the face when he starts glancing around and rocking forward and back on the balls of his feet.

She sighs. He's so transparent. "How was your date?"

"Oh, you knew about that?" Her father can fake a lot of things, but surprise isn't one of them. He grins to himself and scratches his chin. "Well, it was great, Angel, thank you for asking."

Angel isn't amused. She isn't amused by the fact that her father was out there enjoying himself while she's chained up here, but she's even less amused by his hypocrisy. This planet's full of bandit scum, he always says – except when it suits him.

She narrows her eyes. Oh, how she would love to wipe that self-assured smirk off his face.

"Do you love her?" she asks.

Jack cringes, and Angel feels her mouth curling into a smirk despite herself. "What? It was our second date, Angel," he says through gritted teeth, running his hand down over his mask.

She can sense his discomfort over the question. Good. He'd better be uncomfortable. "You always told me you loved Mom the first time you met her."

He shuts his eyes and takes a breath. "Angel..." Jack says in a warning tone. "Don't you do this."

Angel sits down and looks away, folding her arms over her chest and crossing her right leg over her left. She isn't sure she can even say anything without her voice quivering and betraying her anger, so she stays silent instead.

"It has been eight years since you-"

"Nine. Nine years," she seethes. "And I didn't-"

"Nine years! You're going to have to let her go at some point."

She shoots him a glare. They both know that's not going to happen. She can see that he knows it too, so he tries to avoid the subject entirely.

"You know what, Angel? I had a good time with Moxxi tonight. And I'm not going to let you ruin that."

She sighs as her father turns and walks back to the blast doors, slowly sliding open as he approaches them.

"Keep me updated on that lab, okay?"

"Yes, sir."

"Angel."

She stares ahead silently.

"Angel?"

She sighs and rolls her eyes. "I love you."

"I love you too, honey."

Moxxi is an easy woman for Angel to find.

Most people are easy for Angel to find, of course. She has a talent for finding people. Moxxi is just easier than most to track down. She doesn't exactly live her life in the shadows.

What Angel doesn't get is how Jack met her. She lives out in the Deep Fathoms, which is hardly somewhere the President of Hyperion would want to be seen. Not that there's anybody out there to see him, really.

She tries to avoid thinking of how it happened. Even if she knew how, she doubts it would make sense to her. He was probably looking for more bandits to kill, and then stopped when he saw her cleavage on display. A true fairy-tale story they'll probably tell their children.

Angel starts laughing at the mental image of Jack and Moxxi having children. Moxxi cradling a tiny little baby with a mask bracketed to its face. Jack scolding his daughter for wearing so much makeup.

Her father was handsome before she gave him his scar, she supposes. It's been so long since she's seen his real face, though, she can't remember for sure. The mask is ridiculous, though. He might have been handsome, but he wasn't that handsome. She picks up a mirror and looks at her own face, putting her fingertips to her nose, her lips, her cheeks.

Why didn't he just have the mask be made in his old image, before the scar? Why did he need the bridge of his nose more defined, or his jawline so sharp, or his cheek bones so prominent?

She wonders if he sometimes expects to see his old self when he looks in the mirror in the mornings, while his mind is still half-asleep, before he remembers he's on Pandora, before he remembers the disfiguring scar on his burned flesh.

Jack's mask hides his true face. Moxxi's mask just accentuates hers. Her teal eyes stand out more when her lashes are heavy with mascara. Even moreso against the white face paint, and the rouge on her cheeks. She doesn't make an effort to hide the mole over her lip, either. Rather, she embraces it, draws attention to it by deliberately not concealing it.

Angel knows this, because Angel has found plenty of information on Moxxi. Angel has seen pictures of Moxxi without makeup. Moxxi is a wanted woman, quite literally.

Surprisingly, she doesn't look bad in her mugshot. She seems to live for the camera, no matter the reason her picture is being taken, no matter who's behind it.

Moxxi stands five foot, three inches, according to the barred lines behind her, though the heels she's usually in push her up to 5'6", at least. Hair brown, eyes blue, according to the old Atlas profile Angel has brought up.

Wanted for lewd behavior, indecent exposure... Angel isn't surprised about that. Not that she's judging, either. It's not the place of Pandora's Guardian Angel to judge.

Wanted for harboring a fugitive, aiding and abetting somebody charged with desertion, and conspiracy to murder? Angel didn't see that coming.

Maybe Moxxi doesn't wear her mask because she's ashamed of what she sees in the mirror. Maybe she wears it to fool others into thinking she's not as dangerous as she really is.

Angel has a few pictures of Moxxi in makeup, still frames grabbed from the surveillance footage while Jack showed her around his city. Her eyes are wide, the look of a woman who has clearly never seen a skyscraper before. Her mouth hangs just slightly open in one of them as she looks up at one of the towering buildings. If Moxxi was impressed with Opportunity, Angel thinks she would lose her mind if she took an interplanetary shuttle to Kravatia.

If she had seen her mugshot without any context, Angel wouldn't even believe it was the same person. Her unkempt chestnut hair almost covers her face more than it frames it. Her eyebrows are pointed down in the middle; her nostrils are flared; her lips are parted and her teeth bared in a snarl. She holds a black card with a six-digit number in front of her chest, her white knuckles aligned with its edges. Below the numbers, in white block lettering, reads "HAVEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY".

The only similarity is those piercing teal eyes. They're softer in the pictures with makeup, yes, but they are undeniably the same.

Angel has often thought of trying to warn Jack's various girlfriends about him, about the kind of person he really is, behind the mask. She considers doing the same for Moxxi, but it's clear that the woman is capable of handling herself.

There's something chilling, something ferocious about the snarl on Moxxi's face in her mugshot. Angel vaguely recollects a memory of her childhood.

"Mom, get out here!"

Angel hears the door open behind her, and her mother instantly lets out a small yelp. "Angel, get away from that!"

"But it's hurt! It needs help!"

The cat's back is arched, and the fur on its tail stands on end, the animal's attempt to look bigger and scare the young girl away.

"It's okay, kitty," Angel says in the softest tone she can manage.

"Angel, your father will be home soon, just let him take care of it!"

The cat hisses and swipes a paw at Angel, narrowly missing her skin. The blood matted on its fur is slowly thickening, small droplets splattering onto the dirt beneath it. It backs up into the corner of the fence, and Angel slowly walks towards it as non-threateningly as she can.

Angel's mother pulls her back just as the wounded cat makes another swipe at her.

"I know you're just trying to help, baby," she says softly, running her hand over her daughter's hair. "But you can't walk up to a cornered animal like that. That only leaves it with one way to escape."

Angel leans back into her mother's body, watching the cat as it flicks its tail and eyes her nervously.

Maybe Jack is the one that needs to be warned.

Angel generally doesn't take much interest in her father's various girlfriends. Most of them, he's not with long enough for her to even learn their names. They always seem like her father's attempt to replace her mother. Not for Angel's benefit, of course, but his own. Angel doesn't want a replacement.

She's becoming fascinated with Moxxi, though. Moxxi isn't anything like the others. Moxxi is bad, and she doesn't give a shit what people think about her.

Angel has had to be good her whole life, because good girls aren't noticed. Good girls don't stand out. Good girls blend in, and that's what Angel had to do to survive – or so her father told her.

Her mother is the only reason she was allowed to have friends when she was in school. John was terrified that her tattoos would get her noticed, so her mother compromised and covered them up. John was worried that Angel would use her powers and get noticed, so her mother made Angel promise she wouldn't ever use her powers out in public.

John was worried that if she were allowed to have friends, that they'd discover who she was, and that only bad things could come of it. But that was something her mother would not compromise on.

"You can't keep her caged up her whole life, John! She needs friends!"

"She has me! Who loves her more than her own father?"

"She needs friends her own age."

"Friends her own age won't understand-"

"You can't keep her protected her whole life, John. You're going to have to let her grow on her own at some point."

So her father taught her to blend in. He taught her to bring as little attention to herself as possible, he spent every morning covering her tattoos over with paint, and above all, he told her to only use her powers at home, when he was around to watch her.

She has been good her entire life. She's been an angel, because it's what she needed to do to blend in. Angels don't get noticed. Angels don't get attention. Angels are taken for granted.

She's through being the angel.

Jack has taken everything from her. It's only fair that she do the same to him.

"I love you." There's a certain tension to his voice this time.

Twelve footsteps, very quick and deliberate. Forty seconds of the elevator roaring to life. Two sets of blast doors opening and closing. All told, just under two minutes for Angel to wait for her father.

Jack stands silently with his arms folded over his chest for a few moments. Angel is the first to break the silence.

"Do you have another date tonight?"

He stares her down for a few seconds, watching her eyes, her mouth, her fingers. After a moment, he gives his answer, slowly. "I think you already know the answer to that."

She does, but Angel has a good poker face.

Even if she hadn't been watching the surveillance Jack had ordered on Moxxi, she knew him well enough to know that he would start getting possessive. The same cycle always repeats itself, over and over. Angel isn't sure if she's more curious about why he gets this way when a relationship turns serious, or why he always expects the next time to go differently, because she certainly knows it will always be the same.

"You're going to confront her, aren't you?"

Confront, of course, is a euphemism, and while both of them know it, neither is going to admit they know exactly what Angel means by it.

"Dammit Angel, you know I don't like you looking into my personal business."

"You shouldn't use that kind of language, Dad," she says, a biting tone to the last word.

"Don't test me, Angel." He folds his arms over her chest and narrows his eyes at her. "Not today."

She crosses her arms over her chest, mirroring his movement. They stare each other down in silence for a moment, each daring the other to speak up, neither yet willing to be the first to break. But there's something about the angry glint in her father's right eye that makes Angel give in first.

"So what's wrong with this one?" she asks, studying his one good eye carefully. Jack rolls his head from side to side, trying to avoid the question, so Angel presses on: "We both know I'm not a little girl anymore. Don't you think you owe me an answer on this?"

He looks at her for a moment, then relents. "I don't think she's good enough for you."

"For me. For me?" Angel scoffs. "I'm not the one trying to replace Mom. But she's good enough for you to sleep with, I'm sure-"

"Angel."

She considers him for a few seconds, then her eyebrows slowly arch up in realization. "You didn't even tell her about me, did you?"

Jack is good at lying to a lot of people, but he's terrible at lying to his daughter. He shakes his head and opens his mouth, but no words come out.

Angel stares into Jack's eyes and slowly nods her head. Of course he didn't. Why should he? What could he possibly gain by telling her he has a daughter? "That's what I thought..."

"She's a bandit, Angel. She-"

"Would you just stop? Would you stop pretending that this is all about me? Would you just once admit that you're doing all of this for yourself?"

"Why, you ungrateful little-" Jack balls his hands into fists and swallows back the next word. "After everything that I've done for you, and you – The, the, the nerve you have, speaking to me like that–"

"Go."

Jack narrows his eyes. "What?"

"I'd like for you to leave right now," Angel says as calmly as she can muster.

Jack shakes his head slightly, a vein in his forehead, hidden behind his mask, throbbing.

"GET OUT!" Angel shouts, her voice amplified ten times by the speakers decking the walls.

Jack grinds his molars together, but bites his tongue and turns to leave. As the blast doors slowly open, he turns around to look back at her.

"You want to know what's wrong with her, Angel?" he asks, a grin spreading over his face, the same grin that he always gets when he thinks he's one step ahead.

Angel tilts her head to the side and raises her eyebrows, telling him to continue.

"She crossed me," he says in a low, menacing tone. Angel's eyes widen as she bites the inside of her cheek, and Jack lets out a low chuckle. "Goodnight, Angel," he tells her, just before the doors close between the two of them.

Angel's shoulders only relax slightly once she hears the elevator complete its journey to the surface, and the entry door opens and closes again.

Angel watches the feeds of the security cameras in Opportunity, waiting for Jack to pick his moment. He was angry when he left, and she has a dreadful feeling that he's about to do something rash. She knows she can't let that happen. She supposes she'd feel responsible for it, but even then, that's not the whole story.

The cameras give her a visual feed, but the city planners haven't yet installed microphones to pick up audio. Normally, she would be able to hack into Jack's ECHO and listen through that, but he left it behind. Angel assumes he did it just to stop her from interfering.

Of course, if he really didn't want her watching, he should've known better than to meet Moxxi in Opportunity again. But clearly he wants her to watch.

He looks casual enough, for a while. Moxxi doesn't look like she's aware anything is wrong. They're walking slowly together. Angel figures he must have told her they were going to the Lexicon, Opportunity's finest hotel, because when he leads her on a path away from it, she seems to look confused.

Angel switches to the next camera in the grid as they walk out of view. He's lead her into an alley. The way through is temporarily blocked by a chain link fence to guard off the construction yard, so tonight, it's a dead end.

Angel leans forward in her chair. Jack's body language has changed...

Zoom in.

...and the look on Moxxi's face tells her that she noticed it too.

Jack's back is turned towards the security camera. He slowly walks towards Moxxi, who is backing away from him just as slowly. Moxxi is soon backed into the corner of the chain link fence and the wall of Hyperion Bank. Jack reaches his right hand out for Moxxi's left arm, and that's when Angel notices it.

Moxxi's expression changes quicker than the blink of an eye. The confused arch of her eyebrow and the hurt look in her eyes are gone. Even underneath the makeup, Angel can see the same angry snarl from the mugshot.

Hacking into Moxxi's ECHO shouldn't be too difficult. All Angel needs to do is use the coordinates from the geo-tracking feature to find her ECHO's serial number.

Moxxi's right arm makes a move for the holster strapped to her thigh, but Jack grabs her arm before she can draw Rubi. Angel gets into Moxxi's ECHO just as she growls at Jack: "Big fucking mistake."

Angel can hear a crunching sound as she watches Moxxi rear back and smash her forehead into Jack's face, sending him falling back to the ground as he clutches his nose in pain. Angel's hand goes up to cover her mouth instinctively.

"You broke by dose, you bitch!"

Jack slowly rolls over, resting on his knees and his right elbow, still clutching his nose with his left hand. Angel can see a small pool of blood already on the ground, and more on his hands. She leans forward, biting down on the knuckle of her index finger.

Moxxi delivers a kick to his gut, and he grunts as he lands on his side. "Nobody threatens my children," she spits.

Angel sees Jack reach for his pocketwatch. She activates her microphone and tells Moxxi: "You should get out of there."

Angel sees the surprise on the woman's face from hearing a disembodied voice speaking into her ear, but the shock quickly wears off when she hears sirens going off.

"Let me worry about the police bots," she says. "You just need to get out of there."

Moxxi glowers down at Jack for a moment, but two approaching loader bots, painted dark blue with a black stripe down their sides, send her running.

"Convict detected. Apprehending criminal."

Angel thinks of how impressively quickly Moxxi moves as she infiltrates the City of Opportunity Police Loader network.

Jack pounds his fist on the ground as he looks up and sees units #074 and #075 give up pursuit of Moxxi.

Angel watches as he slowly stands up and walks towards the camera monitoring him. He stares up at it and shouts. Angel can't hear what he's saying, but she can read his lips easily enough, even despite the blood running down from his nose:

"You are in big trouble!"

Angel waits until Moxxi makes it safely back to her place in the Deep Fathoms before contacting her again.

"I... can't believe you just did that," she says, a hint of awe in her voice.

Moxxi immediately takes the defensive. "Look, I don't know what your angle is-"

"No, no, you don't understand. I'm glad you did it."

Angel bites her bottom lip, waiting for Moxxi to say something, say anything, but all she's met with is silence.

"He's had that coming for a long time," Angel continues. "I've been waiting for somebody to finally put that bastard in his place."

"Who are you?" she asks.

"A friend of a friend. That's not important right now. Let's just say I have good reasons for wanting to see Jack suffer. I only wanted to contact you so... so I could tell you... thank you. "

Angel waits with bated breath for a response. Eventually, she hears Moxxi speak up, a hint of amusement in her voice. "It did feel pretty good..."

Angel smiles. "You have no idea."

With a quick mental command, the monitors in the Control Core power down. Angel slowly floats down and presses a button on the console beside her. The circular floor panel beneath her opens up, and a platform with a queen-sized bed on top of it rises up from the hole in the ground, filling the space the floor panel previously filled.

Angel slowly floats down into the bed, gently slipping beneath the covers.

She allows her mind to wander. The image of Moxxi putting her father in his place immediately comes to mind, and she smiles. Jack finally wronged somebody who wasn't afraid to fight back.

Angel knows her father: he will be livid. He'll want to take everything away from Moxxi.

She doesn't suppose it'll be too hard to make sure he doesn't. It's been a long time since she's played the role of Guardian Angel. She's glad to have the opportunity again. She knows it won't be safe for her to be out in the Deep Fathoms much longer, though, so far away from any population center that isn't a bandit town. First thing in the morning, she'll contact her again, and suggest that she move to Sanctuary, with Roland and the Raiders.

She stares up at the ceiling above her in silence, then bites her bottom lip.

Hyperion monitors and records every ECHO communication on Pandora. Every conversation, every late night drunken confession, every desperate broadcast is archived and encrypted for the security of the planet. But even the most advanced security measures can't keep Angel out.

She reaches into the files and quickly sorts out communications from all but one of Pandora's citizens. With a few moments of concentration, she isolates, splices, and processes a few files until she's left with a sound clip not even two seconds long.

Play it.

The sound clip she manufactured plays, and Moxxi's voice sounds in her ear, telling her "I love you."

Angel closes her eyes and loses herself beneath the blankets. She doesn't need her monitors in order to conjure up Moxxi's image anymore.

It may not be real, but it's real enough for her.

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again." — F. Scott Fitzgerald