#can u believe i've now written two fics with the basic premise of 'man seeks business investors'

[oodlyenough]

fic: return on investment (1/2)

If Atlas were a baby, Fiona realizes, she would be its luxurious, jet-setting mother, travelling the world on a whim, and Rhys would be the live-in nanny doing all the actual childrearing.

--

Atlas needs money. Thanks to Felix, Fiona has four million dollars.

Rhys will probably regret this.

3.5k in this chapter. Mostly comedy, with a bit of drama to come. Post-game. Pretty exclusively about Rhys & Fiona’s relationship, with bit parts and cameos from Sasha, Vaughn and Yvette. Kudos to @shinyopals, @firstofoctober and @valoscope on Tumblr for humouring this idea long enough for it to grow as it has. Also on AO3.

Update: Part 2 on Tumblr | Part 2 on AO3

The first million of Felix’s nine is spent getting Fiona and Rhys back to Pandora after the Vault transports them half-way across the galaxy.

It’s not how Fiona imagined spending her first million dollars. It’s also not how she imagined her first visit to another planet. Or who she imagined visiting it with.

It does put an end to Rhys’ whining when he learns she has millions of dollars cash in her back pocket, though, so at least there's that.

“I didn't think Vaults were supposed to cost you money,” Rhys points out, ever so helpfully, as Fiona parts with a larger chunk of change than she's ever previously held.

“This was a dud,” Fiona reasons. “Obviously. The next one I find’ll be better.”

“Seriously? You still wanna be a Vault Hunter? After all this? You’re not all… Vault-ed out?”

Rhys looks at her like he's pretty sure that's stupid. Truthfully Fiona is pretty sure he's got a point, but it's not like he's one to talk.

“Hey, people with glass career ambitions shouldn’t throw stones.”

Rhys smirks. “Yeah, not sure that figure of speech really held up for you.”

“Whatever, just… shut up. You're lucky I'm nice enough to pay for your ticket, too.”

“Technically that’s money you stole from me and Vaughn, so…”

Fiona flips him off, upgrades her ticket to first class for the leg home and leaves him in coach.

That leaves eight million to split with Sasha.

Sudden wealth agrees with Sasha—or at least, Sasha agrees with sudden wealth.

She spends a chunk right away, on a tricked-out caravan that makes the old one look like a clown car, a sound system powerful enough to wake the dead, and at least a dozen guns that individually cost more money than any gun has any business costing.

Fiona understands the kid-in-a-candy-store impulse (Sasha nearly buys out one of those, too), but she’s older, arguably a little wiser, and definitely more patient. Besides, she might end up teleported across the universe again.

So instead she takes her four million, buys a new hat, and waits for an opportunity to present itself.

Rhys gets them all together with such forced nonchalance that it can only mean one thing: he wants something, and he is nervous to ask for it.

Fiona knows this, but she decides to let it play out anyway. Watching him squirm is funny.

Hours later, when Sasha and Vaughn are preoccupied with Sasha’s new motorbike, Rhys finally spits it out, and even though Fiona knew there was a request coming, she nearly chokes on her beer.

“You want me to what?”

“Invest,” he repeats, like it sounds any less insane the second time around. When her eyes remain as wide as dinner plates, he raises both index fingers. “I know, I know, I know, just—hear me out—”

He launches into a well-prepared sales pitch/slideshow/shameless plea, of which Fiona absorbs about twenty per cent through her haze of surprise, confusion and bewilderment.

When he’s finished, Fiona watches him closely through narrowed eyes. Her first question is, “Did you ask Sasha the same thing?”

“No.” He shifts in his seat under her scrutiny. “It seemed like a bad idea to… mix business and pleasure.”  

“God.” Fiona just about gags. “I’ll give you the money if you promise never to call my sister ‘pleasure’ ever again.”

Rhys is disturbingly unperturbed, tilting his head with a grin. “Is that a deal?”

“I dunno…” Fiona tilts her chair onto its back legs and pushes back her hat so she can stare up in proper contemplation. “Would that mean I’d own Atlas?”

“Nah, there’s lots of different ways you can do it, you don’t have to be involved at all. Could just be a loan with interest, or—”

“I wanna own it,” Fiona decides.

“You… what?” he sputters. She can just about see the gears in his head grind to a halt—or the circuit boards, or whatever cybernetic garbage he’s got implanted in there. “No, you don’t.”

“Uh, yeah I do.”

“...Why?”

Fiona shrugs. She lets the front legs of her chair hit back against the ground with a thunk.

“Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Fiona: Vault Hunter, business owner.” She spreads both hands in the air as if she’s unfurling an imaginary banner.

Rhys stares at her, dumbfounded. After a second, he narrows his eyes. “You were that kid on the playground who had no interest in the toy truck until somebody else was playing with it, weren’t you?”

“Dunno. Didn’t grow up with a lot of toys. Or a playground.” She pouts, aiming for a guilt trip, but she must fumble the landing, because Rhys just rolls his eyes.

“You don’t want to own Atlas,” he insists.

“Sure I do.”

“Look, the interest rate I’ll give you—”

“Nope.” She leans across the table, her chin cradled in her bridged fingers, smirking. “Wanna own it.”

Rhys leans forward too, with an equally snide smirk, like he’s hoping to catch her in a bluff. Fiona realizes two things in quick succession: that this has become a game of chicken, and that she isn’t about to lose.  

“Really? That’s really what you want. You really want equity, not interest, or a portion of the profits, or—”

“Really.” She slides one hand free and extends it across the table. “So, deal?”

Rhys’ narrowed, mismatched eyes study her face and then her outstretched hand, his jaw working in wordless contemplation.

Finally, with an aggravated huff, he grabs her hand in his. “Deal.”

Fiona grins, and tries to make sure her grip is as tight as his, even if her efforts are wasted on his prosthetic.

“Don’t worry,” she tells him, “I’ll still let you do all the work.”

Rhys shakes his head as he lets go, scowling. “You’re such an asshole.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” She points a finger in mock offense. “I’m a rich asshole.”

Once she signs on the dotted line, Fiona owns, technically, 51% of Atlas’ outstanding shares.

Majority shareholder. It sounds like it pains Rhys to say it.

Sasha asks what that means, exactly, and Fiona sort of shrugs, and Rhys groans very loudly and hits his forehead on the table.

If Atlas were a baby, Fiona realizes, she would be its luxurious, jet-setting mother, travelling the world on a whim, and Rhys would be the live-in nanny doing all the actual childrearing.

Rhys does not appreciate this metaphor as much as Fiona does.

He also doesn’t appreciate when Fiona refers to Atlas as her “hobby”, her “side hustle”, her “pet project”, or basically anything that describes it as “hers” at all.

This, of course, only encourages her to do it more often.

For the most part, though, she doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Atlas. Vault Hunting is a pretty preoccupying gig. Rhys sends her updates, sometimes—because he thinks she might care or because he wants to make her feel guilty for her uninvolvement, she’s not really sure—and she sort of half-skims them. She hasn’t got the head for business, anyway. She’d rather get shot at than read a quarterly report. Literally.

“That’s why I’ve got loyal servants like you,” she tells him.

If looks could kill, and if those killing powers worked even through a vidlink, she’d definitely be dead by now.

Fiona leans back against the wall, one foot braced against it, and buffs her nail polish while a nervous-looking woman in a lab coat turns her back to Fiona, hand at her ear.

“Hi, yes, sorry to bother you,” the woman says, “it’s Sophie, from R&D?”

There must be a pause on the line, because Sophie shoots a skittish glance over her shoulder at Fiona.

Fiona waves.

Sophie turns away again immediately, and Fiona shakes her head. She isn’t even trying to be intimidating.

“Yes, hi,” Sophie says again, apparently transferred to another line. “I—no, no, there’s nothing on fire this time. There’s just, um, there’s a woman here? Who wants a tour of the lab?”

Fiona wonders if Sophie is one of the so-called Children of Helios, and if so, exactly how long it’s going to take for those children to stop hiding in their parents’ basement.

“I know we don’t do tours,” Sophie says, sounding a little irritated at the insinuation. It’s the most Fiona has liked her so far. “But she says she’s—well, she…” Sophie casts another helpless glance at Fiona, like she resents what Fiona’s presence is making her say. “She says she owns the place.” Sophie is still watching Fiona from the corner of her eye as she nods slowly to the voice on the other end of the line. “Right. Okay. Will do.”

Finally, Sophie turns to face Fiona properly.

“He says he’ll be down in a minute,” says Sophie.

Fiona grins, pushing herself up from the wall. “Great.”

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” is the first thing Rhys says to her, and Fiona snorts.

“Hi, Rhys, I’m fine, good to see you, too, it’s been so long,” she says pointedly, but he ignores her, moving straight to the door, his palm held out to interface with the control panel.

She watches him work, head tilted. They haven’t seen much of each other in recent months, each caught up in their personal whirlwinds. Fiona is finally starting to earn some respect, and Atlas is taking its first fledgling steps as an actual, functional business. Again. Vault Hunter, CEO. It’s been… busy.

The Rhys in front of her now is even starting to look the part, all expensive clothing and serious facial expressions and the perpetual vibration of someone who’s consumed way beyond the recommended daily intake of caffeine.

Fiona knows him, though, and she’s not so easily fooled.

“It’s really�� not a great time for you to be here,” he admits to her as the door slides open. “I’ve got advertising proofs to approve, financials to look at, a couple big meetings that really need to go well, and shepherding you around is not exactly the prep I had planned.”

“Shepherding?” Fiona counters, following him through the doors. “Thought you’d be excited to show off.”

Rhys smiles thinly. “Yeah, well, you know, I would be! Just… kinda busy… trying not to lose all your money and torpedo my own career. Again.”

That sounds more like the Rhys she knows, always a little more awkward and uncertain than he tries to pretend. Fiona grins and claps him on the shoulder as they head into the lab.

“Tough. I want to see what my money’s paying for.”

Her money, it turns out, is paying for a number of things. The Atlas of yesteryear had a lot of irons in the fire, and in that regard, at least, Rhys’ is no different.

There’s a limited line of guns, the expensive sort that collectors pay exorbitant amounts of money to never use. Fiona asks if these were made explicitly to please Sasha, and Rhys gets a dumb look on his face and shrugs, which she takes as a yes.

They don’t keep the plantlife in the lab, he explains, which makes sense, but he assures her there’s a lot of it. Fiona remembers ten-foot carnivorous flowers and decides she’s not really missing out.

“Is it all still so… aggressive?” she asks, and Rhys sort of grins.

“Aggressive plantlife really agrees with Pandora,” he says, which she has to admit sounds true enough. “We’re working on fruit and stuff though, you can try some later.” Then something catches his eye, and he waves her forward eagerly. “Fi, come here.”

He introduces her to a frazzled woman named Hannah, standing on the outside of a tiny observation room. Through the window, a small, nondescript robot is holding what looks like a glorified button. Painted on the floor are two separate, coloured circles.

“We’ve been trying to learn more about the teleportation technology from the Vault of the Traveler,” Hannah tells her, and over Hannah’s shoulder, Rhys wiggles his eyebrows excitedly.

“Quick, easy interplanetary travel, right?” he prompts.

“Easy is one word for it.” Fiona tilts her head and raises an eyebrow. “Another is nauseating. Disorienting. Terrifying.”

Rhys dismisses it with a shrug. “I mean, it’s... probably less terrifying if you know it’s going to happen.” He sidles up next to her, full-on salesman. “Just think, though! Pandora to Dionysus in ten seconds.”

“Yeah, Dionysus will love that,” Fiona jokes, but it does sound pretty cool, now that he’s said it.

He scratches the back of his neck. “Well… we can worry about that later. It’s a work in progress.”

“I made some adjustments,” Hannah says, and then launches into a technical explanation that sounds like gibberish to Fiona. Rhys makes a good show of looking very attentive, but Fiona’s pretty sure he has no idea what any of it means, either.

By the end of it, Hannah’s holding up a remote control, and all three of them are watching the robot in the observation room curiously as Hannah holds up a remote control switch.

“It’s supposed to reappear in that blue circle, there,” Hannah explains.

The little robot dematerializes from its red circle and rematerializes almost instantly, in a bright flash of light, three feet into the air and nowhere near the blue circle. Before it can even hit the ground, it disappears again, reappears elsewhere, faster and faster, with non-stop bursts of blinding light, clattering around the room as it collides with the walls, floor and ceiling.

Finally, there’s a memorable slam against the window that sends them all flinching backwards. Hannah flips the switch the other way, and the robot falls from mid-air and lands on the floor.

Fiona cringes.

“It doesn’t, um, there’s no AI in that, or anything,” Rhys says hastily, though he looks a little horrified too. “It’s fine.”

With matching, pained thumbs up, they leave Hannah to her work.

Along with the guns and the experimental teleportation, there’s a variety of miscellaneous tech, small-ticket items that Rhys shows  to Fiona with all the enthusiasm of a teenager working part-time at an amusement park.

Every employee they run into knows Rhys, and Rhys knows all of them, well enough that she thinks he might be cheating, but she never catches his ECHO eye lighting up.

None of them know Fiona, which leaves her the great pleasure of introducing herself as Rhys’ boss, reveling in their look of confusion and Rhys’ scowl.

“I mean they really should have heard of me,” Fiona tells him.

“They don’t have reason to,” Rhys says. “It’s not like you actually do any work here.”

“You could have posters. ‘The Woman Who Made This All Possible’.” When that fails to get a response, she nudges him with her elbow. “Or a statue.”

“I’m not building you a statue,” says Rhys flatly, a disappointing underreaction.

It’s unusual for Rhys not to take Fiona’s bait, and she frowns. “I feel like your heart’s not in this.”

Rhys ignores that, too. “Last lab’s up here, let’s just finish up.”

There’s not much to look at in the last section of the lab, except for various computer displays she doesn’t understand, some whiteboards covered in indecipherable writing, and various hunks of metal in various states of completion, largely unrecognizable to Fiona. She peers at a printed list of specifications, trying to make sense of it, her eyebrows knitted together.

“Is this an… arm?” she asks finally. When there’s no answer, she prompts, “Rhys?”

Nothing. When she looks up, it’s obvious she’s lost Rhys’ attention. He’s standing in the hall, staring in deep concentration at some display projected from his palm, his golden eye flickering wildly.

“Hey. Rhys.”

No luck. Fiona rolls her eyes.

“Mr. Robot,” she tries again, and this time she reaches up to flick the port at the side of his head.

The display from his palm flickers for a second, and Rhys reacts like he’s been shot, jumping away from her with a yelp and flailing both arms uselessly.

“God, don’t do that,” he scolds, glaring, and Fiona would maybe feel a little bit bad about it if his reaction were not so funny. “What? What do you want?”

“Food,” she says, aware of the sudden rumble in her stomach. “Where’s this fruit you promised me? Lunchtime!”

“Oh. Right.” He points to the exit doors behind him. “There’s a cafeteria that way. Keep going, hang a left, can’t miss it. You’ll find something.”

He turns to go the other way, already focusing on his palm display again, and Fiona catches him by the shoulder.

“What, you’re not shepherding me?” she asks.

“Can’t. Sorry. Busy.” He doesn’t even look up as pulls out of her grip and waves her off. “I think you can manage lunch on your own, Vault Hunter.”

Fiona watches him go and shakes her head.

“Jackass,” she mutters.

“This is Atlas food, and I own Atlas, mostly, so if you think about it, this is really already my food, and I shouldn’t have to pay.”

Fiona says it all clearly and slowly, with such a winning smile that surely no one could deny her.

The man serving food at the canteen does not look convinced. “Lady, I don’t even know who you are.”

Fiona’s about to explain why that’s really not her fault, and she’ll be speaking to the CEO about that, because it seems wrong, really, that she not get her due, and—

“It’s fine, Steve,” comes a voice from behind her. “She’s with me, just put it on my tab.”

Turning to face her unlikely saviour, Fiona finds Yvette, eyebrow arched, hands on her hips, and lips pulled into a smile. Steve mumbles something about executives looking out for each other, but he hands Fiona her tray of food without further complaint.

“Thanks,” says Fiona brightly, after Yvette’s grabbed her own food and lead them to a table. “Rhys basically abandoned me,” she adds.

Not that she’s feeling resentful, or anything.

“Yeah, he’s been a ghost recently,” Yvette says, sliding into a booth. “He always gets like this when he’s busy. He’d probably sleep in his office if your sister would let him get away with it. Vaughn and I used to stage interventions at Hyperion.”

The second she’s said it, she looks like she regrets it, a shadow passing over her face at the mention of Helios. Fiona pretends not to notice, studying her plate of food intensely.  

“But anyway,” says Yvette, abruptly trying to regain control of the conversation, “I didn’t know you were visiting today!”

“It was a surprise.” Fiona takes a swig of her drink through her straw and raises her eyebrows. “You know, like a secret shopper. Gotta say, though, my tour guide gets a failing grade.”

Yvette laughs at that, and then she starts to catch Fiona up, filling her in on all the details Rhys had been too distracted to bother with. Atlas is doing a lot of work with cybernetics, Yvette explains, and at various price points. There are lots of people on Pandora who could use prosthetics like Rhys’ own, but not many who could pay for them. Trying to find the right balance of dexterity, function and affordability is the primary focus and current struggle of the R&D team.

“One of our suppliers is a real dick, too,” Yvette adds, matter-of-factly. “I know he’s trying to overcharge us. I’ve worked with him before.” She rips her piece of toast in half and points at Fiona with it. “That’s one of the meetings Rhys has been hyperventilating about.”

“He didn’t tell me any of this,” Fiona says, pulling the lid off of her soda cup to chase down the last drops of her drink with her straw.

Yvette only shrugs. “Like I said, he gets like that.” She pops the second half of her toast into her mouth. “Besides—it must be pretty boring compared to what you’re up to these days. You must have amazing stories.”

Fiona pushes the ice around in her empty cup. Vault Hunting, not unlike conning, is about ten percent the sweet thrill of victory, ninety percent guesswork and fumbling to cheat death in ways that are embarrassing to think about later.

Still, she doesn’t like to spoil the illusion.

“Oh yeah,” she says, looking up. “Totally. Great stories. The best stories.” Already she’s mentally fishing for anecdotes that lend themselves to her… more creative impulses. “This one time—”

Yvette shifts closer in anticipation, but when she glances at her watch she blanches. “Shit. Hold that thought. I should probably get back to work.” She rises easily from the booth and takes her tray with her. “Come see me before you leave, all right? I wanna hear about the Vault Hunting.”

“Will do.” Fiona leans back in her chair, one arm draped over the side of it. “Thanks for lunch.”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” Yvette winks as she drops her tray on the pile and walks backwards to the door. “Rhys pays that tab anyway.”

Part 2 on Tumblr | Part 2 on AO3