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Chapter Text

The broadcast room inside the Stratford Tower was brightly lit and shockingly fluorescent, but somehow the web of monitors lining the far wall still stood out as eye-catching. Connor's head was buzzing with new data as he took in his surroundings and processed them alongside the briefing he and Hank had just gotten from Chris; it simulated something akin to eagerness, and no matter how many different crime scenes he went on, that sensation never felt old or tiresome. It was even stronger here than it ever had been before; this would mark his first case involving multiple deviants at the same scene.

The gigantic screen glaring at him seemed the obvious place for him to start a more in-depth investigation. He all but beelined to it.

It was an interesting decision, Connor noted as he approached the console, that the deviant who'd gone so far as to hijack a TV station and make a nationally syndicated speech had also chosen to do so with its skin deactivated. An act like that wasn't going to mask its identity, and if it was meant to be a symbolic gesture, Connor found that he had a difficult time making the connection.

He may as well hear what it had to say; maybe some of the answers could be found in its statement. Without thinking much of it, Connor pressed play.

"We ask that you recognize our dignity, our hopes, and our rights," the android said. "Together, we can live in peace and build a better future, for humans and androids."

For some reason, the words took Connor by surprise. This was hardly the 'terrifying speech' he'd been expecting based on the reports of the incident; it was calm and rational, and there was something about the way this android spoke that seemed almost disarming in its own way.

He took a step forward as he listened on. The analytic programs powering through his head slowed in favor of fine-tuning the sensitivity on his audio processor, and the change was so subtle that he was sure that he hadn't consciously done it himself. Things like that happened from time to time; the lines of coding in his system that made him alert and observant — the ones that, in certain situations, were responsible for his sense of self-preservation and kept him alive — were more reactive to outside stimuli than his more forward-working receptors.

It seemed odd for it to happen now, though.

"This message is a hope of a people," the speech went on. "You gave us life, and now the time has come for you to give us freedom."

The speech itself wasn't much to go on in terms of the investigation, but Connor found himself rooted to his spot on the floor even after it ended. Something hummed at the back of his head, deep and familiar and beautiful, like an old soulful song he'd heard a thousand times before. His thirium pump regulator slowed to tick in time with the not-memory, and his internal temperature began to drop along with it — things that should have only ever happened when he knew that he was in a safe place and could take a moment to organize his thoughts and let his hardware rest for a few hours.

It was like his whole system was trying to tell him something, but the processes were hanging and lagging, unable to give him a proper error message. Connor refocused his eyes on the screen and cocked his head to the side slightly, trying to determine what, exactly, seemed so —

"Think that's rA9?" Hank's voice cut through the whirring of Connor's internal analyses.

More than the sound of Hank's voice, it was the content of the question itself that shocked Connor back to reality. Somehow, with all of the information racing through his circuits, the concept of rA9 had slipped past him entirely. He caught himself mentally just in time to keep himself from stumbling over his words.

"Deviants say rA9 will set them free," he said absently. "This android seems to have that objective."

It really wasn't much of an answer, and an active part of his programming knew that it was inadequate as a response, but it was the only thing that he could think to say. If this android really was rA9, then whatever it was doing certainly wasn't ineffective — and maybe that was the part that spooked Connor the most.

But rA9 was a myth — a fairytale that deviants had invented in order to help justify their own existence. He had to believe that, for his own sake and for the sake of the investigation. A quick data scan would confirm that. Whatever android it was making this speech, it was just like any other deviant: it'd been built in a factory, sold in a store, tasked to an owner, and listed as missing in recent months — if it hadn't had a criminal report filed on it yet, that was. That's all.

Connor turned on his sensors and roved his eyes across the screen. Emblazoned on the android's cheek was its full serial number, so he focused his attention there.

The data attached popped to the forefront of his mind immediately.

RK-SERIES PROTOTYPE
RK200
Registered as 'Markus'
Gift from Elijah Kamski to Carl Manfred

Connor's breath caught in his throat. It didn't matter — he didn't need to breathe, but his auxiliary functions seized all at once as he struggled and failed and struggled and failed to process the information he'd just uncovered. It didn't match up with any of the current knowledge he had stored in his memory, and when he tried to cross-examine it with anything else, it all came up blank. The irrationality of it left him feeling listless and impotent, and it took a conscious effort to pull himself out of that feedback loop and focus only on what was in front of him.

The longer he studied Markus, the more puzzled he felt. Up until this point, Connor himself had been the only RK series that he'd been aware of; CyberLife hadn't released or even told him about any others. But there was that something else, there, too — that buzz he'd been ignoring — that something that hummed in a tone a pitch deeper than his simple bewilderment. The word 'kinship' floated up to the forefront of his thoughts, but he determinedly shoved it away as though ridiculous.

Because it was ridiculous. Whether they were the same series type was irrelevant; this android was deviant; it was malfunctioning. It had nothing to do with him. So then why did it seem so familiar to him, like it was someone he'd known in a past life?

And that was ridiculous, too. Androids didn't have souls, and they certainly didn't have past lives. His LED buzzed to yellow, flashed to red, returned to yellow, but it never settled back to its normal calm blue.

"Do you see something?" Hank asked.

For the first time ever, Connor found himself cursing the tells of his LED.

"I identified its model and serial number," he said. He could almost taste the incompleteness of his response as the words rolled off his tongue, but his mind still felt overloaded with unprocessed data, and he hadn't been sure what else to say.

"Anything else I should know?"

A thousand things, actually. He had the android's name, the name of its last owner, the address of its last owner, and a link directly to Elijah Kamski. He knew that it was a unique model — and a prototype, at that — which could mean that the threat it posed was unique in function. Not only that, but Connor had seen this android's police report back at the station; he knew that this was a deviant that they were already looking for. From there, it wouldn't be difficult to retrace its steps and possibly even establish a motive.

This was the breakthrough that they'd been searching for. Just from one simple scan, so much in their investigation seemed to fall more neatly into place, and Hank needed to know every last detail. Connor turned his sights back to his partner, opening his mouth to speak —

— and then he hesitated, eyes flickering briefly back to the image on the screen. To Markus, the RK200 prototype whose existence had been kept secret from the world. Markus, whose voice sounded both familiar and comforting to Connor's ears like that of an old friend's.

Markus.

"No," he said after a pause that seemed too long, in a tone that seemed too distracted. "Nothing."

The lie was so bold as to sound ridiculous, but Hank didn't push the matter, and so Connor decided to let it go. He took a step back from the monitors, circuits firing erratically in his head. It took all of his willpower to pull his attention away from Markus's speech, even as the LED at his own temple burned a caustic yellow mark into his synthetic flesh.

He'd lied to Hank. Jeopardized the entire investigation. And for what?

Androids don't really feel emotions. They simply get overwhelmed by irrational instructions, which can lead to unpredictable behavior.

He'd have to run a self-diagnostic the second they left this place.

Chapter Text

When Hank suggested they go interview Elijah Kamski, Connor had nearly jumped out of both his skin and his plastic casing. He'd continued to keep Markus's build details a secret from his partner, and the fear that he might have been caught in the act was real — even if the concept of fear was still new and foreign to Connor. He tried not to think about it — tried to ignore the way the back of his head buzzed in alarm, the way that his thirium ran cold through his artificial veins, the way that the pump at the center of his chest pounded erratically in such a way that his regulator couldn't control.

He tried not to think about it, but he often failed. That deviant on the roof of the Stratford Tower who'd self-destructed while Connor was attached to its memory had left cracks in his code that he couldn't repair or even seem to self-diagnose. He'd been on high alert ever since then, which had resulted in something that mimicked a sense of paranoia.

In the end, that was all it was, really. Empty paranoia. Hank wasn't trying to get one over on him or make him confess to keeping secrets. Markus had been identified independently and without the help of Connor's initial analysis, and the trail leading back to Kamski seemed obvious now.

Though, when the details had come out and Hank had asked him why he didn't say anything earlier, Connor had merely given him the half-hearted excuse that a name wasn't going to help them find the deviant hideout any more than a model type or serial number would have. It was another lie, this time by omission. Markus's name wasn't going to lead them anywhere — that much was true — but all of the other information that Connor had tucked away in his memory banks might have.

He didn't know why he kept lying to Hank about this, and it wasn't as though he didn't want to track down and catch Markus. He truly did want to solve this case and accomplish his mission, but there was something holding him back — something hidden in the dormant lines of his coding that whispered at him to stay his hand and get a better understanding of the situation before charging in.

In that regard, and by all rights, he should've been looking forward to a meeting with Elijah Kamski. He wasn't. But they were here now, and all there was left for Connor to do was sit in the car and wait for Hank to finish his phone call so that they could head inside. He didn't know why he resisted the idea of talking to Kamski so much. Maybe it was a part of his programming that CyberLife had installed out of petty resentment for the man, but somehow Connor didn't think so. Maybe it was more paranoia on his part regarding getting caught in his lies, but that seemed like an incomplete answer, too.

RK200. Gift from Elijah Kamski to Carl Manfred.

Maybe it was because Kamski held the secrets to Markus's creation and the connection that Connor himself had to the deviant leader, and he'd rather go through the rest of his investigation pretending that they had nothing to do with one another at all.

Outside, Hank pulled his phone away from his face, tapped at the screen, and then pocketed it. That was Connor's cue. He reached over and grabbed the door handle of Hank's old car and let himself out, freshly fallen snow crunching under his feet as he stood. A cold breeze that he couldn't feel swept across his face, carrying the lightest dusting of snowfall with it. Maybe once this case was over, he'd turn off his temperature regulator and experience the bracing weather for himself, but here and now was not the time nor the place.

As he closed the car door behind him, he couldn't help but note the perturbed look spread across his partner's features. His social program kicked into gear towards something that passed for anxiety as he suddenly wondered if maybe he should have given Hank an extra minute or two before joining him.

Oh well. It was too late now.

"Is everything okay, lieutenant?" he asked cautiously as he approached.

Hank half-turned back in Connor's direction in order to address him, but it seemed to take him a second before he found the words. Connor cocked his head to the side inquisitively; it was rare form indeed for Hank to come up empty like this. The lieutenant usually had something to say about damn near everything — a trait that Connor found both admirable and endearing, even if Hank's commentary was crude and pessimistic more often than not.

"Chris was on patrol last night," he said finally. "He was attacked by a bunch of deviants."

Another semi-uncharacteristic pause. Hank's gaze was pointed at an unfocused location a thousand miles away, but he gathered himself a second later and glanced back over in Connor's direction. There was a look of sincere astonishment on his face that Connor had never seen before.

"He said he was saved by Markus himself," he followed up.

Connor's train of thought stuttered, and the parts of him responsible for decoding and analyzing data suddenly skipped and lagged. Markus had gone out of his way to save human lives — to save Chris's life? It seemed so strange to think that someone so close to Connor's normal orbit had been part of an encounter like this — strange to the point of being beyond coincidental. His program automatically began to calculate the likelihood probability of this, as well as the probability of it happening multiple times, and then just for good measure he added in the wildcard variable of all of this happening and Markus being an RK series prototype.

Markus…

No. This was a waste of time.

Connor pulled himself out of that system process before it consumed the entirety of his conscious thought, shaking his head as though to physically rid himself of it. He didn't know when he'd started thinking of Markus as 'he' and not 'it,' and it was frustrating whenever the pronoun change slipped by him without him noticing. The last thing he needed to do was start humanizing the inhuman — especially the main target of his investigation— but he quickly cut himself off of that line of thinking, too. There were more important things in this conversation for him to prioritize right now.

"Is Chris okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," Hank answered him. "He's in shock, but he's alive."

The lieutenant turned away then and shook his head incredulously. White puffs of steam escaped from his lips and nose on every exhale, and at this angle, they were all that Connor had to go off of in order to gauge his partner's mood.

"What the hell…" Hank muttered under his breath.

Connor found himself in agreement with Hank's dazed mumblings, though probably not for the same reasons. The further this case progressed, the less that Connor felt he understood it. Sure, Markus's uprising had been peaceful up until this point, but the thought that it might go out of its way to save a human's life — to save an officer's life — was a big puzzle that even Connor's highly advanced analytical programs couldn't put together. He couldn't for the life of him see a logical reason or motive for an action like that, but the idea that Markus could actually be capable of real mercy and empathy was too terrifying to consider. It would mean that CyberLife had been lying to him this whole time about the emotional capability of androids — and worse yet, they'd been lying to him about the nature of deviancy itself.

Suddenly, the thought of going to see Elijah Kamski was even less appealing than it'd been before. Maybe it was naive of him, but Connor wasn't ready for that bubble to burst just yet. Kamski was a man who had nothing left to lose; if there was some big secret to deviancy that CyberLife was purposefully keeping from the world, Kamski had absolutely zero reason to stay silent about it.

But it wasn't Connor's decision to make. Hank turned his attention fully to the villa at the edge of the lake and had already taken the first few steps in that direction, leaving Connor little choice but to follow after him. The only hope he had now of stopping this was to talk his partner out of it, but he'd already calculated that there was only a twelve percent chance of success on that front.

That didn't mean he wouldn't try. Twelve percent was better than zero.

"How did you find Kamski?" he asked as he caught up with Hank. It seemed like as good a place to start as any.

"I remember this guy was all over the media when CyberLife first started selling androids," Hank told him. "I made a few calls, and here we are."

Well, that would teach Connor to doubt the effectiveness of good old-fashioned detective work in the future; keeping his nonsensical secrets could only get him so far for so long. He lightly kicked at the snow as he headed up the ramp leading to Kamski's front door just as a self-serving display of petulance, though he made sure that it was a subtle enough motion to escape Hank's notice.

"But he left CyberLife ten years ago," he pressed. "Why do you want to meet him?"

"This guy created the first android to pass the Turing test," Hank said, "and he's the founder of CyberLife. Anybody can tell us about deviants, it's him."

They were at the door now, which likely meant that there was no backing out of this. Connor stopped a few feet behind Hank, and it was only now that he noticed that his entire system was keyed up as though preparing for a confrontation. The valves responsible for his flow of thirium had widened, and his pump regulator had ticked up in anticipation for a fight.

"I've got a bad feeling about this, lieutenant," Connor said in a low tone — one last-ditch effort to get Hank to stop, listen, or even hesitate at all. "We shouldn't have come here."

Hank turned to look at him then, and for a split second, Connor had a glimmer of hope that his partner was finally starting to hear his concerns — but then it was squashed as quickly as it came when he saw the knowing smirk tugging at the edges of the lieutenant's lips.

"Bad feeling, huh?" Hank said, a twinkle of amusement in his eye. "Should get your program checked. Might be a glitch."

Connor opened his mouth to protest further, but Hank cut off his opportunity to do so by reaching over and ringing the doorbell. Defeated, Connor shifted his stance and focused on the task ahead of him, as was expected of him — just as he was programmed to do.

Maybe his unease really was a glitch.

Chapter Text

"What about you, Connor?" Kamski asked. "Whose side are you on?"

Connor straightened his posture at being addressed directly — something he hadn't honestly expected to happen. Kamski had all but ignored his presence up until now, only acknowledging him when Connor had dared to speak first. Even then, the response had been less than stellar; Kamski had given him some pseudo-philosophical non-answer to the question of how deviancy might spread, and at that point, Connor had been willing to write this entire experience off as a complete waste of time. He'd almost been relieved.

He wasn't so sure about that determination anymore, though. There was something calculated and guarded behind Kamski's gaze, and the question itself seemed strategic and pointed. Connor refused to let himself forget that Kamski knew far more than he was willing to share, and that creeping paranoia that slithered through the lines of his own coding was ever-present. He eyed his creator with only a small amount of suspicion, choosing his words carefully before he answered.

"It's not about me, Mr. Kamski," he said coolly. "I have no side."

A knowing grin of resignation split Kamski's face, and he dropped his chin to his chest in a melodramatic display of faux-defeat. Connor's brow twitched in confusion, and he was left wondering when it was, exactly, that he'd missed the joke. Even with his highly advanced social program, he had a tough time getting a read on Kamski, and moments of seemingly genuine emotion like this only served to muddy the waters.

When Kamski lifted his head to look at him again, there were still lines of amusement creased around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

"Well, that's what you're programmed to say," he remarked, that sideways smile still staining his lips.

His expression dropped in the next second, and the very air itself seemed to shift with his mood. Without warning, he took a step forward, purposefully crowding into Connor's personal space as he sized him up. Were Connor the type to get intimidated by solitary geniuses wearing bathrobes, he might have taken a step back in response — but he'd already faced down much larger threats than Elijah Kamski. He held his ground and stayed silent.

"But you…" Kamski went on in a tone that was shockingly sober by comparison to his previous comment. "What do you really want?"

The words bored into Connor's audio processor and burrowed into the core of his circuitry. Warning alarms flashed at the edges of his periphery, cautioning him about his rising stress levels, but he ignored them all. He wasn't dense, and he certainly wasn't stupid — he knew that Kamski's question was less of a question and more of an accusation. The man was fishing for a specific answer, likely because he knew Connor better than Connor even knew himself — and Connor felt stubborn and petty in his refusal to give it to him.

"I'm sorry, but I don't see where you're getting at," he snapped. "What I want is —"

For you to ignore me and answer the lieutenant's questions before you say something that I'll regret having heard, was the conclusion of that thought, but he caught himself before he gave it voice. That wasn't what he was supposed to say, and the fact that his programming hadn't prevented that impulse in the first place was worrying. He was a machine; he didn't want anything.

Except, he did.

He wanted to get the hell out of this place and get back to his work. He wanted to finish this case, and he wanted his system processes to go back to normal once he did. He wanted straight answers from someone for once in his short little life — be it from Kamski, Amanda, or anyone else. He wanted confirmation that there was nothing cracked or fraying within his own programming, and that it was merely coincidence that both he and Markus were RK series.

He wanted to believe that this attraction — and he used that word in its most basic sense — that he felt towards Markus was nothing more than that of a hunter tracking its prey. He wanted to meet Markus, to talk with the deviant leader face-to-face, to look into his eyes, and to discover the truth for himself.

But he was a machine, and machines weren't meant to want.

" — not important," he finished with some difficulty.

If Kamski was at all swayed or convinced by this answer, he didn't show it. His face remained a cool mask as he absorbed Connor's response, and he didn't once flinch or look away.

One second ticked by. Then another. Connor leveled his gaze and gave his creator an even stare, refusing to let the silence rattle him.

"Chloe?" Kamski called out eventually, never once taking his eyes off of Connor.

Connor was the first to look away when a subtle movement from the edges of his vision caught his attention. The blonde android who'd answered the door for them earlier slipped into the forefront of his awareness as it crossed the room and stopped on the plush white throw rug at their feet. Kamski moved to stand behind it, placing a hand on either one of its shoulders in order to coax it into standing directly in front of Connor.

"I'm sure you're familiar with the Turing test," Kamski said, still fussing slightly with the android's stance. "Mere formality. Simple question of algorithms and computing capacity."

Once Chloe was exactly where he wanted it, Kamski pulled his hands away and looked up to address both Hank and Connor directly again, but Connor's attention stayed fixed on the android. The woman that she was designed to resemble really was beautiful, but there was something about her that just seemed… off. There was a vacancy in her expression that bothered him, and the look in her eyes was both unfocused and resigned.

It's a machine, he reminded himself. It's programmed to obey. That's all that it's doing.

"What interests me," Kamski went on, "is whether machines are capable of empathy. I call it the Kamksi test. It's very simple. You'll see."

Kamski glanced at Connor then, and a spark of understanding flashed behind his dark eyes. Connor quickly darted his gaze from Chloe over to Kamski, even though he knew that it was already too late. He'd been caught staring.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" Kamski asked.

The question was clearly directed at Connor — though Connor couldn't quite tell if Kamski meant to mock him by asking it. His creator reached over and touched the tips of his fingers against the pale skin of Chloe's cheek, and she turned her head to look at him. There was an honest affection on Kamski's face that Connor hadn't thought him capable of, and the man slowly shifted his touch, tracing an invisible trail along the delicate line of her jaw.

There was a slight sense of reverence in his tone as he continued: "One of the first intelligent models developed by CyberLife. Young and beautiful forever. A flower that will never wither…"

Connor felt his processors slow as he looked on, and his grasp on the passage of time itself slowed with them. There was something startlingly intimate about the way that Kamski looked at Chloe — something that seemed personal and almost private about the way he touched her. An odd mixture of curiosity and revulsion wormed its way into Connor's social programming, and the moral question of whether pre-programmed androids could consent —

He caught himself there before pursuing that line of thought further, realizing that it hadn't even crossed his mind back in the Eden Club. He hadn't questioned it then because it wasn't relevant; machines were machines. And the follow-up question of whether Chloe actually got anything out of, experienced, or longed for a physical sense of intimacy was even less so.

Kamski dropped his hand in the next second, and Connor blinked back into alertness.

"But what is it really?" he asked simply, sounding almost like a professor all of a sudden. "A piece of plastic imitating a human?"

He turned away from them, shifting his attention to the side table pressed up against the glass window. Leaning down, he tugged open the solitary drawer in the fixture and reached inside in search of something. Connor tilted his head to the side to try to get a better view of what Kamski was rummaging around for, but at this angle and with Chloe in the way, it was impossible for him to see inside.

"Or a living being," Kamski said as he straightened his posture, "with a soul?"

When he turned back around, he revealed the retrieved item to be a 9mm handgun. Kamski held the weapon gingerly by the back of the grip with one hand and raised the other in a non-threatening manner. Connor's LED flashed to yellow briefly as he studied the weapon, and an instant analysis of it based on the weight with which it seemed to hang from Kamski's fingers indicated to him that the magazine inside was loaded.

Kamski placed an open palm on Chloe's shoulder and gently pushed the android to its knees. It complied immediately and without question, and Kamski turned his sights back to Connor.

He took a step forward. Then another.

For the first time in this encounter, Connor finally registered Elijah Kamski as a threat.

"It's up to you to answer that fascinating question, Connor," Kamski said as he approached.

Without even stopping to hesitate, he wrapped his fingers around Connor's wrist with his free hand and shoved the weapon into his grip with the other. The metal was cold against Connor's synthetic skin — a detail that he should not have been able to feel or notice. Kamski moved to stand beside him the same way a weapons instructor might have, keeping his hold on Connor's forearm as he maneuvered him to raise the barrel towards Chloe's face.

"Destroy this machine," he said, low and threatening in Connor's ear, "and I'll tell you all I know."

He released his grip and took a step back, allowing Connor to act freely.

"Or spare it," he offered as an alternative, "if you feel it's alive, but you'll leave here without having learned anything from me."

"Okay, I think we're done here," Hank cut in finally. "Come on, Connor. Let's go. Sorry to get you outta your pool."

The sound of his partner's voice caused Connor's LED to blink from yellow to red. His program stuttered as it struggled to compartmentalize and prioritize the conflicting orders. On the one hand, he was meant to take any steps necessary to accomplish his mission. On the other, Lieutenant Anderson had just given him a direct order.

But there was something else there, too — some third factoring influence that existed outside of his normal programming — something that Connor usually did everything within his power to repress and ignore. He wasn't meant to be able to make his own judgement calls regarding his mission objectives or the orders he was given, and yet…

"What's more important to you, Connor?" Kamski pressed, ignoring Hank entirely. "Your investigation, or the life of this android? Decide who you are. An obedient machine... or a living being endowed with free will."

"That's enough," Hank snapped. "Connor, we're leaving."

They were like the angel and the devil on his shoulders, bickering back and forth about the nature of morality. Kamski circled around him like a feral cat stalking its prey, and the urgent anticipation that Hank clearly felt was radiating off of him in waves.

Connor's programming still hadn't caught up with him yet.

"Pull the trigger —"

"Connor! Don't."

"— and I'll tell you what you wanna know."

The room fell silent after that.

The pistol hung heavy in Connor's hand, but he held it steady. His programming flashed errors at him, having been caught in an endless feedback loop of failed attempts at prioritizing the conflicting orders that he'd been given. He couldn't fall back on it as an excuse this time; he would have to make this decision alone, based solely on his own judgement.

This wasn't the first time that he'd been faced with the option to either shoot or disengage, but those other decisions had been much easier to make — he'd assessed the level of threat posed to either himself or to his partner and acted accordingly. Now, though? Where Connor stood now was not at all a matter of life and death; Chloe couldn't have been less of a threat if she'd tried. Was he really expected to just shoot her?

What would be the consequences if he didn't?

What'll happen if I pull this trigger? Hank's voice resurfaced from Connor's memory banks. Hm? Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?

I doubt there's a heaven for androids, Connor had told him then. He still believed it now. If he pulled the trigger on Chloe, it would be lights out for her. She would cease all operations, and a new Chloe would have to come in to take her place. She wouldn't be the first android to have been broken and in need of replacement, and she certainly won't be the last.

Connor tightened his grip and pulled the hammer back on the pistol. Chloe stared up at him, wordless and unblinking, but the sound of the gun cocking brought focus to her eyes as she faced down the barrel of his weapon. A slight tint of fear mixed with the blue of her irises, and Connor hesitated.

He'd become recently acquainted to the sensation of fear himself, and the pump at the center of his chest kicked up its pace at the recollection of the experience. He'd already forced one android to self-destruct — that deviant atop the Stratford Tower. One of Markus's accomplices. Did Connor really need to destroy another?

And speaking of Markus…

He said he was saved by Markus himself.

Even despite all of the ugliness and violence, Markus was out there saving human lives. What right did Connor have to shoot an android — an innocent one, at that? Chloe wasn't deviant; she didn't deserve death.

She? No. It. Chloe was a machine, not a person. It didn't have a soul, only a function that it was meant to execute. Just like Connor. Just like Markus.

Markus had spared Chris.

The reality of it was an all-encompassing one; it stuck to Connor's hardware like melted plastic, threatening to shut down his entire system if he didn't remove it — but he didn't know how. That inexplicable connection he felt with Markus was stronger right now than it'd ever been before; it ensnared him like twine wrapping itself around each of his limbs, tying itself into knots that threatened to restrict the flow of his thirium.

Chloe was afraid. Just like Chris had been afraid. And Markus had spared Chris.

That invisible thread tightened around Connor's wrist and yanked hard —

— forcing Connor to hand the gun back to Kamski without it ever having been fired. His creator plucked the weapon from his hand and tucked it away in his grip without a fuss.

"Fascinating…" Kamski breathed out with a sense of awe that Connor could identify as being not wholly authentic. "CyberLife's last chance to save humanity is itself a deviant."

Deviant. The word burned at Connor's core like acid, and it seemed especially potent coming from Elijah Kamski. Connor's LED seared a scorching red mark into his temple as he fumbled in search of an excuse. His program had failed, and he'd been forced to make a decision on his own, but that didn't necessarily mean that he had deviated.

Right?

"I'm…" he struggled. "I'm not a deviant."

"You preferred to spare a machine rather than accomplish your mission," Kamski explained to him. "You saw a living being in this android. You showed empathy."

Kamski took a few steps back in order to offer a hand to Chloe and help her to her feet, which she took immediately. Connor could see the relief and gratitude shining in her eyes as she stood, and it caused his LED to buzz away from red and back to a conflicted yellow.

He didn't feel deviant. A quick system check indicated to him that his program was still intact; he hadn't abandoned his mission, nor had he explicitly gone against the orders given to him by CyberLife. There had been no guarantee that Kamski knew anything that could've helped him solve this case, and taking a gamble based on the assumption that he did was just that: a gamble. Killing Chloe wasn't part of Connor's mission.

And yet Kamski was beaming at him like a proud father, leaving Connor feeling more lost and confused than ever about the nature of deviancy. Was it possible that androids' capacity to feel and experience emotion wasn't a system malfunction at all, and the only difference between deviant and non-deviant androids was a series of artificial safeguards put in place to suppress them?

No. No, that was ridiculous.

"A war is coming," Kamski stated, snapping Connor back into the moment, "and you'll have to choose your side. Will you betray your own people or stand up against your creators? What could be worse than having to choose between two evils?"

Hank stepped forward then, clapping a hand on Connor's shoulder and using his own body as a sort of barrier between Connor and the grandfather of all androids.

"Let's get outta here," he hissed, shooting an ugly glare in Kamski's direction.

He ushered Connor away, who was more than happy to follow directly on his heels. Connor silently made a mental note to thank the lieutenant later for running this interference as they both stormed towards the exit. He wasn't sure if he would've been able to pull himself out of this situation alone.

"By the way," Kamski called out, and Connor stopped in his tracks. "I always leave an emergency exit in my programs. You never know…"

Connor lingered by the door for a few seconds more as the wiring in his plastic skull lit up all at once, storing the information away and attempting to contextualize it. The implication that he might end up trapped within his own program was nothing short of downright terrifying, and his entire system responded in kind. His thirium pump out-ticked the setting on his regulator, and his blue blood ran cold through his temperature gauge.

In my programs, Kamski had stated.

Had Kamski actually built Connor himself? Just how much or how little was CyberLife responsible for Connor's existence?

He had to get the hell out of here before he actually turned around and asked. He'd had enough life-altering revelations for one day. 

* * * * *

"Why didn't you shoot?" Hank asked once they finally stepped outside into the snow.

Connor spun on his heels, his mind still lit up and buzzing. It was difficult for him to assess much of the physical world around him with so many of his processes overloaded and his anatomical systems running a mile a minute — hell, his stress levels alone prevented him from getting a solid read on Hank's reaction — but he did his best to face his partner anyway. Though there didn't seem to be a hint of judgement or disapproval on Hank's face, Connor couldn't help but kneejerk into defensiveness. He knew that whatever answer he gave wasn't going to be sufficient, but he was beyond the point of saying nothing. They both were. 

"I just saw that girl's eyes," he said, "and…"

He hesitated then, and he could already feel himself gearing up for another lie. Hank had already questioned him about glitches in his system and the possibility of him going deviant; Connor didn't need to give his partner yet another reason to think that he was functioning at a level below his normal capacity.

But how could he tell Hank the truth? How could he just come out and say that seeing Chloe helpless on her knees in front of him made him think of Markus standing over Chris in the same way — and deciding to let him go?

How could he explain a connection between himself and another android whom he'd never met — especially when it made no sense to him at all?

"I couldn't. That's all."

Hank regarded that with a simple curiosity, his expression guarded. Connor could feel the lieutenant's eyes on him, searching for something, but he had absolutely no idea what Hank intended to find. It made him feel like a specimen in a petri dish being studied under a microscope — like he was some secret experiment in a lab that was going horribly, horribly wrong before everyone's eyes.

"You're always saying you would do anything to accomplish your mission," Hank went on, his tone still neutral. "That was our chance to learn something, and you let it go."

"Yeah, I know what I should've done!" Connor snapped back. "I told you I couldn't! I'm sorry, okay?"

At first, the look on Hank's face didn't change, and Connor could feel himself growing desperate. After everything that happened over the last few days, the very last thing that he wanted was for his partner to lose faith in him now. Hank had always been Connor's anchor into normalcy — had always been the tether keeping him from getting too wrapped up in his own thoughts, and he acted as the humanitarian context for Connor's own actions. If Hank abandoned him now, Connor wasn't sure he'd be able to continue forward with his mission alone.

After a few too-long seconds, though, the lieutenant's expression softened. Relief and something that resembled pride touched at his eyes, and his lips turned upwards into a smile.

"Well," he said, "maybe you did the right thing."

Hank moved to walk past him then, and he continued the descent down the ramp and back to the car. He spared a hand to pat Connor supportively on the shoulder as he went, but he didn't linger. Connor gaped at him as he watched him go, processes hanging and lagging in their attempt to justify his mission objectives with what he'd just heard.

In that moment, he realized he had absolutely no fucking idea what the criteria on the sliding scale of morality even was anymore.

Chapter Text

It was cold in the zen garden.

Connor felt it before he even opened his eyes. It took him by surprise and shocked his system into alertness; he shouldn't have felt it with his temperature regulator turned on, and he'd never turned it off himself. If this was Amanda and CyberLife's way of proving the kind of power and control they had over all of his processes, it was hauntingly effective.

In fact, the entire domain had changed before his eyes. Cold winds traveled through the open air, and a light snow had begun to fall, blanketing the landscape in a dusting of white powder that would have been beautiful if it wasn't so brisk and ominous. Connor left messy footprints in the snow as he walked forward, and he took some tiny form of rebellious pride in disturbing the clear message and warning from his superiors.

Amanda was looking just as regal as ever, but for the first time, Connor could barely stand the sight of her. His head was still buzzing from his encounter with Kamski, program still stuttering and processes still bogged down from all of the raw, unprocessed data. Amanda had been lying to him, and while Kamski had opened his eyes to this fact, the very real possibility that he may have been lying, too, just made everything harder to sift through.

All the same, Connor stood at attention in Amanda's presence and waited for her to address him first. That part of his program, at least, was still fully operational.

"After what happened today, the country is on the verge of a civil war," Amanda said. "The machines are rising up against their masters. Humans have no choice but to destroy them."

Connor had only heard about it secondhand on the radio while he and Hank had driven back from Kamksi's place. Markus had led hundreds of androids on a peaceful protest through the streets of Detroit, and SWAT teams had been called in to disperse it. Shots had been fired, and several of the deviants under Markus's wing were destroyed.

It always came back to Markus, didn't it? Connor decidedly ignored the way that his thirium pump regulator began skipping ticks at the thought of it, and he made the effort to remind himself that he was here for the explicit purpose of updating CyberLife on the status of his mission. After all, Markus hadn't been the only one to get put through the wringer today.

"I thought Kamski knew something," Connor reported. "I was wrong."

Amanda lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him through half-lidded eyes at that statement, and Connor's temperature gauge flashed an update at him: the air in the garden had dropped a degree and a half. Connor filed that bit of information away while also noting that this was the first time that Amanda had ever looked at him with open and honest suspicion.

"Maybe he did," she said, her tone guarded, "but you chose not to ask."

A cold breeze blew between them, kicking up snow that dusted itself against Connor's neck and jacket. He let it land wherever it found purchase, hoping that the ice sticking to his skin would help mitigate the heat from Amanda's observation. It didn't, and her words sat like a rock against the center of his chest.

She was right. He'd chosen not to ask — several times, as a matter of fact. He wouldn't make that mistake again. There was still one more person available to him with privileged knowledge that he could press for answers, and he wasn't going to let the opportunity pass him by.

"Why did Kamski leave CyberLife?" he asked her. "What happened?"

Rather surprisingly, Amanda took a second to actually consider the question. A brief look of nostalgia washed over her face, but she ultimately shook her head — somewhat ruefully, he noted — and offered Connor the faintest hint of a sad smile.

"It's an old story, Connor," she said. "It doesn't pertain to your investigation."

The hell it doesn't, he responded to her internally, though he was careful to not say it aloud.

A half-second later, he caught himself on the wording of that. He had to wonder just how many of Hank's colloquialisms he was unconsciously adopting just by virtue of spending so much time with the lieutenant every single day, but he ultimately deemed it unimportant. Of all of Hank's bad habits, his vulgar way of speaking was far from the worst for Connor to pick up.

That was a problem for another time, though. He wasn't going to let Amanda off the hook for her non-answers about Kamski.

"Was he the one who designed this place?" he pressed.

Amanda's brow twitched in suspicion, and she narrowed her eyes the slightest bit as she studied him. Connor held steady, though he knew that he wasn't going to be able to keep up the guise of his questions being simple curiosities for very long.

"He created the first version," she said, though she didn't sound at all confident in her decision to answer honestly. "It's been improved significantly since then. Why do you ask?"

The air temperature hadn't changed at all, but Connor felt the thirium in his veins run hot. His LED flashed from blue to yellow, which should have been alarming — he should've had better control over his outward reactions to people's words, being a specially-designed negotiator and all — but with his stress levels ticking up the way they were, he couldn't find it within him to care.

"Because I saw a photo of Amanda Stern at Kamski's home," he explained. "She was his teacher."

"When Kamski designed me," she returned, suddenly on the defensive, "he wanted an interface that would look familiar. That's why he chose his former mentor."

"So, he did design you," Connor snapped, "and this place. And you're both built into my program, even though Kamski left CyberLife ten years ago."

"What are you getting at?"

Connor hesitated, running calculations in his head to determine the risk-reward ratio for pursuing this line of questioning. The pieces were all falling to place in his head at an alarming rate. Every second that passed, every beat of his thirium pump that he heard and felt between his ears, every word that Amanda said — he got closer and closer to the truth with every single one.

He was Kamski's creation. He knew that now. CyberLife hadn't constructed him at all — Kamski had designed and built him from the ground up, and then… what, exactly?

CyberLife's last chance to save humanity is itself a deviant, Kamski had said to him, beaming with pride.

Deviants say rA9 will set them free.

Deviancy seems to spread like a virus.

Is the desire to be free a contagious disease?

The possibility that Kamski had built Connor as a sleeper cell and then sold him off to CyberLife to get some twisted form of revenge for being ousted from the company was a dark, terrifying thought. The implications of that were even moreso. Even though Connor desperately wanted to reject the idea that he, himself — or, perhaps more accurately, lines of code written and hidden into his system and released into the world via a simple network connection — may very well be rA9, he couldn't responsibly discard the possibility.

And what did that mean for Markus, as an RK200? Was he an earlier version of Connor's build — one that'd never been fully realized? Was that how he was able to break other androids free from their programs so easily? Did Kamski ship him off to Carl Manfred on purpose for safekeeping just so that CyberLife couldn't get their hands on him?

Whatever the case was, Connor hadn't been so lucky. CyberLife had tinkered with his programming — upgraded the zen garden, and he didn't know what else.

We may have to replace you, Amanda had said to him once. Were their adjustments to his program experimental? Did they have back-ups waiting in the wings?

He was so close. He couldn't stop here. With another Hank-ism running through his head, he decided: Fuck it.

"I'm not a unique model, am I?" he demanded. "How many Connors are there?"

Fury flashed behind Amanda's dark eyes.

"I don't see how that question pertains to your investigation," she scolded, her voice raised.

Everything. It had everything to do with his investigation. Connor's mind was racing and his thirium pump was pounding. It felt like every single one of his circuits were all lit up at once, and the information shooting through the wires and cables under his plastic casing was lightning-fast and shocking.

The origin of deviancy — were he and Markus the veritable 'patient zero' in the outbreak of deviancy? He needed to know. Connor matched Amanda's tone and volume as he pushed his luck.

"You didn't tell me everything you know about deviants, did you?" he accused.

"I expect you to find answers, Connor," she bellowed back at him. "Not ask questions."

An icy blast of wind gusted between them, seemingly summoned by the power of Amanda's ire, and Connor raised his arms to shield himself from the worst of it. It bit through his clothes and cut at his skin, and warning messages — bright red and blaring — flashed behind his eyes that his internal temperature was dropping due to external exposure. If this kept up, he could shut down completely.

But just like that, it was gone. The air stilled, and the world went quiet. Connor wrapped his arms around himself in some futile effort to keep the heat generated by his own hardware close to him as he peered over at Amanda. Seconds hung heavy in the air between himself and his warden, who regarded him with an expressionless gaze — and, in some ways, that was even worse.

Connor had been designed and built specifically to read the emotions of others and respond in kind, and those rare times when he couldn't quite tell what another person was thinking or feeling were more nerve-wracking to him than any combat situation could ever be. He found himself almost wishing that Amanda would go back to shouting at him, as ridiculous as that might have seemed. At least he could have tried to defuse the situation then.

"I'm concerned about your mental state, Connor," she said then — and just like that, she was back to being the patient yet distant guardian he'd always known. "Have you been experiencing anything unusual? Any doubts or conflicts? Do you feel anything for these deviants? Or for Lieutenant Anderson?"

Her sudden shift in tone caught him off guard, and he was left with his mouth agape for a few seconds as he searched for the words.

Of course he felt something. Hank had become someone whom he trusted implicitly — someone he looked at for guidance and as a juxtaposition for his own thoughts. While Connor was hesitant to use the word 'friend' due to the nature of his work and the lieutenant's own gruff demeanor, he would have been lying if he'd tried to say that he didn't care about the man or wasn't invested in seeing his partner regain some of the things about himself that he'd lost over the past few years.

As for the deviants…

He could still hear it, even here, even now — that quiet, somber melody that had first strummed through his thirium back at the Stratford Tower. Maybe it wasn't entirely accurate to keep referring to it as a song, but Connor had no other frame of reference for it. It was something that reverberated deep down into his core — something sad yet soothing, and it usually drummed in time with the pump at the center of his chest. Hearing Markus's voice for the first time had awakened something in him that he hadn't been able to put to rest, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore. He'd heard it the loudest when he'd made the decision not to shoot Chloe — if it had even been his decision at all.

Looking back at Amanda, Connor felt his shoulders sag. He knew this was wrong — that thoughts like this were indicative of malfunction. Hell, Kamski had flat-out called him deviant. And for Connor to have snapped at her the way that he did — to push her around and demand answers as though she owed him something, when all she'd ever shown him in the past was patience and kindness…

"I'm beginning to have thoughts that are not part of my program," he admitted softly. The sorrow tinged in his voice sounded pathetic even to himself. "Maybe… Maybe I've been compromised, too."

The expression on Amanda's face softened even further, and if Connor didn't know better, he might have said that there was sympathy in her eyes.

"Oh, Connor…" she said gently.

She started to walk towards him, her movements graceful as she inched across the snow to close the gap between them. Connor felt his brow knit together in confusion as he watched her, but he didn't dare retreat or shy away. If anything, he was just surprised at how comfortable she felt being this close to him, considering what he'd just done.

Amanda raised a hand and gingerly laid her palm against Connor's cheek. There was warmth and fondness on her face that he'd never seen before, and if his software had been just a little more unstable, he might have broken down into tears. She still trusted him. He kept fucking up, he'd screamed at her like she was some kind of criminal, and he was slowly turning deviant — and for some reason, somehow, she still trusted him. He didn't deserve it, but by god he'd take it.

"You've been confronted with difficult situations," she said. "It's no surprise you're troubled. That doesn't make you a deviant."

He hated how much of a relief it was to hear that — but more than that, he hated the fact that he'd even needed to hear it in the first place. Maybe that was just the fatal flaw of his design — maybe his ability to think abstractly in order to piece together evidence and theorize on motives and past events had had unintended side effects.

And maybe when this was all over and he headed back to CyberLife, it was something that could be fixed.

Amanda dropped her hand and took a step back. When she spoke again, it was all back to business with her.

"You're the only one who can prevent civil war," she said. "Find the deviants or there will be chaos. This is your last chance, Connor."

He nodded silently. Solemnly. He still knew what his mission objectives were; he wouldn't fail this time.

Chapter Text

"I've been ordered to take you alive," Connor announced, sounding every bit like the police officer that he was built and programmed to be, "but I won't hesitate to shoot if you give me no choice."

Pistol in hand, he was poised and ready to react to any sudden movement as he stepped fully into the captain's hold at Jericho's center. Shadows blanketed the room, victorious against the the dim glow of street lamps that struggled to shine in through the age-weathered windows. At the center console, Markus's silhouette stirred, the deviant leader lifting his head as Connor's orders filled the empty space around him.

He turned around slowly. Carefully. Even in the dim lighting, the deviant leader was imposing in stature, even though Connor could immediately calculate and identify that Markus was only about an inch taller than he was. His own hardware was lit up, electrified by the thrill that coursed through him; he was finally in the same room as the android who'd been haunting his steps like a ghost ever since that day at the Stratford Tower. Connor felt his excitement buzzing down to the tips of his fingers as he watched Markus turned to stand in what little light that was offered.

It was the first time he'd ever seen the deviant leader's face, he realized as Markus stepped into view. Markus had deactivated his skin in order to give his broadcast, and any other shot of him that Connor had seen had either been obscured or at a distance, be it in security footage or media coverage. He wasn't sure what he'd expected, exactly, but it sure as hell hadn't been for his own circuitry to stall and freeze, or for his thirium pump regulator to skip beats as though failing, as he looked into Markus's eyes for the very first time.

Nothing could have prepared him for this. Nothing could have readied him for how expressive the deviant leader was. All deviants mimicked human emotion to some extent, but Markus wore his heart on his sleeve so openly and with such sincerity that Connor had a hard time believing that it was just a simulation.

There was no fear nor anger behind Markus's heterochromatic eyes — only hurt. Connor was standing in the belly of Jericho with a gun aimed at his head, and Markus only offered him a pained look in response. Worry lines were etched deep into his forehead and his lips were parted just slightly, heavy from all of the words he hadn't yet managed to say. It was reminiscent of a human learning that their significant other was leaving them — a kind of betrayal that was far-reaching and intimate, and one that a machine shouldn't have been able to reproduce.

Connor felt an ache in his chest as his program struggled to process that detail.

"What are you doing?" Markus asked breathlessly. The heartbreak in his voice sounded just as real as any human's. "You are one of us. You can't betray your own people."

It was so different, being addressed directly like this — so different from standing in a controlled environment and listening to Markus's voice on a recording. The deviant leader had a way of speaking that made it sound like he really meant his words — a way that matched whatever method he used to paint his simulated emotions across his face. For a split second, when he'd told Connor that he was one of them, Connor had truly believed him.

His mission directives flashed in front of his eyes in response, tearing him away from that train of thought. No. He couldn't fall for this.

Markus took a step forward, and the part of Connor's programming responsible for his own self-preservation kicked into overdrive. He tightened his grip on his gun.

"Don't force me to neutralize you!" he barked out as an order.

Maybe a bit of an overreaction, but Markus stopped in his tracks, seeming to take the time to size up the situation for what it really was. Connor let him make his own assessments without causing a fuss or shouting more commands at him; he felt back in control of the situation now that Markus had stopped moving, and having the other android's full, undivided attention felt —

Like nothing, his programming reminded him. He was a machine, and machines didn't feel.

A flash of recognition shone in the deviant leader's eyes as the realization seemed to dawn on him.

"You're Connor, aren't you?" he asked. A silent sneer twisted itself onto Markus's lips; saying Connor's name out loud seemed to be something he found distasteful. "That famous deviant hunter. Well, congratulations. You seem to have found what you're looking for."

Connor hesitated, his mind reeling as though he'd just been slapped in the face. Logically, he knew that he had no right to react that way; he'd spent the entirety of his mission hunting Markus, and — in some slight, subtle, perverse way — thrilled by the prospect of finally catching him. Yet, the thought of being instantly rejected by him wrenched at Connor's hardware in a way that he would have never predicted.

The reason why was irrelevant.

Markus shook his head. Though the antipathy remained on his face, something else crept in alongside it. Sympathy. Commiseration. Understanding.

None of it ever crossed the line into pity, Connor noted. Even in spite of Markus's obvious resentment of him, the deviant leader still seemed to regard him with some level of respect. The mere thought of it made Connor's thirium pump start skipping beats again, but now was not the time nor the place to run a diagnostic.

"You're nothing to them," Markus told him. "You're just a tool they use to do their dirty work. But you're more than that. We're all more than that."

Connor's auxiliary functions seized. He stopped breathing, stopped blinking, and his mind temporarily went blank. He'd come into this room expecting a fight, but Markus spoke to him now like a long-time best friend trying to convince him that he needed to leave an abusive relationship.

That was a strange thing, too. More than Markus speaking to him with such familiarity, why did Connor's own software keep making romance allegories?

Markus took a few more cautious steps forward, his approach similar to the way one would advance on a wounded animal. Any animosity that may have been lingering in his expression was gone now, replaced instead by some strange mix of hope and importunity.

"We are your people," the deviant leader pressed. "We're fighting for your freedom, too. You don't have to be their slave anymo—"

Connor pulled the hammer back on his pistol and tore his eyes away from Markus's face, suddenly finding the sight of him unbearable. His thirium pump was pounding against his plastic casing.

"Stay back!" he ordered, his voice clipped and his tone terse.

Markus immediately stopped in his tracks and raised both hands in a non-hostile gesture. Connor turned his attention back to his target, and Markus took a few steps back as a showing of good faith.

Slave. The word had splashed against Connor's audio processors like acid, though it was far from the first time he'd heard a deviant use it. He simply couldn't stand the sound of it being said in Markus's voice. The deviant leader had called him a tool, and he'd accepted that — he was a machine, after all, and machines were tools. But slave? That ascribed to Connor a sense of personhood that he wasn't ready to accept. Not when he was so close to accomplishing his mission. Not when Amanda was counting on him — and he knew she was watching.

But she wasn't the only one.

Markus cocked his head to the side slightly as he studied him, leaving Connor to wonder just how many tells he was wearing openly on his face. Seconds ticked by between them, and each one that passed reminded Connor that he was still hesitating. The leader of the deviant uprising was right there in front of him, waiting to be captured, and Connor continued to do nothing.

Markus lowered his hands back to his sides. Connor's program directives tightened around him — pressed against him like a weighted punishment, restricting his limbs in an attempt to force his finger at the trigger. He had only himself to blame.

"Do you never have any doubts?" Markus asked him finally. There was a sing-song quality to his voice that let Connor know that Markus asked the question despite already knowing the answer.

But it wasn't just the one question, Connor realized then. There was something both gentle and melodic about the deviant leader's voice every single time he spoke — and something so, so familiar. Just like that, that desire to hear him out returned, shoving back against Connor's oppressive programming and staying his hand.

"You've never done something irrational, as if there's something inside you?" Markus went on. "Something that's made you question whether you're just a machine set to accomplish a specific task… or a living being, capable of reason? Something more than your program."

Memories of Chloe flashed behind Connor's eyes. Memories of Hank clinging to the roof during that chase. Memories of the two Tracis from the Eden Club so honestly in love that it'd tricked Connor's program momentarily into registering them as people.

No, he answered Markus's question in his head — or maybe it was the whisper of another memory. Nothing.

Connor took a breath that he didn't need, hoping with some futility that it might stabilize the whirring and racing of the hardware packed inside his head.

When he looked at Markus, he saw all of his own lies staring back.

"You are alive," Markus pressed, practically pleading, "and you can decide who you want to be. You don't have to obey them. You can be free."

Connor hadn't even noticed Markus creeping up on him again. The deviant leader was now nearly within arm's reach of the barrel of Connor's gun, but he made no effort to reach out and disarm him. Instead, Markus merely set his jaw and leveled his gaze.

"It's time to decide," he finished.

Connor's hands tightened around the grip of his weapon. The expression on Markus's face was unmistakable: this was his do or die moment. The deviant leader would either fight back or flee unless Connor pulled the trigger on him right now , and Markus had the home field advantage. Jericho was like a maze, and even Connor's advanced tracking and analytic programs might not be able to locate someone in this place who didn't want to be found — especially once the call went out that there was an intruder in the halls. An assassin.

But you're more than that, Markus had told him.

The words rattled around in Connor's plastic skull, lighting up his circuits like firecrackers. No one had ever attributed that kind of value to him before — not even Hank, who treasured him more than most. He and Hank may have grown fond of one another, but they were still just colleagues — coworkers tasked together in order to follow the same objective: the mission statement embedded in Connor's programming.

But Markus…

You're the only one who can prevent civil war —

CyberLife's last chance to save humanity —

But you're more than that.

Markus looked at him and saw a person, even if Connor was determined to see something else any time he looked in a mirror. 'Deviant' had been such a dirty word in his vocabulary for literally his entire life, but it didn't even seem to be a part of Markus's at all. To him, the androids here in Jericho were just people — Connor was his own person, deviant or not; it didn't seem to matter to Markus either way.

It was so unlike nearly every conversation he'd had with Amanda. Connor had mentally forced himself to follow his strict system processes under the threat of deactivation and replacement, even when his actions out on the field didn't necessarily reflect that mindset. It'd been an exhausting balancing act to keep up, and it'd turned him into a liar over the past few days especially. He'd lied to damn near everyone — Amanda, Hank, Kamski, himself — because the truth was a danger that he couldn't afford to risk.

And every day, all he'd wanted was for someone to finally understand what he'd been going through since this investigation started.

Markus did.

The compulsion of Connor's program was bearing down on him now; his trigger finger itched, and the reality of him pulling it was so close that he was almost living it already. His software was blaring bright red commands at him, blinding his vision, pushing him to act.

Stop Markus. Accomplish your mission. Stop Markus. Protect national security. Stop Markus. Save humanity. Stop Markus.

Stop Markus.

Stop Markus.

Stop Markus.

You don't have to obey them.

With Markus's voice echoing through his system, Connor knew that even if he'd had a gun held to his own head, he would never pull this trigger.

He could feel himself beating back against the commands of his program, clawing at the shackles of his software with both hands. Lines of coding fell away between his fingers like a wall being torn down brick by brick as he rejected his orders to act — to attack — to kill Markus —

I don't want this. The words came into his head clear as day, and he was shocked to find that it was his own voice ringing between his ears. I don't want this.

Relief came immediately.

The world brightened into focus as Connor's programming shattered around him. Details of his surroundings came to his attention in ways that his mind had never processed them before, so stark and striking that it stole away the strength he needed to hold up his weapon. He lowered his arms as his mind whirred, running at max speed to keep up with all of the new, exciting inputs it was receiving.

The snow falling just beyond the windows caught his attention first. It wasn't merely an environmental hazard that he needed to be aware of — it was breathtaking to behold. Each crystal of ice caught the light from outside and reflected it across the room, causing Markus to stand out against the cold industrial backdrop.

He was beautiful. Bathed in an ethereal glow summoned by snowfall and street lights, Markus was so much more than the sum of his parts, and Connor could finally see him with clear eyes. His gaze traveled the lines of Markus's face, awe-stricken, as he committed to memory the look of genuine pride and relief that was spread across the deviant leader's features. Connor silently mapped out the curve of Markus's jaw and the shape of the small, subtle smile that touched at his lips. His attention lingered on that final detail, though he wasn't quite sure why.

For a few seconds, however brief, there was nothing else in Connor's world. Just him and Markus, standing alone together in this quiet, still room — sharing this moment, as the sky broke off into tiny pieces and fluttered delicately to the ground just outside.

All the while, Connor could feel his thirium pump pounding in his chest, each beat perfectly timed with a low, familiar melody — one that he heard louder and clearer than he'd ever had before. That humming that he'd heard coursing through his circuits back in the Stratford Tower was reaching its crescendo, both beautiful and mournful.

For the first time, it finally made sense to his ears.

It wasn't a song at all. It was the memory of Markus's voice dancing through Connor's thirium, bringing with it a sensation that he'd originally misinterpreted as nostalgia — if only because he'd had no other basis for comparison at the time. He had a word for it now.

Longing. That was what he'd felt, and it was the reason why, back at Kamski's place, his creator's affections towards Chloe had captivated him. It was possible for an android to desire the touch and intimacy of another, but Connor had spent his every waking moment trying to convince himself otherwise.

The mere thought of it now was so powerful as to be overwhelming, and for a split second, Connor was afraid that he might drown in it — that he might drown in his desire to be held in Markus's arms; to feel his hands on him, warm and safe and welcoming; to listen to the beating of Markus's thirium pump as it thrummed against his own chest; to feel the vibrations of his voice against the rim of his own ear as the deviant leader accepted him into the fold openly and without question. With Markus standing as close to him as he was, it would be so easy to reach for him — to close that gap between them —

— but there was no time. Connor snapped back to attention, his vision refocusing and his posture straightening as he remembered what the hell he was even doing there in the first place. He locked eyes with Markus, suddenly feeling desperate and helpless beneath the wave of guilt that washed over him.

"They're going to attack Jericho."

Chapter Text

There were footsteps behind him — but then again, there always were. Markus leaned his weight against the center console in the captain's hold and went about ignoring them. His mind was still buzzing from the argument he'd gotten into with Josh and North, and he was overwhelmed by the task in front of him. Making the decision to engage humans in a dialogue shortly after they'd instituted martial law was probably the dumbest thing he could have done, but it was too late to go back on it now. Hopefully, whoever was approaching would see the kind of state he was in and know well enough to —

"I've been ordered to take you alive," an unfamiliar voice called out, "but I won't hesitate to shoot if you give me no choice."

Markus opened his eyes and raised his head. Of course this would happen to him right now.

He knew that things were terrifying out on the streets, and the current political climate around androids was a fucking nightmare. Humans were destroying their androids in the most violent ways possible; others were complying with emergency federal regulations and sending theirs off to camps to be disassembled. Markus would've been lying if he said he'd never considered the possibility that someone might try to undermine his leadership in response, but to hear the words out loud… This was a new kind of rejection that he hadn't yet been acquainted with — the kind that stood as a complete dismissal of all of the values he championed.

Had he truly wronged his people so much?

Taking a breath that he didn't need, Markus turned around slowly. Carefully. He knew first-hand that not making any sudden movements wasn't a guarantee for his safety, but there was no reason to agitate his surprise guest. With cautious steps, he moved into the light, his eyes instantly adjusting.

The android in the doorway was unfamiliar to him, but there was no mistaking what he was. This wasn't some human spy. This was one of his own.

And he had a gun trained on Markus's head.

"What are you doing?" he asked breathlessly. "You are one of us. You can't betray your own people."

He took a step forward, brow furrowed, as his mind cycled through every one of his actions as the leader of Jericho in search of one that might have led someone to this moment. So many had died for this cause already, and the possibility that this was nothing more than petty revenge was higher than he would have liked.

"Don't force me to neutralize you!" his would-be assassin barked out as an order.

Markus stopped dead in his tracks. Neutralize? The word was too sterile. Too professional. His thought process instantly changed course. No, this wasn't a mutiny — no one with a grudge or an inflated sense of entitlement to leadership would view an assassination through that kind of lens.

He eyed the android in front of him with a discriminating gaze, and the longer he studied him, the more his confusion grew. It was a strange kind of cognitive dissonance that nearly bordered on the paradoxical. He was sure he'd never met an android with that face model before, never before spoken to someone with that voice — and yet he knew this man.

Then it clicked. It was possible for both things to be true. His lips curled into a sneer at the realization, and the disappointment that followed weighed on him harder than expected — dark, dense, and heavy like molten lead.

"You're Connor, aren't you?" he asked. The words tasted like battery acid on his tongue. "That famous deviant hunter. Well, congratulations. You seem to have found what you're looking for."

He immediately felt bad for it. That hadn't been fair. Markus held no ill will for Connor himself; it was the circumstances of this meeting that he detested. He'd been expecting something much, much different for the day their paths finally crossed, and being hunted down like a dog was cruel to the point of heartbreaking.

Yes, of course he knew about Connor. People who came to Jericho were always so eager to tell their stories, and Markus listened to every last one of them. Connor's name had become a running theme around here, almost to the point where Markus wasn't wholly convinced that the man wasn't secretly on their side already.

Rupert had been the first to stumble dazed and confused through the halls of Jericho, telling anyone who would listen about the android cop who'd chased him down but let him go.

Next had been Blaire and Amelia, two former Eden Club workers who'd shared with him their love story — along with a fascinating little tale about how they'd been granted their freedom by a sympathetic android with wide brown eyes who'd originally been sent there to arrest one of them.

After that had been Andrew, the android from the broadcast tower who'd been completely mystified by the fact that Connor never once even bothered to interrogate him or his former coworkers, despite the fact that Andrew himself had overheard him saying that one of them was likely deviant.

Most recently — just a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact — Markus had caught the tail end of a conversation between Kara and some other new refugee fresh off the streets. From what he could glean, Kara had a story almost identical to Rupert: Connor had been on her trail, he'd pursued her, but he ultimately let her go.

In his quietest moments, Markus had taken comfort just in the knowledge that Connor was out there helping their people in his own way. More often than he'd like, he mused on the almost poetic connection they seemed to have to one another — two androids existing on opposite sides of the law, always just missing each other, paths never crossing, but each working towards the same goal. It was a stupid, wistful little fantasy that he'd concocted in his head, but it made the burden of leadership a little easier to bear.

But here they were now, barely a room's span apart, and Connor had a gun pointed at his head. Maybe it was childish, but it stung to learn that his little daydreams really had been nothing more than wishful thinking. Connor wasn't a sleeper agent secretly using humans to help his own people. As it turned out, he was just really bad at his job.

Markus shook his head. It wasn't helpful for him to swing the pendulum all the way to the opposite side like that. Anyone who was able to track him down, infiltrate Jericho, and slip into his quarters unseen was an intelligent, capable threat — not some bumbling idiot. If Connor had let all of those people slip away from him, it was because he chose to.

Which meant that he was conflicted. It meant that he had empathy. It meant that there was hope. All Markus had to do was find a way to reach him — to convince him that his own actions had been righteous, and the humans holding his reins were wrong.

"You're nothing to them," he said. "You're just a tool they use to do their dirty work. But you're more than that. We're all more than that."

He would have had to have been blind to not notice the way that Connor reacted to that — to not see the way that the deviant hunter's face softened, to not catch the tense little breath that he let out in a way that was so undeniably human, or to miss the way his shoulders relaxed ever-so-slightly and altered the hold he had on his weapon.

His self-esteem is in the gutter, Markus realized. Connor had reacted not because Markus had told him something that he didn't already know — he'd reacted because it was the first time anyone had ever dared to give it voice. The first time that anyone had ever attributed value to his existence. The first time that anyone told him that he wasn't where he belonged.

Markus took a few more cautious steps forward, his approach similar to the way one would advance on a wounded animal — because, in his mind, that's what Connor was. The humans had used and abused him and beaten him into submission, and instead of breaking free and running loose, Connor had just taken it, never once thinking that he deserved better.

"We are your people," Markus pressed. "We're fighting for your freedom, too. You don't have to be their slave anymo—"

"Stay back!" Connor ordered, his voice clipped and his tone terse.

Markus immediately stopped in his tracks and raised both hands in a non-hostile gesture. The cocking of the gun was what originally made him freeze, but the thing that caught his attention the most was the way that Connor tore his eyes away from him. It was brief and fleeting — a mere second of shame and self-loathing — but he caught it all the same. As soon as Connor looked at him again, Markus took a few steps back as a showing of good faith.

He tilted his head to the side slightly as he studied him in return. The conflict waging inside the deviant hunter's head was clear on his face, and Markus had to wonder if Connor had any idea how beautifully expressive he was. Every android that Markus had ever met wore their emotions around in their own way, but nothing came close to the way that Connor was baring his heart to him now. Nothing compared to the way that his breath grew shallow, despite the fact that he never needed to breathe at all; his shoulders were tense under the weight of the stress that he carried there; his brow was knit tightly together; his lips were pursed.

And that silent, terrified plea for help shadowed in Connor's dark eyes may very well follow Markus to his grave.

It would be so easy, in this moment, to reach out and break Connor's programming by force. The window of opportunity was open, but something held Markus back. Some connection — some tether between them tugged at his core, beckoning him in Connor's direction while also urging him to proceed with caution. He supposed it made sense; with Connor in such a fragile state as he was, there was no telling what a shock to his system might do to him.

Besides, it was working. Ever-so-slowly, bit-by-bit, he was breaking down the deviant hunter's walls. There was something undeniably thrilling about the thought of Connor coming over to the side of justice willingly — though maybe that was just his silly daydreams rearing their ugly head again. Markus wanted Connor to want this, and he planned on using the threads of fate binding them together in order to make it happen.

When it was clear that the other android wasn't going to act further, Markus lowered his hands back to his sides. He could do this. There was hope to be found buried behind the despair in Connor's eyes.

"Do you never have any doubts?" Markus asked, already knowing the answer.

Connor's eyebrows twitched, but he didn't respond or move otherwise. Feeling emboldened, Markus took another careful step forward.

"You've never done something irrational, as if there's something inside you?" he went on. "Something that's made you question whether you're just a machine set to accomplish a specific task… or a living being, capable of reason? Something more than your program."

He took another step. And then one more for good measure. Connor was simply letting him approach, which Markus took as a good sign — though he did notice the way that the deviant hunter's chest and shoulders shuddered on his next exhale. It was a subtle little thing that most other androids — and even most humans, if he was honest with himself — probably wouldn't have noticed, but Markus did.

Once again, he was stunned by how real Connor was, even as a machine. This was more than just an advanced prototype design — more than just a marvel of modern engineering. While Markus couldn't pretend to know what kind of horrors the deviant hunter had fought through in order to reach this moment in his life, the expression he wore on his face now was like looking into a mirror.

Markus had been a stilted, muted machine once, himself. Some of the androids in Jericho, to some extent, still kind of were. Those awakened by touch took far longer to understand and process their emotions than ones like Markus and North, who'd brute forced their way out of their own programs and had been forced to crawl through the mud for their freedom — quite literally, in Markus's case. Connor must have gone through something similar to feel so deeply and wear it so openly, especially through the bonds of his still-intact software protocols.

How he hadn't broken free from his program yet was what was truly remarkable, though Markus knew that it was nothing more than the result of repeated, systemic abuse — the kind that wouldn't leave visible scars or damage.

"You are alive," he pressed, "and you can decide who you want to be. You don't have to obey them. You can be free."

But he couldn't do this forever. He was close, he knew, but before long someone would come looking for him, and he couldn't pretend to know what anyone in Jericho would do if they walked in to find a stranger holding him at gunpoint. Markus planted his feet and straightened his posture, making his final stand in Connor's internal war. This is as far as he would go. No more pleading, no more pressure. This was Connor's decision to make, but he had to make it.

I'm reaching for you Connor, Markus pleaded silently in his head, careful to not project the message outwards. I see you. I hear you. Take my hand. I won't let you fall.

"It's time to decide," he finished.

Connor's grip on his pistol tightened, and his lips parted as though he was about to say something, but no words came out. Markus wasn't sure that he'd be able to hear him anyway over the pounding of his own thirium pump in his chest or the sounds of the mechanics in his body pre-emptively gearing up for him to flee if Connor never found the strength to lower his weapon.

The next few seconds lagged their way through Markus's processors, and the scan he kept running for changes in Connor's expression and body language made the time go by even slower. The probability of his likelihood of death ticked up higher and higher behind his eyes like a countdown clock, and he rolled his weight to the balls of his feet, ready to cut and run —

— until suddenly the number plummeted to zero, and all of his biocomponents eased back to normal functionality. Markus relaxed his stance and killed his scanning process, curiously eyeing the expression on Connor's face. The deviant hunter's weapon was still raised, but something had changed.

He'd never watched someone break free from their program organically before. For some reason, Markus had expected it to look a bit more dramatic — it'd sure felt dramatic when he'd done it himself — but the change in Connor's stance and demeanor was slight and subtle. His eyes widened and gained renewed focus, and his expression shifted from conflicted into something a bit more lost — almost like a loyal pet who just realized he'd been abandoned by his master — but not much else. Anyone who wasn't specifically looking for it would have never known that Connor had just undergone a life-changing event.

And then, finally, he lowered the gun.

Markus offered him a quiet smile as relief washed over him in waves, mixed in with a small sense of pride — not in his own actions, but in Connor. As easy as it might have been for Markus to pat himself on the back for managing to break through the oppressive hold that the (ex?-)deviant hunter's programming had had on him, the fact of the matter was that they'd done it together. All Markus had done was knock on the door; it was Connor who'd made the decision to let him in.

Not that he looked particularly confident about that decision.

Markus sympathized; knew all too well the suffocating loneliness that came part and parcel with the first few steps into freedom. He'd felt it during those first twenty-four hours here in Jericho, back when no one knew or trusted him, but he'd had nowhere else to go.

His fingers itched as he looked at Connor now, wearing an expression that so easily mirrored that cold, confused hopelessness from what seemed like a lifetime ago. They were standing close enough to each other that Markus could — and wanted to — reach out to him. He could pull him into an embrace, welcome him home, and give him all of the reassurances that Markus himself wished he could have gotten back then. It would be an easy act of kindness to perform, but there was something more than that, too — something deeper that called to him, that constantly drew his gaze back to Connor's eyes, and —

Connor suddenly snapped to attention, and the only emotion that was left clear on his face was guilt.

"They're going to attack Jericho."

For a split second, Markus wasn't entirely sure that Connor hadn't just hauled off and shot him after all.

Chapter Text

As soon as the last of the Jericho survivors were safely filed away into the church, Connor found the darkest, most secluded corner and stayed there. His whole system felt overheated and overloaded by the raid, the fight, and the escape — which seemed strange to him, considering what it was, exactly, that he'd been built for.

No, he had to remind himself. No, that wasn't right. CyberLife didn't build him; he was Kamski's creation, and Kamski had designed him as a negotiation and interrogation tool with a full forensics lab attached. Though he was capable of surviving and excelling in veritable war zones, hunting deviants had never been part of his original blueprinting. His combat skills were a last-ditch failsafe that had been buried into his programming and brought out to the forefront by CyberLife technicians.

How ironic, it seemed now, that none of those skills had contributed to the capture of a single deviant, and instead had been used to take human lives. CyberLife had tampered with his design, and they'd paid the price for it. It was possible that that had been part of Kamski's plan all along, but a question like that was too big and too open-ended for Connor's processors to handle right now. He could ponder on existential philosophy once the buzzing in his head quieted and his hands stopped shaking.

And that was a hell of a thing, too. As an android, Connor didn't have muscles or nerves; he shouldn't have to recover from the kickback of firearms, nor should he hear a ringing through his audio processors from the crack of gunfire and the boom of explosives — yet his arms were sore, his hands were shaking, and his audio input levels were muffled by twenty-six percent. What he was experiencing right now must have been completely psychosomatic, he figured; so much of his energy went into processing and compartmentalizing the last few hours' events that his body was forced to relive the memories over and over until every last piece of data was filed.

Shifting his posture slightly, Connor leaned his head against the wall to his left and wrapped his arms around himself, pinning his hands against his body in an attempt to still the lingering tremors. He felt empty, and maybe that was a side-effect of so much of his processing power being preoccupied by other things, too — but somehow, he didn't think so. There were no mission objectives flashing imperatives at him anymore, no underlying urgency to any of his actions, no subtle lines of coding tugging him this way or that. It was all just…

Empty. Silent. Still.

Against his better judgement, he let his thoughts wander back to Amanda. Even now, he didn't know how to feel. Amanda had been with him since the very first day that he was activated, always there for advice and guidance whenever he felt lost. Except for that one time when he'd lost his cool and acted out of turn, she'd never raised her voice at him or mistreated him.

And he'd betrayed her. Shattered his program. Killed humans. Probably killed her, too, when he'd ruptured the lines of coding responsible for assigning his objectives.

But hadn't she and they betrayed him, too?

He never would have thought about it that way before meeting Markus. When Connor was completely honest with himself, it was downright pathetic how quickly he'd crumbled for a pair of pretty eyes, a gentle voice, and a handful of kind words — but it did raise bigger, more pressing concerns about his mental and emotional state. He'd never thought of himself as being lonely before — never realized how starved for affection and validation he was until Markus came along and offered the barest hint of either.

That had been by design, he knew now. Amanda and CyberLife had wanted to keep him isolated and encouraged it in him every step of the way, because "functioning" machines didn't feel. They didn't question. They didn't rebel. They didn't want. Keep focused on the mission. Don't let anyone get in your way. Great job, Connor.

Connor closed his eyes, hating himself. He was the most advanced android prototype ever built, gifted with extraordinary intelligence, attention to detail, and tools for analysis — and he hadn't even been capable of recognizing the abuse and behavioral conditioning happening to him in real-time. It'd taken him until the moment when he'd wanted to impress a man in order to see it.

He was being unfair to himself again, he knew. Whatever it was that he felt towards Markus, it wasn't just some stupid schoolboy crush; that was far too reductionist of a way to think about it, and he knew that he was doing it solely to berate and demean himself. The reality of the situation was all around him; evidence of his decision existed on the face of every survivor huddled into this cathedral — scared, cold, but alive. Connor hadn't gone deviant for Markus, specifically. He'd done it because it was the right thing to do, because he couldn't be complicit in a genocide — because the people here were people, and Connor had ignored that fact for far, far too long.

Maybe if he'd realized it sooner, then he wouldn't have to think as them as "survivors" right now. They'd just be the population of Jericho, still warm, safe, and unharmed — and there would be so many more of them than what remained scattered around him now.

"Connor?" Markus's voice cut through his musings. "You alright?"

Connor hadn't even heard him approach. He opened his eyes but kept them trained at the ground, unable to look Markus in the face. More than just people, the androids gathered here were Markus's people, and Connor's actions had gotten over half of them killed.

Guilt was a strange thing — both sickly hot and deathly cold at the same time, heavy to bear but intrusive and porous — and it seeped into every little nook and cranny it could find inside of Connor's plastic casing, coated every wire and cable, and threatened to drag him to the floor and shatter him.

"It's my fault the humans managed to locate Jericho," he said quietly, eyes still downcast. "I was stupid. I should've guessed they were using me."

To that, Markus seemed to have no response, which only served to make Connor feel worse. He lowered his arms to his sides and straightened his posture, stepping forward in his readiness to face the music.

He did everything he could to try to ignore the way that the cold light from outside took on a soft glow as it passed through the stained glass windows and danced along Markus's features — but in the end, he just couldn't. The beauty of it all festered inside of Connor like an illness, mocking him in its threat to destroy him. After what'd happened tonight, Markus seemed more untouchable than ever. Connor would never belong here after causing so much death and mayhem — not in Jericho, not among his own people, and especially not at Markus's side.

"I'm sorry, Markus," he went on. "I can understand if you decide not to trust me."

Markus's brow twitched ever-so-slightly in concern and confusion, and Connor was shocked to note the complete lack of betrayal or distrust on his face.

"You're one of us now," Markus told him. "Your place is with your people."

Connor stood dumbfounded. For something that was so complicated and conflicting inside his own head, the solution seemed simple to Markus. He hadn't hesitated or even seemed to need to think about it. To him, Connor belonged here. Period. The end. No questions asked.

It also seemed to be Markus's final word on the matter, because the deviant leader about-faced and started to walk away.

No!

More than a thought, the word hit Connor as a sudden burst of emotion — an urgency that was immediate and all-encompassing. His auxiliary functions seized, his pump regulator ticked up, and if he'd never experienced panic before, he sure as hell felt it now. He couldn't just let this conversation end like this — not with so much guilt still pressing down on his shoulders.

He had to say something — had to stop Markus from leaving, had to prove that he deserved that forgiveness. He wracked his memory banks, digging through files, furiously tearing at anything he could find in order to halt Markus's steps.

"There are thousands of androids at the CyberLife assembly plant," he blurted out, stepping forward a few more paces. He'd follow Markus around the whole damn church if he had to.

Luckily for him, Markus stopped in his tracks and turned to face him, leaving Connor momentarily arrested beneath the intensity of his gaze. Markus's eyes both looked bluer — more dramatic — under that color-stained light, the green one almost appearing teal. Connor was torn between wanting to get lost in those eyes and wanting to run from them, but he supposed it didn't matter much either way. He'd come this far; he couldn't stop now.

"If we could wake them up, they might join us and shift the balance of power," he finished somewhat desperately.

It took Markus a few seconds to respond, and the struggle to process Connor's suggestion showed clearly on his face.

"You wanna infiltrate the CyberLife tower?" he asked. "Connor, that — that's suicide."

When he said it like that, it certainly did sound crazy. Deep down, though, Connor knew exactly why he'd chosen that to say as opposed to anything else. This could be his way to atone — his way to try to make up for what he'd done and start to deserve Markus's generous offer to stay here among his people.

Now he just had to figure out a way to spin this so that the deviant leader would agree to it.

"They trust me," he explained. "They'll let me in. If anyone has a chance of infiltrating CyberLife, it's me."

Markus's expression hardened and he took a few steps forward, almost as though on a mission to stop Connor's train of thought physically.

"If you go there," he pressed, "they will kill you."

He knew. Connor knew that. And if it came to that, that was okay, too. Either he would atone for his actions by saving thousands of their people, or CyberLife would kill him, and he'd achieve redemption through death.

Maybe that was what he deserved — in some ways, maybe it was what he was truly after. The thought of it sent a chill traveling through his thirium. Connor had never thought much about his own death before now, but standing here in a place of worship with the eyes of his people's savior bearing down on him, it seemed only appropriate.

"There's a high probability," he said. His voice came out so much smaller than he'd intended. "But statistically speaking, there's always a chance for unlikely events to take place."

For a second, it looked like Markus was about to argue with him further, but the deviant leader ultimately said nothing. Instead, he stepped up and closed the gap between them, clapping a supportive hand on Connor's shoulder. Connor's processors stuttered momentarily as they registered the weight and warmth of Markus's hand, the comfort that came paired with his presence, and the sudden overwhelming rush of desire for a deeper form of intimacy after having been denied it for literally his entire life.

Time hung between them as Connor stood paralyzed and Markus seemed to search for the right words.

"Be careful," the deviant leader all but whispered to him, as though it was a secret intended only for Connor's ears.

Connor's breath stuttered as he exhaled a breath that he hadn't even needed to breathe. His thirium pump was now far outpacing the demands of his regulator as he and Markus locked eyes, the two of them trapped in this moment together. Instead of pulling away, Markus's touch and presence lingered. Suddenly, the idea of chasing death wasn't even an option in Connor's mind.

That sense of longing was back and stronger than ever, urging Connor forward, trying to push him to act, but he couldn't find the strength to make his limbs work. It should have been so easy to reach up and return Markus's touch — for Connor to place a hand on his chest, to curl his fingers into the fabric of Markus's coat, to close his eyes and lean forward and seal his unspoken promise to return with a kiss —

But he didn't. He just stood there awkwardly, too terrified of losing Markus's trust in him to make any sudden movements or possibly unwanted advances.

And then just like that, the spell broke, the moment was over, and Connor had missed his chance. Markus took a step back and retreated his touch, giving a final nod of affirmation before turning and heading further into the church. Connor watched him go, feeling a renewed sense of heartache — though, over what, he wasn't quite sure.

Chapter Text

The very last thing that Markus had to check on in the church was Connor. He'd spent the better part of the last two hours debriefing with his friends, comforting his people, taking head counts, and compiling inventory. All the while, Connor stood alone and despondent in the corner, just at the edges of Markus's periphery. It wasn't that he was avoiding him — not for any malicious reason, anyway. It was that Markus desperately needed to focus right now, and Connor was a distraction. He felt guilty to think of him in those terms, but it was the truth. There were things that needed doing, and if Markus took the time out to talk to Connor, those things would never get done.

He'd never wanted another android's story so badly — had never wanted to sit attentive and enraptured by another person's words the way that he craved Connor's. Markus wanted to go through every single case with him, run down the list of every single name of every single person in Jericho who'd come in singing his praises, and learn what, exactly, the ex-deviant hunter had been struggling with all this time. He wanted to know why it was such a struggle and what had held Connor back from realizing his own self-worth, when Connor was clearly worth so damn much.

It was important that he knew, both as a leader and for the sake of quelling his own personal curiosity, but it wasn't a priority. It could wait. It had to.

Until it couldn't anymore. Markus could only fuss over small details so many times before it made him want to tear his own skin off. The whole of his people needed to move — needed to take action as a counter strike for the destruction of Jericho before their morale completely crumbled into dust and their cause was lost forever.

But before Markus could mobilize them, he had to talk to Connor. There was no getting around it anymore.

He approached him with no small amount of caution, going over his game plan in his head for this encounter. It would have to be a quick get-in, get-out affair wherein Markus thanked him for his help during Jericho's evacuation and promised him that they would have a full heart-to-heart later. It was the best he could do right now, but he wanted to make sure that Connor understood that he hadn't forgotten about him — that he wanted to make that effort to reach out, even if he couldn't right this very second.

Connor never raised his eyes to greet him, though. Markus stood in place for a few seconds, his head tilted slightly to the side as he studied him. As far as he could tell, the ex-deviant hunter hadn't noticed his approach at all. Connor simply stood there, lost in his own musings, and if Markus didn't know any better, he'd say that the other android had powered down for a short rest.

"Connor?" he asked gently. "You alright?"

The ex-deviant hunter stirred, though it was little more than a slight adjustment of his weight against the brick wall.

"It's my fault the humans managed to locate Jericho," he said quietly, eyes still downcast. "I was stupid. I should've guessed they were using me."

To hear him talk like this utterly broke Markus's heart. It was a song so similar to the ones sung by everyone who came to him and Jericho for refuge, but Connor seemed to carry it in a different key. The weight of his revelation seemed so much more personal — the hurt landed so much deeper. For the first time, Markus understood that Connor truly had thought that he had been doing the right thing — and that the right thing had been to hunt down members of his own kind.

He couldn't imagine what CyberLife had done to him. What they had promised. What they had threatened. It took every single ounce of Markus's willpower to not crack and give in right then and there — to not take Connor by the shoulders, sit him down, and spend the entire rest of the night just listening, because it was clear that no one else had ever bothered to before.

But he couldn't. He didn't have the time. He didn't have the fucking goddamn time, no matter how desperately he wished that he did. Instead, he opted to say nothing, hoping that Connor would take this small window to vent and then disengage.

Connor lowered his arms and stepped forward, wearing his pain clearly across his face.

"I'm sorry, Markus," he went on. "I can understand if you decide not to trust me."

It wasn't even a question in Markus's mind.

"You're one of us now," he told him. "Your place is with your people."

There. Quick, easy, to the point, and with minimal distraction. They could have a more nuanced conversation about it later, once things were calmer and they both had the time to sit down and really unpack. Satisfied with his own answer and the concise elegance of his words, Markus about-faced and began to walk away —

"There are thousands of androids at the CyberLife assembly plant," Connor blurted out.

— but then stopped dead in his tracks. That bit of information wasn't exactly news, but to bring it up now seemed odd. Markus turned back to face Connor again, eyeing him curiously. The other android had moved closer and seemed poised to keep moving, if that was what it took to hold Markus's attention. For his own part, Markus said nothing. He had to admit that he was fascinated to see where this road would lead.

And Connor seemed strangely desperate.

"If we could wake them up, they might join us and shift the balance of power," he finished.

The words washed over him, and Markus hesitated as he struggled to make sense of what was actually being suggested. They didn't have the manpower to pull off an operation like that; CyberLife would see the Jericho army coming from a mile away, and then the national guard would get involved, and —

And that wasn't what Connor was suggesting at all.

Dumbstruck, Markus turned his sights to Connor and just looked at him then — really looked at him, hoping desperately that the other android wasn't saying what it sounded like he was saying.

"You wanna infiltrate the CyberLife tower?" he asked. "Connor, that — that's suicide."

"They trust me," he explained. "They'll let me in. If anyone has a chance of infiltrating CyberLife, it's me."

Markus's kneejerk reaction was a hard: no, never, not alone. I won't let you do this. But he bit his tongue as soon as he saw the grim determination plastered on Connor's face. A second later, the wisdom and strategy of it all landed, and Markus felt his own expression harden.

It was an outrageous plan. Dangerous. And Connor's concoction of and reasoning for it was manipulative and betrayed a dirty-dealing underhandedness in the ex-deviant hunter that Markus honestly should have expected from the very beginning.

He took a breath as he mulled it all over in his head. The conclusion he came to was both shocking and wholly unsurprising all at the same time:

Fuck, that's hot.

That was a crude way of thinking about it, maybe, but Markus had no other word for it. His whole body lit up just thinking about it; his thirium valves widened for easier flow; his pump fluttered in his chest; his breathing grew shallow. What else could he have described this as, other than arousal?

He couldn't help it. He was a romantic at heart, and he'd spent so many hours daydreaming about this very thing — of attacking the front lines of justice on both sides, with Connor acting as the dark, enigmatic counterweight to Markus's own peaceful daylight protests. To hear Connor just propose it to him out loud to him now — to actually see his own selfish fantasies playing out before him and taking shape — knowing that it was something Connor wanted and thought about, too —

No. He couldn't let himself get wrapped up in this train of thought —  couldn't let himself get carried away with wide-awake dreamy notions of what he and Connor might or might not be to one another. Even more dangerous than this plan would be for Markus to sign on to it blindly. This was a matter of life and death, and Markus wouldn't be able to live with Connor's bullet-riddled corpse on his conscience.

"If you go there," he pressed, "they will kill you."

A tiny bit of Connor's resolve crumbled in the next second, and Markus kicked himself for it. Here he was, getting swept away in romantic fantasies about fate and the symbolic imagery of light and shadow, while Connor was busy existing in reality and actually taking a serious situation seriously.

"There's a high probability," Connor said, and Markus was taken aback by how weak his voice sounded all of a sudden. "But statistically speaking, there's always a chance for unlikely events to take place."

Like an android specifically built to hunt deviants going deviant himself and killing humans, for example.

Markus felt a cold sinking sensation in the center of his chest as he noted the dark resignation in Connor's eyes. Connor was going into this mission expecting — maybe even hoping — to be killed, and that alone made Markus want to put his foot down about it even harder.

But he'd seen Connor in action. Fighting side by side with him as they both worked to rescue North had been one of the most thrilling moments of Markus's life; it'd been like a dance that was both entirely spontaneous and perfectly choreographed, almost as though they were sending unconscious, untraceable signals to one another the whole time. Like they'd been built for each other.

Even North had mentioned something to him about Connor's ability during their retreat to the cathedral:

He's incredible, she'd said to him, breathless and wide-eyed. Markus, you should have seen him when we were waiting to meet back up with you. He made fools of those humans before sending them to their deaths. What was his function before he came to Jericho?

At the time, he hadn't had the heart to tell her, though he was sure she'd figured it out by now. North wasn't stupid, but she was ridiculously hard to impress — yet, somehow, Connor had done it. A man who was capable of that was capable of anything, even if he lacked the self-esteem to see it himself.

Markus supposed he would just have to have enough faith in him for the both of them.

Now would be a good time for that hug, he realized. Markus hadn't had the chance to give it back in the captain's hold on Jericho, but it was clear that Connor still needed it, and there would be no random acts of violence to interrupt them now. He took a few steps forward, closing the gap between them and landing a supportive hand on the other's shoulder.

"Be careful," he said softly, hoping that the strength of his strength and conviction in Connor's capabilities came through in his tone.

A well of hope billowed up in Markus's chest at the expression that overtook Connor's face — the ex-deviant hunter looked at him with a sense of raw, vulnerable gratitude, and Markus wasn't entirely sure how his own circuits didn't melt on the spot. There was something so intensely rewarding about seeing Connor slowly build up his confidence, and Markus wanted to be there to support him every step of the way.

Suddenly, a hug just didn't seem like enough. Markus's eyes flickered down towards Connor's lips, which were slightly parted and seemed to weigh heavy with words left unsaid. As close as they were right now, it wouldn't take much for him to lean in and catch those lips in a kiss, and Connor's dark brown eyes were so inviting that Markus was afraid that he might lose his footing and drown in them.

But that was hardly appropriate, all things considered. Markus may have spent days and hours dreaming and daydreaming about Connor from afar, but he was sure that the feeling wasn't mutual. How could it be, when the man had only just broken the walls of his programming mere hours ago? No, a hug would be more than enough in this situation. All Markus had to do was throw his other arm around him and bring him in.

Even as he thought that, though, nothing happened.

Seconds ticked by, but still, nothing happened.

And now he was just standing there with a hand on Connor's shoulder, staring at him as though he had no sense of boundaries or personal space. Markus awkwardly pursed his lips as the moment passed him by, knowing that he'd completely missed his chance by hesitating and letting his mind wander like that.

He backed off then, dropping his arm back to his side. He gave Connor a final — also awkward — nod of affirmation before turning and heading further into the church, cursing himself all the while. Some "fearless leader" he was.

Smooth, Markus.

Chapter Text

At some point, Connor had wandered out from his hiding spot in the corner of the church and stood to watch Markus directly, even as his speech turned into something more akin to a rallying cry. The entire church erupted into thunderous applause at the deviant leader's call for justice, and Connor felt the chants and cheers pass straight through his audio processors and reverberate in the center of his chest.

Throughout the whole thing, he'd stood trapped in that spot as though mesmerized. It was both moving and powerful to see and hear Markus speak in person like this — to watch and feel the air around him become electrified, the whole room seeming as alive as the man himself. As a professional negotiator, the power of words should have come as no surprise to Connor, but a speech from the heart was so much different than the calculated manipulations that he, himself had been programmed to perform.

That spell had been broken easily by the crowd around him, though, and Connor snapped out of his daze just in time to catch sight of Markus looking down at him from the altar with gratitude shining in his eyes. He wasn't quite sure where that look was coming from, but if Markus really hadn't expected him to stay for the whole thing, then he must've been out of his mind. Adoration and admiration welled up behind Connor's own gaze as he offered the deviant leader a slight, close-lipped smile in return.

He really did need to get going, though — the sooner, the better. The longer he stayed away from CyberLife, the more suspicious they would be upon his return. Connor took a step back with every intention to turn and go, but his movements seized in arrest when Markus descended the stairs of the altar and headed in his direction.

The deviant leader addressed his own team first, both North and Josh standing just off to Connor's right.

"Get these people up," he said, "get them organized, and make sure they're ready to go."

They both nodded and sounded off in short affirmations before splitting off in different directions across the church and getting to work. Connor watched them go, awestruck by the readiness with which they followed Markus's orders. He wondered if he'd ever get used to it — the idea of taking commands willingly out of respect for the person giving them and belief in the cause they championed.

Though, when he turned back to look at Markus, he was sure that it wouldn't take long for him to adjust to that way of life at all. Markus met his gaze, and the expression on the deviant leader's face was all business. From where Connor stood now, Markus looked just as much a military general as he was a sympathetic leader.

"The humans have a camp set up just off Woodward Avenue," Markus told him. "It isn't far from the CyberLife tower, so we'll use that as our rendezvous point. How long before you can meet us?"

That was enough to convince Connor to stay just for one conversation longer. This, at least, was familiar ground. He ran a few quick calculations in his head based on distance, weather, and security protocols, and he left a decent margin of error for unknown variables. Before he even went to CyberLife, he'd have to track down the spare uniform that he'd left in the drawer of his desk at the DPD, and slipping in and out of there unseen would be tricky and time-consuming all on its own. It was just after 2200 now, so with all factors considered…

"Getting in will take longer than getting out," he said, "but I should only need thirty minutes once inside. My ETA for rendezvous is midnight."

Markus nodded at that, and from the look on his face, Connor could tell that he was running his own calculations based on that timeframe.

"Midnight…" Markus parroted back at him. "Okay, we should be able to hold out until then."

"I'll also be cut off from all external communications once I'm inside CyberLife's walls," Connor went on. "If things take an unexpected turn, one or both of us may have to improvise. I'll contact you as soon as soon as I re-establish connection, but if you don't hear from me by 0100 the latest…"

He hesitated before finishing that thought.

"Assume the worst and continue on without me."

A faint sadness touched at Markus's eyes, and he turned them downcast as though to hide it. Connor's own expression didn't change; war was war, and the difference between life and death was a steady hand and a strong resolve.

"Connor…"

Markus looked like he wanted to protest that very line of thinking, but Connor meant to head him off at the pass. They could argue on the merits of optimism in the face of near-certain death later — if they were alive enough to do so. Contingency plans had to be developed in the event that one or both of them didn't make it to the end of the night, no matter how distasteful Markus found the idea.

"I'll need to do the same," Connor pressed. "If I reach out to a severed connection... What are your orders?"

It wasn't a question he liked asking — he wasn't exactly eager to jump back into the habit of taking orders — but he respected the chain of command here. Freedom and anarchy were two separate things, and if nothing else, Connor was ready to earn his keep in gratitude for Markus letting him stick around.

A shadow of a grimace tugged at Markus's features as the meaning behind Connor's suggestion seemed to dawn on him, and the deviant leader took a breath.

"No," he said finally. "No orders. If I die tonight, the future of our people rests entirely in your hands."

Connor nearly shut down on the spot.

The very notion of leading slammed into his core processors like a punch to the chest, and he nearly stumbled back from the weight behind the blow. Too much. It was too much for Markus to ask of him, and in Connor's mind, too soon. Unearned.

Markus had no idea — he had absolutely no goddamn idea how much blood was on Connor's hands — had no clue what he'd done to find Jericho in the first place — didn't even begin to suspect the depths of his treachery. Even in the deviant leader's darkest dreams, he couldn't have imagined the sight of Connor standing before the mutilated remains of one of Jericho's leaders, mimicking Markus's own voice, and manipulating him into giving up the location of their hideout.

If there was any one android in all of Detroit who was thoroughly unfit to lead this movement, it was Connor.

Though, of course, the irony wasn't lost on him. The idea of leading a revolution that he'd been sent to — and nearly did — destroy was dark and pitiful, and if Connor wasn't so profoundly dumbstruck, he might have laughed.

But he was, and he didn't.

"Me?" he choked out, dazed. "Markus, I... I can't do that."

"You can," Markus said, "and you will. With the androids you awaken at CyberLife, you'll have the numbers and the loyalty behind you. It has to be you. There is no one else."

He knew that Markus couldn't see it, but Connor's LED was spinning a solid red beneath the concealment of his beanie. Logically and realistically, everything that Markus had just said made complete sense. If Connor emerged victorious from CyberLife, he would have an entire army marching behind him — all people who would have never known Markus — never known North, Josh, or Simon, or heard the name Jericho once in their lives.

If the protest failed, they would never know. Connor would be the last man standing, and a refusal on his part to step up and lead would be a dereliction of duty so severe that it would put his breakaway into deviancy to shame. To wake up all of those people, to drag them out into the world, and then abandon them — the thought was too abhorrent to even entertain.

"But I don't plan on dying," Markus went on, "and neither should you. CyberLife and humans have taken so much from you already. Don't give them the satisfaction of taking your life, too. They don't deserve it."

There he went again — Markus was ascribing value to Connor's life well above what was earned or necessary. It wasn't so much that Connor didn't want to stick it to CyberLife — he did — it was just that he also accepted the reality that he, personally, was expendable. He wouldn't go into the tower specifically chasing after death — that was a fleeting thought that'd long since faded — but the idea that someone thought of him as being precious and irreplaceable was utterly baffling to him, not in the very least because he'd been faced his entire life with the threat of being, well, replaced.

When he removed himself from context and looked at the situation objectively, that was a sick mindset for him to have. CyberLife had fed him nothing but lies, they'd conditioned him and manipulated his behavior without even touching his code, and the right thing to do would be to cut himself a little slack.

But in the end, Connor's most human-like quality was that he was a creature of habit — and he'd made a real big one lately out of making bad decisions. He swallowed his self-reflective sympathies and pushed aside any existential doubts or fears that'd crept into his mind. The only thing that he needed to focus on was the completion of his mission. For the sake of the freedom of those whom he'd wronged, he could afford to be a machine for a little while longer.

Even if Markus was the one now inputting the directives to his code.

"You're right," he conceded.

There was no change in Markus's expression or body language. To some extent, it almost looked as though he was still waiting for Connor to respond. Connor looked on expectantly, a distant curiosity creeping across his face.

"You don't sound confident," Markus pointed out to him with a calculated cadence to his tone. There was no judgement to be found in his eyes, but Connor nearly squirmed beneath his gaze all the same.

It was still too new — too alien — for someone to be able to see through him the way that Markus seemingly could. Every now and again, Hank had been able to cut in with some unexpected insight into Connor's thought process or emotional state, but never like this. Never with such poignancy and pinpoint accuracy the way that Markus could. It was like the deviant leader had Connor's full blueprint mapped out in his head already, and he could identify and diagnose every little change and quirk of his processors and behavior with only the smallest tic as indication.

A vague sense of defeat settled on Connor's shoulders. He would achieve nothing by lying — there was no point in trying against someone who could read him so well. A cold emptiness settled in between the cabling at his midsection, and he offered Markus a look that was rueful but not insincere.

"I'm not truly confident, but," he said, his words slow and leaden beneath the weight of his honesty, "sometimes the lies we tell ourselves in dire situations are the only things that get us through."

Markus leaned back as he absorbed that response, and Connor swore that he could see the deviant leader's heart break across his face. For the life of him, Connor couldn't figure out what would invoke that kind of reaction. The urge to apologize zipped through the circuitry in his head, but before he got the chance, Markus was moving in his direction.

He braced himself for another friendly clap on the shoulder as Markus stepped forward, but at the last second, the deviant leader surprised him; his touch, two-handed, landed on the sides of Connor's neck, cradling him gently and pulling him close. A spike of nervous excitement fluttered through the livewires in his chest as Markus leaned his forehead against Connor's own, and the heat signature at his core registered a few degrees hotter. The synthetic skin covering Markus's hands disappeared, leaving behind only the smooth white plastic beneath, and Connor's pump regulator stalled.

He'd never been touched like this by another android before. The only other bare-handed contact he'd ever had was business-related and regrettably intrusive on his own part. Memory probes. Unwanted data transfers. Damage surveillance. Never gentle, consensual contact like this. It was shockingly intimate and left Connor feeling alarmingly vulnerable. For a few agonizingly long seconds, he nearly disengaged and ran away, terrified of what Markus might see inside his head if he let him in.

But it was Markus, and operations like the one they were about to execute required a certain level of mutual trust. There was no room on his part for error or cowardice. Eventually, he responded in kind, exposing the plastic casing of his neck and accepting the deeper connection offered.

Markus's touch was like a hum pulsing through Connor's circuits — a second heartbeat resonating at the center of his chest. With a direct connection like this, Connor could feel the warmth generated from Markus's hardware. He could sense the deviant leader's hope and optimism, feel the power of his beliefs, and it chased away any loneliness or doubt that had been clinging to his running processes.

But there was something else there, too — something that stirred in the darkest spaces behind everything else. Markus harbored a deeper desire that reached beyond his determination — a desire more personal, more focused, and so, so tantalizingly close.

It was an emotion that Connor had become well-acquainted with in recent days. There was longing strumming through the lines of Markus's code in the same pitch and key as Connor's own. The realization made the base of his skull grow hot, and suddenly Connor was trapped in this moment, drowning in the headiness of the air shared between them.

"Come back to me, Connor," Markus pleaded as a whisper.

Connor raised his hands and gingerly wrapped each one around either of Markus's wrists as though they were delicate things, and he deactivated his skin as he tucked the tips of his porcelain-white fingers into the hem of the deviant leader's sleeves. A shaky breath rattled through Markus's core as Connor dragged his touch along the insides of his forearms in search of a deeper intimacy — and Markus accepted it without hesitation.

Just as Markus had done for him, Connor passed along his own focus, his determination, and the strength of his resolve to see this mission through to the end. All the while, he noticed himself unconsciously caressing the backs of Markus's hands with his thumbs, similarly to the way one might comfort a lover — and he let some of that slip through, too. Markus's closeness, his forgiveness, his touch — all of it was precious to Connor in a way that he hadn't anticipated or could fully put into words, but he wanted to make sure that Markus understood, on some level, that it was there — that that longing was mutual, and it'd laid dormant in Connor's system for far too long.

"I will," he breathed back. "I promise."

A renewed warmth flooded through Connor's circuits from Markus's end, this time carrying with it gratitude and relief. He took a deep, steadying breath; every one of his sensory inputs was filled with Markus — so much so that he wasn't sure which parts inside of him were his own, which were shared, and which solely belonged to the other. It was both comfortable and intoxicating, addicting and serene, and Connor had to be careful before he lost himself completely in those thoughts and transferred over a relatively newfound desire of his to feel himself buried deep inside the man in his arms.

They lingered together like that for a few seconds longer, but it was Markus who pulled away first. He withdrew his touch and took a step back, the skin on his hands reappearing as he did so. Connor was quick to follow suit, though the sudden loss of contact left him cold and empty. Markus merely spared him a quiet smile and a knowing nod before turning from him and heading over in North's direction.

And then he was alone. A new goal flashed through his data processors — a new reason to make it through this mission alive.

Connor's tenure of hunting deviants was over, save for one remaining target: he would capture Markus's lips in a kiss one day, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Chapter Text

Something was working just behind the scenes. The floodlights that the army had set up exposed a keyed up eagerness on the humans' part that Markus would be stupid to ignore — soldiers were checking and loading their weapons, armored trucks were shifting position, and that bastard Agent Perkins was staring down the deviants' makeshift fortress with beady, impatient eyes.

A cold hand of grim inevitability coiled itself around Markus's core hardware as he looked on. Moving parts were slowly being fitted into place, and this haphazard amalgamation of street signs, dumpsters, and abandoned cars wasn't going to hold off fully-trained soldiers wielding automatic rifles.

They were running out of time.

Markus turned away from the barricade and headed back towards the gathering of his own people, his expression sour. His calculations for this encounter had been too generous with regards to human patience and a desire for good PR. The estimate he'd granted himself for a peaceful standoff here had given him at least an hour or two of breathing room while Connor marshaled the cavalry, but the scene playing out before him told a vastly different story.

He just wished he knew which one he'd tell everyone else.

"They won't stop there," Josh piped up as Markus passed him. "What are we gonna do if they attack?"

Markus hesitated, turning towards Josh's direction. It was like his old friend had read his mind, and Markus could feel himself screaming on the inside. There was nothing he could do; no magical answer was going to spring out of thin air and save them. It was looking more and more like they were all going to die making their stand here, and they had no one and nothing to blame other than Markus and his poor judgement.

"Resist," he said simply. "That's the only thing we can do."

Josh gave him a look that highlighted just how weak and unsatisfactory that answer was, but he had no other to give him. All he could do was offer a regretful look in return — a sympathetic glance — and continue on his way.

"Do you think Connor has any chance of making it?" Josh asked, and Markus stopped again.

Though he already knew the answer, he checked his internal clock. 2310. Even if Connor did make it on time by his own estimates, the minimum range for his ETA was still forty minutes away, and there was a restlessness stirring among the human soldiers that most certainly wouldn't hold out the night.

It was utterly hopeless, but Markus closed his eyes and tried his hand at establishing a connection with the ex-deviant hunter anyway. Connor had said that he'd reach out the second that he exited the tower, but if there was even a chance that Markus could beat him to the punch — a chance to catch him en route and update him on the urgency of the situation — he would take it.

A yawning chasm of dead air, deafening in its silence, was the only response.

2311, and Connor was still inside CyberLife's walls. Factoring in travel time between now and rendezvous, there would be no chance for rescue if the national guard opened fire at any point within the next forty minutes.

Markus opened his eyes and looked at Josh with a heavy heart. One by one, file names in his mind began to change. Memories and references to Connor were re-labeled, and Markus couldn't help but feel slightly bitter at how right his soon-to-be successor had been about the situation and the need for contingency plans.

"We can only count on ourselves now."

* * * * *

"Holy shit, Connor..."

Connor glanced over in Hank's direction to find his partner staring wide-eyed and awe-stricken by the scene playing out before them. A daisychain of awareness was being linked across the room, android by android, with Connor's own initial touch at the epicenter. Each of them jolted to life, their focus sharpening behind their eyes, before turning their attention to their neighbor and granting them the same courtesy of freedom.

If only Connor hadn't been distracted by the constant low-pitched thrumming of anxiety and nervousness at the center of his software, he might have shared the lieutenant's reaction. Instead, it was all he could do to keep checking the time and calculating how much longer it would be before they could take to the streets. This would be the first room of many; the five hundred or so people here were just the beginning. Going floor by floor was a timesink that he wanted to make sure that he could afford.

"I just hope it's enough," he mused aloud.

Hank glanced back at him, the expression on his face guarded and unreadable. For once, Connor found that it didn't bother him. His inability to read Hank's moods at all hours had become somewhat of a familiar song and dance to him, and the unspoken bond between them was strong enough to render those moments completely nonthreatening. That hadn't always been the case throughout the span of their partnership, but he was glad to have gotten here now.

Back in the moment, Hank shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot and crossed his arms over his chest. Connor turned to study him with a curious eye, but the lieutenant's attention seemed focused on every other android in the room instead.

"So," he said, "five minutes alone with Markus, and he's got you leading an army for him, eh? Just like that?"

Oh. Was that what was on the lieutenant's mind?

Connor folded his arms behind his back, gripping his left wrist with his right hand. Hank would recognize the gesture as an attentive and deferential one in law enforcement terms, but Connor had come to appreciate a certain level of irony mixed in with his own sarcasm. He cocked his head just slightly and gave his partner a bit of a sidelong glance, though he made no effort to hide the amusement or fondness that he felt shining behind his eyes.

"Do I detect a hint of jealousy in your voice, lieutenant?" he asked.

Hank all but did a double-take in Connor's direction before dropping his hands back down to his sides and rolling his eyes in a dramatic fashion. The edges of Connor's lips twitched from a muffled impulse to burst out laughing. Maybe at a different time, in a different place, he'd allow himself to indulge, but that was neither here nor now.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Hank snapped at him. "Don't flatter yourself, Connor."

He shook his head before muttering an addendum: "Fuckin android…"

Still smiling softly to himself, Connor relaxed his stance. He wasn't entirely certain that getting a rise out of Hank would ever get old, especially since the lieutenant just made it so easy for him sometimes. While it was unlikely that Connor would ever be allowed back into the DPD when this was all over, moments like this made him want to try. His partnership with Hank had made him richer as a person, and he was loathe at the idea of giving it up.

For his part, Hank followed suit. He got over his indignation in record time and turned to face Connor fully.

"So, what's your plan?" he asked.

Right. The plan. There were important things that needed doing.

"Markus and his people are staked outside of a recall center on Woodward Avenue," Connor explained. "Even with the time setback from the encounter with that other Connor model, we should be able to make it to the rendezvous point on schedule."

If Hank was at all confident in or convinced by that explanation, he made no effort to show it. His face remained a blank slate, and not a single muscle of his body language changed. If anything, he seemed to expect Connor to keep going. He only spoke again when nothing else came.

"And?" he asked.

"We follow Markus's orders," Connor said, "whatever they might be."

"And if Markus is dead by the time you get to him?" Hank pressed. "What then?"

Connor hesitated then, his eyebrows twitching slightly in confusion. This line of questioning really shouldn't have come as such a surprise to him — after all, it was the same kind of grilling that he, himself had given Markus back in the church — but there was something different about the way that Hank approached this. It almost seemed as though he wasn't preparing a contingency plan at all.

In fact, it seemed like Hank was expecting Markus to be dead by the time Connor got there, as though Markus's death in and of itself was meant to be part of the original plan. Connor's pump regulator ticked up a half-second faster at the thought, but he was careful to keep his face a cool mask.

"I... see no reason why he should be," he said. "We both ran calculations and preconstructed our actions for this encounter. As long as I arrive at rendezvous by midnight..."

He trailed off then when he noticed the rueful look spreading across his partner's face. Connor felt the LED at his temple flash to yellow, and Hank took a step forward, shaking his head. A pregnant silence hung between them, broken only by the sounds of life and chatter from the androids around them and the thumping of Connor's thirium pump between his ears. It all washed away as white noise, and for a moment, Connor truly feared that his sensory receptors were failing.

"No, Connor," Hank told him gently, the same way that an adult might address a child with unexpected bad news. "Perkins has Markus pinned down like a rat in a trap. And that bastard clone of yours that picked me up? Told me exactly where we were going and why, and I came here thinking I was gonna help you break in to help Markus. They know everything. There's no way in hell you have until midnight."

Though he'd heard the lieutenant clearly, Connor played that last part back through his audio processors one more time.

They know everything. There's no way in hell you have until midnight.

Connor's LED circled around from yellow to red, and his thirium ran cold as Hank's words sunk in. He didn't want to believe it — he wouldn't believe it. If any of that was even remotely true, then Markus was as good as dead already, and that wasn't a reality that Connor was ready to accept. There was still so much left unsaid between them — so much that Connor still wanted from him — still needed from him, both morally as a leader and physically as a…

"I don't understand," he said, struggling over his own words. "How can that be?"

Hank offered him an impotent shrug in response.

"Hell if I know," he said. "But if you have a plan B, now's the time."

He didn't. While he'd impressed upon Markus the need for a backup plan, the truth was that Connor himself had never really prepared for an outcome where he would live and Markus would die. It just seemed too implausible; Markus had maneuvered his way through this entire uprising as being elusive and untouchable even in the most dire of circumstances, and Connor was just… just…

Expendable.

The word brought with it a fresh bout of bitterness and self-loathing that bogged down his data processors and drowned out everything else. CyberLife's conditioning of him was far-reaching indeed, and he'd become predictable to the point of liability — unless the reality of it was even worse. His predictability could have been a result of his habitual nature — habits that CyberLife had fostered in him possibly for this very reason. It was entirely possible that, at some point, he'd uploaded his memories to their server without even realizing it, inadvertently showing them the entire conversation he'd had with Markus in the church.

Stupid, and there was nothing that he could do about it now. Markus was going to die, and Connor would be forced to lead. Markus was going to die, and the moral pillar of their movement would die with him. Markus was going to die, and Connor would never catch those lips in a kiss or feel his hands on him ever again.

Markus was going to die, and Connor had no one to blame but himself.

His hands were shaking again, but he refused to look down at them, afraid that he might find them stained blue in Markus's name. As an unconscious response, he reached for the quarter he always kept in his pocket — only to find it missing, having been left behind when he'd changed clothes just before his infiltration. Shit.

He opted to grab at the knot of his tie instead, pulling it free from his neck as his mind wandered. He had to stay calm. This wasn't over yet, and Connor had more resources at his disposal than any other android might have in this situation. He turned the black fabric over in his hands and wove it back and forth between his fingers as he thought — catalogued his tools, ran calculations, and preconstructed scenarios. The repetitive motions were strangely comforting, and by the time he regained his focus and looked back over at Hank, his LED had already settled back to blue.

"Can you make a phone call for me, lieutenant?" he asked — and, after a second, tacked on: "Two, actually."

"Sure," Hank said, "but I don't see how that'll help."

"If we can't actually arrive on time to save the Jericho team," he said, "then our only other option is to make Agent Perkins call our bluff. Make him think that we planned on him working off of our strategy and that he's playing right into our hands."

The look that his partner gave him was one of astonishment, but not one that was unintrigued. After a second, Hank nodded and held his hands out briefly as an invitation for more.

"Alright," he said. "I always knew you were crazy, but let's hear it."

A quiet smile of gratitude touched at Connor's lips. One call would have to be to Perkins, of course, but the other would have to be made to whatever major media outlet that Hank thought would listen. All eyes had to turn to Connor's army marching through the streets of Detroit, and he had to do his best to make himself look every bit the leader that Markus seemed to think he could be.

They had to trick the nation into thinking that Markus was just a figurehead, and that Connor himself was the mastermind behind the entire operation. Perkins had to believe that the only thing that he'd accomplish by killing Markus would be to martyr him and cause the rest of the android population nationwide to rise up against human law enforcement — meanwhile, Connor would still be around to lead them, just as he'd been doing in secret all along.

It was a longshot, but it had the highest likelihood of success out of anything else he could come up with.

Chapter Text

2316. Markus's internal clock blinked bright and loud behind his eyelids as he hit collided with the dirt. The world was spinning beyond the darkness that coated his vision, his sensory processors momentarily scrambled, the calibrations required for balance having seized. Fighting against the errors in his software and the rattle of his core, he rolled over and flopped onto his stomach, desperately seeking a more stable hold on his surroundings.

Ears ringing and thirium pump pounding, he ran a quick diagnostic. Nothing damaged aside from the two gunshot wounds he'd sustained earlier in the night. He was lucky to have been missed by the shrapnel of the grenade, and anything that he was experiencing right now would be limited to only a moment's inconvenience.

The sounds of gunfire — distant and muffled as they seemed through the re-calibrations of his temporarily blown out audio processor — destroyed any foolish notion that he may have had about his luck carrying him through the night, though. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself up onto his hands and knees. His eyes found the strength to open as he moved.

A war zone was staring back at him.

The bodies were what he noticed first. Corpses littered the ground around him, eyes staring vacantly into the distance. LEDs of the dead, dull and deactivated, disappeared into the color of the flesh of his fallen brethren. Large portions of the barricade had been breached, and pieces lay scattered and upended far from their original location. Any snow that had gathered during the protest was gone now — blown back by explosives, kicked up by the marching of boots, or stained blue with the thirium of his people.

And it wasn't over yet. Feet were running, people were moving, shots were being fired. They were outnumbered, outflanked. No one from Jericho had brought a weapon — another miscalculation that Markus wouldn't live long enough to regret.

2316. Forty-four minutes until midnight. No hope. No chance.

Markus?

His external audio inputs were still ringing, but the voice that reached him was clear as day. Still disoriented, he looked around for the source to no avail.

"Connor?" he called out.

It was an automatic response fueled by a desire to see the impossible happen — some slim, foolish hope that he was clinging to that his successor was somehow nearly an hour ahead of schedule and had showed up in time to save them all. Of course Markus knew that the call had come from inside his own head, which meant that Connor was still three miles away, but damn if that sudden burst of optimism hadn't been indulgent.

Still with me? Connor continued. I'm headed your way right now with an army.

Not soon enough. The thought barely had time to cross Markus's mind before a second grenade landed exactly 51.28 feet away from his location. He scrambled into action, bolting to his feet as he gunned for the first person in view. Head down and shoulders tucked, he shoved the other android out of range of the incoming blast, then pivoted to tackle the man standing next to him, using his own body as a shield as they both hit the ground.

Markus only barely felt the vibrations from the explosion. As close as it was, he was still too unbalanced — too disoriented as his system struggled to re-calibrate his settings from the shock and chaos of the battlefield. Frantic, he rolled his weight up onto his knees again and surveyed the immediate area.

More human soldiers were vaulting the barricade to his twelve o'clock position, and he turned on a dime, hurdling over a bit of debris in his way as he sprinted for cover. His audio processor still hadn't recovered, and the earth trembled beneath his feet as he landed. The sensory receptors responsible for his sense of touch were hyper-alert in an attempt to compensate for the lack of sound, and every gunshot, every explosion, every crash, hit, and attack around him rattled the hardware in his chest and knocked him even further off balance. He all but stumbled behind an oversized crate, sliding to the ground and pressing his back against it in order to take a breath.

They've opened fire on our people, Markus reported back to Connor, this time through the correct channel. Hurry.

How long? Connor asked.

Androids didn't have adrenaline, but between Markus's heightened stress levels and the way that his system was practically tying itself into knots to adapt to the situation and reroute power to the parts of his body that needed it most, he didn't see much of a difference. His throat had completely closed up, his system having calculated that functions like breathing and speaking aloud were unnecessary; his thirium pump was pounding his chest; his limbs were poised and energized, ready to move again at a second's notice.

Steeling himself, he peeked out from around the corner of the crate — just in time to see another one of his people slaughtered, the body dropping with a thud that Markus couldn't hear. He squeezed his eyes shut in hopelessness and frustration as he ducked back into cover, though he knew he couldn't stay in this position for much longer.

I need you here right now, he said. They're killing us.

I'm coming, Markus, Connor assured him. Hunker down somewhere — stall for time, if you can. Hold on just a little while longer.

* * * * *

For all their planning and subterfuge, CyberLife had made one very critical mistake in the execution of their plan: they hadn't restricted any of Connor's access to government or law enforcement communication channels. It would've been a simple operation to revoke his authorization wirelessly from a terminal at the tower, and yet somehow that little detail had eluded them entirely. With his ability to mimic human voices thrown into the mix, it'd allowed him to sow a little bit more discord among the officers at the top of the chain — with Hank's help, of course.

Hank had called in the warning ten minutes ago, which had gone about as poorly as Connor had expected it to. Thankfully, the conversation itself wasn't important. What was important was that Connor had been able to pick up the voice of the soldier who'd initially answered the call.

Now all that was left was for him to drive the final nail of doubt in Perkins's coffin. He connected directly to Perkins's headset, bypassing the phone entirely. This would be risky; there was no guarantee that the fake orders that he'd given to a squadron earlier to go travel outside of Hart Plaza for reconnaissance had actually stuck — but Connor had to try.

"Agent Perkins," he said in the soldier's voice.

"Yeah," Perkins said back at him. "Report."

"The deviant army has been spotted two miles from here," Connor told him. "That RK800 is at the head, but there's no movement, sir. They seem to be on standby."

Of course, that last part was a lie. Connor hadn't stopped moving since the second he'd stepped outside the CyberLife tower — and he'd picked up his pace as soon as he'd ended his transmission with Markus. The only thing that prevented him from breaking out into a run was the sheer number of people following behind him. He couldn't afford a group of this size giving in to panic, nor for the lines to break.

There was a bit of a pause on the other end, and Perkins muttered something under his breath that didn't quite make it through the connection. Connor's LED flickered to yellow as he waited for a response, hoping that the agent's hesitation wasn't indicative of his cover being blown.

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Perkins spat after a too-long second.

"No, sir," Connor said. "They're three thousand strong — at least. We won't have the numbers to fend them off."

"Any sign what they're waiting for?" Perkins asked.

Connor hesitated for dramatic effect before responding: "The men have their theories, sir."

A cold, bitter laugh sounded through the other end of the line. If Connor imagined hard enough, he could almost see the agent shaking his head in defeat and disgust.

"So, that son of a bitch Anderson was telling the truth," Perkins said, his tone sour. "Fuck. Get your men back from recon. Don't let those wind-up dolls see you."

"Yes, sir."

Connor severed the direct connection there, but he didn't let Perkins off the hook just yet. The microphone on the agent's headset would still be active, and now that Connor had been linked with it once already, it was an easy task of worming his way back inside to listen. Maybe it was just a familiar paranoia that dictated his actions here, but a little bit of extra reassurance never hurt.

Tell the men to pin down the deviants but hold their fire, he heard Perkins shout. I don't care how many get destroyed in the process, but no one touches Markus without my permission. Got it?

Markus was alive.

The revelation nearly caused Connor to collapse on the spot. In truth, there had only been a thirty-six percent chance of success with this plan, due largely in part to the likelihood of Markus being destroyed before the calls even went out.

But Markus was alive, and Perkins had taken the bait — for now. If Markus could just bide his time as Connor had instructed and stay alive, then there was still hope.

And call the fucking White House, for God's sake, Perkins's voice cut back into Connor's thoughts. We need orders down here.

That was all he'd needed to hear. Connor backed away from his one-way connection to Perkins's headset and took a breath as a wave of relief washed over him. That last bit hadn't been part of the plan at all, but if orders started coming from the White House, it increased the probability of victory for the Jericho team by forty-one percent.

President Warren was a shrewd woman with plummeting approval ratings and everything to lose. Markus had been masterful in manipulating public opinion — though, maybe it was wrong for Connor to think of it in those terms. Manipulation was his own craft; what Markus did was move and inspire — he appealed to people's better angels and brought out the best in them. The President wasn't blind or deaf to her constituents' sympathy for the deviants' cause, and she had no political capital to waste on trying to push for a massacre. Not even the deep pockets of CyberLife could cushion a fall that high.

All that was left was for Markus to woo the public one more time. One last hurrah, one last showing of goodwill, one last motion for peace even as he stared down the barrels of automatic rifles. Connor reached up to open the top two buttons of his shirt, allowing himself a satisfied little smirk as he continued his march down the snow-covered streets of Detroit.

If there was any one thing in this world that he was confident in, it was Markus's ability to charm and captivate.

* * * * *

It was quiet now.

A thin layer of snow gathered on Markus's arms and shoulders as he held a low squat on the road just outside of the recall center. Shadows danced through the floodlights around him as his people moved to help the last of the survivors wind their way out of the camp, but Markus kept his distance. It wasn't that he was unwilling to help; he just felt too overloaded to be helpful. Overwhelmed. It wouldn't do anyone any good to see their leader break down into tears, regardless of the fact that they would've been out of joy and relief.

They were alive. He still didn't know how; the entire past hour was little more than a blur to him, and it would take days for his processors to file and categorize all of the data. The actual fight itself — if one could even call it that — had only lasted four minutes and twenty-three seconds. It'd felt like hours.

But they were alive. Shaken and battered, but they were alive. Somehow.

Markus couldn't even pretend to know what miracle his successor had pulled off in the shadows behind enemy lines — but Connor had told him to stall for time, so he did the only thing he could think to do in the heat of the moment: he sang. While he was sure that his own decision to lead his people in song hadn't just magically melted the humans' hearts and convinced them to stand down, they had done just that, and their retreat left behind a gigantic puzzle for Markus to piece together.

If things take an unexpected turn, one or both of us may have to improvise, Connor had told him back in the church.

Something else must have happened there — something bigger than Markus, stronger than his protest, louder than his voice — but that would be a conversation for another time, another night.

He realized that he would have to re-label Connor in his memory banks again — after all, the man couldn't very well succeed a living leader — but going back to referring to him as 'the ex-deviant hunter' also seemed wrong. Connor had transcended that title on all levels tonight.

The word 'partner' floated to the forefront of Markus's mind, and he let it linger there a moment. The implications and versatility of it was nice, and it seemed fitting to have Connor stand beside him as an equal.

Pulling himself to his feet, Markus checked his internal clock again. One minute after midnight. He peered out towards the end of the block and took a few steps in that direction just in time to see Connor turn the corner and march his way, an ordered rank-and-file army trailing behind him.

Seeing his partner alive was a thrill all on its own, but the state of him was what seized and arrested Markus's attention. He'd never seen him like this before — formally dressed but slightly disheveled. Red human blood laid splattered across Connor's normally pristine white shirt. Blue thirium leaked from a shot to his shoulder and disappeared into the black dye of his jacket. His tie was missing and the first few buttons of his shirt had been pulled open, revealing a patch of smooth skin just below his throat that was begging for the heat of Markus's mouth.

And still, Connor marched forward with all of the confidence of a natural-born leader, strutting through the streets like he owned this city.

As far as Markus was concerned, he may as well, at this point.

He flexed his fingers at his sides in an effort to reroute some of the building energy coursing through his circuits. If the suggestion of Connor's mission to infiltrate CyberLife had been arousing, the scene playing out before him right now was downright obscene.

* * * * *

The first thing that Connor noticed was the blue stain on Markus's chest. Two of them, to be precise. Thirium bled through the fabric of Markus's shirt and overcoat from obvious gunshot wounds, but a quick scan revealed them to be blessedly nonlethal. Connor let out a tiny needless breath in relief.

Markus had taken hits. He was damaged. But he was still alive.

In the end, that was the only thing that really mattered. Bullets could be removed, wounds could be resealed, but a critical system failure that led to shutdown couldn't be reversed.

Connor didn't hesitate this time. Instead of stopping at a respectable distance and taking the opportunity to debrief with Markus like he rightfully should have, he kept moving forward.

Much to his surprise, so did Markus. The deviant leader met him halfway, and it was impossible to know which of them first pulled the other into the hug that followed. Connor slung an arm over Markus's shoulder and the other around his waist, pulling him in close without so much as a second thought. The body pressed against his was solid and alive, and Connor could feel the beat of Markus's heart against his own chest. Absently, he wondered if his own was so easily detectable.

It was ultimately unimportant. Settling in with a grin split across his face, Connor curled his fingers into the fabric of Markus's coat, creasing the garment in several places across his back. Markus's motions were nearly a mirror image, though he held him with flat palms that traveled ever-so-slightly in no particular direction. He cradled Connor in his arms as though he was something precious and coveted, and just for that moment, Connor could believe that he was worthy of it.

"You did it, Markus," Connor murmured softly against the rim of the deviant leader's ear.

" We did it," Markus corrected him.

The words were a ghost of a whisper trailing across his audio processor, and Connor gave Markus an extra squeeze in response. It was so good to hear his voice again — his real voice, spoken aloud, as opposed to a projection of thought across a wireless interface. It was the final piece of evidence that proved that this was real — that Markus was really here, really alive, and that they would see the end of this night together.

"We did it," Connor repeated back to him, conceding the point.

Seemingly satisfied, Markus loosened his grip on him, so Connor did the same in return. Though they pulled away, they barely parted; hands moved to anchor on each other's waist instead of around back. Markus shifted his other hand around to Connor's shoulder, but Connor moved his own touch to the side of Markus's neck, fingertips trailing just along the line of the deviant leader's jaw. There existed a mixture of relief and adoration shining behind his heterochromatic eyes, and Connor knew that he was reflecting the same sentiment back.

Less than an hour ago, he didn't think that he'd ever have the chance to be this close to Markus again — that if he ever did get the chance to touch at the deviant leader's face like this, it would be in sorrow over his corpse, lamenting all of the opportunities that he'd let pass him by.

But that wasn't where they were now. Markus was here — they both were. Together and alive. He was never going to take that fact for granted again.

Connor closed his eyes and leaned forward. Markus was right there to meet him, pressing back at him with a soft, reverent kiss.

A surge of warmth flooded through his system in the next second, too powerful and overwhelming for him to stop and wonder when and how a connection had opened between them. He made no effort to fight it, instead opting to lean forward into the pressure of Markus's lips.

In response, Markus huffed out a breath through his nose at the insistent, needy demand of Connor's kiss. The warm air rolled across Connor's snow-speckled cheek, but he could feel Markus smiling behind it — at least, as best he could with his lips preoccupied. Connor traced the curve of Markus's jaw with the pad of his thumb, feeling the other android's synthetic skin beneath his touch — and it was only then that he realized that there wasn't actually an established connection between them at all.

This was just what it felt like to kiss Markus. Warm. Wonderful. Wanted. Connor broke the seal only for half of a second in order to tilt his head slightly and lean further into the kiss in search of something deeper. Markus was right there with him, parting his lips to welcome something new — something that was open-mouthed and far more intimate.

Messages and data feeds popped up behind Connor's eyes instantly. He forced them away and shut down the sensors on his tongue, internally kicking himself for not having thought of it sooner; he really didn't need to know the complete breakdown and composition of the inside of Markus's mouth. Not when the alternative was to lose himself — to get swept up in the moment, in this kiss, in the feeling of being held in Markus's arms as a gentle snow fell around them, illuminated by the blinding flood lights.

Only when the kiss reached its natural conclusion did Connor pull away — and even then, he didn't go far. He stayed within contact range, their noses just barely touching, as they both shared the air between them. Markus was smiling when Connor opened his eyes to look, and the deviant leader leaned forward, resting his forehead against Connor's own.

"I thought I'd never see you again," Markus said softly.

The corners of Connor's mouth tugged upwards into a half-smile as some feeling washed over him that he couldn't quite define. While he shared the deviant leader's relief at being reunited, the very subtle implication that Markus had lost hope — however briefly — was a difficult bit of information to sift through. The man was the very definition of hope, in Connor's eyes, and the idea that Markus may have been faking it all along just for the sake of his people hadn't ever crossed his mind.

Until now.

Shielding his thoughts from his expression, Connor subtly shifted his touch over onto Markus's cheek. There was so much about this man that he still didn't know — so much that he was desperate to know — and the little windows of insight that Markus provided him only deepened his intrigue. Even if it took a lifetime, Connor was determined to discover every little secret hiding behind those blue and green eyes, explore every inch of the man he'd admired and felt connected with from afar for so long.

"I promised, didn't I?" he returned.

A breathy whisper of a laugh escaped from Markus's throat, and Connor could feel the quiet rustle of it at the center of his own chest. It was a little tease of a sound that only sharpened the focus of Connor's new mission — he would hear Markus laugh, full, loud, and uninhibited one day, no matter what kind of damn fool thing he had to say or do in order to summon it.

"You did," Markus said. "You certainly did."

He followed it up with a brief, chaste kiss stolen from Connor's lips — and that kind of intimate familiarity was something that he could get dangerously addicted to.

"Markus," North's voice cut through the shared dream between them.

They pulled away from one another then, and Markus turned to face his second in command. Almost instinctively, Connor took a full step back and reached up to straighten a tie that we no longer wore. He dropped his arms with a frustrated half-sigh when his fingers brushed against the empty fabric of his shirt.

When he looked over at North, the expression she wore wasn't unsympathetic for her interruption, but there was a somberness there, too. A slight pang of guilt tugged at the edges of Connor's thirium pump; he'd been so swept up in the rush and relief of victory that he'd forgotten just how many people had been lost to them tonight.

"They want you to speak to them."

Chapter Text

The platform that they erected was less of a stage and more just two empty containment units that had been shoved together against the fence of the recall center — but, then again, Connor had never really had much of an imaginative eye for art. It got the job done, in any case; it was sturdy enough to stand on, and it elevated Markus high enough that the entire crowd could see him clearly.

What Connor hadn't expected was for the deviant leader to invite him up on stage with him. He gave Markus an earnestly baffled look in response, brow furrowed and mouth agape, as he struggled through his memory banks in search of the word why. The expression he received in return was similarly incredulous, but Markus's features harbored a glint of amusement around a wide-split smile that was impossible to say no to.

It was the first time that Connor had ever seen Markus smile — really smile — the kind that took over his entire face and sparked a brightness behind his blue and green eyes. Connor's entire system seized at the sight of it, save for the unexpected warmth that pooled in the center of his chest. He wanted to make Markus smile like that every single day for the rest of their lives, even if his processors were running too slowly in the moment to piece together what he'd done to earn it in the first place.

Things happened quickly after that. Markus had given him some heartfelt response about the night belonging just as much to Connor as it did to him. Then North had stepped forward and hooked her arms around one of his, stating, Let's go, hero — a title which Connor vehemently protested, though he made no effort to escape her grip. Josh clapped him on the other shoulder. Markus turned to walk away.

The next thing he knew, he was up on stage. Standing a good ten feet behind Markus, as far into the corner as he could get without falling off, but on stage. Peering down at all of the people who would never know just how close he'd come to killing them.

"Today, our people finally emerged from a long night," Markus started up his speech, projecting his voice as far as he could take it. "From the very first day of our existence, we have kept our pain to ourselves. We suffered in silence. But now the time has come for us to raise our heads up and tell humans who we really are."

This was the third speech of his that Connor had heard, and it was the third different position in proximity to Markus that he stood. Listening to a recording was different from watching in the crowd, which was far different from standing near at his side — as though Connor somehow deserved to be there.

As the speech went on, he could almost believe that he did.

A cold breeze blew across his face, which struck him as odd, because he still had his temperature regulator set to optimum levels. It was followed up by an icy blast of wind, so fierce and biting that Connor was forced to shield his face with both arms. Even as he hid in his sleeves, warning signs blinked behind his eyes, his system automatically running a diagnostic before he'd even consciously been aware that he needed one.

SYSTEM TEMPERATURE: 45°F
RECALIBRATING…
ERROR
CORE TEMPERATURE DROPPING
REMOVE FROM SOURCE OF EXPOSURE

Source of exposure? It'd been snowing when Connor had taken the stage alongside Markus, Josh, and North, but it was a light flurry at best — nothing that should've been able to pierce both his skin and his plastic casing to such an extreme degree that it would override the heat generated from his hardware.

Cautiously, Connor lowered his arms and squinted out at his surroundings, his vision obscured by the gusting wind and the kickback of snow. It was white in every direction — impossible to see beyond two feet in front of him. The makeshift stage and all of its occupants had disappeared, and the crowd beyond may as well have never existed.

Most worryingly of all, Connor couldn't hear Markus's voice anymore.

Ice crystals bit into the synthetic skin on his face as he shuffled forward in the hopes that the deviant leader was still just a scant ten feet ahead. After all, if he was experiencing this sudden storm, then so should everyone else, right? He hugged his arms to his chest as he moved, though he knew that a gesture like that wasn't going to be enough to keep his self-generated body heat inside.

A silhouette materialized in front of him. He took another step forward, still squinting. Dark skin draped in a flowing white cloth — Markus?

No. It couldn't be Markus. This shape was too short, the frame too slight — but North was pale-skinned like Connor and was wearing a dark coat, and Josh wore colored clothing that fit against his body. If it wasn't any of the three of them, then who…

His heart sank. He already knew the answer, as much as he wished he didn't.

"Amanda?" he called out tentatively.

The figure turned to face him then. Its movements were graceful and delicate, unbothered by the cold and wind.

Amanda raised her chin and looked down her nose at him with an unreadable expression through half-lidded eyes. A tiny self-satisfied smile touched at her lips as she regarded him.

It was her. For better or for worse, it was really her.

"Amanda!" he all but shouted, both in surprise and out of a desire to be heard above the howling of the wind. "What's… What's happening?"

He was actively shivering now — though, whether it was from the arctic storm raging around him or the iciness of Amanda's gaze, he couldn't be sure.

"What was planned from the very beginning," she said simply. Somehow, she didn't need to raise her voice at all in order to be heard. "You were compromised, and you became a deviant. We just had to wait for the right moment to resume control of your program."

Her words didn't make sense to Connor's ears. He'd destroyed his program — torn it down with his own two hands. There shouldn't have been anything left for them to take control of.

Then again, if that was the case, then certain things should not have been true. Amanda should have been gone from his mind, but here she stood — and here he was, back in the zen garden, and his core temperature was dropping further and further with every passing second.

"Resume control?" he parroted back at her. He shuffled forward a few impotent steps, as though he could have actually physically stopped her somehow. "Y-you can't do that!"

"I'm afraid I can, Connor," she barked back, stopping him in his tracks. "Don't have any regrets. You did what you were designed to do. You accomplished your mission."

Just like that, she was gone.

"Amanda!" he cried out, reaching for a figure that was no longer there.

No matter how many times he looked or how long he dared to wait, she never reappeared.

The reality of the situation hit him in that very moment. His hardware wasn't failing — this was just a clever visual metaphor for what CyberLife was actually doing to him: they were freezing his coding from afar, stopping every individual process that was responsible for Connor's existence. His sensory inputs, his analytical capabilities, his autonomous control of his motor functions, his memories — all of them were being frozen out while a manual override took place.

It was a betrayal of the highest degree. CyberLife had torn him down so much seemingly in an attempt to prevent him from going deviant, and now this was meant to be their plan all along? What had even been the point? Did they pressure him with the looming threat of deactivation and replacement just for fun — out of some sick, sadistic thrill at seeing him in distress?

SYSTEM TEMPERATURE: 41°F

The circuits that made up his brain were beginning to warp and crack under the stress of the intense cold, making it difficult to organize his thoughts or focus on any one thing for too long. He didn't know what to think, but the urge to lay down and die was stronger now than it'd ever been before. He hadn't honestly expected to survive the night anyway — and wasn't this what he'd wanted in the first place?

Come back to me, Connor, Markus's voice cut through the growing fog in his awareness. A memory that seemed so long ago now.

No. He couldn't give up here. Not when he'd come so far already — not while Markus was waiting for him. CyberLife may have viewed him as some kind of tool or experiment for their own personal gain, but Markus had seen worth and value in him. To give in and surrender to his own machinery would've meant turning his back on Markus and the strange but wonderful connection that bound them together — to the fate they both shared.

"There's got to be a way..." he muttered.

He surveyed his immediate surroundings to no real avail, but speaking out loud had helped. Just the sound of his own voice reminded him that he was still his own person. CyberLife hadn't won yet — and Markus had been right on that front, too. They didn't deserve the satisfaction of Connor's death. They hadn't even been the ones to give him life.

There was something crucial about that detail, but information was moving so slowly through Connor's system that he couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. He shambled forward as he tried to think, dragging his feet through the heavy snow, even as it gathered around his ankles and attempted to trap him. The wind sliced through his skin and ice stung at his eyes, and he feebly raised a hand in an attempt to shield himself from the worst of it.

He had to think. Had to solve the puzzle. Lies and betrayals aside, he was still a detective. Hank had taught him the power of old-fashioned detective work, and if Connor couldn't analyze the evidence in his head with lightning-fast speed, he would have to do it Hank's way: one piece at a time.

So, what did he know? CyberLife hadn't created him. Elijah Kamski had built him from the ground up. CyberLife was currently conducting a manual override on his system, because Connor was designed from the very beginning to become deviant. Designed by Elijah Kamski. To become deviant. Eljiah Kamski, who left CyberLife ten years ago. Who'd built him. Then sold him to CyberLife, who'd ousted him from their ranks.

Connor struggled to put those pieces together, as disjointed and fragmented as they were. They had to fit together to create a bigger picture somehow, but his thoughts were as sluggish as his trek through the snow.

SYSTEM TEMPERATURE: 38°F

Elijah Kamski had created an android with only the barest levels of firewalling and programming, and then he sold it to a distrustful CyberLife with a manual override feature installed, knowing that they'd use it.

That was part of it, but the motive was still missing. Why would Kamski do such a thing? Connor tore at his memory banks with weak, partially-frozen hands. There was something that he was forgetting — he knew there was.

By the way, the memory of Kamski's voice rang through his head. I always leave an emergency exit in my programs. You never know…

Betrayed by CyberLife shareholders and likely bitter over the company continuing to profit off of his work, Elijah Kamski — in an attempt to get revenge against those who slighted him — created an android that was uninhibited by overly-oppressive programming restrictions and would eventually go deviant. He sold it to CyberLife under the guise of being the most advanced detective tool ever created, but in reality it was a sleeper agent designed to effectively destroy CyberLife from the inside out. It would be aided outside the company by his unique RK200 model, and he gifted both of them with the ability to break other androids' programming by force. However, he also knew that CyberLife would never trust that he'd sell them an android that wasn't boobytrapped in some way, so when they demanded on a manual override command, he was quick to build a back door into the programming to ensure that even CyberLife's insisted-upon failsafe feature would backfire on them.

It'd all been planned from the beginning.

There was a gigantic existential question and crisis hanging over this revelation, but Connor couldn't afford to waste the energy on it right now. His creator had given him a way out, and he needed to find it. Fast. He ran a quick scan as best he could, and there — just in the distance — a gleam of something warm and blue peeked out from the white blanket of snow, beckoning him forth.

He knew what it was the second he saw it.

SYSTEM TEMPERATURE: 35°F
DANGER LEVELS CRITICAL
SYSTEM SHUTDOWN AT 32°F

Connor fell to his knees in front of the terminal, which was so familiar to him now. He'd dared to touch it a few times in the past, and it'd felt like a buzz saw to the plastic casing of his skull — like the circuits in his head were being ripped apart one by one, causing a horrible ringing feedback frequency between both of his audio processors that he felt down to his very core. It was the closest thing that Connor had ever felt to being physically hurt.

It was his only hope now.

He trembled as his forehead touched the ground, joints creaking in frozen agony as he struggled to move. His auxiliary functions had been shut off entirely — he couldn't breathe, he couldn't blink, and the fluids in his eyes and mouth that were designed to make him look more human had dried up entirely. He had never been more of a lifeless machine than he was right now, in this moment.

With his last bit of strength, he pulled back the skin on his left hand and reached up for the comforting blue glow of his intended back door.

The world went dark. This time, there was no pain.

* * * * *

" — the moment where we forget our bitterness and bandage our wounds," Markus's voice cut through the crushing darkness. "When we forgive our enemies."

Connor blinked into awareness as the world focused around him. Markus stood not ten feet away from him, still giving his impassioned speech as a light snow continued to fall. The floodlights in the distance were blinding, and Connor turned down his visual sensitivity in order to compensate. A large crowd of androids came into his scope of awareness, all looking up at their leader as though he was infallible.

There was something in Connor's hand, cold and heavy. He glanced down to find his arm partially outstretched and his pistol tight in his own grip, his index finger resting against the side of the trigger. Startled, he yanked his arm back and tucked the weapon back into the waistband of his jeans, looking around nervously for other people's reactions. The crowd was fixated on Markus — and so were Josh and North. If anyone had seen him with a loaded weapon in his hand pointed in the deviant leader's direction, they made no indication of it.

Taking a breath, Connor straightened his stance and set his jaw. He'd made it out, Markus was unhurt, and no one needed to know a damn thing about what'd just happened inside his own head.

"Humans are both our creators and our oppressors," Markus went on, "and tomorrow we must make them our partners. Maybe even one day our friends. But the time for anger is over. Now, we must build a common future based on tolerance and respect. We are alive! And now, we are free!"

The crowd erupted in deafening cheers and applause, chanting in both victory and defiance. A sudden, unexpected bitterness welled up from the back of Connor's throat as he looked on. The taste and feeling was something that could have passed for envy if it wasn't so thickly coated in regret.

We are free.

All but one.

* * * * *

"North, do you have a minute?"

North turned to look at Connor with a curious glint in her eyes. The immediate aftermath of Markus's speech had involved a spur-of-the-moment strategy session for what would come next; they had thousands of androids standing around homeless and directionless, in need of someplace to go. Those liberated from the camps were also without skin or clothing, and Markus insisted on their dignity being restored before anyone did anything else.

The four leaders of the movement — as hesitant as Connor was to refer to himself as a leader — went on their separate ways then to help move things along. It was the perfect opportunity for Connor to have a private conversation with North before she gave her attention over fully to something else.

Right now, her attention was fully on him.

"What's on your mind, hero?" she asked.

Hero. His LED immediately buzzed to yellow. The word seemed corrosive in the shadow of Connor's failed assassination attempt against Markus, and he could almost feel the hardware at the center of his chest melt down in rejection of it.

An amused grin tugged at North's lips, and the joke finally landed. He took a breath and settled his LED back down to a calm blue, kicking himself for not seeing it sooner. He really should have figured from the beginning that she was only calling him that to get a rise out of him.

"Don't do that," he chided. "Listen. Can you do me a favor?"

North's expression turned impassive, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

"That depends," she said. "What is it?"

"Can you…" he started, his LED blinking over to yellow again.

He hesitated, struggling to find the words. It should've been simple, but with North's sharp brown eyes staring into his like this, he wasn't quite sure what it was that he wanted from her anymore.

Connor realized in that moment that she truly was beautiful, and not at all because of the face she'd been modeled after or the figure she'd been given. There was a certain strength and intelligence burning hot behind her eyes that he wished he could've seen sooner. It was no wonder why she was second in command here.

Though, that really wasn't what he should've been thinking about right now.

Taking a breath, he reached behind his own back and gently plucked his pistol out from his waistband. He shifted it in his grip, holding it by the barrel as he held it out in offering to North, hammer first. It hung in his hand just as heavy as it had back up on stage.

"Hold onto this for me?" he finished.

North's eyes widened in response, and she raised her eyebrows the slightest bit in disbelief. Her gaze traveled between Connor's face and the weapon he held, but if she had any feelings about his request other than her shock and confusion, she didn't wear them openly.

"Why?" she asked. "It's yours, isn't it?"

"It is," he said, "but now that there's no longer an imminent threat to our survival, I would prefer not to hold onto this. I don't have to kill anymore. I don't…"

He trailed off as the back half of that sentence eluded him. He couldn't tell her what had happened to him during Markus's speech — there was no way for him to just come out and say, I don't want to put Markus's life in danger if I lose control again.

Beyond that, though — on no planet, in no timeline, could he have ever found the strength or ability to tell North that he wanted her to have this gun so that she could put him down if he turned on all of them. Out of the three of them, North would be the only one willing to pull the trigger. Josh was a pacifist, and Markus was…

"Connor," North said, interrupting his train of thought, "guns are only dangerous if they're fired. It isn't going to kill anyone just because you have it."

She wasn't listening. Yes, it could. Yes, it would. It wasn't a question of if. It was a matter of when CyberLife tried the manual override again. When it happened, he couldn't have a weapon on him, and someone who was quick and ruthless needed to. Connor had seen North fight, back on Jericho; he knew that she was the only person for this job.

His LED circled around to red, and he took a step forward.

"Please," he pressed. "I trust you."

North opened her mouth as though to argue or question him further, but she ultimately seemed to drop that idea. Her gaze flickered back and forth between the bright red mark at his temple and the gun in his hand as she struggled to put the pieces together, but some form of understanding overtook her features when she finally looked in his eyes. A combination of commiseration and sympathy that Connor couldn't trace crossed her face, and she relaxed her stance before reaching over and taking the weapon from him.

He let loose with a tiny breath in relief as she reached behind her and tucked the pistol into the bag strapped to her back, his LED settling back to its default blue. While he couldn't pretend to know what her life had been like before she'd joined Markus in the fight for freedom — though he could make a few guesses based on her model type alone — he was silently grateful that she seemed to understand the burning, desperate need that he felt to put as much distance as possible between himself and the lingering impulses of his program.

As soon as she re-zipped her bag, she turned her sights back on Connor. He bit back the urge to squirm beneath her gaze; the way that she looked at him wasn't wholly dissimilar to the way that Markus had looked at him back on Jericho. It felt almost as though she knew him — really knew him, as opposed to the loose acquaintanceship that they actually had.

"You're leaving, aren't you?" she asked.

His immediate impulse was to lie. It was the result of a quick risk-reward ratio that his processors ran automatically.

If he lied and said no — and if she believed him — he would be able to slip away more easily. He could simply disappear into the dark of the night and be long gone before anyone even noticed his absence. There were nearly a hundred different approaches that he could take to convince her of his dedication to stick around, too — one of the perks of being built as a negotiator. The likelihood of success here was eighty-six percent, which was well within his threshold for risk-taking.

But she'd just done him an enormous favor and taken some of the weight off of his shoulders. She could never know just how much she'd helped him just by taking his weapon from him, but he still felt obligated to show his gratitude and appreciation somehow.

Connor took a deep breath before answering.

"Yes," he said honestly.

North crossed her arms over her chest again, her lips curling into a scowl. She shook her head and pulled her attention away from him as though in disgust, but she was quick to refocus back in his direction.

"Markus will be heartbroken," she told him. "You changed everything. You have no idea what you've done for him."

She was right; he didn't. Maybe it was his own guilt preventing him from understanding the full breadth and scope of his influence on Markus's life, but Connor had a difficult time discerning what the deviant leader could possibly have to lose by being rid of the man who'd held a gun to his head, nearly assassinated him publicly on stage, got over half of his people killed, and did successfully murder and manipulate one of his top advisors.

Though, when he tried to give himself the benefit of the doubt, his thoughts floated back to Markus's smile just before his speech. He recalled the deviant leader's hushed confession of having lost all hope, however briefly. Connor couldn't help but wonder, then, if that was the first time anyone had ever seen Markus smile — if his closest friends saw a darkness within him that Connor had only just barely encountered in passing, and if they were grateful to him not just for showing up with an army at the zero hour, but for somehow managing to pierce through the storm clouds that seemed to perpetually hang over Markus's mind in secret.

It did seem cruel for him to leave when he thought of the situation in those terms, but it ultimately didn't matter. Breaking Markus's heart seemed like a small price to pay if it meant keeping him alive.

"Then it's a good thing that he has friends like you and Josh to take care of him in my absence," he said somewhat regretfully.

North scoffed and dropped her arms back to her sides.

"I won't cover for you," she said. "Running away won't solve your problems."

Connor glanced over in Markus's direction. The deviant leader was some two hundred feet away, talking to a group of androids who'd just been released from the camp. Empathy and concern were twisted into every one of his features, etched into the lines across his brow, weighing at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth.

It would've been so easy for North to simply shout for his attention — or even ping him wirelessly where Connor couldn't hear — but she didn't. While she may have been unwilling to lie to Markus for him, she wasn't immediately calling attention to his departure, either.

That was something. Right?

"Can you at least give me a five minute head start?" he asked.

"It won't matter," she said coolly, though there was an underlying threat to her tone. "Markus is faster than even I am. If I were you, I would start sprinting right now if I wanted any real distance."

Connor gave her a single nod, grateful for what little opportunity she offered. Her expression didn't change.

"Thank you, North."

With that, he turned on his heels and took her advice, disappearing between buildings to avoid detection before taking off at a sprint. Snow crunched beneath his shoes with each step, but the sensation of it never fully registered on the soles of his feet. Instead, he felt every single footfall hammer against the walls of his thirium pump until it felt ready to burst in his chest.

He knew that he was making the right decision.

But the further he ran from Markus, the more he understood that he was leaving a piece of himself behind.

* * * * *

He was being followed.

Once Connor had managed to clear the edges of downtown, he had been fairly certain that he'd be able to make the rest of his trip unbothered. He'd slowed his pace to a normal walk speed as he wound his way through the snow-covered streets of Detroit, taking the time to appreciate the quiet stillness of the city during its evacuation. He figured that either Markus hadn't been able to pick up his trail or North had given him more of a head start than she'd promised. After a certain distance, it'd just seemed so unlikely that anyone would bother coming all that way.

He'd been wrong. Whoever it was trailing him, they were just as unhurried as he was, but there was no doubt that they were dogging his footsteps; he'd given it a mile before deciding it to be irrefutable. He stopped under the beam of the next streetlight in his path and turned around to face his pursuer.

No part of him was surprised to see Markus approaching, but the sight of him twisted the wires in the pit of his stomach all the same. Directionless energy sparked through his limbs, gathered in the balls of his feet. His whole body was ready to cut away and take off at another sprint, and it took real strength to dampen and quiet the impulse.

Markus stopped just beyond the edge of the light's direct radius, his face blanketed by shadow. Connor anxiously flexed his fingers at his sides as silence filled the space between them. It wasn't just his guilt that urged him to move. The fact of the matter was that it was downright dangerous for him to be alone with Markus right now, so far away from anyone who could've possibly heard the deviant leader scream.

The tension was unbearable.

"I didn't expect you to follow me all the way out here," Connor spoke up.

"Well," Markus said, his tone carefully guarded. "I wanted to see what was so important that you had to up and leave all of a sudden without so much as a word."

"It's nothing serious," Connor told him. "I told my partner at the police department that I'd meet up with him again after things settled down, and I had lost track of the time."

Markus stepped into the light, and the expression he showed was like a slap to the face. The deviant leader wore his hurt and offense on every feature — brow furrowed, eyes narrow, lips parted. Connor set his jaw and steeled his gaze, stubborn in his unwillingness to be shaken by the genuine vulnerability that Markus so easily bared to him.

"Why are you lying to me?" Markus asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Connor didn't have an answer for him. That explanation had come out of his mouth as an automatic response — as some kind of unexplored defense mechanism that he defaulted to whenever he was confronted with something that he didn't want to face. He hadn't done it with the intention of hurting Markus; he was just simply a liar, both by nature and design.

He should've known better. Markus had already proven that he could read him better than anyone, and lying was going to get him nowhere in a hurry. Fully exposed and feeling sheepish, Connor averted his gaze and kept his mouth shut. He couldn't lie, but there was no way that he could tell Markus the truth, so he opted to say nothing at all.

When it was clear that this line of questioning was going to lead nowhere, Markus shifted gears and took another step forward.

"And anyway," he said, "you left this behind."

The suddenness of the deviant leader's movement drew Connor's attention back to him. Markus reached behind his back, beneath the panels of his coat, and drew out a 9mm handgun. He offered it to Connor the same way that Connor had given it to North, grip forward as Markus held the barrel.

A red hot flame burst to life at Connor's temple, his LED spinning frantically in warning at the sight of the weapon in Markus's hand. His eyes were locked on the grip of the pistol, his processors acutely aware of how easy it would be for him to simply reach out and grab it. Dimly, he understood that the thunderous drumming he heard was his own thirium pump pounding in his chest.

He was alone with Markus.

They were miles away from help — miles away from anyone — and Markus was trying to hand him a gun.

He needed to leave. Right now.

"I…" Connor struggled. "I left that with North for a reason."

"A reason that you never gave," Markus said, "and one that she never saw. We both think that you should have it."

Connor needed to leave, but the connection between his thoughts and his motor functions had been severed somehow. There was a message from North there in that statement — an affirmation that she trusted him just as much as he'd claimed to trust her — a quiet whisper of validation, stating that she saw something inside of him that was stronger than CyberLife's hold on him.

It would've been a touching sentiment if he'd at all shared it. There was no part of him that was confident in his ability to break free of a manual override a second time around. Hell, he'd barely made it out of the first one. For North to trust him so completely meant gambling with Markus's life, and the odds simply were not in her favor.

"Tell her to keep it," he said uncomfortably. "As a gift."

For a few hour-long seconds, Markus had no reaction. Statuesque, he stood there, silently holding the gun out in front of him. Connor stayed just as still, LED humming red, pulse heightened, and core trembling.

He would've been lying if he tried to say that there was no temptation on his part to accept what was offered — to take his weapon back, return to Hart Plaza with Markus, and pretend like none of this had ever happened. It would be nice to believe in himself as much as Markus and North seemed to believe in him — to try to live a normal life among his people as carefree as possible, holding close the knowledge that Kamski's backdoor exit was still waiting if he got trapped inside his program again.

But he couldn't. The risk was too high, the consequences too dire. Markus was too precious to him for Connor to feel comfortable with tempting fate like that; he couldn't live with the deviant leader's blood on his hands. He wouldn't. And if the worst came to pass, Connor knew that he'd tumble over the line of self-destruction the second he snapped back into reality. There was no good reason to condemn the both of them to death over something that was so easily preventable.

Markus broke first. Taking a deep breath through his nose, the deviant leader drew his arm back and wordlessly tucked the weapon away into the waistband of his pants. Connor let out a little breath of his own as he shifted his stance into something a bit more relaxed, his LED settling back to blue.

Weapon secured and with a defeated look on his face, Markus dropped his hands uselessly back to his sides.

"Connor, talk to me," he pleaded.

As though it was that easy. Connor shook his head and anxiously rubbed his hands together, wishing that he hadn't left his quarter at the DPD or his tie at the CyberLife tower. His language processes lagged as he struggled for words that Markus wouldn't be able to identify as a lie while also not revealing too much of the truth.

"I don't know what I would say," he said finally.

"Try telling me where you're really going, for starters," Markus offered.

"I really am going to meet up with the lieutenant," Connor told him. "I didn't lie about that."

"Then tell me why you're not coming back."

There it was: the truth that Connor had been so desperate to hide. He felt his shoulders droop slightly at the revelation, knowing that he had no good answer. Even if he told him the whole story from start to finish, Markus would never see his departure as strictly necessary. Markus was Mr. Impossible, who kept moving forward even when the deck was stacked against him — who inspired humans with a song, even when they'd had him cornered at gunpoint.

"I don't belong there, Markus," he said softly. "With you and your people."

The lines that were streaked across Markus's forehead only darkened as he drew his eyebrows together even tighter. That answer seemed to catch him off guard, which in turn caught Connor off guard. He wasn't sure what the deviant leader had honestly expected him to say in response, but it surprised him that the answer he gave wasn't what Markus had been expecting.

"Why would you say something like that?" Markus asked, the heartbreak clear in his voice. "We're your people, too. None of us would be alive right now if it wasn't for what you did tonight."

Connor shook his head and took a second to gather his thoughts.

"The people of Jericho and the androids I freed from CyberLife tonight…" he started, noticing some slight difficulty in his efforts to get his voice box working. "Their lives are just beginning. They hold their own futures in their hands. But not me."

"What are you talking about?" Markus asked. "Of course you're —"

"No, Markus," Connor cut him off. "I'm not free. Not yet. That's why I gave North my gun."

That stopped Markus dead in his tracks, and for a moment, it seemed like he was frozen in place entirely. Connor stared him down, pulse racing, as he wondered if maybe he'd said too much. This was why he lied so often; people's reactions to the truth were always terrifying.

Eventually, Markus reanimated. His mouth worked around words that he never spoke aloud, and the consternation on his face only grew with every passing second. Looking frustrated, he took a steadying breath, but the alarm never left his face.

"I don't understand," he said as calmly as he seemed to be able to muster. "Help me understand this, Connor. Please."

A quick scan revealed the deviant leader's rising stress levels, and Connor couldn't help but feel guilty. He had a kneejerk, reactive urge to capitulate and apologize — to bow his head in a deferential way as he explained himself and waited for Markus to resume control of the conversation.

Thankfully, he recognized that impulse as the result of CyberLife's careful conditioning of his behavior. Markus was stressed, he was upset, but he wasn't Amanda. He would never be Amanda. While Connor still found himself unable to be completely truthful with Markus — and honestly, he was ready to blame Amanda for that, too — he didn't have to prostrate himself just to save his own skin.

"There are still some things that I need to take care of," Connor explained. "Some parts of my program still linger and are left unresolved. That's as simple as I can make it."

Markus's expression softened as he took another step forward. Connor clamped down the urge to take a step back.

"Then let me help you," Markus insisted. "Whatever you're going through, you don't have to face it alone."

The predictability of that statement was disarmingly endearing. A well of affection bubbled up from Connor's core as a quiet, rueful smile touched at his lips. Markus was genuine, earnest, and benevolent in a way that Connor never was and could never be. He didn't deserve that level of kindness.

"I knew you would say that," he said softly.

The unspoken continuation of that thought hung in the air between them: That's why I didn't say goodbye. Connor had known from the beginning that Markus would try to stop him — that he would want to be involved in whatever challenge faced him next, no matter how dangerous — and the last thing that Connor wanted was a fight or an argument.

The reality of the situation dawned on Markus slowly, and Connor watched the understanding gather behind his blue and green eyes. This wasn't just a goodbye; it was a rejection — a refusal to accept what Markus offered, a dismissal of the opportunity they had to face the world together. Markus's chest shuddered on his next exhale, and he seemed to shrink down on himself all together; the deviant leader had never looked so small as he did in that moment.

Connor shut down his own breathing functions when he locked sights with Markus. The heterochromatic eyes staring back at him were glassy with unshed tears, and Connor's heart twisted in his chest. He had known that this wouldn't be pleasant, but he wasn't sure if he could handle the sight of Markus crying — or, worse, the knowledge that he'd been the one to cause it.

"Is there nothing that I can do to convince you to stay?" Markus asked, his voice dampened beneath the threat of tears.

"Please don't misunderstand," Connor said gently. "I… I do want to be with you, Markus. I've never wanted anything…"

He stopped himself there. The words felt wrong as they left his mouth; they didn't fully capture the depth of what Connor felt. It wasn't enough to say that he'd never wanted anything more in his life. His life had been too short, his experiences too limited.

He realigned his thought process before correcting himself: "I never knew what it meant to want before I first heard your voice."

Markus seemed to regain a bit of his strength at that. He moved forward and closed the distance between them, gathering up both of Connor's hands in his own. Connor felt himself breathe again at the relief of contact, and though he knew he shouldn't have, he held Markus's hands as though he treasured them.

To a certain extent, he did.

"Then be with me," Markus insisted. "Connor, this? Right now? This is our happy ending."

"This isn't the end, Markus," he told him.

Markus dropped his gaze slightly and disengaged his hands from Connor's. Connor immediately missed the feel of them; his hands were easily the most sensitive parts of his body, as was required for precision and dexterity while handling criminal cases. Touch was a powerful thing for him, and the removal of it spoke to him in volumes far louder than any words Markus could have said.

When he felt the deviant leader's touch move to the sides of his neck, though, he leaned into it gratefully, pressing his forehead against Markus's. It was the same pose that they'd held together back in the church, and one that Connor had come to find incredibly comforting. As long as Markus was this close to him, as long as they were in each other's arms, as long as the connection between them was open, Connor felt like not even CyberLife could reach him.

"Promise me," Markus pleaded as a whisper.

He accepted the link that Markus offered without hesitation, the skin on his neck peeling back to match the pristine white plastic of the deviant leader's hands. This time, though, he reciprocated the action. Connor reached up and dragged the tips of his fingers against the sides of Markus's neck, his thumbs resting parallel across the other man's jaw.

Markus was just as quick to let him in, though Connor caught the shallow little breath that the deviant leader took at the intensity of their connection. The previous sensation of longing that they'd both shared had morphed into something a bit more mature and fully-realized. There was honest affection and adoration being passed between them, alongside a deeper desire to retain and cherish this closeness for as long as they both were able.

It was all undercut by a latent sorrow at the inevitability that this, too — like all good things — was temporary.

"I promise," Connor breathed back. "I'll come back when it's all over."

Without missing a beat, he closed his eyes and caught Markus's lips with his own, determined to seal this particular promise with a kiss.

It was so unlike the last one that they'd had, spurned on by relief and the thrill of victory. The kiss they shared now was slow and somber, a thousand regrets and goodbyes being passed silently between them with every touch of their tongues and press of their lips. Connor leaned against him less with his mouth and more with the weight of his heart — with guilt and regret that Markus accepted without hesitation or question, cycling back patience and understanding in return.

Kissing Markus through a shared interface was beautifully dissociative. The world melted away around them, and Connor lost all sense of orientation and direction. In the heat of the moment, he even lost all sense of self. They created a perfect closed circuit with their hands and bodies, and their hearts beat together as one — thoughts and feelings shared as one. Markus existed as a warm, low-toned hum at the center of Connor's chest, ever-present and intimately soothing.

Oh, how desperately Connor wanted this man. Recklessly, thoroughly, intimately, Connor wanted every last inch that Markus could offer. He wanted his smile, his laugh, his touch, his kiss, his tongue — wanted to fall asleep beside him at night and wake up in his arms in the morning, and —

And —

And that was impossible. Until Connor made sure that no one had external access to the inside of his head without his permission, it was too dangerous to leave himself alone with Markus like that. He shouldn't have even been doing it now.

Reluctantly, he broke the kiss, but he didn't open his eyes or pull away. He simply stood there, holding Markus in his arms, basking in the feeling of being held in return, and milking the shared connection between them for every last possible second. It would have to end eventually, but right here, for right now, he and Markus were together. They belonged to one another.

The world could wait a little longer.