Work Text:
Jensen’s still comatose. He’s the lucky one.
He hasn’t had to watch cleaners sift through broken glass and pray they’ve already gotten all the blood, even while some morbid fascination pushes you to look for it, to watch for the evidence of your coworkers and their last moments. Evidence they existed at all. Frank walks past windows and workspaces and mentally labels them; for all he was mocked for being a shut-in, he remembers each and every name. He has that sort of brain. Pattern recognition. He used to brag about it in hackerspaces, but it feels like more of a curse, now.
Jensen hasn’t had to walk through empty labs and abandoned desks, feeling the spaces. He hasn’t had to walk through rooms full of death and know that Jensen could have prevented it, wasn’t that his fucking job?
They should have had Belltower. They needed Belltower, not one jumped-up ex-cop who thought he could be a SWAT team on his own. That arrogance damn near cost the man his life. Instead it just cost everyone else’s.
Sometime around Monday, when the cleaners are finishing up, Sarif starts knocking. He doesn’t usually bother, just strolls in as a reminder he owns the place, leans an elbow on Frank’s desk and starts talking at him like they’re friends in a bar somewhere. As if tech security’s less important than the latest jam in the coffee machines or the fact Eileen’s had a baby, isn’t that nice - until he gets to what he actually wants. There’s always another favour.
When the knocking starts, Frank realises how he must look, how snappish he must be. He catches one of the technicians in the canteen muttering about Stay out of the blast radius, Pritchard’s even further up his own ass than usual and watches the silence fall abruptly as they spot him.
But Sarif’s worse. Concealer can’t entirely cover up the eyebags, and he’s all manic focus, running hands through his hair and pacing as he talks about how Jensen isn’t quite dead, how they found a way; as he asks for the Prometheus specs and talks about how this can’t happen again and why the hell couldn’t his staff defend themselves...
He’s wild-eyed and unsteady round the edges, and Frank actually pauses and looks up from reams of code. Sarif’s never been like this before. Maybe when he’s just had an idea for a prototype and he’s buzzing, ready to start on blueprints, but… not like this. Not with this edge of panic, this white-knuckled fear to it. There have always been jokes about Sarif’s obsession with his tech, but this is something else. This feels like a sickness.
And then the visits stop, and that’s how Frank knows David’s down at the LIMB clinic. With Jensen.
After the surgery, when Jensen’s still not dead and clinging onto life as stubbornly as he does everything else, the mania fades. David edges in like Frank’s a cornered animal, actually pausing to let him speak once in a while. Frank hates every minute of it.
A week later, there’s a soft knock on his door. Frank looks up and sighs, waiting for the hedging and the edging away.
It’s not Sarif. It’s Athene.
Something must have happened. He doesn’t know, he’s had his head in the firewalls for the past three days, because there was an anomaly and God don’t let it have been something he missed, something that could have prevented it…
Athene puts her head around the door of the tech lab, after another half-hearted knock. There’s something in her hand, and she raises it. “Are you signing?”
“Signing what?” He looks distractedly back to his monitor. Sure, it’s yet another card, but Ramirez hasn’t woken up yet and… Then he gets it. He grinds his teeth. “Oh. He made it, did he?”
“It was a close call. You don’t know how close.”
Actually, he spent two days without sleep in front of flickering screens, waiting on news and to see if any short-notice specs needed to be delivered, because if these augmentations couldn’t do something to save people then what was the point of them. When it came through, the fact Jensen was one of the few people down there not DOA? It just seemed like cruel irony.
“Frank - “
“No. Ask someone who actually cares.”
“You’ll regret it, you know. He’s in a lot of pain.” Athene’s voice is soft. Sometimes she reminds him of the school nurse he had when he was young, the one everyone actually liked; that calculated gentleness, that careful, I’m not judging you but everyone else will, and she thinks he can’t see through it but he’s sat through this kind of thing enough times. (We know it was a misunderstanding. Just give us the account details. You couldn’t really have emptied out the bonds.)
He tsks and looks back to his keyboard. “He’s alive, isn’t he? It’s better than some.”
“He’s not conscious yet, and he’s probably going to be scared when he wakes up. He doesn't know about Megan, and that’s… I don’t envy him."
"He wouldn't have to know if he hadn't gotten her killed."
"You know how the patients get sometimes, if it’s their first time...”
Franks drinks cold greyish coffee so he doesn’t have to look at her. “He knows the augs. He watched M – Reed build them.”
Athene sighs. “Have it your own way. But David thinks it’s a shame, you know.”
“Sarif can think what he likes. This isn’t in my job description.” He signed up to work up for a corporation, not “one big happy family.”
There’s another pause, a wave of silence at the doorway that always comes before something he won’t like. Athene says, too softly, “Frank, dear. Have you looked into the counselling? It’s only once every couple weeks, there’s...”
He swallows and looks at a screen, because it’s safer than looking into her eyes. “I can’t afford to lose the time. Some of us are too damn busy to wallow.” He pauses and says, more quietly, “Have you? I’ve barely seen you leave your desk since it happened.”
“I’ll be all right, Frank. It's not me you should be worrying about.” Another sigh, somehow more judgemental than the last, and then Athene gives up on him. Good.
He runs back over the list of the casualties, the dead and the injured. After a while, the names start blurring until he has no idea who’s who. That shouldn’t feel like a relief.
Jensen’s still an asshole. That, at least, is reassuring. There are tales of scared nurses and Jensen taking chunks out of concrete, ones Frank’s not meant to have heard, and when Jensen comes back…
He skulks back. Glowers in the corner of Frank’s office like a deeply unwelcome gargoyle and practically snarls at anyone who dares to ask him about the augs. He’s always been touchy and overly defensive, but this is different. He won’t even look at anyone, just keeps the shades practically… well, welded to his face. As if he no longer deigns to interact with the mere mortals.
Frank sees the new eyes once, when he’s adjusting the retinal systems and integrating the HUD, doing a few last-second checks before Sarif sends out his shiny new guard dog. He blinks when the shields slide back, and then swiftly hides it and starts to work.
Somehow he’d expected narrowed blue eyes. The same old glare. Or maybe that Sarif would have tried to design something close…
No. They’re less human than some of the augs SI makes. More reflective, and a bright acid-green, golder at the edges. Entirely inhuman. Excessive, some might say.
Also out of sync. Which is why Jensen’s dragged himself into Frank’s office. Fix me, Pritchard. Piss off, Pritchard.
When they narrow in pain and Jensen clutches his head, Frank realises that the coldness wasn’t the augs. Jensen blinks and swiftly shuts it all away with a grunt. And Frank realises that even if Adam’s eyes were still human, they’d be empty. As if he doesn’t goddamn care about any of this. He’d probably rather be at home, eating cheese balls and taking the last of his sick leave…
He’ll realise what it is much later: when he’s realising Jensen’s at the bottom of an ocean, long-dead, and wanted to be.
Jensen wanders into the canteen after Taggart’s press conference, about to hop yet another VTOL with Faridah. From the bow-legged lope – the cop walk, Frank always thought sourly, but now he wonders – Frank’s starting to suspect the shades are hiding eyebags and a bruise or two. Even the damn hairgel’s starting to sag. Jensen makes straight for the vending machine, with the air that anyone who gets in his way will be Typhooned, and silently stabs in the numbers for something tooth-rotting.
Frank can’t even blame him, after tonight.
The vending machine starts, stalls, and the candy bar refuses to budge. Jensen sighs, sounding resigned and like this is precisely what he expected. He gives it a quiet tap. Another, firmer one, still seeming wary of breaking the damn thing.
Jensen’s quietly picking the vending machine up and tilting it, shaking it slightly like a chip packet, when Frank leans on the wall nearby.
“Pritchard,” Jensen sighs, as if seeing Frank is the icing on a truly awful cake.
He’s probably waiting for some snide comment. It’s an unorthodox use of the arm mods, after all, and Jensen acts as if anyone seeing a moment of humanity is a fate worse than death. But Frank’s too exhausted and too preoccupied.
There’s a plunk as the bar finally drops. Jensen’s eyebrows raise from under the shades with an exhausted sort of hope, and then he carefully lowers the vending machine and springs down to grab it.
Frank’s on his twenty-second hour without sleep, and he knows Jensen’s been taking valuable time to trail down back alleys and sneak past rioting mobs and poke into apartments just to understand. Besides - he ascertains after glancing around – they’re alone here. It’s an unholy time of night even for their department.
“That goddamn backdoor,” he hisses. “I knew Sarif was overinvested, but this...” He can’t even finish the sentence.
“He had files on me.” That should have come out with rage, but instead Jensen says it with that quiet matter-of-fact exhaustion again. There’s a quiet sound, and when he turns… Frank looks with surprise into tired green eyes.
“Why on earth – Was this about Mexicantown?”
Jensen shrugs. “Guess he was doing some background checks.” There’s something uneasy in his posture.
Frank has a feeling that’s not the whole truth, but he’s in no mood to pry into Jensen’s personal life; he’s seen enough of it already. “Your… contact is safe. I’ve been keeping tabs, especially with the rioting.”
For the first time, Jensen seems awake. He opens his mouth. Closes it again. “...Thanks.”
Frank waves a hand. “But I told him, you leave a door ajar and someone else can open it, I told him so many damn times...”
“I’ve always said the same thing.” The slightest tilt of the lips. A genuine smile, from Adam Jensen. The world must be ending. “He thinks we’re both paranoid.”
“We could have prevented this. And he wouldn’t let us.”
Adam ducks his head, and sobers. “Yeah. But I’m gonna find her, and the others. Gonna try, at least. Someone has to.” He swallows. “You on comms?”
“Where else would I be?” Frank starts to walk away. “Don’t get yourself killed, Jensen.”
Jensen snorts, shades sliding back into place. “I’ll do my best, Francis.” Then he shoves a candy bar into his mouth and turns to head to the helipad.
Frank’s in a crumbling theatre in Detroit when he sees them.
They needed to prepare for the LIMB clinic, and if there’s one thing he’s used to, it’s boredly scraping blueprints and intellicam footage for Jensen. He was looking for security guides, for the cam links, and the file roots didn’t make sense. He thought they purged the footage. Surely, for patient confidentiality, even if they were worried about malpractice suits… The clinics were never his area.
No. They didn’t.
He winces and keeps scrolling through files, ignoring frames and previews. Augs are perfectly ordinary to him, but he doesn’t need to see thousands of surgeries from the greater Detroit area. He almost moves past it.
And then there’s a tilt of the head, something… He spots a familiar beard, under the blood.
So much blood. It’s staining the bandage over Jensen’s eyes, he must have already had the retinal prostheses, it’s on the bandage from where half his skull must’ve gotten blown off and had to be rebuilt, and it’s all over the flayed augs. Frank frowns. That’s a mark of hasty installation, they’re calibrating nerves on the damn table...
David’s a designer, an engineer, not a surgeon. He almost never worked with trauma patients. Frank thinks of Sarif and thinks of slow, deliberate tweaking and calibrations. He doesn’t think of a man wrist-deep in guts and clearly half-yelling at his surgeons.
That would be enough, but Frank realises with a slow, dawning nausea that Adam must be conscious, on some level. Thrashing, and that isn’t just blood on his face, slipping out from under the makeshift blindfold… Perhaps he still had his natural eyes, then. Frank recognises tears well enough. Why the hell -
Maybe it’s that - looking for an explanation, an excuse, something - that makes him click.
“Keep going, we can’t lose him now.” Sarif sounds exactly as strident as he looked.
“He doesn’t need the arm. We can wait, delay surgery - “ Someone offscreen, with the same sort of desperate horror as Frank feels rising in his gut. Because he has to look, now, and that arm’s clearly beyond saving but the rest… there’s too much blood and he’s not a damn doctor, he’s not certain...
“You don’t know what the hell he needs. He’ll make it through.” Sarif glances back to Adam. “He was made for this. Come on, get the damn laser scope!”
Sarif says something else, but Frank loses the words. Loses all of it except the sound. Because Adam’s screaming. Screaming, and screaming…
He slams the off button hard enough he nearly breaks the keyboard, glancing behind him.
No angry cloaked aug. He has a feeling Jensen wouldn’t just let this go.
He sits, numb, and stares until the monitor blurs. It was easy enough reading the notes, when he thought at least some of it had been elective. When he thought Jensen had asked for all the bells and whistles.
Icarus system, Typhoon, Quiksilver reflex mods, rebreather…
But somewhere along the way… well, he has the sneaking suspicion Jensen didn’t. That wasn’t a man who could choose anything. And the idea that Jensen, of all people, the most stubborn man this side of the Canadian border, might have been overwhelmed or pressured into augs…
Faridah said it. He didn’t want to listen. He still doesn’t want to listen.
Upselling. The word goes through his mind, and then he hates it, and he tries to push it away. Maybe it’s the goddamn caffeine making him paranoid. (You’re always paranoid, Francis, a dry, rough voice says in the back of his head.)
Paranoia or not, he doesn’t go near the cams for a while. He runs over blueprints and any potential robots left, instead. Clinics always used to guard the neuropyzene coolers more heavily than the augs themselves. Even before the Incident, they understood desperation.
He isn’t so much avoiding Jensen as… not having pressing business in the same area. But when he’s on his fourth hour combing through code and he’s in dire need of a piss, he barges into one of the old customer restrooms -
And Jensen’s standing by the sinks, staring steadily into the mirror, shaving away months of grime and overgrown beard.
Frank pauses in the doorway, stupidly.
Adam wets the razor and says, without turning around, “What do you want, Pritchard?” There’s little of its usual bite. He sounds exhausted.
Frank tries not to stare at gold knuckles as Adam cleans up the edges of that fussy little goatee – remembers a set on the table twitching and spasming, trying to respond to pain stimulus while still pinned – and Adam’s ducked head. There must still be so many scars, under that damp hair.
He considers saying something. Jensen would probably punch him if he so much as tried. No, more likely snap something disparaging and then turn tail. And it’s not exactly a conversation he’s excited about having, either.
“Still hogging the bathroom, Jensen?” is all he manages instead.
Adam snorts. “You gonna say something about how my bladder should be augmented?”
Frank swallows. “No.” That’s the last thing he thinks he can say right now. He heads down the row to a stall; he's not dealing with Jensen's very literal dick-measuring right now. “I’m going to say, prepare for the LIMB job.”
It’s easier not talking about it, not thinking about it. Jensen is Jensen, the sarcastic asshole who tried to steal his job and kept wandering into his office to try and take him down a peg. (The sarcastic asshole who sank with Panchaea trying to save the world and asked him to look after an elderly woman in a rough neighbourhood because she was “...family.” And who pretended not to water the cactus in his office but did it whenever he was in town, because Megan had given him the thing. And maybe later Frank watered it, too, when Jensen was away for god-knows-how-long and then afterward, when he was at the bottom of the ocean, but… Jensen doesn’t need to know that. Frank just thought the room needed some extra oxygen to counter all the alcohol fumes.)
Not thinking about it does just fine for the rest of the mission, and then Jensen gives him a swift goodbye before being spirited away by INTERPOL. The last conversation they have ends with Jensen passing him a cigarette and actually smiling at him. Amused, but not the smug smirk of their usual conversations. I really owe you one, Pritchard. Frank remembers watching him walk away to the VTOL and Jensen not even turning round but throwing him a jaunty little scout-salute with those custom-built hands, coat flapping ostentatiously. Asshole. It sounded too fond in the privacy of his own head.
Not thinking about it breaks, somewhat, when Sarif calls him.
(He’s no good to me like this, Sarif said while pulling apart skin and squinting through blood, and Frank assumed at the time that just meant half-dead but now he’s starting to wonder. Sarif, who sent Jensen on a mission to the depths of god-knows-where, where he disappeared off the grid for days. And then there’s the damn backdoor he found because Sarif was too busy spying on his employees to consider that someone else could, too. Or the way that Sarif seemed far more focused on retrieving the Typhoon prototypes than his employees. Pattern recognition.)
But Sarif is Sarif, and he smiles and it’s all Fraaank, it’s good to see you, and Frank needs the money. In a week. He tells himself he’ll think about it in a week, when the Blades have had the assets extracted. Besides, what kind of ripper would he be if he passed up a job like that? He’d make history - pseudonymously, of course. It’s almost a duty.
Sarif smiles, and it’s almost… sheepish. “You know there’s only one person we can ask.”
Frank sighs. “He won’t be pleased.”
“He’s Adam. He’ll do the right thing.”
Isn’t that what Sarif always relies upon, the strings he always pulls? Guilt, obligation, the last remains of some kind of twisted fondness.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. It’s one more job, and he needs the money.
He realises his mistake, somewhere in the back of his mind, when he finally vidcalls Jensen.
The annoyed glare he gets for his trouble is comfortably familiar, at least. The body beneath it, however… There are obvious marks of support struts and chassis across Adam’s back. They had the foresight to tuck most of the scar tissue out of sight, but not all. It’s paler against Adam’s already-pale skin, stark. And there are the marks of the Typhoon, the augmentation Jensen always hated – a decision Sarif made for him, and Adam had swiftly started using the non-lethal ammo. There are hints of metal at his hips, and his feet are black and gold Sarif, too. There must be barely any of him left.
Frank should have asked. There was a time to ask. It's probably long-gone by now, and the SI offices are shuttered and dead.
He hides it all away, of course. It’s not the point. A job is a job. “Jensen.”
(He’ll ask, after this. Hunt through the files, pull up the employee contract again... It’s not like he has a lack of time on his hands. But not today.)
“Pritchard.” It’s said flatly, and Jensen nearly downs the whiskey. “I thought I told you never to ping my location again.”
This… This, Frank can do.
Asshole, he thinks. But this time, again, it has just a hint too much fondness in it.