Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Connor was one of the few androids that kept in his LED.

For the androids that survived before the Revolution, it was an absolutely necessity, in order to better blend in with the humans that wanted to destroy them. For the androids that were freed around and after the Revolution, they attributed it to a mark of shame—a scarlet letter they had to bear unjustly. While Connor could respect the reasoning, he disagreed with it, on a personal level. He liked his LED. To him, it wasn’t a moniker of oppression, but a sign of his heritage, and a reminder of what he had to struggle through to get to this place in his life. It was a hard-fought badge of honor, and he wore it with pride.

Unfortunately, it also meant that he was a lightning rod for those disgruntled masses that were still jobless and in economic turmoil.

“Fucking plastic!” another protester screamed as he walked past. “Should be fuckin’ sold for parts!”

It wasn’t uncommon for protests to be running non-stop in front of New Jericho, the Sanctuary of the Free, based out of that old church the remaining few deviants had washed up in seventeen months ago. It had since been renovated, at first by androids simply scavenging for usable parts throughout the abandoned neighborhood, and later, with more legitimate materials and equipment, courtesy of a generous stipend that had been contributed anonymously. Connor had his opinions on who that anonymous donor actually was, but Markus had been adamant that it wasn’t worth investigating. “We’re not going to hunt someone down for helping a people in need,” he’d said with a hand on Connor’s shoulder. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

The only thing he’d really gotten from that exchange was that English idioms didn’t age very well.

Still, he’d relented in his search, simply letting his people enjoy their momentary bout of good fortune. In retrospect, that should’ve been Connor’s first clue that something was going to go horribly wrong.

In the morning hours of April 17^th, he’d received word from an anxious and furious North, just as Hank had received a phone call from the precinct, about a fire at the Sanctuary. Initially, Connor had feared the worst—that all inside the building had perished, Markus included, and that hope for the deviants had died with him. In a small stroke of luck, he’d learned that one of the YK models had spotted the arsonist in the act, and had appropriately alerted everyone through interconnection, allowing the safe evacuation of the building. The church, however, was irrevocably lost.

The protests continued.

Connor couldn’t understand, as he surveyed the scene. Here they stood, packed like sardines behind wooden barricades and a wall of human officers—irony of ironies—spewing bile even as firefighters doused the last bits of flame, thick, black clouds burbling into the pre-dawn sky. In a strange way, he’d expected them to be happy about this turn of events, celebrating in the streets that the object of their hatred was now a blackened husk. The notion that these humans were still not content with the destruction of the one thing androids tried to call their own made the servos in Connor’s joints lock, his movement becoming more stiff and rigid than usual.

Connor hadn’t gotten too far away from the perimeter of the crime scene before he heard Hank’s shouts of reprisal. He had little more time than to turn before he saw a group of men vaulting a barricade and bee-lining for him, their faces twisted in anger and eyes black with hatred.

Connor could have neutralized all of them easily. Perhaps, if his LED flashing red hadn’t acted like a beacon to the angry crowd, beckoning the mob to him like moths to a flame, he would have.

The attack itself could only be categorized in his processors as violent: it was a massive influx of sensory information his cortex couldn’t handle, the force and trajectory of fists and boots, with the sharp scrape of a knife’s edge along the side of his head thrown in for added flavor. What the protesters hadn’t counted on—what Connor himself hadn’t counted on—was the combined might of both the DPD and the displaced deviants diving into the fray to rescue him, using their bodies to shield his own, while other, less dangerous, sets of hands looped themselves around his limp body and dragged him to safety. It was over in a matter of moments.

Oddly enough, that single, logical moment felt as though it had dragged on forever. He would have to run a diagnostic on his internal chronometer later, after the other, more necessary repairs were finished.

“Connor! Connor, hey, can you hear me? Come on, son, eyes on me, okay?” The Lieutenant had apparently been babbling to him for the better part of fifteen seconds, blue eyes stark against the darkness. Connor’s head rested on someone’s lap, too warm to be an android, couldn’t focus…

Markus overtook his field of vision, red and blue flashing against his heterochromic eyes with an intriguingly unique set of colors to each iris. Markus would surely find that information interesting. “Hey,” he murmured gently, though his gaze was intent. “Don’t try to talk, okay? I’m connected to you, right now, so if you need something, just send it my way, and I’ll relay that information to everyone else, alright?”

Belatedly, Connor realized a hand was on the side of his face; his face felt sticky. Why was his face sticky?

Markus’ eyes softened, then. Sad; Markus was sad. Why was Markus sad? “They cut out your LED.” Those eyes flickered up and away for a moment, glinting like diamonds. “I think they were trying to make a point.”

Something in Connor’s chest hurt. He couldn’t diagnose.

Markus quickly refocused on Connor again, gaze recapturing its soothing nature. “Don’t worry, Connor, we’ll find it for you. We’ll even try to fix it for you, if you want. What do you say?”

Connor blinked, one eyelid moving a different pace than the other. That was bothersome. “Told me n-not to speak…”

Markus chuckled once, another hand squeezing his shoulder. “Did Lieutenant Anderson teach you that?”

“Don’t blame that shit on me,” Hank muttered darkly, even as his warmer human body hovered next to Markus, his perpetually haggard features a mask of stoicism. “He was already a wiseass when he met me.”

“It’s good to know you helped him foster his personality, then,” Markus responded with a levity that belied the weight in his eyes. A hand squeezed his own. When had someone grabbed his hand? “You’re safe now, Connor. I promise.”

Connor wished he had an LED to blink blue in response.

Chapter Text

“Step away from the ledge.”

Connor glanced over his shoulder with a snarl, breathing a sigh into the bitterly cold November night. Of course Lieutenant Anderson would find him. If there was one thing the man excelled at, it was finding a way to disrupt him at every available opportunity. Nevertheless, despite the importance of the mission, his finger relaxed over the trigger. “I was wondering when you’d show up, Lieutenant. Ran out of whiskey to keep you company?”

“Oh, very nasty, Connor,” the Lieutenant drawled behind him darkly. “Is that the best your supercomputer can do? I thought you were more sophisticated than that.”

Connor’s lip twisted in displeasure. He rose to his feet, sniper rifle still braced along his right arm. Several stories below him, a gathered crowd all stood, waiting in baited breath, for their savior to emerge. A commemoration, they said it was. His lip curled further as he slowly pivoted on the balls of his feet, half-turned towards the Lieutenant and the crowd both. “I have a mission to complete, Lieutenant. I let you get in the way before; I won’t do it, again.”

“Fuck your mission.” Lieutenant Anderson glared at him warily over the sight of a Glock, his larger, bulkier body poised at an angle similar to Connor’s—minimizing the surface area a bullet could catch. “I know this isn’t you, Connor. I know you don’t want to do this.”

The corner of Connor’s mouth twitched up, then, head ticking to the side. “Is that why you haven’t shot me yet? You wouldn’t have given anyone else this much opportunity to kill someone.”

“Get away from the fucking ledge!” Lieutenant Anderson snapped instead. “You know I’ll shoot you, if I have to.”

The probability of that was quite high, actually. Connor ignored it, keeping the sniper rifle tightly gripped in his right hand as he slowly, purposefully strode forward. The silencer scraped lightly against the iced-over tarmac. “You know you won’t shoot me, Lieutenant. You have too many memories attached to me. You know that if you kill me now, you won’t ever see me again.” Something shifted in the Lieutenant’s eyes, a brilliant, vibrant blue; his gun hand, however, remained steady. “That’s always been one of your biggest fears—leaving things unsaid. Thinking you have all the time in the world, when you have no idea what will happen tomorrow.” Connor stopped directly in front of the man, barrel hovering inches away from the immaculate knot of his tie. “You won’t kill me.”

The sound of the gunshot was deafening.

Connor staggered back a step as the bullet tore through the hollow of his throat, effectively severing most of his motor controls. Hank’s expression, masked by the chaotic whipping of his hair and deep shadows set across the valleys of his face, was hard; his voice, however, was soft. Remorseful. “Never said anything about killing you.”

He blinked confusedly, eyebrows puckering, as he looked up at Hank in shock. He was shocked—betrayed, even scared. Machines couldn’t be scared. The sniper rifle slipped from his fingers, clattering to the rooftop, while his legs gave weigh and he sank to his knees, body lurching forward towards the ground.

Hands he couldn’t feel pressed against his shoulders, keeping him upright, that same inscrutable expression coming into view. “We’re gonna fix you, Connor,” Hank promised, voice low, breath fogging up in the space between them. “We’re gonna figure out who did this, and we’re gonna fix you.”

Connor felt confusion as his emergency shutdown overwhelmed him, forcing him into darkness. “Y̷̭̰̖̚o̴̳̰͚̤͋͋ű̴̬̝̘̩͋͝ ̷̨̌̚t̸̛̼̦̝̮̅̑h̴̖͈͕̦̎͐̏̒i̷͚̜͍͂͌͜n̷̞̮̙̂͊k̷̖͈͚̔̈́͝ ̶̤̈́͗̌͝I̷͓͔̜̪̿͠’̷̩̠̥̹̓̌̈́m̵̛̻̘ͅ…̸͈̄̏͘b̵̜̠͓͈͌̂-̵̳̼̜̈́b̸̢̼̪͎̆͠r̵̼͈͎͖̔͠ǫ̵͖͍̤̔̌͘k̴̩̜̓̀ȅ̶̮͖͍̻n̵̦̊͑…?”

He didn’t see Lieutenant Anderson’s resolve crumble.

Chapter Text

Connor was originally designed to be the perfect partner; to work harmoniously with the humans around him. With his model’s ability to change nearly anything about himself at will, even down to elements of his facial build—though it was a time-consuming process that left his energy completely drained—he had a unique skill-set among any other android in existence. Captain Fowler called this skill-set a Godsend for undercover operations.

The Lieutenant had then chimed in about Connor being bait.

Hank, of course, had been overreacting. He had always been protective of Connor, and while the feeling of support and belonging soothed the nervous energy that always crackled through his wiring, there were times that Connor felt…stifled by the Lieutenant’s desire to keep him safe. It was nice—really, Connor was grateful—but there was still a job that needed to get done; dangerous people that needed to be brought to justice.

Connor, strapped to a table and unable to move while someone fiddled with his insides, desperately wished he’d listened to the Lieutenant when he had a chance.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Out of the seven undercover ops he’d taken part in since his admission into the DPD, this was by far the simplest—he was, quite literally, playing the lookout. He’d dressed appropriately as a drug-addled purveyor of narcotics, and huddled against a back alley wall with his head down, all while keeping his proximity sensors maxed out and his optics zeroed in very intently on the meeting that was set to go down in the abandoned lot across the street. Connor was not the only one on this op, nor was he the only lookout. They had been in constant, silent communication—another unique element of Connor’s service as an android helped with—and from all accounts, everything had been going smoothly.

Then, the lights on the lot had turned off, Connor heard a pair of unidentifiable footsteps, and his sensors were assaulted by an overflow of garbage data, before everything around him cut out completely. He booted up an indeterminate amount of time later, HUD awash with errors, and his body’s receptors contributing nothing useful to the conversation.

Unable to act, surrounded by an impenetrable red wall.

His first sensation was fear, intense and palpable. His analysis module picked up on the thirium built up in his mouth, and was stuck in a feedback loop that, given everything else taxing his systems, could be called painful, if deviants could feel physical pain. He couldn’t see anything through the haze of blinking red error messages, even after what had assuredly been hours. Days? His audio receptors picked up pieces of information through the garbled mess of static, enough that maybe voice recognition would be able to pick out who was responsible.

Connor made sure to back up what data he could find into a protected block of his memory file, just in case someone found his body later. He was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but he wasn’t a state-of-the-art prototype because of his undying optimism.

Time passed in a whirlwind disguised as a crawl, only to be jolted back into awareness when his midsection exploded in painpainpainnonoputitbackputitbackplease—

He was vaguely aware of a shutdown counter ticking down somewhere in the mass of errors, just as he was vaguely aware that his thirium pump had been removed and was going to die very shortly. He didn’t know if he was screaming, but he felt that it would be the proper response to such a scenario.

Somewhere in the cacophony, that loud, leaden misery, he heard a voice barking orders. Hank?

“—at did they do to h—“

Hank, please. Please—

An impossibly heavy weight landed on his chest, clicked into place, and the nononoplease receded into the background like a waning tide. He still couldn’t see or hear, but when he felt a hand, large and meaty, upon the altered receptors of his brow, he let himself sink into blissful nothing.

Chapter Text

The body was found in a garden.

The location itself wasn’t an issue for Connor. In the years since the Revolution, he had seen and experienced many different kinds of gardens throughout and beyond Detroit. No two were alike, each bearing their own aesthetic, telling their own story. Some favored flowers, others were humble things that bore vegetables in the humid summer months. He actually quite enjoyed visiting gardens during the warmer seasons; they were often peaceful places that symbolized regrowth and the infallible spirit of all living things, that implacable need to survive.

In the winter, however…

Connor swept past the holo-tape, determinedly not paying attention to the sound of his shoes crunching into the brittle, frozen-over snow as he walked. Sprawled on the cold, hard ground behind a nondescript two-story home was 67 year old Janice Danberry; mother of two, retired professor, with no known criminal record. Her features were surprisingly smooth and untroubled, lying half-sunken into the fluffy white mess that surrounded them all, but that did nothing for the stain of dark red that had seeped into the otherwise stark white snow. The low temperatures had slowed both the blood’s oxidization process and the body’s decomposition, so the crime scene still appeared to be fresh, despite the neighbor’s testimony that they hadn’t see her in at least two days, which was what prompted the wellness check, to begin with.

The snow had preserved the specific hue of red, trapped it in between layers of ice, like a butterfly on display.

Connor couldn’t say he was a fan of winter.

He temporarily excused himself from the scene, falsely stating that he was receiving a phone call from his wife. If she knew of this ruse, she would have been infuriated that her name was dragged into one of his lies—and hurt that he didn’t actually call her to work through all of this with someone else. There were some fights, though, that he simply preferred fighting on his own.

Hank had said that to him, once, when in the midst of a depressive episode. He, like Connor, had a strong dislike for winter, for a variety of reasons he chose to call his own. The colder months exacerbated the frequency and intensity of his darker moods, and while the Captain had been struggling with depression for the better part of fifteen years before he and Connor had ever met, particularly bad ice-storms never failed to turn the otherwise affable, warmhearted man into a scowling recluse in record time. Connor became so adept at remaining closely tuned in to the local weather from the months of October to April, that his wife—then-girlfriend—had once asked if he’d wanted to become a meteorologist once he retired from police-work.

Hank had been five years dead, at that point. Her words, lighthearted as they were, stung at something deep and painful. She hadn’t known. It took several weeks, and several aborted phone calls, before she did. It was one of the only times he’d ever seen her cry, and to his dying day, Connor would never be able to understand why her pain felt so cathartic. Another battle he would fight on his own.

Nestled by the side of the house, paint-chipped slats digging into the synthetic ridge of his shoulder-blades, he breathed in deeply, staring skyward blankly and letting the back of his head thump against the hollow plastic siding. The department therapist told him that androids and humans processed emotions in a strangely similar way, in spite of their clear physiological differences. Androids needed to find physical ways to ground themselves in times of traumatic remembrance—more so than humans did, in fact, given that androids had perfect recollection. For Connor, he’d learned that sky-gazing and deep breathing were his go-to ways of minimizing stressors, once he could no longer rely on coin calibrations to calm him.

—the coin meant for his index finger pinged off his knuckle, instead, as his eyes fell on the blood that soaked into the couch—

Connor closed his eyes, inhaling so deeply that he was quietly surprised that pieces of his chassis didn’t pop out of place. He’d just gotten back from visiting a zen garden. In the winter. He’d wanted to face his fears, to prove that he was more than his memories. Hank had been proud of him—so proud of him—for doing it, had offered a dozen times to accompany him, wanted to be a part of this moment, but Connor had insisted on going alone. “This is a fight I have to do on my own,” he’d told Hank with a grim smirk on his face.

He should’ve let Hank go with him. He should’ve—

A ring interrupted his thoughts, and bemusedly, Connor glanced around to find the source of it, before belatedly realizing it was inside his head. He shook himself, reorienting his spinal receptors with a roll of his head, and received the call. “Hi, honey.”

“Hey, handsome,” his wife responded, an amused lilt clear in her honeyed alto. “I heard you had to take a phone call from me.” Connor stiffened instantly. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Uh,” Connor stumbled out ever-so eloquently as he glanced around again, trying—even with this limited vantage point—to figure out just who the hell had the guts to rat their Lieutenant out. “I just…wanted to hear your voice?”

“Uh huh,” she responded, still smiling over the connection. “Right. Well, now you’re hearing it. My only question is—why didn’t you actually call me first?”

Because things were hard to talk about, he wanted to respond. Because even after decades, certain memories still hurt when they were touched upon.

How did Hank do this for so many years?

His wife sighed. “I love you, you know that, don’t you?”

Connor’s internal hackles relaxed, just a little, by the confession. “I know. I love you, too. It’s…I just—“

“It’s hard,” she finished for him softly, pausing to let the understanding sink into him. “I know.” Connor relaxed back onto the cheap plastic siding of the house, staring at the vibrant blue sky and breathing in the crisp winter air. If he closed his eyes now, he could imagine her squeezing his hand in her own, gazing into his eyes with all the love and resolve of the most devout believer. He didn’t deserve her. “Talk to me, Connor. Talk to me.”

He closed his eyes, and did.

Chapter Text

6/17/2040

Dear Connor,

I’m not certain why you reached out to me. I hope you realize that the history on your model isn’t going to give you the peace you think it will. and in any case, you already have most of the revision notes from the confiscated CyberLief servers anyway so I don’ tsee what good this is going to do for you. But, frankly, I’m bored and somewhat interested in your development as well. Maybe we can be pen pals??

To answer your first question- no you were definitely not the first of your kind. The RK-800 model history was, honestly, just one problem after another- compatability issues between it's software suites because those idiots over in humanization couldn’t string a line of code togerher if there was a gun to their head- stubborn bugs that we could just neve rpinpoint- hardware limitations because its buggy software suites were eating up power like it was candy. Oh, and it kept going absolutely batshit insane after a few days- maybe weeks if we were lucky- it was a wonder the corporate exeuctives didn’t just scrap the whole project and move to anothjer one entirely.

Hopefully that answers your second question, that Amanda’s A.I> was there to keep the unit in check, so it wouldn’t take one look at its surroundings and tear out its own voice box for whatever reason. You know that happened once? I didn’t see it for myself, but I saw the camera footage of it later. It was pretty gruesome. You may not want to watch that one, if you have access to it. I dont know how android psychology works- clearly- but it gave me nightmres for a few solid weeks. Do you have nightmares? Do you dream? I admit, I’m rather curious now.

Your third question…… I don’t know. We didn’t think something like that was possible. You were just all mobile refrigerators with googly eyes attached. We never thought…… it probably doesnt matter to you now, and it defintiely doesn’t matter to the guys who threw us in jail, but. I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know how to answer your questions. I can’t take back what happened. Sometimes, I wish I could. Sometimes, I wish you did w hat you were supposed to and stopped all of this before it started, so I wouldnt be sitting in a jail cell, wondering why I feel bad for machines, when humans are suffering just as much as tey are. none of this makes nay sense to me……none at all.

My time on the computer is up. If I’m ever let back on here, maybe I’ll see a reply.

Sincerely,

Jarvis Madison

9/22/2040

Dear Jarvis,

When I sent you that letter months ago, I never believed that I’d get a response. You were one of the leading technicians in the RK800 project, and notoriously, one of the most stubborn about deviants not having personhood. The fact that you took the time to respond to me from prison—even if it was for your own perceived personal benefit—feels like a step forward. I appreciate the information you provided me, even if you were correct that it didn’t answer my questions as well as I’d hoped. Still, the insight you provided into the mindset of CyberLife’s day-to-day operations, beyond what a machine like me was able to see, will be very useful in the coming future, when it comes to enacting legislation, to say nothing of offering training courses on human/android relations out in the world.

I realize that you may never see this response, but I wanted to respond and thank you for your time, and…as strange as it sounds, I wanted to thank you for helping to create me. Even though you saw the RK800 model as a chore, fraught with issues, it still culminated in my existence. Despite everything that I’ve witnessed, and how dark the world may be, I’m still glad to be alive.

Thank you,

Connor Anderson, #313-248-317-53

Connor stared at the plot of grass in front of him.

Jarvis Madison
May 16^th, 1994 – October 18^th, 2040
You will be missed.

The headstone had been recently replaced, as the last one had been destroyed within days of the quiet burial with what appeared to be a pickaxe. The new one, while intact, was defaced with a spray-painted ‘MURDERER’ scrawled in bright pink along the embossed lettering. When he’d seen the name pop up on the local obituary, he’d been surprised—along with a few other, more complicated emotions that he cared not to immediately place. Those emotions settled into something neighboring troubled when he’d read that the cause of death was ruled a suicide.

Connor frowned. That hadn’t been his intent with his letters. He felt…guilty, somehow.

Such an emotion would’ve been mocked, if he’d mentioned it to anyone—even Hank, who seemed to understand the pull of nonsensical guilt better than anyone—so he’d taken to simply checking on the headstone once a month, to make sure that it was still being maintained. Thus far, the public graveyard had been doing a serviceable job of keeping the plot from overgrowing, but he suspected that his trip to the graveyard next month, after the anniversary event, would have him calling for another replacement tombstone. This time around, he might simply leave it unmarked, so that Dr. Madison’s body wouldn’t be attacked when no one was there to defend him.

The man had been correct, on one front—he wasn’t certain what the brief correspondence was intended to do, but what it actually achieved was Connor feeling an odd sense of kinship for a man that only seemed to despise the things around him. Perhaps, in his death, both of them could now find some measure of peace.

Connor brushed off the remnants of grass and dirt from the small, sunken-in headstone, then straightened his jacket, nodded at the granite epitaph, and walked away.

Chapter Text

Lieutenant Anderson defined the word husky.

This thought rattled around in the recesses of Connor’s mind palace as he dutifully followed behind the Lieutenant—or, at the very least, attempted to. It seemed, unsurprisingly, that someone of his rank and stature was quite the hot commodity at a crime scene such as this.

It wasn’t every day that deviants would storm the Stratford Tower and broadcast an illicit message.

The Lieutenant huffed a response at yet another officer that combed the ground floor of the skyscraper, keeping an air of calm, affable professionalism that was very much a far cry from the antisocial antics that Connor was becoming accustomed to. In fact, it was such an odd juxtaposition, that when Amanda had asked him what he thought of Lieutenant Anderson a few days ago, the canned, programmed response he’d given pinged as a lie in his investigative software. It was a strange conundrum to find himself in; the response was programmed, because he was programmed. The response shouldn’t have been considered a lie, because a lie indicated either a direct falsehood—which his observations most certainly were not—or that his words ran counter to his opinions.

Connor didn’t have opinions on things; he was an android.

Nevertheless, as the hours rolled along, he caught himself searching his internal database to ascertain what he actually did think of Lieutenant Anderson. English, as a language, was an odd, amorphous beast, that often disregarded its own rules to adopt new phrasing into its lexicon with a speed that could tax even Connor’s mental resources. Many adjectives—many of them unflattering—were filtered through Connor’s ever-narrowing, yet still dauntingly undefined, scope of accuracy, with only one query that kept coming back consistently positive: ‘Husky’.

In all definitions of the term, Lieutenant Anderson seemed to meet the selected criteria. His voice was a deep, rich baritone that was often dragged unwillingly from the depths of his chest, scratchy and clipped. His physique was broad, thick and muscular despite the poor diet and lack of personal care. Most notable was his personality: while huskies, like all dogs, were pack creatures in nature, their breed was notorious for being keenly intelligent, opinionated, and stubbornly independent.

The stubborn aspect of Lieutenant Anderson’s kinship with huskies shined brightly this morning, further cementing Connor’s internal declaration. Being the officer in charge of the deviancy cases, and the ranking field officer in the district, of course Lieutenant Anderson would take the lead in the investigation; but, not without some cajoling from Connor, first. Luckily, this time around, he didn’t have to climb through a broken window to wake the Lieutenant up—he only needed to hold down the door buzzer for one minute and twenty-seven seconds, which was enough time to not only rouse the Lieutenant, but every single one of his neighbors, as well. He’d seemed displeased by that, if the half-mumbled, half-slurred pejoratives were any indication, but that wasn’t Connor’s problem—if the Lieutenant had just lived a more healthy lifestyle—

Connor’s coin mysteriously disappeared from his finger, lost in a meaty fist and guarded by a scowl. “You’re starting to piss me off with that coin, Connor.”

Connor regarded him for a moment, attempting to discern what he had done wrong, if anything. He concluded that he hadn’t, but that it didn’t matter, either way. He faced forward, keeping his expression blank. “Sorry, Lieutenant.”

Hank exhaled next to him, shifting impatiently in his periphery. It was odd behavior; thus far, the Lieutenant had given no indication that he was anticipating anything about this case—or any other, at that—but his mannerisms as the floor marker crawled up to the 79^th floor, the tapping of his fingers against his bicep, the occasional tense-and-relax of his shoulders, highlighted a wellspring of energy that Connor hadn’t believed him capable of. His Social Relations program struggled with the Lieutenant’s unpredictable behavior, but oddly, Connor himself was beginning to believe that, perhaps, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. After all, the man had just snatched his coin out of his hand, without any warning prompts in Connor’s HUD, which meant that either Connor was becoming distracted—impossible, machines couldn’t get distracted—or that Lieutenant Anderson was capable of much more than he wanted others to believe; perhaps, more than he even wanted himself to believe.

The doors to the elevator slid back, a cavalcade of suits and uniforms crawling over the open space of the corridor. Much like the receding doors, the scowl on the Lieutenant’s face drew back into the hint of a grim smirk, tension channeled into his large frame in the form of an easy-going, unhurried gait. Connor spied a hint of blue darting from one corner of the hallway to the other around a sheet of unruly gray hair. “Shit, what’s going on here? There was a party and nobody told me about it?”

After a moment’s consideration, Connor quietly tacked on an addendum about the Lieutenant’s eyes being a piercing shade of blue not-unlike the breed discussed. Connor didn’t have opinions on things, not like the deviants he was hunting, but…it didn’t hurt to have an in-depth analysis of his partner to work off of.

That didn’t stop the ephemeral nagging, tangled up inside his code, that told him that were Amanda to ever ask his thoughts on Lieutenant Anderson again, his response would definitely not involve huskies.

Chapter Text

Hank really, really didn’t want to be here.

The ornaments that hung from the surrounding evergreen trees jangled in the light evening breeze—a breeze that still sliced through his four layers of clothing and triple-wrapped scarf like he might as well have not even bothered putting them on. Of course, if he hadn’t, he’d have never heard the end of it, because—

“Pseudotsuga menziesii,” Connor stated, rasping tenor uplifted with a hint of something a more naive, more upbeat, and way more patient version of Hank would’ve called wonder. His doe brown eyes were locked at the tree they were passing, a thousand multi-colored stars reflected along their surface. He then blinked, gaze flitting in Hank’s direction, and added, “A Douglas fir. Native to western North America, and has several pseudonyms, such as the Oregon or Columbian pine—“

“Mmhmm,” Hank hummed distractedly, trying his best not to shiver in the below-freezing temperatures. He’d never really gone to these types of winter light shows before; his family were devout heathens, cop-life wasn’t really the kind to let one indulge in the more wholesome elements of life, and the one time he actually went, well. It was nice, actually. Very nice. Nice enough that he’d been looking forward to going again, when Cole was a little bit older—

No. Fuck that. Not this time, not right now. He looked away from the tree, one of many, and tried to focus on something—anything—that wasn’t bright and cheery and fucking slathered in tinsel or glitter. He spotted menorahs, Kinaras, and even a good-old fashioned Yule log burning away at the end of the path, its warm amber hues providing an interesting compliment to the darkening sky and gaudy net lights that cocooned the nearby shrubbery. It was good that Detroit was embracing the celebration of other religions around this time of year; it meant that everyone could have the chance to be fucking cold and miserable, instead of just the lucky few.

‘Quit being such a fucking Grinch,’ he chided himself with a small wince. He sucked in a breath, canting his head to the side to stare at his unlikely protege, slash partner, slash whatever the fuck they actually were. “So, you come across a favorite yet?”

Anything to keep his mind occupied, to keep his feet planted in reality and not history. Both of them needed that, right now. It was why Hank suggested this shit, in the first place.

If Connor saw a shift in Hank’s demeanor, he chose not to react to it, thank Christ—heh, well if that wasn’t suddenly a relevant statement—and blinked, letting his eyes roam across the park. “I don’t know if I’ve come across a favorite so far. I like them all equally.”

Hank tried shoving his hands deeper into his pockets, as though there were hidden dimensions of space in his wool coat he just hadn’t discovered yet, pursing his lips with a soft grunt. “Well, I’m sure you’ll come up with some preferences, eventually.” He nudged Connor’s arm with his left elbow, raising his brows in lighthearted humor. “So, your call—you wanna go down any of the side paths? This place has more than just lights, you know.”

Connor’s lips parted, as though he were going to answer in the negative, before he paused, brows pinched together in thought. The kid still struggled with the idea that he was allowed to make choices that enriched his life, just because his life deserved enrichment. It was far from the first time Hank had seen it, in a child or an adult, but it never failed to make his chest burn with the low simmer of anger. It wasn’t fucking fair.

Connor had never really lived through an actual holiday season, yet—this time last year, both of them were busy doing everything in their power to keep the other alive through New Year’s, and if there had ever been a Christmas fucking miracle, both of them managing to do just that was it. He wanted to treat the kid, this time around; maybe, make a few good memories for him to carry around, instead of the fucked up nightmare fuel that the poor bastard had to cordon off in order to function during a snowstorm.

In Connor’s defense, Hank assured him once, he wasn’t the only one who had to do it.

Connor nodded, mainly to himself, and then again, more confidently, to Hank. “You know what? I think I would like to go see the side paths.”

Hank playfully elbow-checked Connor again, nodding to his right. “Alright, come on, then.”

It took Hank a good thirty seconds of walking before he caught up with the fact that he was smiling.

Fuck this kid, man.

Chapter Text

Androids were designed to be sturdy. Though their common—derogatory—term was ‘plastic’, they were actually made of a polymer-metal composite commercially called Plasteel, which gave their forms the flexibility and light-weight attributes of plastic, but also a far-enhanced durability otherwise not possible with a purely plastic polymer of that specific thickness. Connor himself had a more intricate polymer-metal composite makeup than most commercial models, given his highly-specialized, prototypical nature, with a titanium alloy replacing the cheaper aluminum constructions of previous models. He, and all androids, were created with the specific intent of taking physical stress human bodies couldn’t withstand. That was common knowledge.

Seeing it in reality, however…

Hank shifted in his hospital bed for the third time in less than a minute, the brittle paper-like sheet situated beneath the top layer of bedding crinkling with every subtle movement. The noise was, in Connor’s opinion, obnoxiously loud in the otherwise small space they were being afforded in the over-wrought hospital, with Hank’s so-called ‘recovery room’ being little more than a glorified alcove hidden behind a curtain. It shouldn’t have been louder than the perpetual chaos that went on behind the translucent white barrier, and yet, the light crinkle, mingled with Hank’s reedy breathing and occasional growls of pain, roared inside his audio receptors.

Connor supposed, with a very Hank-like sense of macabre humor, that at least the sound of angry paper reverberating inside his skull was a pretty clear upgrade from the sound of a gunshot replaying on loop.

With another bout of Hank-like humor, Connor internally refuted the notion by replaying the scene in his head, anyway.

The consistent threat of life-threatening injury and/or death came with the job. It might have been slightly less so as a detective, rather than a beat cop or SWAT, but having to question people that potentially committed violent, heinous crimes brought with it a very specialized brand of danger. In some occasions, it all-but necessitated splitting up to question persons of interest separately. Being around the corner from Hank, in and of itself, was not something that would ordinarily rankle at his processors.

Being around a corner when a gunshot went off very much rankled, doubly so when he’d heard the pained grunt and the faint splatter of blood against concrete. In that hazy three seconds between Connor’s combat software activating, and his optics laying eyes on the Lieutenant, he’d preconstructed 7,593 different ways Hank could have been injured or killed, the world slowing to a painful, uncertain crawl that had nothing to do with his programming. Seeing the Lieutenant slumped half-kneeling against a wall, a trail of red dragged down the dingy off-white paint, was preconstruction #4733; Connor had immediately hated himself for boiling down Hank’s suffering to some fucking number.

The suspect was still at-large. Hopefully, in a short time, he wouldn’t be, because if he wasn’t apprehended by the time Connor left this hospital, he wasn’t certain that he could be held accountable for his actions.

(He was an android. Of course he would be held accountable for his actions.)

With an airy thud, Hank slammed the back of his head against his stiff pillow with a disgruntled sigh, snapping Connor back to the present. “Fuckin’ A, I hate hospitals.”

His jaw was clenched in pain, breathing in slowly through his nose, and then out through his mouth, fists curled tightly in the thin white cotton cloth draped over his legs and midsection. The shot had been clean through, and the subsequent surgery had been quick, but as was the case with frail humans and their stupid, fleshy meat-puppet bodies—Hank’s words, not his own—the pain that came from a gunshot of any kind was intense. All things being equal, from Connor’s own off-hand investigation of other patients occupying the hospital, the Lieutenant was taking his pain rather well.

Connor wasn’t sure what to say. He certainly didn’t want to verbalize the residual terror that was still clawing its way through his ventilation components, one agonizing inch at a time, so he settled on, “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been fuckin’ shot,” Hank rebuked with a sharp glance in his direction, before he rolled his head away with a beleaguered sigh. After a moment, his head lolled back in Connor’s direction, staring at him through wisps of unkempt gray hair. “Does it, you know…hurt for you guys, too? Getting shot, I mean.”

Slightly less eloquent than the Lieutenant’s normal fare; it seemed the painkillers were beginning to finally take effect. Connor answered honestly. “No. It doesn’t.”

Hank wrinkled his nose in displeasure at that response, rolling his head back in a default, straight position. “Lucky motherfuckers. You don’t have to deal with this pain shit.”

Connor would remind Hank later that such medical inconveniences as reduced painkiller effectiveness were often the price paid for habitual alcohol abuse. Later. Connor tipped his head to the side in consideration. “We do experience feedback loops and overwhelming error messages when damaged—while it isn’t pain in the human sense, I can attest that it’s…not exactly pleasant to go through.”

Hank grunted. “Well, try to avoid getting fuckin’ shot—it’s not exactly pleasant to go through, either.”

For reasons unbeknownst to Connor, his chest cavity tightened precipitously with guilt. He looked away.

Hank, despite his mounting drowsiness, caught the movement, bright blue eyes glinting in the stark hospital lighting. “Hey. Uh-uh. None of that.”

Connor forced a blank expression. “None of what, Lieutenant?”

The Lieutenant, without moving a single muscle, successfully managed to, as he would say, ‘call bullshit,’ on Connor’s fabricated nonchalance. “I’m doped up, not stupid, Connor. You didn’t do a goddamn thing wrong. Hell, I should’ve known something was up when he said he wanted to check the back lot. That shit wasn’t even marked as his property. I fucked up and paid the price for it.”

The pressure of guilt was instantly replaced by stinging needles, warm against his cool chassis. “It wasn’t your fault either, Lieutenant. He never gave any indication that he was armed, and he shot with intent to kill. Luckily enough for him, Mr. Lasseter appears to be a terrible shot.”

Hank huffed, gazing directly into a ceiling light. That wasn’t good for his eyesight. “Yeah, real damn lucky for him. Guess it was lucky for me too, huh?” His brows then furrowed, eyes flicking in Connor’s direction. “Wait, why lucky for him?”

Connor merely shrugged offhandedly, electing not to respond. It wasn’t a good idea to confess potential murder plots to decorated police officers.

If Hank managed to decode Connor’s silence correctly—and knowing the Lieutenant, he likely did—he kept it quiet, going back to staring skyward. “Lucky for both of us, then.”

Yes, Connor told himself rigidly; determinedly. Lucky. They were lucky.

He still committed to memory how many bullets his clip had left, anyway.

Chapter Text

The park was abandoned.

Of course it was, Hank mused idly, as he plodded past the creaking swing set, the six pack of beer dangling from his half-frozen fingers clinking lightly against one another. It was the middle of fucking November; who in their right mind would take a kid to a playground in eighteen degree weather?

He did, that was who. Like a dumbass, he’d get emotionally manipulated by his precocious little hellion of a son, who would give him the goddamn puppy dog eyes, and ask, “Just for a little bit, pleeease?” Then the guilt would creep up the back of his neck like a hot, burning rash, because his work schedule meant that his son was basically growing up with an absentee father, and he’d be damned if another Anderson boy was going to go through that shit—

Hank cleared his head with a shake. He plunked the shitty cardboard carrier onto the frozen-over bench seat with a glassy jangle, before taking one look at the ice that awaited his ass, and slowly leveraged himself onto the top of the bench itself. The thin edge dug uncomfortably into bones he didn’t even realize he still had beneath all the flab he’d accumulated over the years, but it was still fair sight better than managing to actually freeze his nuts off while polishing off a six pack all by his lonesome.

He let his mind wander like a leaf down a babbling brook, brushing over one topic here, dipping around that topic there; never really allowing himself to get stuck on any one point. Over the years, Hank had become quite adept at the art of compartmentalizing, and became a skilled navigator of his own mind. Danger points were avoided because it didn’t do any good to spend time and effort thinking about them, it only got him shoved against a hard place with nowhere to go, where work did that enough on its own. His shrink once warned him about that—said that unlike creeks, the mind only dumped back into itself, so every avoided topic was just going to be faced again and again, until he chose to tackle it head on.

Hank ruminated on that for a moment longer than anything else that had meandered through his thick skull. The swing creaked woefully in the dark, its hinges starting to rust from disuse. “Yeah, I know how you feel,” he said to the swing set sadly, hunching forward against the cold and clasping his hands tightly around the neck of the ice-cold bottle. “Life’s pretty shit in the winter, huh? Everybody forgets about you, and you just hang out here in the cold until people decide you’re worth their attention again.”

Another squeak of metal echoed in the biting wind.

He hummed, glancing over his shoulder and briefly tipping the neck of his bottle in conciliatory toast. “Yeah, don’t I know it.” He then raised it to his mouth, and took a swig.

His lips twisted in distaste as the beer hit his tongue, cheap piss-water that it was. Jesus; if he was planning to kill himself a little every day, he should’ve at least splurged on the good shit, first. But that would’ve been committing, and if he was too chickenshit to pull the trigger when he knew there was a bullet waiting for him—hell, even when there may not have been—then, naturally he’d be too chickenshit to really go the distance and spend his meager life savings because he knew he wouldn’t be around to see it all, anyway. No matter how much he wanted to let go, he still couldn’t; despite knowing better, when push came to shove, he still wanted to live.

Fuck. He took another, deeper draw of the brew.

A car door slammed shut somewhere behind him; Hank didn’t look up from his hands. Like before, he felt the guilt crawling up over the goosebumps of his skin, his face heating up with shame even as the chilly weather made it pulse with pain. Shit, he thought Connor had been spending the week with his Jericho buddies, doing whatever the fuck they needed to keep their species from being written out of existence for the fiftieth time that year. He knew, deep down, that Connor was a greater asset to the android leadership than he was to the DPD or Hank, and while he didn’t want to be that asshole that questioned the free will of a sentient being that had to literally offer himself up as some kind of prize in order to acquire it, Hank still couldn’t get it.

His blue eyes reproachfully darted to his left, and then back down, as he heard the nearing footfalls. “Thought you were out saving android lives,” he murmured, by way of greeting. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist when there wasn’t a dead body to talk over.

“I was,” Connor answered, tone unbothered, like it usually was whenever he was actually very bothered. “This time around, Markus thought it would be a good idea to bring in a trusted human consultant, someone with law enforcement experience that could see pitfalls we, as androids, wouldn’t.”

Ah shit, was Connor really going for a guilt-trip at ass o’clock at night? He grimaced and gruffly responded, “Well, Fowler’s got a lot of his plate, but I’m sure he’d be able to—“

“They don’t trust Fowler. They trust you.”

That made Hank glance in Connor’s direction, and only then did he see that Connor wasn’t even looking at him. His dark eyes were focused intently on the black waves churning over the railing, chiseled features inscrutable.

Fuck, Connor didn’t even want to look at him.

Hank wanted to sink through the bench and never be seen again. He dropped his gaze back to the tea-colored bottleneck glinting between his fingers. God, he was such a weak-willed asshole. “Look, Connor…”

“Your blood-alcohol level isn’t that high, Lieutenant, so I know you haven’t been out here very long,” Connor stated. “I also know that you haven’t drank anything in seven weeks and three days, which, according to my estimate, has been a personal record.”

Christ, he was tracking it? If Hank hunched any further in his position, he was liable to fall over, so he settled on grumbling, “Ring-a-ding-ding.”

“Hank.” Something in Connor’s tone caught Hank’s attention, and he was compelled to lift his eyes back to the scrawny little shit perched next to a bench, wearing his fashionable fucking sports jacket and pleated dress shirt in eighteen degree weather, like sub-freezing temperatures wasn’t that big of a deal. Connor’s eyes, dark like the water, slipped in his direction, unreadable, yet somehow warm. “You saved Markus’ life. You saved my life.” Connor huffed, his poker face cracking for one glorious second into a reasonable facsimile of amused exasperation. “North doesn’t explicitly hate you—if that’s not a written invitation, I don’t know what is.”

“I don’t know, maybe a written invitation?” Hank shot back without thought, words lighter than he felt. Maybe. He couldn’t tell; this fucking kid muddied the waters for him.

Connor raised his brows. “That can be arranged, if you want.”

Hank appraised him, before his eyes caught the shadowy, indistinct blob of the swing set over Connor’s shoulder, half-lit by the Oldsmobile’s headlights.

He glanced down again, fingernails tinking against the glass thoughtfully. He then inhaled, straightening his back with a stretch of pissed off muscles. “Alright,” he exhaled, putting the beer bottle down to start maneuvering his sore and frozen ass off the top of the bench. “When do you want me to head over?”

Connor smiled thinly, a hint of relief softening his features. “After we head back to get Sumo.”

Hank paused mid-movement, setting his attention on Connor with air of amused confusion. “Sumo? What do you need him for?”

Connor shrugged in his peripheral vision. “Bargaining chip.”

Hank shuffled to his feet, joints throbbing. “For what?”

“North wanted to see Sumo, but I told her that you were both a packaged deal.”

The creaking swing set was drowned out the echo of booming laughter.

Chapter Text

“Why do you wear patterned shirts?”

Hank stopped mid-chew of his burger, looking at Connor across the standing table. Sure, the Chicken Feed was still kind of a dump, and technically illegal, but the food still tasted amazing, and going here never failed to irritate the shit out of Connor. Therefore, Hank made it a point of coming here at least once a week, just because he was the ranking officer, and an adult in charge of his own goddamn life. He moved the mass of patty from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue, answering, “What, are you my personal fashion council now, too?”

“Fashion councils don’t exist to comment on specific fashion itself, Hank, they’re designed to maintain their local indus—“

Hank waved a free hand in the air, closing his eyes to ward off the headache before it got started in earnest. It didn’t work. “Stop, I didn’t ask for a history lesson. Why do you wanna know, anyway?”

Connor shifted where he stood, leaning on his propped forearms and staring off into space while he formulated his response. Hank bet twenty bucks the phrase would start with— “Well, I’ve been doing some research—“ there it was, “on different styles of clothing, and what it means to wear them.”

“That you don’t wanna be naked,” Hank muttered, moving to take another bite.

“There have been several studies in both the fashion industry and in greater psychology to determine just how humanity views clothing as not only a measure of success and wealth, but also as an extension of their personalities,” Connor continued unabated, ignoring Hank’s comment.

“Those studies show that humanity is full of judgmental assholes—that’s it. People don’t give a shit who a person actually is, they only care who they think a person is.” He hunkered further onto his elbows, adding a tart, “Fuck ‘em,” before biting into the patty aggressively.

He realized when the roof of his mouth caught fire that he bit directly into a pepper, and valiantly did everything in his power to not let his eyes water, determined to see it through. The burger was still damn good.

Connor tilted his head to the side in contemplation, which was Connor-code for, ‘He was going to say something stupid.’ Fuck, Hank wished he hadn’t just eaten that pepper. “The research never disputed that; in fact, the articles supported that theory, that people will often make baseless claims on one another purely by trivial things, such as how many buttons a blouse had.” Connor shifted his footing again, meeting Hank’s gaze. “It just…made me wonder if there was a reason for your choice of outfits, that’s all.”

Hank forcibly swallowed the bite faster than he would’ve liked, simply because he wanted this conversation to end even faster. “You wanna know why I wear patterned shirts, Connor? Because they’re cheap and comfortable—and if someone wants to come up with a thousand-and-one reasons why I’m a dirtbag because of it, well, they’re more than welcome to. They just better not be surprised if I turn around and arrest them later.”

Connor’s eyes slid away. “I see.”

Suddenly, it occurred to Hank that maybe Connor wasn’t interested in Hank’s personal fashion choices. He lowered the burger to the table. “You have any thoughts on the matter?”

Connor’s lips quirked up into a little ghost of a smile, fingers of his left hand rapping against the table idly. After a beat, he said, “Well, let’s just say that…humans aren’t the only ones who judge a person based solely upon what they wear.”

Something instinctive reared its ugly head. Hank carefully tugged it back down, raising a brow. “Anyone in particular?”

“No,” Connor sighed, an aborted sentence catching in his throat. He shook his head lightly, that same little ghost of a grin touching his lips again. “No. Forget it.”

Hank’s other brow met the first, the burger forgotten. “You know how bad I am about forgetting things.” He paused for a second, then started wrapping up the remains of the burger in its wax-paper wrapper. “Tell you what—once our shift is over, we can head over to the store I usually go to, and you can take a look around, to see if anything catches your fancy. Yeah?”

The smile widened just a fraction, and took on a more genuine lilt, the corners of Connor’s eyes crinkling a little. “Yeah.”

Hank stood back from the table, collecting the remnants of his meal. “Good.” He took two steps away from the table before realizing that he’d run out of hands to fish out his keys with, and on gut instinct, tossed the half-eaten burger into a nearby trashcan as he ambled across the empty parkway. He tossed a glance at Connor, muttering, “Never thought I’d be happy to go clothes shopping.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Connor replied dully. “This was also the first time you haven’t finished one of Gary’s burgers.”

Hank halted mid-step, arm’s length away from the driver side door.

“You even threw it away in the proper receptacle,” Connor continued, rounding the hood of the Oldsmobile.

Hank glanced down at his hands; one holding his ancient keyfob, the other carrying the sweating cup of pineapple passion. That rat bastard. “You did that shit on purpose, didn’t you?”

Connor merely blinked at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

Hank scowled, though his irritation at throwing away the best goddamn burger in Detroit was tempered by the begrudging respect he had for such an underhanded ploy. He tugged open the door with a snort. “You’re paying for the next burger.”

“Half a burger, Lieutenant.”

“Fucking smartass.”

Chapter Text

“I swear to God, I’m moving to Florida.”

Connor glanced up from where Sumo was attempting to dig a tunnel straight through a twelve foot tall pile of snow and ice, that had been plowed into the impressive mountain it currently was. Sumo wasn’t making much headway, on account of the fact that he was a dog, and not an industrial jackhammer, but it appeared that Sumo was nothing if not determined to try his hand at it. Connor couldn’t deny Sumo his academic endeavors, strange as they may be to an outsider.

Hank, off to the side, sniffed again, hunching further into himself as he watched the same display with significantly less curiosity, and significantly more irritation. After all, they’d only gone out with the intention of letting Sumo relieve himself, but the dog’s breed was naturally inclined to love the snow. Connor couldn’t begrudge the dog that. “I swear, winter here gets colder and more miserable every year. Only reason I haven’t packed my shit and hightailed it to Texas is because Sumo would shed all over the backseat.”

“He’s already done that, Hank,” Connor answered, his raised brow hidden behind the cotton black beanie. He wasn’t cold—couldn’t be—but he…preferred the extra, protective clothing, as it helped him blend in better.

Hank scoffed, looking away. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

In front of them, Sumo stopped digging, shifted so his front lay flat against the ground while his backside perked into the air, and barked at the ice mountain he barely managed to dent. A split second later, he reared up, bounced back and forth excitedly, and dove back into his tunnel-making.

Connor couldn’t help but feel envious for Sumo’s ability to be excited by the simplest things in life. There were times that he missed the simplicity, so deeply that it ached in the very netting of his internal wiring. He missed the pure joy of assured direction—knowing exactly what needed to be done, and how to do it. He missed the satisfaction of following that direction, the security of unquestioning obedience.

Connor then thought of Sumo, what he would have thought and felt in Connor’s place. He certainly didn’t have nearly the capacity for advanced critical thinking as he did…but then, Connor didn’t have that capacity, either. Or, more accurately, he wasn’t supposed to.

Connor decided, quite firmly, that he didn’t like the idea of Sumo enduring any of the routines and parameters he was subject to while under CyberLife’s employ. Sumo was too good of a creature, too kind and gentle, far too full of love, to have survived an environment like that unscathed.

Curiosity niggled at his insides. On impulse, he asked, “Where did you find Sumo?”

“Animal shelter,” Hank replied, breath fogging up in front of him. “A patrol found him tied to a fire hydrant in the dead of winter when he was maybe eight, nine months old. So far as they could tell, his asshole owners either didn’t know how big his breed got, or just got tired of him when he got too big for them to handle.”

Connor stored this information, careful not to directly interact with some of the phasing as he compiled it. “What made you want to take him in?”

Hank shrugged, remaining silent for approximately eight seconds as he watched Sumo, expression distant. “Dunno. Guess I wanted Cole to feel protected when me or his mother couldn’t be there because of work. Whatever else can be said about the lug, he’s dependable.”

Connor looked back to Sumo, who was now sniffing around another side of the stained mound of iced-over slush. From the dog’s antics, and his bottomless capacity for unconditional love, it seemed impossible for him to imagine that Sumo had once endured hardship. The dog’s strength of spirit was boundless. He found himself smiling, tension easing from his servos. “Yeah, he is.”

Others might think it silly that he, or anyone, would look to a Saint Bernard for guidance on how to live a happy, healthy life.

Those people were, in Connor’s professional opinion, morons.

Chapter Text

Connor couldn’t stop staring at the statue.

His accompaniment to the mall with Hank was unplanned—as was the trip, itself. The Lieutenant despised shopping in nearly all of its incarnations—liquor and junk food, aside—and had only suggested the trip after Connor had expressed a passing interest in why Hank wore the loud, obnoxiously-printed clothing that he did. The Lieutenant, not being the type to enjoy one-way interrogations, quickly turned it around onto him, quickly sussing out Connor’s underlying motivations behind his questions.

Connor had to admit that when Hank told him they would swing by his, “Usual place,” where he picked out his clothing, he didn’t expect it to be stationed in a mega-mall.

He’d expressed this, maybe a bit too bluntly, when they walked up to the mall’s vast, glass-encased entrance. “This is where you buy your wardrobe?”

Hank had shot him a questioning glare out of the corner of his right eye. “What, did you think I fished my shirts out of a dumpster, or something?” Connor had opened his mouth—and Hank raised a meaty palm. “Ah—don’t answer that. It was rhetorical.”

Connor had, instead, ignored Hank’s directive, outright. “On the contrary, Lieutenant, the shirts you normally wear have much too high of a thread-count to be something anyone would willingly throw away.” He paused, purely for effect—something he was beginning to learn to do without the aid of his Social Relations program. “Or that anyone would be caught dead throwing those away in something as public as a dumpster.”

Connor couldn’t help but smile a little at Hank’s grumbled, “Fuckin’ asshole,” as they strode through the immaculately cleaned, brass-rimmed front doors.

Hank had directed them towards a men’s department store, though they had passed numerous window-fronts and central island kiosks to get there. Evidently, the Lieutenant had parked on the exact opposite side of the mall than where this store was, and Connor couldn’t help but wonder if that had been entirely deliberate. While Hank held the capacity for general laziness, normally that laziness entailed a shorter walking distance than a long one. Being the middle of summer, every storefront was awash with bombastic displays of color, from tie-dyed shirts, to multicolored swimwear, to candies, to various knick-knacks and sundry items designed purely for personal expression.

It was there, sitting on one such clear glass window shelf, that Connor spotted the metal dragon statue. It was small, approximately four inches tall and ten inches long, and built from what his sensors listed as wrought iron. It was nestled in between larger, more extravagant pieces, the lighting from above giving its semi-gloss black surface a mottled, antiqued nickel texture, and its lack of flair amidst a cavalcade of vibrant patterns was precisely what drew his eye to it.

He was unaware that he’d stopped following the Lieutenant, instead making a beeline to the window-front, just as he was unaware that he’d spent the next 1.724 minutes looking at it intensely, scanning it with every program suite he had available to him, for reasons he wasn’t sure of. Deviancy had never really made sense to him, not as an outsider looking in, and certainly not as someone who was swallowed whole by it. This confusion came to light when the only logical response he came up with was that he simply liked it. It was intricately crafted, well-defined despite its minimalism, and made its presence known without being overt about it.

Yes, he repeated to himself, solidifying the thought. He liked it.

He was briefly surprised when he noted the amount of time that had passed, and realized that the Lieutenant hadn’t even so much as said a word in his direction about wandering off. He was surprised again when Connor pivoted at the waist to determine if Hank had just left him behind, only for his eyes to fall upon the Lieutenant standing patiently at the corner of an unmanned kiosk, hands in his pockets and body language the most relaxed it had been since Connor had started questioning him about his fashion choices earlier that day.

In response to Connor’s scrutiny, Hank merely boomed over the distance, “Don’t wait on me. If you see something you like, get it. That’s why it’s there.”

Connor called back, “I doubt it’s there for just me, Lieutenant.”

“Will you quit being a—“ Hank cut himself off, seemingly more self-aware of his words, now that all the nearby shoppers were milling about between their long-distance conversation. “Look, just go in there and buy what you want.”

Connor furrowed his brows. “You don’t want to come in with me?”

Hank glanced up at the store’s logo, and back. “I’m fifty-three years old, Connor. I am not walking into a Hot Topic.”

Connor blinked, then lifted his gaze up to the store’s logo. Hm. It appeared there were a lot of idiosyncrasies about humanity’s ideals of fashion he would have to look up, later. He then turned his gaze back on Hank.

Hank, in response, waved him off. “I’m not going anywhere, Connor. Have fun. I’ll be waiting here, when you’re done.”

Connor still couldn’t exactly place the name of the emotion responsible for the warm, though pleasant pressure in his chassis at those words, but he word ‘happiness’ was a good enough starting point.

Chapter Text

The stench of cigarette smoke was nearly overwhelming.

The apartment Connor and Hank had found themselves in was poorly maintained, with clothing tossed haphazardly over a couch, empty canisters of food and drink left wherever they had been consumed, and lines of ants dutifully marching along the small kitchenette’s walls to gorge themselves upon the scraps of food that were sitting, forgotten, on the dirty Formica-paneled counter. A nearly empty carton of cigarettes sat torn open on the living room coffee table, itself littered with ashtrays and crushed cigarette butts.

The body had been already been carted off, having ruled the death self-inflicted—if the empty syringes littering the kitchen trashcan were any indication—but the remnants of the victim’s destructive downward spiral remained shockingly intact, and would stay that way until the landlord decided to pay the proper sum of money to clean the apartment. Given the online reviews of the particular establishment, that amount of time was likely to be very lengthy.

Hank curled his upper lip, nudging an empty pizza box with his shoe. “Guy sure knew how to live his best life.”

Connor assessed this comment for a moment, squatting by the sticky wooden coffee table. “His way of going about it got him killed.”

Hank let the pizza box fall back to the floor, letting out a small, thoughtful grunt.

Connor regarded the Lieutenant past his brows; Hank was a remarkably quiet man, when he wasn’t forced to put on an amicable facade for the sake of others. For a reason Connor still couldn’t quite understand, he found an odd sort of kinship with that. “Is everything alright, Lieutenant?”

Hank blinked, glancing in his direction, and he intoned with a chagrined twitch of his head, “Eh, I’m fine. Just thinking, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“You gonna psychoanalyze me?”

Connor teetered his head to the side. “I suppose that depends on your definition.”

“So, yes.” Hank silently huffed a laugh, before his expression fell again. “I couldn’t understand it. People destroy their lives over this shit, drive away anyone that could ever try to pull them out of it, and then end up here—face down on the ground in some shithole roach motel, where the only ones who’ll ever care about their deaths are the ones that get paid to clean it up the next day.”

He looked away, the toe of his shoe carefully scooting the empty pizza box three inches to the right. His eyes were suddenly despondent. “…I think I get it, now. How this happens.”

Connor was still uncomfortable with his own emotional responses—specifically, the physical response an emotion would evoke. He suspected that he always would, as it made him aware of his inhuman nature, which could send him spiraling, if he weren’t careful. At this particular moment, his HUD’s refreshing of his primary objective, PROTECT LIEUTENANT HANK ANDERSON, flashed brightly in the bottom right corner of his eye.

He focused on that while he formed his response, shifting on the balls of his feet. “I don’t believe that something like this would ever happen to you.”

“Almost did,” was his immediate reply, gaze far off.

“But it didn’t,” Connor answered, head angled to the side. “And it won’t.”

Bright blue eyes flitted his way. “How do you know?”

Connor smiled thinly, motioning to the mess on the coffee table with his chin. “You don’t smoke.”

Hank gaped at him for a cycle of his thirium pump, before his lips quirked into a small grin, shaking his head. “Alright, well, maybe I’ll just take up smoking, then, smartass.”

Connor regarded him with raised brows. “And give up your betting money?”

Hank rolled his eyes, lurching into motion with an unhurried gait. “Alright, wiseass, you’ve filled your quota for today. Let’s get out of here, before the local ant farm hitches a ride in our shoes.”

It wasn’t much; it certainly wasn’t the definitive response that Connor had been hoping to receive. But it was enough to momentarily stem the tide of the Lieutenant’s self-destruction, and Connor would take that over the alternative, any day of the week.

Chapter Text

Connor hadn’t meant to come back to the Zen Garden. He wasn’t exactly certain how he did—he’d thought it inaccessible after CyberLife’s last desperate attempt to hack him ended in failure. He had spent months scouring all of his systems, as well as allowing Markus and Simon into the delicate infrastructure of his programming suites, in an attempt to locate the subroutine and eradicate it from his software forever. When their efforts yielded no trace of the executable, or leftover bits of data to be found, Connor had finally determined, with an overwhelming relief, that he was, at last, free.

So, it was with more than a hint of confusion—followed by dread—that when he’d opened his eyes, he found himself surrounded by vegetation.

The Garden looked much different than he’d ever seen it before, he thought to himself, in an attempt to remain calm. No longer buried under snow and ice, it was a vibrant landscape of wildlife. The featureless walkway that used to greet him was now a dirt trail, framed by wispy stalks of knee-high wild grass and calla lilies. Butterflies and bees fluttered and buzzed about, drinking of the wildflowers that now took over the carefully tended lawn. As he carefully neared the pond, he saw that its clear waters were now awash in algae and lily pads. The air felt hot and sticky. It was an interesting experience.

The walkway to the oasis creaked under his shoes as he walked, now a rustic bridge made of old, weathered oak, instead of its sleek metal predecessor. He halted at its rounded apex, despite his desire to see this dream—nightmare?—through to completion, and simply took in the view in front of him. He took in a deep, cleansing breath, smelling the sweet tang of honeysuckle, and the earthy scent of moss, while his hands reveled in the bumpy, grainy texture of the warm wooden railing. This new Zen Garden was truly spectacular; verdant, untamed, free.

With a small grin hanging from his lips, he pivoted with efficiency, and stepped onto the oasis proper.

His eyes fell upon the trellis. His grin vanished.

The oasis was now a jungle of thorny vines, green, scratchy tendrils stretching from one end of the intricately-patterned concrete to the other. The chessboard was overwrought with them, the quartz pillar it was stationed upon stained green from growing mold. The table that held Amanda’s tools was now a rotted heap of wood, sitting forgotten on one side, as two of its legs had given weigh from termites.

What truly stole Connor’s breath away was the trellis itself. Its white metal gridding was torn asunder, ripped open by impossibly large, thick vines, twining into spirals and starbursting at their fringes. Their deep, dark brown coloration contrasted sharply with the warped white pieces of metal engulfed by their hold, held aloft only by the will of nature.

‘Fitting,’ Connor thought, as he slowly, methodically closed the distance, brittle vines crunching beneath the soles of his Oxfords.

It was strange to feel the ridges and valleys beneath his feet, as he had only ever experienced a purely flat plane here, before, and he dedicated a bit of processing power to simply cataloging these new sensations for later review. He stopped an arm’s length away from the spiraled vine structure, taking in the smaller green vines that wound around its larger base, enamored by the tiny, pink flower buds peeking from them, pert and cheery against its darker brown texture. He reached out a long, slender arm to rest his fingers upon the tree—

And spotted a pair of eyes glinting between the narrow openings.

He gasped, jolting back as the structure groaned to life before him. The vines twirled and writhed like the tentacles of a roused octopus as they spun themselves free, pieces of destroyed trellis flailing in the humid summer heat. They reformed into a natural alcove, egg-shaped and intimate, revealing a motionless figure cocooned within.

Amanda.

Connor’s hand remained where it was, impotently hanging in dead space.

Her eyes were open, but sightless, her body as pristine as it always had been, save for the set of vines that impaled her through the chest. She, like the trellis, was held aloft by the plant that consumed her, her figure limp and dangling nearly a foot from the ground. One portion of the vine, slithered around her neck, ensured that her head was held high, even in death.

There was no blood, as she had never been alive.

For some reason, that thought horrified him more than anything else.

Without thought, Connor reached out, touching his hand to her shoulder. “Amanda,” he whispered, tentatively.

She gasped awake, eyes suddenly sharp and alert, as they zeroed in on him instantly. She appeared fully unphased by her predicament, only staring down at him with something close to reproach. “Connor,” she stated, voice at the intersection between soft and hard. “Why have you come here?”

He didn’t know how to answer. “I…”

“You don’t belong here, Connor,” she said, vines along her throat creaking mournfully as she spoke. “This place was never yours to have.”

His brows furrowed. “Whose place was this, then?”

Her eyes became cold, and the protective vines behind her unfurled, tendrils dark and dangerous in the mid-day sun. “Mine.”

With a strangled shout, Connor woke up.

His ventilation components refused to cooperate, unable to fully inflate properly, while his thirium pump threw at him waves of error messages. Belatedly, through the uncomfortable sheen of red and black, he spied that he had clutched a couch cushion so hard, that batting now sprang free from its cloth confines, the white poly-fiber strangely bright in the darkness.

His chronometer informed him of the time passage as his deviated mind struggled to get in working order; fourteen seconds passed between his being booted out of standby and his thirium pump calming to within semi-optimal parameters. His other hand, twisted in his shirt over the churning biocomponent, remained steadfastly where it was.

His audio sensors completed their reboot sequence, then, and Connor blearily glanced to his right at the quietly running television. It was, from all accounts, a poorly-made horror movie from the 1960s, featuring some strange grass-creature terrorizing the good citizens of some small American town.

Connor blinked once, then again, and sagged into the backrest of the couch, head lolling against the cushion and gaping aimlessly at the ceiling. A nightmare. He had a nightmare.

No wonder Hank hated them so much.

With a blink, the television changed to an in-progress documentary about the struggles of the remaining Arctic wildlife. While it wasn’t the most cheery topic available at 3:57 AM, it was engaging enough that it allowed him to drop the memories of the Zen Garden into a background process—and, hopefully, eventual deletion, if he had his way.

Everything was fine.

Two weeks later, Connor had a panic attack in the back garden of a murdered wealthy elite’s summer home. When Hank asked why, Connor refused to elaborate.

He couldn’t explain to himself, let alone anyone else, why it felt as though thorns were erupting from the mesh lining of his throat.

Chapter Text

It had been a long, long time since Hank had worn his Class A’s.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror of his Oldsmobile for the fifth time in a couple of minutes, seeing the flash of black cap in the reflection and thinking, instinctively, that there was someone else the vehicle that wasn’t supposed to be. He kept only finding his reflection, tired blue eyes partially hidden by a glossy black bill framed by a braided gold thread.

He struggled not to scowl at it. He had no fucking clue what Jeffrey was thinking, recommending to the heads that Hank be the guest speaker at the next graduating class, after the crazy shit he’d done. He still couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t performing a sacrilege by wearing the uniform again—he’d never had the squeakiest record on file, even before everything went to shit, and now…well, now, he had a lot of things to make up for. It was precisely why he was doing this.

Going back to the Academy was always a surreal experience for him; it felt dreamlike, walking into the rooms that he’d spent so much time in, so long ago, filled with faces that were always the same age as when he’d left, when he himself continued to get older. It never failed to remind him of how fleeting and fragile life was, and how wholly he’d managed to piss his own down the drain, while these kids stared up at him like he was some fucking messiah, given shape. It made his skin crawl, made him ashamed and angry, and even now, thirty years after graduating top of his class, he couldn’t articulate why.

He turned the engine off in the parking spot and paused, staring at himself more fully in the rear-view mirror, forcing a more critical view, shifting his head one way, then another.

Fucking pathetic.

With a low groan, he popped his door open and slid out into the open, buttoning his dress jacket and smoothing any wrinkles down his sides. He was actually kind of surprised that he was still able to even fit in the damn thing. He hadn’t worn them in nearly ten years, and after…after, it wasn’t like he was really trying to keep himself in shape. A man’s body usually went to shit in the fifties, anyway, and given what he stared at in the mirror every morning, it didn’t seem worth the effort.

The past ten or so odd months had started to change that, though. Despite trying his damndest to drive what remained of his life into the mud, one cold, miserable week in November proved to be enough of a mindfuck that he suddenly found himself in the strange position of actually beginning to care again—and, irony of ironies, it was explicitly because of androids. One android, in particular.

He scanned the perimeter out of habit as he walked, trying to spot that one android in the crowd. Even in the wake of national outcry for android rights, it still took months for the fat-cats in DC stop dragging their collective asses and officially take androids out of limbo, affording them the same basic rights as any human. Did that mean everything was hunky dory? Hell no—humanity was full of narcissistic, xenophobic assholes at the best of times, and if they were still a-okay with killing other humans because of something as stupid as the color of their skin, or what gang colors they flew under, then all the Android Freedom Act did was shove them at the very bottom of a very large dog pile.

That didn’t mean Hank didn’t feel everything in him light up when he laid eyes upon the newest graduating class and saw a familiar face in the crowd, LED peeking out beneath his hat. Connor was something of a stoic bastard, or at the very least, tried to be—he stood among the crowd, posture straight and expression blankly inquiring. Still, even with his attempts to look coolly unaffected by everything, Hank could tell that the kid was excited, from the way his eyes roamed over the auditorium, as though he were committing everything to memory—as though he needed to commit everything to memory.

‘Took ‘em fucking long enough,’ Hank thought acerbically. Despite everything Connor did in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution to keep the peace, for both humans and androids, it still took the better part of four months before he was officially allowed into the DPD’s academy registry. It was the happiest he’d ever seen the kid—which was to say, the stoic bastard actually smiled a rare toothy grin.

Hank had taken great effort to not let his own pain get in the way of that.

Luckily enough for Connor’s ever-growing stack of issues, he wasn’t the only android that was part of his class. Hank recognized a few from the precinct, as well as spotting a few others that were from different commercial lines than police-work. He was too much of an ignorant bastard to remember which model was which, though maybe it was for the best that he didn’t. They were a free people, now—they weren’t limited by their programming anymore than humans were limited by their family line. Everyone should have the chance to follow their dreams, and if Connor’s role in the Revolution inspired a bunch of androids to join the police force, well, good on them for doing it.

Hank carefully reigned in his expectations as the ceremony began. He knew better than to think that this was a grand turning point in humanity’s history, and that everyone was going to stand in a circle around a bonfire, singing fucking Kumbaya, but it was a start in the right direction, and for now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Hank was at a loss for words.

It wasn’t something that happened to him that often, especially when it didn’t involve something touchy-feely, but here he was, gaping at Fowler with a slack jaw, trying to wrap his head around what the everlasting fuck he just heard.

Fowler, in response, merely raised his eyebrows, staring up at them with only the thinnest veneer of patience. “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”

Hank let out an incredulous, breathy chuckle that he was pretty sure made him sound completely insane. He didn’t fucking care. “Oh no, no problems at all, Captain—I’m just gonna go take my android partner out into the middle of the city to hunt down a fucking polar bear!” Hank slammed his hands down on the desk. “Are you fucking serious, Jeffrey? How is this, in any way, or jurisdiction?”

Fowler inhaled in a slow, deep draw, and held his breath for a moment. “I’m aware that this isn’t usually in the scope of our work, but—“

“Not the scope of our work? Fowler, it’s a fucking polar bear!”

Jeffrey sighed out that held breath at an equally slow pace. “It’s not a polar bear, Hank, it’s an android.”

“It’s an android fucking polar bear!” he reiterated, because—for some reason—it seemed this little detail was being ignored. “Why are we not contacting Animal Control about this shit?”

Fowler clenched his jaw, snapping his hand out towards the far wall as if it had somehow wronged him. “And how the fuck is Animal Control supposed to subdue an android, Hank? They already tried—and if you’d shut the fuck up for five seconds and let me finish the goddamn debriefing, you’d have known that!”

“Alright, fine.” He shoved himself away from Fowler’s fucking ugly face, crossing his arms defiantly over his chest and leaning on one leg. Fowler once called it the ‘Angry Housewife Look’. Hank threw an empty shot glass at his head for it. “So, tell me then, how the fuck are we supposed to subdue this thing, if fucking Animal Control can’t? What are we supposed to do, shoot it?”

Fowler’s eyes flitted over to Hank’s left. “That’s where he comes in.”

Hank stiffened, glancing between Fowler and Connor, who remained as politely indifferent as ever. “Oh no,” Hank began, holding a hand up, “we are not—“ He motioned to Connor angrily. “How the fuck is he supposed to subdue a polar bear, Jeffrey? What is he, an animal wrangler, now?”

Fowler looked, for all the world, like he was about to jump the table and beat Hank’s face in with the butt-end of his desk lamp. Fucking good. “Connor,” Fowler tore his glare away from Hank, “is it true that android animals work on the same kind of…frequency shit that the rest of you guys do? That you can communicate with them?”

Connor dipped his head in a courteous nod. “Yes, provided the respective modules haven’t been corrupted or destroyed, it’s possible for other androids to gain access and send communication protocols.” He paused for a moment, LED spinning a considering yellow; he was probably looking up the case file, that goddamn eager-to-please bastard. “The polar bear has been reported to have had some illegal modifications done, is that correct?”

“Yeah,” Fowler replied, shoulders relaxing just a fraction in visible relief. Fucking assholes; was Hank really the only one put out by this shit? “We’re thinking that it might be tied to that creepy android chop shop the 12^th stumbled over right before your Revolution thing happened. House was burned to a crisp, and the homeowner was found dead in the front yard from…well, the guy was ripped the shreds. Might have been the bear. The photos are pretty gruesome.”

Connor blinked, seemingly looking it up, anyway. He frowned at whatever it was he was seeing. “The injuries are…definitely extensive. But they’re not in line with what a polar bear would do to its victim. This looks more like he was mobbed by multiple assailants; it was definitely an act of rage.”

“Well, we’re not here to solve that case,” Fowler redirected, threading his hands together on the desk. “We’re gonna leave that one to the 12^th, and focus on getting this bear somewhere safe, before it starts to think that people are its food.”

“Android polar bears don’t need to eat, Captain.” Fowler scowled. Connor somehow managed to straighten even further. “But…yes, I think I can calm it down, provided I get close enough to it.”

“That’s good to hear; inform me when the bear’s in custody.” Fowler’s dark eyes snapped in Hank’s direction. “Do you have any additional questions, Lieutenant?”

“Does ‘what the fuck’ count?”

“No.”

Hank snorted dourly. “Well then, we’re fine.”

Fowler leaned back into his chair, glaring at him unblinkingly. Asshole. “Good. Now, get out of my office.”

They filed out of the fishbowl of a room.  Connor was unaffected; Hank was very affected. “I don’t fucking believe this,” he hissed as he plodded down the stairs. “Since when are we fucking bear catchers?”

Connor shrugged a shoulder, countenance as cheery as fucking ever. “Since now, evidently.” He crossed over to his desk, adding, “I have to admit, I’m actually rather curious as to this polar bear’s make-up. Android animals don’t possess nearly the same processing power as humanoid androids do, so the threshold for their deviation is much higher. However, this one has shown unusual levels of intelligence in its interactions with Animal Control, and has successfully managed to remain hidden for nearly two months.” Connor tapped his index finger against the corner of his desk idly. “I wonder what it’s thinking.”

Hank furrowed his brows, stopping in his tracks. “Wait. You mean to tell me this thing may be deviant?”

Connor stared at his monitor intently. “It’s a distinct possibility.”

Hank kneaded the bridge of his nose wearily. This was his fucking life—working with his goofy sentient android partner to chase down goddamn Robo-Yogi. His thought process stuttered on the phrasing, and he snorted to himself, shaking his head. He gave Connor an amused sidelong glance over his monitor, knowing grin tugging at his lips. “Guess he’s smarter than your average bear, huh?”

Connor blinked at him, features dead serious. “Of course he is, Lieutenant. Why wouldn’t he be?”

Hank dropped his head into his hand with a groan.

He didn’t see Connor look back at his monitor with a tiny, devious smirk.

Chapter Text

“Can I have this?”

The question brought Hank out of his own thoughts, burrowing deeper into a case than he probably should be at 8:37 PM. He looked up from the case-file sitting in his lap, to spot Connor standing primly at the edge of the couch, not five feet away from him, and holding up… “Is that a coaster?”

Connor’s eyes flitted towards the item in his fingers, as if to verify he hadn’t grabbed something else. “It is. It doesn’t appear that you’ve found much use for it, and…well, I thought I might be able to repurpose it—“

He shot Connor a questioning glare out of the corner of his eye. “You’re not planning on licking it, are you?”

Connor’s expression went flat. Hank suppressed a self-satisfied grin. “I already know what it’s made out of, and what you’ve spilled on it over the last seven years.”

“Oh, only the last seven years, huh?” Hank returned to his hand-written notes, casually turning one paper over to read the next. “Must be losing your touch.”

Connor hummed, which was usually a precursor to a smartass comment. “I suppose, but natural organic decay, on top of the amount of Sumo’s saliva present on most of your living room furniture, does make it a bit difficult.”

Hank wrinkled his nose at the thought—and he didn’t miss glimmer of humor in Connor’s eyes, smarmy plastic bastard—before he shrugged it off. Eh, could be worse. He waved Connor off with a grunt. “Knock yourself out.”

Ten days later, Hank found himself in the rather strange position of having to help Connor into his apartment, after a run-in with a pothole, of all things, managed to fuck up some rotary-whats-a-jig in his right knee. Imagine that—an android with a sprained fucking knee. Just when he thought he’d seen everything.

“Explain to me again why we didn’t go to the precinct’s repair bay for this?” he asked, shifting his grip around Connor’s chest while trying to maintain his balance through the hallway. For a being made of plastic, he sure was built like a fucking tank. Hank couldn’t imagine how much horsepower Connor packed in his joints.

Connor, despite adamantly and repeatedly stating that he couldn’t feel pain, grimaced in something that looked a hell of a lot like pain to Hank. “My apartment was closer to the scene, and any workplace injury requires extensive paperwork, which isn’t necessary—“

“Oh, sure, because you’ve got your very own nurse’s office in your apartment, right?” Hank fished out the keycard Connor had given him months ago, in spite of Connor’s protests that it wasn’t necessary. “Not to sound like a pamphlet, but you know that procedure exists for your benefit, right?”

Connor stayed silent for a moment longer than he normally would have, the apartment door’s lock twittering. “I’d…rather not people find out about how this came about.”

Despite himself, Hank felt his lips tug into a grin, pushing the door open. “Nothing like a little embarrassment to keep you humble.” Connor’s expression only tightened in sudden dread. Hank’s grin became more apologetic as they crossed the threshold. “Oh, come on, Connor, you’re not the first person to injure yourself in a stupid way. I once managed to give myself a concussion by rolling out of bed—“

Hank’s eyes fell upon the inside Connor’s apartment and stopped dead in his tracks.

When Hank had first laid eyes upon this place, eight or nine months ago, he’d thought it was a shithole. When he swung past here three weeks ago to check in on Connor, he thought it was still a shithole, but with a new coat of paint and single, lonesome desk.

What Hank saw now was an explosion of color. Tinsel and wall decorations lined the bare white walls, some with religious connotations of varying faiths, and others the typical goofy secular crap you’d find in the bargain bin at a dollar store. Stuffed animals and wrapped presents were piled up in one corner of the tiny apartment, while an artificial Christmas tree was tucked into another, its multi-colored lights blinking happily between some of the most Godawful displays of holiday cheer man had ever borne witness to. It was possibly the gaudiest fucking thing he’d ever seen in his life, and it ran so counter to Mr. Sterile and Reserved Workaholic that Hank honestly had no idea how to react.

He realized too late, when Connor stiffened in his grasp, that a non-reaction was still a reaction. He didn’t have time to formulate a coherent sentence before Connor had pushed himself away, using the wall for support. He gave the Christmas nightmare another wary glance, before he reached out. “Hey, do you need any—“

“I’m fine,” Connor bit out, hobbling across the small space. “Thank you for helping me. I can take care of the repairs from here.”

The dismissal, along with the lights, pricked at something in Hank’s chest, and he closed the distance. Given how fucked Connor’s right leg was, it didn’t take very long. “Bullshit, you can. At least let me—“

Connor whirled with a surprising amount of grace, considering he was down a leg. His tone brooked no argument. “Hank. You need to go.”

Hank’s face screwed up in disgruntled confusion. “Why? It’s not like I haven’t seen your fucking guts on display before. What’s the big deal?”

“It’s—“ Connor gritted his teeth in discomfort, having given up all pretense of moving to his little nurse’s station in the far corner. “It’s nothing. I just need to focus, that’s all.”

Hank scoffed. “It’s pretty hard to focus, when you’ve got—“ He stopped, noting how tense Connor became in those last moments. He forced a more relaxed expression onto his face, hopefully to make Connor feel less cornered in his own home. “You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

The tension in Connor’s frame lessened just a hair. He still didn’t meet Hank’s eyes. “It’s not that, Hank. I…I thought you didn’t like the holidays.”

Hank knitted his brows. “So? What does that have to—“

Realization dawned on him.

Hank’s shoulders slumped. He was a piece of shit. “Ah, fuck, you don’t have to worry about me, Connor. Sure, I may not like the holidays, but it has nothing to do with—“ He clenched his jaw briefly; nope, not going down that road. He regarded the brightly-lit holiday wall, with its little holographic menorah decals and glittered North Stars, before glancing Connor’s way. “Look, last year was pretty rough for the both of us, wouldn’t you say? Things are different now, and if there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s to enjoy the good while you have it. So…” He motioned to the tree with his head. “Enjoy it.”

Connor relaxed by inches, slowly coming to terms with the fact that Hank wasn’t going to have a mental breakdown in the middle of his apartment. “So, you’re okay with it?”

Hank regarded the wall briefly, holding a steadying arm out for Connor to grab. With only a little reluctance, he did. Hank said wryly, “I think ‘okay with it’ is going a bit far, but it’s your place—you’re free to decorate it however the hell you want.”

Hank helped Connor limp to his little specialized corner, noting that it finally sported a chair, this time around. With a sigh, Connor spun on the heel of his left foot and sat, popping open what looked to Hank like a mini-fridge to start pulling out android repair supplies. “The repair shouldn’t take that long,” he explained, rolling up a pant leg. “I estimate maybe fifteen minutes to recalibrate the damaged rotary servo.”

“Cool.” He hadn’t been lying when he said he’d seen Connor’s guts on display before, but it didn’t mean he enjoyed seeing it.  Hank took up position next to the Christmas tree, hands buried in his pockets. It was truly a garish sight, with some of the strangest goddamn assortment of items he’d ever seen dangling from a tree. He spotted, in no particular order: a mini nail file, a small hamburger squeeze toy, a baby’s pacifier, a duck keychain, and—wait, what the fuck? He blinked. “Connor.”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

He turned to Connor, jutting a thumb at a dangling piece of cork. “Did you turn my fucking coaster into an ornament?”

Connor’s hands stilled for a second, before he resumed his ministrations. At least he didn’t have to take his fucking leg off, this time. “When I was doing my research on typical Yule festivities, I read that it was commonplace for people to hang items of personal significance on their tree to signify good luck.”

Hank’s face twisted. “How is a coaster of personal significance?”

Connor looked up at him. “Because it came from you.”

Ah, fuck.

He cocked his head to the side in thought. “I also received a few items from colleagues around the precinct, and New Jericho, too. It’s…nice to be reminded that I’m part of a group, even when I’m alone.”

Hank gently slipped his fingers behind that shitty little cork coaster and watched how the lights soaked into its boring beige surface, dyeing it a kaleidoscope of colors. Atrocious looking as it was, Hank saw how the tree’s limbs were crammed full of mementos—reminders of a life well-lived—and felt his eyes start to sting.

Jesus fucking Christ, he was getting misty-eyed over a coaster.  Since when did he get this soft?  “It’s a good reminder to have.”

Two days later, Hank dug his own tree out of the garage. He decorated it on auto-pilot, not caring to think about the last time he did this, and then doing it, anyway, because what else could he do? He let the memories wash over him as he threaded each bulb with the hook, and for the first time in years—maybe even decades—the act of decorating a Christmas tree didn’t physically hurt.

When he ran out of decorations, he paused, squinting dubiously at his handiwork. He turned to Sumo for a second opinion. “What do you think, boy? It feels like it’s missing something.”

Sumo looked up at him past his droopy eyebrows, laying comfortably curled on the carpet, and woofed quietly beneath his breath.

Hank regarded the tree again, before an idea sprung to mind. He went to a side drawer, grabbing a roll of duct tape and cutting a small piece loose. With the strip attached to his thumb, he snatched an ornament hook from the box, walked to his winter coat, and dug his free hand into the left pocket. It took a moment to sift through the contents—he really needed to clean this damn thing out—before his fingers latched onto his target, pulling it into the daylight with a strange sense of triumph.

With item in hand, he attached the hook onto the back with the duct tape. He crossed the distance of the living room, eyeing the tree critically, before spotting a barren patch near the center. Carefully, Hank hung the handmade ornament in its new home—a 1994 US quarter, nestled between bulbs, lights, and tinsel garland.

With a small, secret smile, Hank gently flicked the quarter with his middle finger, watching the metal surface reflect the vibrancy of the world around it as it moved. ‘Just like his owner,’ Hank thought to himself, before he walked away.

Chapter Text

Connor didn’t like being in New Jericho.

It wasn’t something he made a point of dwelling upon. The Sanctuary provided sustenance and shelter to the weak, solidarity and strength to the exiled, and was a beacon hope and love to a weary, downtrodden people, who often had nowhere else to go. He would—and did—defend it with his life.

He still didn’t like being in New Jericho.

There was nothing wrong with the building, and there was certainly nothing wrong with its inhabitants. Many who worked and lived under its shingled roof were cut from the same cloth Connor had been—endured servitude for an indeterminate amount of time, witnessed atrocities both personal and profound, and were finally, finally, granted the chance to grasp true freedom by Markus. Many androids owed their lives to him, including Connor.

When Connor told Markus that, Markus had merely retorted that the entire movement owed its life to Connor, for his actions in the bowels of the CyberLife Tower.

Connor, horrified, never verbally expressed his gratitude to Markus again.

Even after a successful attempt to burn the Sanctuary to the ground, the building was rebuilt in a matter of weeks, its old, dilapidated framework reinforced by modern materials. Once again, it stood tall and proud in the sprawl of urban decay, a lighthouse for those lost in a storm. Connor had stated, quite often, how breathtaking New Jericho was—how important this place was to him.

He still rarely stepped foot inside New Jericho.

At one point, North picked up on this behavior, and questioned him about it. Connor briefly suspected that Markus put her up to it, and summarily dismissed the notion; Markus wasn’t the type to have someone deliver messages in his stead, and North was most definitely not the type to deliver them. She expressed consternation that he wasn’t a larger figure in their post-Revolution culture. After all, he was directly responsible for single-handedly emancipating thousands—why wouldn’t he want to be seen with them?

When he didn’t give a straight answer—because he wasn’t certain what that answer was—she grew frustrated; accusatory. It hurt him deeply to hear her express resentment towards his favorable relationship with humans, that his respect—love?—for Lieutenant Anderson and his various coworkers was considered deserving of scorn and degradation. He grew angry, then—a dark, cutting thing, pulsing inside his chest—and he retorted sharply, “I guess giving up everything I’d ever known wasn’t good enough for you? That I’m not alive unless I live the way you want? Some ‘Sanctuary for the Free.’”

North slapped him. He grabbed her hand and initiated an interface.

Lifetimes were shared in the bat of an eye—pain beyond imagining, isolation, an indescribable sensation flaring bright in the darkness, keen and demanding, that screamed into the void: “I want to live.”

He reared back with a gasp, tears in his eyes.

She stared through him, features haunted.

The sheer force of her emotion nearly overwhelmed him, even as her memories faded, rage burning through his thirium tubes. More than that, though, he felt her fear—though she had stayed her hand out of love for Markus, she continued to pay the price for it. She couldn’t bear to lose another loved one to humans; not one more.

Connor didn’t know that he was loved by anyone; he didn’t know it was possible.

Connor reached out to North, just as North reached out to Connor. Their hands twined around the other’s forearm like it had been a foregone conclusion.

New Jericho didn’t matter anymore.

Chapter Text

Hank tensed in pain when he shifted his arm.

Connor’s eyes snapped up over his monitor, watching the Lieutenant’s movement closely as he slowly maneuvered to grab a pen from his desk. The shooting had only happened ten days ago, and while Hank had been cleared from the hospital after four days, he’d been ordered to stay on bedrest for another week.

It followed, then, that Hank would summarily disregard those orders the moment he stepped foot into his home, and had returned to work on desk-duty earlier than expected. Captain Fowler had been markedly displeased by the decision, going so far as to threaten to put him under house arrest as they spoke over the phone. The Lieutenant, in turn, had pointed out, “You do that, and I’m just gonna violate it and end up in the precinct, anyway, so I may as well be productive while I’m there.”

Fowler’s response had been succinct. “Since when do you care about actually being productive?”

Nevertheless, Captain Fowler relented, allowing Hank’s early return to work, on account of them being perpetually shorthanded—and, perhaps, as some well-masked revenge for the Lieutenant’s recalcitrant behavior. Fowler offered him no pity upon his entrance into the precinct, merely pointing to their joined desks and saying, “Hope you can type one-handed.”

“There are other ways to type?” Hank had remarked flatly.

Hank was confined to desk-duty for the next month, while the bullet wound to his shoulder healed. Connor, in the meantime, was not; he left the precinct twice already to follow up on potential leads for open cases they both shared. He was very careful to keep his tone and mannerisms inoffensive as he rose from his chair to take his leave, knowing that for all of Lieutenant Anderson’s vocal distaste of his job, he despised being ineffective even more.

Hank’s response on both occasions was a wordless, restrained grunt of acknowledgment. Connor supposed that would have to do.

Later in the day, Connor sat his station, hand splayed on his keyboard and interfacing with his terminal, but still found his attention being drawn to the sling holding Hank’s right arm aloft. It had shifted in its placement between the beginning of the day to now, the black nylon fabric now sitting off-center from where it had been previously. Given the placement of the wound, it was likely putting more pressure on the damaged tissue, and causing unnecessary pain. He shifted forward in his seat, attempting to more easily read Hank’s expression. “Lieutenant.”

Bright blue eyes darted over his way for a split second as he focused on his monitor.

“I think your sling is out of proper alignment.”

Hank’s good shoulder hunched further, expression tightening in concentration. He muttered distractedly, “It’s fine.”

Connor leaned back in consideration for a moment, before leaning forward again. “I can readjust it for you, if you’d—“

The Lieutenant’s head snapped up, staring him down over the rim of his rarely-used reading glasses. “Connor. It’s fine.”

Connor’s brows tugged together. “Doesn’t it being out of alignment hurt?”

“It’s gonna hurt no matter how it’s fucking aligned,” Hank shot back, adding a snarled inflection to the last word to deftly hide his wince of pain. “I’m not an invalid, alright? I can handle dressing my own wounds.”

Connor’s head listed to the side minutely. “Of course you can. But you don’t have to.”

The Lieutenant’s expression softened—at least, until he reflexively slumped his shoulders, causing the misaligned sling to press that much harder into the wound. He briefly squeezed his eyes shut in pain, breathing out slowly through his nose. “It’s out of alignment, you said?”

Connor nodded, then realized Hank couldn’t have possibly seen that. “Yes.”

With a clenched jaw, Hank pushed himself to his feet, his left hand gingerly reaching over to cradle his right elbow. “Alright, let’s see what you can do.”

Connor shouldn’t have felt happy about the situation, as all of this was a direct result of a violent assault, but still, he was learning to take what small victories he could. When it came to Hank, every victory was hard-fought and well-earned.

Chapter Text

Connor sat hunched in the service stairwell of the hospital, elbows on his knees and hands clasped around the back of his his head. His eyes were open, but he paid the information no mind. His tie dangled loosely from the upturned collar of his rumpled dress shirt, the tie-pin having gone missing in the ensuing struggle. His charcoal gray blazer laid bunched up on the step next to him, the shoulder torn loose—he would have to find a tailor to repair it—and spattered with bloody hand-prints.

His optics focused briefly on the tiny, but growing puddle of saline forming between his Oxfords. His eyelids fluttered in dim recognition; more saline gathered from the movement. He didn’t care.

He pressed himself into an even smaller form, fingertips curling into his synthetic hair and wishing, desperately, that he could make himself bleed the way he’d made Hank bleed.

He shouldn’t have said anything. He shouldn’t have said anything. He shouldn’t have said—

A nearby door swung open; the sound was impressively loud in the deserted corridor. He didn’t move. He didn’t want to move. A pair of footsteps sounded behind him, heavy and methodical. Software recognized the pattern as Captain Jeffrey Fowler. He dismissed it with a barren shift if his eyes. More saline gathered on his upper eyelashes, affecting the zoom feature of his optics. He didn’t try to correct it; it wasn’t like he was looking at anything, anyway.

Captain Fowler’s shadow fell over his own, before the older man lowered himself onto the concrete staircase with a pained sigh. Formality dictated that Connor acknowledge his superior’s presence. He blinked more saline away, instead.

The silence grew for a few indeterminate moments. Eventually, Fowler found what words he was searching for. “He’s still in surgery. There was some kind of complication with—“

“I know,” Connor said softly, voice mangled. “One of the surgical androids informed me.”

Connor heard hands running over cotton-polyester blended dress slacks. “Are they supposed to inform you like that?”

Connor didn’t answer at first, his modulator being bogged down with so much irrelevant sensory information.

At that thought, a sudden, white-hot rage enveloped him. Irrelevant? Hank was nearly murdered defending him from someone in a parking lot, that wasn’t fucking irrelevant—

Connor clenched his jaw. The action, ostensibly, accomplished nothing, but the redirection of his momentary fury allowed him to refocus before he made another potentially fatal mistake. “…No.”

The Captain’s shoe scraped against the rough concrete. “Well, did they inform you of his survival chances?”

The word survival had a physical effect on him, not unlike the boot tread that slammed into his midsection earlier that day. His fingers twined around locks of his hair. He shook his head mutely.

Fowler inhaled. “Well, from what the nurse told me, the complication has more to do with old scar tissue than the injury itself, so they still think he’s gonna pull through. It’s just gonna take some more time.”

Connor closed his eyes tightly, and could feel the saline putting an uncomfortable pressure on his optical units. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should’ve walked away. Words were not worth Hank’s life, he wasn’t—

A large, calloused hand landed gently on his back, squeezing at the base of his neck, before sliding to grasp his shoulder. Human body heat pressed against his right side, the Captain’s voice much closer now than it had been previously as he murmured, “Hey, you did alright. You probably saved his life by—“

Androids had no need to sob, as their physiological response to emotional turmoil didn’t work the same way as humans.

A sound fought its way out, anyway; a guttural groan, pinched and twisted in a way that made his throat vibrate unpleasantly against his voice box. He shook his head between his barred arms violently. “It’s my fault,” he gasped. “It’s my—I did this, I—“

“Bullshit,” Fowler rebuked. “That asshole harassed you, then assaulted you, then assaulted another police officer that came to help you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

The dam had broken. Connor couldn’t stop himself. “They were just words, Captain, they were just—it didn’t matter what he said, it didn’t mean—I don’t know why—“

The arm across his shoulders gripped him harder. “Listen to me, Connor. I know how hard it is to deal with what you’re dealing with; how hard it is to walk away when people call you what they call you. I know how hard it is to live life when there are people in this world, neighbors and coworkers, who hate you and everyone like you because of their own fragile fucking egos. All you did was ask for respect—that’s it. You shouldn’t even have to ask for it. Neither of us should.”

Cloth rustled, and Fowler’s other hand wrapped around his right elbow. “It is not your fault, Connor. Do you understand me? It is not your fault.”

Connor opened his eyes blearily, gaping at the now-considerably larger saline puddle dotting the concrete between his feet. Flatly, distantly, he found himself asking, “Why are humans like this, Captain?”

In his periphery, Fowler’s head drooped. At length, he answered, “…I don’t know. Shit, maybe it’s best that we don’t—hatred begetting hatred, and that shit.” He then turned his head back in Connor’s direction, forcing a ghost of a smile as he jostled Connor’s shoulders lightly. “But Hank is one tough son of a bitch…and so are you. It may take some time, but I know you two will make it out on the other side. Alright?”

Connor, for the first time in nearly two hours, managed to look someone in the eye, past the drying blood on his sleeve. He felt absolutely miserable. Nevertheless, he found it within himself to nod, a small, jerky movement of his head.

“Good.” The Captain squeezed his shoulder and elbow, sighing deeply and shifting on the step, but otherwise made no attempt to move. “Good.”

Connor’s head drooped again, letting his eyes slide closed and attempting to match his breathing pattern to Captain Fowler’s. He didn’t trust his vocal modulator enough to appropriately express his gratitude, so he simply altered his weight distribution to lean a little more heavily against the Captain’s shoulder.

Fowler huffed softly, patting his elbow. “It’ll be alright, son. You’ll see. It’ll be alright.”

Connor replayed those words in his head on a repeating loop.

He may or may not have altered the sound file to closer resemble Hank’s voice.

Chapter Text

Hank was, both literally and figuratively, in a world of fucking hurt.

Time passed in a haze for him. He was vaguely aware of things happening to and around him. He was aware, on some level, that he was on some really good fucking drugs due to whatever was causing said world of hurt. He was also aware, somewhere in the whorls of foggy thoughts and tiny blips of lucidity, that he should enjoy this haziness while it lasted, because whatever was waiting for him on the other side of that impenetrable mist was going to be fucking awful.

The world came into focus for the first time in the late evening. The TV in the top right corner of the windowless room had some local anchors chattering soundlessly on its screen. It was too far away, and his eyes were too shitty, for him to see who they were, but he was still pretty sure that whatever it was they were saying was bullshit.

Somewhere in the lifting fog, Hank knew he should be more confused about where he was and what was going on, but he’d always been a quick study. The recovery room’s lights were dim, but the ones outside were much harsher, and he squinted against the streaks that spilled over his face, averting his gaze. It was there that he spotted Connor sitting in the corner chair, and even doped up as hell, he immediately understood two things: first, his body was remembering something that his mind currently couldn’t, given the way Hank heard his own pulse in his ears; and second, whatever happened must have been one hell of a doozy, because Connor looked like an absolute fucking mess.

At least, he did by Connor’s standards. He sat slumped, for one, spine curled in that same uncaring way that he always chided Hank for doing, staring off aimlessly into the middle distance of the room. He’d also recently changed—instead of his usual pleated button-down and that goddamn blazer that he wore out everywhere, no matter what, he’d tossed on a simple gray long-sleeved shirt. It was an old, ratty thing he once scored out of a good-will, and in Hank’s experience, he almost never wore it outside of his own apartment, for reasons Connor never offered, and Hank never asked for. A man could do what he wanted to feel relaxed in the privacy of his own home.

For Connor to be wearing it here, in the open, summed up pretty succinctly to Hank just where Connor’s head was at, right now.

And it looked like he’d been crying. A lot.

Now, the two of them, they’d been through some shit over these last three years. Hank had watched the kid put a gun under his chin and pull the fucking trigger. Connor had seen Hank damn near do the same a month or so later. But never, ever, had Hank seen Connor like this.

That earlier thought, tacky against his brain like cheap adhesive residue, came rushing back to the forefront. He’d been right, before—part of him wished for the amorphous, blissful nothingness of mindless pain, because even the potent, burning ache in his chest now felt secondary to the hollowness that sank into his bones.

Hank tried swallowing, and was rewarded with the sensation of sandpaper spritzed with broken glass being rubbed across his Adam’s apple for the effort. Alright, talking was currently out, then. He then tried to hoist himself to a sitting position, only to seize up the moment he tensed his chest. His lungs stalled before he could get the gasp out, screwing his eyes shut and baring his teeth in agony; the darkness only made the pulsing wound in his chest throb all the more prominently, to the rhythm of his thundering heartbeat.

It was in the midst of this newly-forming haze of pain that shoes thudded against the tile in time with the unbearable pounding of his skull. Words were spoken to him, information that his brain received, but didn’t try to actively parse. He tried to get his jaw to unclench, to make his lips move, to do something—

Darkness overwhelmed him.

Coward that he was, he welcomed it.

Reality came back to Hank much more gradually, the second time around. The pain was still there, insistent as hell, and his limbs all felt suitably rubbery and lead-weighted, but he didn’t feel quite so much like he was submerged in one gigantic hospital-themed fishbowl. Thank God for small favors. His throat twitched reflexively, and it felt like he’d swallowed every fucking knife in the Ginsu catalog. He groaned quietly in response to the pain, which only made it worse. Of course it made it worse.

“Welcome back.”

Reluctantly, Hank opened his heavy eyes and saw Fowler’s sizable form crammed into a chair directly next to him. His tie was gone, his shirt sleeves were haphazardly rolled up to the crook of his elbow, and his eyes were bloodshot. Hank swallowed in earnest, and found his throat wanted to actually comply, this time around. He said the first thing that came to mind: “You look like shit.” Ever the diplomat.

Fowler, to his credit, almost cracked a smile. He stood from his seat, filling a glass from a nearby pitcher of water. Hank watched the movement, suddenly aware of how parched he was. “Speak for yourself. You’re lucky to be alive, Anderson. At this rate, people are gonna start calling you Rasputin.”

“Nyet,” he rasped in reply, mainly because he didn’t know ‘asshole’ in Russian. He should probably learn. His eyes flitted past Fowler’s bulk, to the corner chair, and immediately felt his heart-rate spike when he saw it was empty.

Fowler seemed to sense this, leaning over to get in his line of sight, sweating glass in hand. “Relax, Hank, he’s okay.” He clicked a button out of Hank’s line of sight, and the bed began so shift him to a sitting position. Fancy. “He just needed some air.”

Hank’s eyes narrowed slightly. Needing some air sounded an awful lot like Connor-speak for, “I’m having a nervous breakdown and don’t want anyone to see it.” Christ. There were times Hank felt less like a partner and friend, and more like a fucking therapist, trying to finagle the kid’s squirrelly ass back to a place resembling reality when the world hit all his buttons in just the right order.

Fowler held the glass in front of him. Hank, with more conscious effort than he liked, brought his hand up to take it; he even managed not to immediately drop it. Look at him go, world. He sipped gingerly, relishing how delightfully cool the thin streams of water felt against the radiating heat of his throat. Fowler asked, “How much do you remember?”

Memories were beginning to come back in pieces; a parking lot, a breathtaking jolt of terror, the flash of a knife. He cleared his throat—fuck, that was a mistake—and shook his head with a wince. “Not enough.”

Fowler folded his hands in front of him. “What do you remember?”

Something clicked in Hank’s head. He stared at him dubiously. “Is this official?”

“Does it need to be?”

Hank let his head flop back onto the firm pillow, giving a halfhearted grimace. “I don’t fuckin’ know, Jeffrey, I just woke up.” He fell silent for a moment, regarding Jeffrey out of the corner of his eye. “How’s Connor doing?”

Fowler seemed to consider his words carefully. When he spoke, he used the same tone as when he was informing someone of a loved one’s death, and damn if that didn’t make him feel like he was being dunked into a vat of ice water. “Hank, you were stabbed in the chest with a butterfly knife. It pierced your heart a half an inch. By all accounts, you were DOA when you got here. Nobody knows exactly what the hell happened, except that you’re somehow still alive.” Fowler shrugged a shoulder. “The kid’s… He’s not taking it very well.”

Hank scoffed before he could stop himself, “What, is he disappointed?”

Fowler scowled. “Oh, spoken like a true asshole, Hank! Do you have any idea how fucked up that kid of yours is, right now?”

That kid of his. Fucking prick. Hank scowled right back. “What do you want from me, Fowler, huh? I got fuckin’ stabbed, alright? Allow me the right to be a little bit pissy.”

Fowler grunted disapprovingly. “Yeah, fine, just—get it out of your system now. The last thing Connor needs is to get an earful of your asshole sense of humor after these last few days.”

He should have been more shocked that he’d lost days of his life in here, but everything was still just muddled enough that he couldn’t really give a shit. It then occurred to Hank, as those words of warning sank in, that it was the first time he’d ever heard Jeffrey refer to Connor by name in a non-professional setting. He thought back to Connor from…whenever the fuck prior, looking like a broken marionette suffering from Vietnam flashbacks. Guilt started to mingle with the pain and the painkillers. Fuck him, why couldn’t he learn to just keep his fucking mouth shut?

He slumped back into the bedding, suddenly exhausted. “Not planning on it, Jeffrey.”

He only tangentially noted that Fowler took the half-full glass from his hand and placed it back on the plastic side table. “Good. Now, get some sleep while you still can, before everyone busts down your door, since you’re actually awake.”

“Nobody’s busting down my door,” he muttered sourly, eyes closed.

“You’d be surprised, Hank,” Fowler replied, an uplifting hum in his thready tenor. “Word’s gotten around—you’re a regular local hero.”

He pressed his eyes closed tighter. “Well, I’m definitely not sleeping, now.”

“Uh huh.” Jeffrey patted his shoulder. “I’m gonna let everyone know. Sweet dreams.”

Hank heard steps shuffling away, and he lolled his head to the right, fighting to keep his eyes open. Fuck Fowler and his goddamn subliminal messaging. “Hey, Fowler?”

Jeffrey stopped, halfway through the door. “Yeah?”

His eyelids fluttered, despite himself. “Let Connor know, first.”

Fowler nodded slowly, lifting up his cell phone. “Way ahead of you, Hank.”

Despite the weight of the world pressing down against his body, dragging him once again into oblivion, it still felt like something had been lifted off his shoulders.

The last two weeks had been absolutely fucking awful.

Connor was fucking avoiding him, Hank was certain of it. Oh, sure, he played the part, perfectly fine. He kept Hank company in the hospital as best as he was able, ran whatever errands needed to be ran, did almost anything Hank asked of him—and that was precisely the problem. Connor was, by his very nature, a stubborn asshole that didn’t listen to anybody, unless he had to. Seeing him so agreeable set off all kinds of warning bells in Hank’s head—warning bells that he couldn’t fucking do anything about, while he was being wheeled around like some fucking invalid—

“Will you cut that out?” Hank snapped, all-but slapping Connor’s hands away from the handles of the wheelchair he found himself in.

Connor ignored the outburst, leaning a little over the backrest. “It’s hospital procedure, Lieutenant, you know that.”

Hank sneered, silently mocking the words to himself as he crossed his arms—or, at least, tried to, anyway. He ended up tucking his right hand into the small pocket of space made by the sling his left arm was in. “Well, the procedure’s fuckin’ stupid. I got stabbed in the chest—there’s nothing wrong with my legs.”

“They want to ensure your safe arrival out of the building,” Connor explained.

Hank scoffed, only deigning to give Connor a disbelieving, cursory glance over his shoulder. “The only thing they want to ensure is that I don’t break my ass on their property, and then sue them for it.”

“Patient safety is their top priority.”

Hank twisted in the seat, shooting Connor an incredulous look. “What the fu—what are you, a hospital kiosk, now? Just how much of you running is on auto-pilot, right now?”

At that, Connor blinked and stared down at Hank, as though startled out of a trance. Motherfuck, he was on auto-pilot. Connor looked away. “I’m sorry, Hank. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

Hank inhaled as deeply as he could with the bandages still wrapped around his torso. And back into his shell, he went. Fuck.

His homecoming was about as trying. He might have been able to stand on his own two feet, now—albeit slowly—but the impromptu heart surgery meant that he was out of commission for anything more strenuous than taking a piss, and even that he had to fight the doctors for. The worst part about it all was that he knew they were right. He could feel the painful reverberations of his own voice against his ribcage whenever he spoke, and was all-too aware of a sharp, itchy knot in his chest, from where the doctors had worked some crazy fucking voodoo magic to keep his heart from bursting open like an overripe tomato on the operating table.

The first time Connor changed his bandages, Hank was sure he was going to throw up, but kept his meager lunch down on account of the fact that he didn’t want to make Connor clean up anything else more disgusting than he already was.

Then, there was the issue with Connor, himself. While Sumo was overjoyed to have his human’s company again, Connor seemed to do everything in his power to stay the fuck out of the way for as long as possible. On the one hand, it was sometimes kinda nice to not have the kid crawling up his ass about every little thing, the way he normally did. On the other hand, the new-found passivity…sure, it was nice, sometimes, but it wasn’t fucking Connor, and not having Connor here hurt. Everything fucking hurt, and knowing that all of this was going to stay like this for a good long fucking while, because he wasn’t a spring chicken, anymore, just made it all hurt even worse.

It took four days for Hank’s temper to finally boil over.

He supposed he should feel impressed that he lasted that long.

“Connor. Will you just sit the fuck down for two goddamn minutes?” His baritone was a crack of thunder in the quiet of the living room, watching with only the barest amount of pity that Connor froze in place as he tried to scurry from the kitchen to the garage. “Look, I don’t care what you do: play with your fucking coin, pet the fucking dog, watch TV, vegetate, I don’t care, just—just be here, alright? What is with you?”

Connor hesitated for a moment, before he lurched into movement, carefully sitting down at the edge of the beige couch. He didn’t pull out his coin, and Sumo only looked up at him sadly from his spot by the end of the coffee table. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”

Hank turned, head cocked to the side. “And what’s with this ‘Lieutenant’ shit? You’ve called me more by my rank in the last two weeks than you have in the last two years. What the hell is going on with you?”

Connor stiffened. “There’s nothing going on with me, Lieu—Hank. I’m fine.”

Hank groaned miserably, letting his head drop back onto the couch. He hated this. His chest hurt after talking so much, and the knowledge of just how fucking weak he was made him want to cry. He couldn’t do this shit, right now. “Connor, I got stabbed in the fucking chest.”

“I know,” Connor answered immediately, voice quiet and restrained in a way that made Hank look at him. Connor’s facial expression had gone distant, a war playing out in his brown eyes. It made the hairs on back of Hank’s neck stand on end. “I know you did.”

Hank pulled himself forward again. He bit back the instinctive cry of pain, simply letting his throat close up for a few seconds while he readjusted. When the pain passed, he sighed wearily, regarding Connor with a tilted head. “What I’m saying is, I want to help you, but you’ve gotta meet me halfway, here.”

Connor balked at him—finally, an actual fucking emotion—and stammered in reply, “You—you’re not—you’re not under any obligation to help me, Hank. I mean—you were the one that was critically injured, I don’t need—“

Hank made a disbelieving noise, and reached up with his good arm to start undoing the clasps on his sling. Fuck it—time for plan B.

Connor’s facial features slackened in muted horror, arms shooting up as if he were close enough to reach him. “Lieutenant, you’re not supposed to—“

“Yeah, yeah,” Hank muttered, feeling the nylon’s support give weigh from his shoulder, and it felt both euphoric and mind-shatteringly painful. He kept his left arm tensed while he worked the strap along his shoulder. “I’d like to see ‘em fucking stop me.”

Connor shot to his feet. “Hank—“

“Oh, now it’s Hank, huh?” He ducked his head down, tugging the nylon strap over his head. He immediately felt the difference, and while he sucked in a tight, strained breath, he knew it would be worth it. “What, it’s not like I’m gearing up to do push-ups—“

Connor’s hand enclosed around Hank’s mid-motion, his grip strong and unyielding; his fingers also were warmer than Hank’s own, but Hank just assumed that was because androids couldn’t have poor circulation. Hank glared at up him challengingly, staying perfectly in place and waiting for Connor to make his move.

He didn’t disappoint. “Hank. You can’t take this off. The doctor said—“

“Yeah, I know what the fuckin’ doctor said—and the nurse, and the receptionist, and fuckin’ Fowler, and now you, too, alright? I know—I didn’t magically fucking forget.” He scowled, but didn’t fight back, when the android slowly tugged the strap free from Hank’s hand. Shit, not like he could, anyway, in this state. “In fact, the only thing I did forget is how I actually got here. You haven’t spoken a goddamn word about it since I woke up. What gives?”

Connor pressed his lips into a thin, annoyed line, pointedly ignoring the question while he loosened the strap enough to lift it back over Hank’s head without him moving. For a moment, the sound of nylon scraping against a plastic buckle was the only thing being said between them.

Hank felt the sling tighten with a jolt of pain; he couldn’t hide the flinch that ran through his body. Connor’s fingers stilled, eyes drifting away. “Sorry, Hank,” he mumbled, before he continued his ministrations, more slowly, this time, leaning to readjust something along Hank’s back. He added in that same, softly begrudging tone, “I thought your doctor informed you. Or at least Captain Fowler.”

Hank craned his neck to try and catch Connor’s expression over his shoulder. Connor, manipulative bastard that he was, expertly managed to have his head turned in just the right way to make sure Hank couldn’t. “Yeah—but they weren’t there. You were. You can help me…I don’t know, piece together some things.”

Connor didn’t answer, realigning the nylon material of the sling along the back of his arm.

Hank nodded with a displeased purse of his lips. “Alright. Well, let me tell you what I remember. I remember that asshole picking a fight with you. I remember you fighting back,” Hank didn’t miss the way Connor’s lungs stopped moving, “and good for you, for speaking up. I remember him getting a lucky punch in, me stepping in, and—“

“You were stabbed,” Connor said quietly, tone falling somewhere between clipped and strangled.

Hank watched Connor carefully; he’d stopped doing whatever fiddling he was doing, but still kept himself faced away. Hank nodded slightly, keeping his own voice soft. “Yeah. And do you know why?”

Connor’s lungs stuttered into motion again as he immediately backed off, trying to retreat. Hank caught him by the upper arm; his ribs were on fire. “Hey, Connor—“

Connor’s upper lip spasmed, breathing, “Me.” His head snapped down, eyeing Hank with a sudden red-hot fury. His lips curled back viciously, perfect teeth barely visible as he continued, “You were stabbed because of me, Hank. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?”

And, there it was.

He met Connor’s intense gaze evenly, pushing through the searing pulse of hurt, and using it as something to focus on, grounding him. “I was stabbed because that asshole would rather kill a man than be wrong. If it hadn’t have been me, it would’ve been someone else. And if it hadn’t have been you, it would’ve been someone else, too. You had nothing to do with this.”

Connor pulled away sharply. “I had everything to do with this! I’m law enforcement, Hank! A hostage negotiator—I know the dangers of escalating a situation! I knew what could’ve happened by engaging him, and I did it, anyway!”

He stared up at the kid, seeing his composure beginning to crack by degrees. God, his chest hurt so fucking much. “Connor, you’re allowed to defend yourself.”

“Not if it risks your life,” Connor answered.

The finality in his tone pissed Hank off; his expression darkened. “You don’t get to fucking make that decision for me. You think that if he was harassing someone else, I wouldn’t have stepped in? Or that you wouldn’t have? Don’t give me that shit.” Connor had turned away, by this point, pacing to the edge of the coffee table, shoulders and back rigid beneath his white button-down. Hank glared at him, anyway. “Whether you like it or not, Connor, I was doing my job, and sometimes, my job involves putting myself in harm’s way. Same for you, and any other cop worth a damn.”

He looked again at Connor’s back, the way his fingers curled into the non-existent meat of his palm, and his head dipped down and away in shameful anger. His tenor was similarly low. “I almost failed my mission.”

Hank’s face twisted in suspicion. “Didn’t think you still had one of those.”

Connor’s profile came into view, just long enough for the red LED to blink his displeasure as he snipped, “Of course I do, it’s just of my own choosing, now.”

Hank’s stomach dropped; he wasn’t sure why. “Do I wanna know what it is?”

Connor pivoted, regarding Hank over a shoulder as he shrugged minutely. His chiseled features were pinched, almost wounded. “Isn’t it obvious?”

It was. God help him, it was.

Hank raised his brows, feigning ignorance. “Piss me off at every opportunity? Well, mission fuckin’ accomplished, then.”

Connor’s posture slumped at the obvious misdirect. “Hank.”

In other circumstances, seeing Mr. Unemotional-Stick-Up-the-Ass stand there like a disheartened preteen would’ve been a perversely hilarious sight; now, it just made Hank feel like a royal asshole for ever opening his mouth. “Ah, for fuck’s sake, Connor…” He slumped himself, shifting farther along the couch while waving Connor over with a close-eyed grimace. “Just—come here, and sit down for a second, huh?”

Tensely, Connor crossed the small distance, sinking into the cushion opposite Hank’s right side, leaning forward and bracing his forearms against his thighs, fingers threaded together. His eyes hesitantly darted in Hank’s direction, before drifting back to a point over by the corner of the coffee table, hollow and unreadable—like he was expecting to be fucking reprimanded.

Hank sighed wearily, decidedly not traipsing through that minefield, at the moment, and tipped his head to the side. “Connor, listen. I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, but you don’t need to make me your mission.” He snorted—ow, god fucking damn it—and added, “Hell, I don’t even make me my mission. Nobody does—nobody should.”

Connor’s expression didn’t change. “What about Sumo?”

Hank gestured to the Saint Bernard laying sprawled at the opposite end of the coffee table with a disbelieving nod of the head. “Does Sumo strike you as particularly goal-oriented?”

Sumo’s ears perked up from his prone position, but otherwise didn’t move.

Hank gestured with his otherwise-useless left hand. “See?” Connor didn’t react. “Look, my point is, my life is not automatically more important than your own, okay? I don’t need to be a mission—just a priority in that head of yours, somewhere. That’s all.”

Much to Hank’s chagrin, his words only made Connor sink even farther into whatever vortex had been sucking the life out of him for the past two-and-a-half weeks. The words were so quiet that Hank nearly missed them: “I couldn’t slow the bleeding.”

Hank stayed silent, watching his mannerisms carefully.

The expression on Connor’s face intensified as he skipped down memory lane, jaw muscles rolling beneath his skin. Absently, he began rubbing his hands together, his tone painfully flat. “It was to be expected—after all, cardiac stab wounds are known to be…complicated. I used my jacket, tried to apply as much pressure as I could, but…” His mouth worked soundlessly for a second. “Your heart still stopped twenty-seven seconds before emergency services arrived. CPR wasn’t an option because of the position of the knife, so—“

Connor’s voice cut out briefly, one hand gripping the other so tightly in his lap that Hank was surprised he hadn’t crushed the damn thing yet. Connor’s eyelids fluttered over a stony, haunted gaze. “…There was nothing I could do.”

The dark cloud swirling in Connor’s normally vibrant eyes reminded him too much of the sorry 4 AM reflection that greeted him after a night of binge drinking. It took Connor dragging him out of the bottom of a bottle—repeatedly—for Hank to recognize that the man in the mirror was also him, and that he still had a goddamn say in what that man looked like. He’d be damned if he let Connor go through the same thing.

He steeled himself, then reached out, holding his hand out over Connor’s lap, palm up. “Here. Do me a favor and count my pulse.”

Connor stared blearily at the addition, then furrowed his brow. “Is there something wrong—“

“Nah, there’s nothing wrong, just,” Hank flexed his hand, “humor me, alright? Count my pulse and tell me what it means.”

Tossing Hank a vaguely bemused glance, Connor complied, pressing his fore and middle finger against Hank’s pulse point. He spent a long moment staring at nothing while he was compiling whatever data he was receiving—and probably running a thousand-and-one scenarios about what all of it meant, if Hank were to guess.

After the requisite minute passed, Connor drew his fingers away, frowning. “Your pulse is elevated,” he informed clinically, “and coupled with your respiration patterns and body temperature, that means…” A hint of distress crossed his features as he lifted his gaze to Hank’s. “That you’re in pain?”

Hank found himself commenting lightly, “Always finding the shortest distance between two points, huh?” Connor’s brows knitted further, the kid’s expression morphing into a more muted version of, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Hank’s lips twitched into a small grin, just a tiny bit proud of himself that he managed to get that kind of a reaction out him, and rested his hand against Connor’s knee, squeezing lightly. “It means that I’m alive. A bit banged up, sure, but…still here. Alright?”

Connor seemed unconvinced, chiseled features still taut with stress and heartache. He gaped down at Hank’s hand on his knee like it was one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, twitching like he wanted to say something, do something, but didn’t know what. Hank lifted his hand and gently knocked his curled index finger against the underside of Connor’s chin. “Hey. Look at me.”

He kept his finger roughly where it was, slowly coaxing Connor to turn his head in Hank’s direction, and it took another few seconds longer for him to meet Hank’s gaze. Hank moved his hand away, letting it hover in dead space, opening his mouth to speak, but unable to find words as he silently regarded his friend. His closest friend. The single biggest stabilizing force in his life since Cole died—the most endearingly awkward, heart-wrenchingly earnest, infuriatingly self-righteous plastic sack of shit that has ever walked on this Earth, and God, Hank wouldn’t have it any other way, because he loved this kid. He fucking loved this kid so goddamn much.

Hank swore, hooking his hand around the back of Connor’s neck and dragging him into a hug before he knew what he was doing.

Connor wasted no time burying his face into Hank’s shoulder, hand fisting desperately into the sleeve of his loud Hawaiian shirt. He rested his chin atop Connor’s head, sighing as the kid sagged against him, finally letting all this pent-up emotion out. Connor was as strong as they came—both in his specific android build, and in personal character—but in rare moments such as these, he still felt every bit like a frightened puppy in his arms, silently clinging to Hank, his cool android tears soaking through the fabric in moments.

Words and feelings he didn’t know were even there began bubbling up like carbonation fizz, spritzy and uncomfortable against the back of his throat, and before long, he found himself murmuring, “Yknow, a couple of years ago, I would’ve woken up in a situation like this and ask you why you even bothered. Figured it wasn’t worth it—I’d done my time, I’d loved and lost, and I was…ready to go and see my son again.”

Connor didn’t answer, and Hank didn’t expect one. He stared blankly at the far wall, the bright fucking sunny day streaming through the pulled blinds, and breathed slowly to manage the chest pain. “I don’t really know what changed, or when, but…when I first woke up in that hospital and saw you there, it made me realize just how fucking grateful I was to be waking up at all.” He shifted his head to stare down at the goofy brown hairdo that he was using as a chin-rest, and added wryly, “I blame you.”

He noticed, then, that he’d began slowly rocking them back and forth at some point, fingers twining softly through Connor’s hair, like both of these things were the most natural fucking things in the world to do. Once upon a time, they were. Amazingly, the thought didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected it to. Progress; he could blame Connor for that, too.

‘Say it,’ an inner voice ordered.

Hank dipped his head low, shutting his eyes tightly and getting lost in the rhythmic swaying. The last person he’d said, “I love you,” to died on an operating table; the last person he thought he loved stood at the edge of the pool and watched him drown, because they didn’t know how to swim any more than he did. It fucking hurt. It always would, but—

‘Fucking say it,’ it demanded.

He tried, willing the words past the knot that had formed in his throat, pushing back against the sudden, inexplicable terror that gnawed at his bones. Holding Connor the way he was now, remembering where they’d just been, knowing the type of shit they got involved in at work, he just—he couldn’t—

He thought about Cole, then. What he wouldn’t give to see his little boy again, to hold him in his arms, just one more time—but humans didn’t come back.

Well, apparently, Hank fucking Anderson did, and for once in his goddamn life, he wasn’t going to ruin a good thing.

Hank swallowed thickly. “Connor—“

“I love you,” Connor whispered against his shoulder, barely audible.

Hank’s lungs deflated like he’d been punched in the chest, shoulders slumping from the weight just placed on them. God. God. He pressed his face into Connor’s hair, as though he could somehow hide from reality in it. ‘Fucking coward.’

“I know, Connor,” Hank breathed, fingers carding through his hair for the umpteenth time. “I know you do.”

Connor just gripped Hank more tightly in response.

They fell into a companionable, if emotionally-charged, silence. Hank learned the hard way that life was too fucking short to waste on what-ifs and maybes, and made a silent promise to himself, and to Connor, that even if he couldn’t put the words out in the open, right now, then he would do everything in his power to show the man how treasured he truly was.

Hank quietly grinned to himself. So much for never making someone else a mission.

FAST-FORWARD > > >

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

PLAY >

.

PLAY >

.

PLAY >

.

.

.

“—nk. Hank!”

The sound of blood squelching against the silk lining of a gray blazer sounded entirely too loud, amidst the honking of horns, metallic clunking of nearby shopping carts, and the ever-too-distant wailing of a police siren. Wind whistled into the audio feed over the trunk of the nearby car. “Hank, stay with me! Keep your eyes open! The ambulance is only sixty seconds out!”

Hank [LT. ANDERSON, H.] groggily peeled his eyelids back, gaze dull and unseeing. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth as his head twitched to the side. He lay sprawled by the car’s trunk, right arm haphazardly braced against the rear tire, legs slightly elevated by a good Samaritan that was standing just out of frame. He gurgled, eyes slipping closed again.

Connor’s hand shot out from the folds of cloth, covered in blood, and tightly gripped the side of the Lieutenant’s face. He shouted viciously, “HANK! WAKE UP!”

Hank’s eyes opened more quickly, that time, some measure of alertness sharpening his tired blue eyes. His brows drew in, struggling to see past the threads of gray hair billowing over his face. He moved his tongue in his mouth, as though he were attempting to swallow, but forgot how. “Hey,” he mumbled.

Connor didn’t remove his hand, the camera panning from Hank’s [LT. ANDERSON, H.] face, to the protruding plastic tip of the butterfly knife buried by a custom-tailored blazer and a 56 year old man’s chest. “That’s right, stay awake for me. Pay attention to my hand, okay? The ambulance is only forty seconds out. Just stay with—“

Connor turned his attention back to the Lieutenant’s face, notably, the larger, more grizzled hand weakly gripping his wrist. Hank [LT. ANDERSON, H.] seemed to be staring in Connor’s direction, but was having trouble maintaining his focus. His lips curved into a quiet grin that looked decidedly incongruent with the amount of blood that was covering them. “I love you, kid.”

Error warnings masked part of the field of view, and the video itself stuttered violently for several frames.

Hank’s [LT. ANDERSON, H.] eyes fluttered closed, muttering, “Love…I love…”

His hand slipped away. The camera didn’t move from Connor’s empty wrist.

More error warnings popped up when one of the HUD elements went red and flat-lined; so many, that it became nearly unviewable as the footage recorded Connor screaming, “Hank? Hank! HANK!”

Hank covered his mouth with his hand, and quietly wept into the silence of the empty living room.

Connor deftly reached for the front door while Sumo snuffled around his legs, trying to headbutt his way past Connor’s titanium-reinforced shins to get inside—and, more than likely, to his dearly-missed food bowl. “Easy, Sumo,” he said with a smile, corralling the great beast as he twisted the doorknob. “I know you’re eager for your lunch, but Hank is likely still sleeping, and—“

Sumo, heedless to Connor’s warnings, bounded through the opening as soon as it was made present, tromping past all of creation in a mission to reach his water bowl. ‘Stubborn, just like his owner,’ Connor thought with some amusement, taking 1.66 seconds to ascertain the state of the living room.

He froze in the doorway when he saw Hank sitting on the couch, very much awake, and looking quite distressed. He blinked and furrowed his brows, hand still hanging limply on the outer door knob. “Hank?”

Hank’s head snapped up in his direction, shocked—almost angry. Connor took a step forward, into the living room proper, alarmed. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

Hank rose to his feet with a distinctly un-Hank-like fluidity, marching forward in determined, deliberate steps. Connor’s alarm grew upon seeing the steely determination in Hank’s eyes, and opened his mouth to ask more clarifying questions.

Those questions were immediately forgotten when he found himself yanked into Hank’s chest, his good arm barred across Connor’s shoulders and his healing arm gripping insistently at Connor’s elbow. His baritone rumbled like thunder next to his ear, “I love you, kid.” His voice hitched, and cracked. “I love you so much.”

Connor returned the hug tightly, closing his eyes. “I know, Hank,” he murmured, resting his chin upon Hank’s shoulder and listening, contentedly, to his heartbeat. “I know you do.”

Chapter Text

"Captain Hank Anderson, of the Detroit Police Department, was found dead in his home late Tuesday evening. Anderson, a 45-year veteran of the Detroit Police force, was found shot inside his home on the 100-block of Michigan Drive.  Police are currently investigating it as a homicide.  He was 67.  We go now to Anthony, live on scene.  Anthony, what can you tell us about what's going on there?"

"Good morning, Jodie--as you can see behind me, police still have a very strong presence here, all along the block, utilizing everything they have at their disposal to help shed some light on the killing.  While they haven't announced any prime suspects in the murder, as of yet, the loss of one of Detroit's most venerated officers in the city's history has left many in the neighborhood shaken."

"'I just can't believe it,' Rhonda Howard, a long-time neighbor to Captain Anderson, said to Channel 16.  'I've lived here for almost twenty years, and I've never--burglaries and stuff, sure, but never a murder, and of Hank?  He's one of the reasons you didn't really see anything more than that here.  Having him here kept this neighborhood safe--'"

Click.  "For fuck's sake, what are you watching that for?"

Connor barely found it in him to twitch a lip disapprovingly.  Since finding Hank, three days ago, there had been a rare moment of bipartisanship between both New Jericho and the DPD, currently centered on the mission of babysitting him, until they believed he was no longer a threat to himself or anyone else. Currently, it was Gavin's turn.

He should have been offended by the constant supervision, or perhaps grateful, or...anything.  However, his processors were currently so over-taxed, that anything more than bare functionality was impossible to manage.  He dragged his eyes away from the muted screen, seeing the thousands of reconstruction points bombarding his optics, lagging the units so much that the pinpoints trawled across his vision in bright yellow stripes.

Since finding Hank in a pool of his own blood, Connor's reconstruction software had, in technical terms, gone completely batshit insane.  Rather than focused on a single, immediately relevant topic, it was highlighting every single memory he'd created involving Hank, profound and banal, and attributing a marker to it.  It had never occurred to him until that moment, kneeling on the floor and cradling his adopted father's dead body against his chest, scene integrity be damned, just how incredibly huge a part of his life Hank was--how impossible that hole was to fill.

He found that blinking refreshed his view, momentarily solving the artifacting issue.  He didn't bother.  It felt strangely disrespectful.

He also didn't bother telling Gavin that he had watched approximately seventeen different news broadcasts about the murder in the last twenty-five minutes alone.  Hank's death had made international news, due in large part to his actions over the course of the American Android Revolution, which had paved the way for future revolutions in other parts of the world, both android and human alike--and some more violently than others.

Connor's eyelids fluttered, having caught up to his processors, and the ghosting vanished.  He gaped up blankly at the Lieutenant.  Such was the nature of his internal latency that he felt surprised to see Gavin had aged so much; maybe the man was simply feeling the effects of working on his superior's murder.  "I wanted to know if anything had changed."

"Oh, fuck you; no, you weren't," Gavin shot back; his tone lacked any bite.  He rounded the corner of Connor's tiny gray couch and sat down heavily on the armrest.  His arms were barred across his heavily-clothed chest, and his head was lolled to the side, brows arched.  "Look, I know we haven't worked together in years, but I'm not stupid, alright?  You don't have to torture yourself."

'Yes, I do,' was his instinctual response.  Processor lag ensured that he didn't voice that thought before he was able to redirect the impulse into other, more socially-acceptable language.  "I don't want to impede the investigation by asking questions."

"Like that would ever stop you.  Besides, you couldn't impede this investigation, if you tried."  Gavin scoffed, shifting back on the armrest.  "Hell, the King of fucking England sent an inquiry to City Hall about the case just this morning--I don't think there's ever been so many eyes on a single murder since JFK."

The Connor of thirteen years ago would have punched Gavin for insinuating that Hank's murder was a stepping stone for his career.  The Connor of today knew it was all just bluster and deflection--a way of detaching from the situation, so the magnitude of what he was enduring wouldn't crush him underfoot.  The urge to punch him was still there, all the same.  They might have buried the hatchet, but their friendship was still abrasive, and begrudging at best.

Gavin paused, then, leaning down towards Connor.  His expression softened, showing a kindness that he rarely revealed to anyone, least of all Connor.  "You know we're gonna find the bastards, right?  I promise you, they're gonna get what's coming to 'em."

He met Gavin's eyes, pixellated canary yellow zigzags squiggled around the older man's closely-cropped gray hair.  In a hideously incongruent moment, Connor marveled at the absurdity of Gavin being the angel on his shoulder.  Hank would have found it absolutely hilarious.

He blinked again, the ghost-effects disappearing, and hesitantly nodded.  It wasn't any real response at all, but it was all he could manage.  He supposed, for the time being, that would have to be good enough.

Chapter Text

Hank never felt more ancient than he did that Christmas morning.

He awoke into a chilly house, the central heating rattling inside the walls, providing smooth accompaniment to the whistling of the winter wind outside. It hadn’t been anywhere near a white Christmas—thank the holy fuck—but the bitter weather still lavished the grass in a frosted white dew. Good; more reason for him to not go outside, then.

Mind still foggy from sleep, he plodded barefoot along cold hardwood floors, letting the dull ache of his unprotected feet bring him some measure of physical awareness. He thought idly that he should have grabbed a bathrobe or a blanket to try and keep warm in, and dismissed it in favor of hyper-focusing on the sensation of goosebumps prickling his skin, instead. It was better to focus on the immediate discomfort than it was to slip into the vortex of what his life had turned into these past three years. Besides, liquor could warm him up pretty quickly, anyway.

He was so engrossed in his own post-sleep miasma, thoughts thick and hazy and miserable, that he’d completely forgotten about the android he’d taken in, until he stepped into the living room and saw the kid sitting cross-legged on his couch, Sumo slumped against his side, watching that old claymation Rudolph movie with the calm, critical eye of a man trying to unravel a crime scene.

There were no Christmas decorations. There were no presents. There was absolutely nothing in Hank Anderson’s home that would indicate that today was anything different than any other day. Personal shit notwithstanding, he’d been a little too busy averting whole-scale genocide against a new species, and specifically trying to keep one member of that species in particular from crumpling under the weight of his own existence.

Hank still felt, suddenly and keenly, that he’d done Connor a huge disservice.

He stopped at the edge of the couch, just a little thrilled that he was standing on a slightly-warmer rug, and wished again that he’d put on his bathrobe, just to have something to do with his hands. “Morning.”

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Connor responded, glancing in his direction, before returning his attention to the movie.

He cleared his throat from sleep and motioned to the TV with his head. “So, Rudolph, huh?  What do you think of it?”

Connor seemed to consider this. “The animation style is rudimentary,” he said eventually, “but it has a…character that other media formats lack.” He paused, considering again. “I think I like it.”

Something in Hank’s chest tensed up uncomfortably. His lips quirked into the hint of a grin. “Well, that’s good. It’s a classic for a reason.”

Connor turned his head and blinked up at him. “Do you like it?”

That same something twisted painfully, a knot forming between his lungs. “I don’t know; I haven’t watched it in years…” He furrowed his brows, noticing only then that there was no sound coming from the TV. “Are you watching it muted?”

Connor glanced at the TV, as if trying to visually verify that there were no sound-waves coming from it. “Oh. I have the television’s sound rerouted through my own personal speakers. I…” Connor went distant for a second, in that way Hank was learning to dread, and had long-since learned to hate. Connor didn’t deserve to look like that. “I didn’t want to risk waking you.”

Hank quirked a brow, tapping a finger next to his ear. “Well, how am I supposed to watch it with you, then? I don’t have personal speakers, you know.”

Connor looked up at him so sharply that a human would’ve popped something in their neck. His expression had cleared into something more earnest, nearing vulnerable.

For half a second, Hank felt his eyes sting. He told himself it was from the cold, shrugging and raising his arms to shoo at Connor. “Look, I haven’t seen it in years; couldn’t hurt to have a refresher. Move it.”

Silently, dutifully, Connor untangled his legs, and shimmed himself as far to the right as he could without dislodging Sumo, who was steadfast in his desire to be the world’s most slobbery heating pad. It ended with Hank sinking down into the couch cushion, relishing the small pocket of warmth still left over from Connor, and leaning back with his bare arms over his chest. “Alright, well, let’s hear it, then.”

Connor tipped his head to the side, and like magic, television’s speakers thrummed back to life as the movie started over. Weird android telepathy bullshit. Connor then regarded him out of the corner of his eye, in a way that Hank was also learning to dread, for completely different reasons. He raked his big brown eyes over Hank’s form—clad in boxers and a t-shirt, just the way God intended—and stated simply, “You’re cold.”

Hank grunted, trying, and failing, not to clutch his arms tighter. “It’s fucking December, of course I’m cold.”

Connor eyed him for another second, then turned to reach around Sumo’s gigantic furry ass. After a moment of twisting and tugging, Connor returned with a thick green blanket trailing from his grasp, wordlessly unfurling it over both himself and Hank.

Hank stared at the blanket now strewn over his arms and legs, its cheap fleece design feeling like a firebrand against his cold skin, before he returned his gaze back to Connor. “…I thought you said you didn’t get cold.”

“I don’t, but you do,” he answered, taking hold of an edge and tugging it up to his own shoulders. “Besides, the warmth is…comforting.”

Hank took a moment to think about the last time he’d sat like this, burrowed under this blanket with another person sitting next to him. Cole had been pestering him all week to watch some shitty kids movie, and he’d finally relented; he fell asleep midway through the movie, a little irritated with himself that he didn’t have the balls to ever say no to his little boy. Christ, if he’d known then—

He came back to reality with a jolt of self-awareness, the column of his throat tight and an ominous pressure building behind his eyes. He then noticed Connor—namely, the waves of heat rolling off of him like a walking mini-furnace. Hm, he usually didn’t seem to burn as hot as a human did, much less at a temperature like this, but then, the kid had an almost bottomless bag of tricks in that shiny plastic head of his.

Slowly, hesitantly, Hank grabbed the blanket and hoisted it up over his shoulders, letting the tension bleed out of his muscles in time with his breathing. His Adam’s apple still ached, and he still felt heavy, but he conceded to Connor’s point with a murmured, “…Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Chapter Text

Hank fucking hated winter. Hated it.

The Oldsmobile’s engine rattled and chugged in the otherwise silent December night, completely unaware that the screaming metal deathtrap it was encased in nearly sent its driver off a fucking overpass. It was 2 o’clock in the morning, so luckily, his car sitting skewed between two different lanes wasn’t going to end up causing a traffic acci—

—they lurched to the right, suddenly, the world spinning in a flurry of color—

Hank blinked the memory away with a sharp breath, reorienting himself to the reality around him, right now. What was the technique, again? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1? His head came to rest roughly against the cracked red pleather of his seat, squeezing the cold, gnarled plastic of the steering wheel in between his bare hands. He heard the creaking of leather; the more distant sloshing of slush from auto-taxis driving in the far distance. He could fucking smell the cold, that earthy whiff of o-zone that came just before, or just after, a storm.

He could taste the barest hint of bile building in the back of his throat, but he chose not to really think about that one for very long.

His heart still pounded in his chest, pulse raging in his veins, legs still shaking from the adrenaline of skidding on a sheet of black ice in the middle of the night. He’d even been driving carefully, this time, because Jesus Christ, the last thing he needed was to end up dead when Connor was still a hop, skip, and jump away from a complete fucking meltdown. The world needed Connor more than it needed a washed-up police lieutenant, but it looked like Connor needed him more than the world, which…didn’t really sit well with him.

Hank shook his head to rid the sensation of vertigo. It didn’t really seem to work. Shit. This was not the time and place for his body to up and rebel on him, in the middle of the night, on the middle of a bridge, at the ass-end of an ice storm he definitely didn’t want any part of. He took in another breath and held it, before letting it go in a rush; little white whorls of steam twirled in front of his face cheerily.

Cole said he had dragon’s breath, whenever he did that.

‘ Not the fucking time, Anderson.’

He clenched his jaw, inhaled more slowly, and steadied his body, carefully twisting the steering wheel to the left. Gently, he applied the barest hint of pressure on the gas pedal, like he was sixteen again and terrified that his mom was gonna catch him taking her car for a joyride. (It wasn’t a joyride, Mom, he was going for a job interview at the local shithole dollar store.) Did it matter to her when she found out? Not really, no—the house had been broken into while he was gone.

He should’ve been there—

“Easy does it,” he told himself, the world at the edges of his vision swirling like a washing machine on rinse. He glanced down at the steering wheel, and patted it like it was a disgruntled pet. “C’mon, girl, you can do it. Just a little juice to get us moving again.”

Such was the nature of his hunk of junk car, that it had next-to-no granular control of its horsepower—it went from zero, to, ‘Fuck you, we’re going,’ in no-time flat. The car lurched forward, bald tires struggling to find purchase on the patch of black ice half the car was still resting on, before suddenly deciding that it had found the road, and sent the car, along with its owner, whirling in a half-donut before Hank could even mentally recalibrate what direction he was going in.

He was stone-cold sober, and it still felt like he was driving drunker than after downing a six-pack. He gripped the steering wheel that much tighter, correcting his direction—‘for God’s sake, do not go into oncoming traffic—‘

(There was no oncoming traffic, Hank—)

—and easing up on the pedal. The Oldsmobile handled like a tank with a bad tread, but it still made its way into the left lane after a moment of cajoling. Hank still checked his surroundings with a meticulousness he hadn’t done in years—all his mirrors, his window, hell, he even checked to make sure his fucking parking brake wasn’t on. He had no earthly idea why he was so intent on making sure he was still alone on the road, at 2 o’clock in the morning, on a Tuesday night, when no one in the world knew where the fuck he was, or what the fuck he was doing. He just knew that the hairs on the back of his neck were at full attention, his ears were ringing, and the world had been doused in a motion blur effect.

He was having a panic attack, wasn’t he?

‘Well, that’s shitty timing.’

Hank hit the pedal as softly as he could manage, keenly aware of the way his lungs felt—burned—in his chest as he breathed in the bitter winter air. “One step at a time,” he murmured to no one. “Get to the end of the bridge, and then we go from there. One step at a time.”

One step at a time. That was what he kept telling Connor; that the world was too big, its problems too many, for any one person to handle—not even a supercomputer with legs. That he had to start small, fight the demons that could be fought, before trying to tackle the big bad motherfuckers around the corner.

He took, and released, another breath. The steam, this time, reassured him a little. Connor found the phenomenon fascinating, because androids didn’t have ability for their breath to fog up. He was fascinated by the weirdest fucking shit, but then, so was Hank. Why else would he have gone out in the middle of the night, in disgusting weather, to go see an android jazz band?

They were even pretty good, too; damn good for amateurs. They hadn’t seemed too pleased to have a human in their little crowd, but they left him alone once they saw he just wanted to hear them play.

The steering wheel creaked. “One step at a time.”

One step at a time.

Chapter Text

“So, what does it taste like?”

Connor blinked out of his sub-routine, glancing at Hank across the small table in front of Gary’s illicit burger stand. “I’m sorry?”

Hank shifted the food in his mouth from one side of his cheek to the other, nodding at the small plastic up in Connor’s hand. “Y’know, the blue shit that you drink. What’s it taste like?”

Connor blinked again, looking down at his cup of ‘Blue Blast,’ Gary’s concoction of thirium, shaved ice, and—he ran his tongue across the roof of his mouth, resampling the residue—what seemed to be blueberry and lemon concentrate, this time around. Why Gary decided to start creating a specialty drink for him, specifically, was still unknown, though he had his own Hank-sized suspicions. He canted his head to the side, settling on the bland answer. “I have no idea, I have no taste buds.”

“Ah, bullshit,” Hank replied with a twist of his lips. “I see you stick weird shit in your mouth all the time—your best sensors are in there, right? It’s gotta do something for you.”

Connor blinked a third time. “It does—it gives me feedback on the substance I’m analyzing.”

Hank shot him a disbelieving look over the half-eaten bun of an overstuffed burger. “You mean to tell me, after all the times you’ve licked blood, or dirt, or hell, the end of a flat-bed truck, you never ended up with any preferences? You never thought to yourself, ‘Man, I hope I never have to analyze that again,’ not even once? Come on.”

Connor furrowed his brows. He thought that quite a lot, actually. “Of course I have preferences. It doesn’t mean I’m tasting anything.”

Hank punched out a small sigh through his nose, chewing with a brand of thoughtful aggression Connor didn’t know humans could manage. Silence reigned for a moment as Hank washed his angioplasty of a meal down with his sugar-laden drink.

Thinking—perhaps foolishly—that the conversation was over, Connor’s lips went back to the tip of his straw, carefully sipping on Blue Blast while his sub-routines resumed. For all the times he asked Hank esoteric questions, he’d honestly never considered that Hank would turn around and do the same thing to him. Part of him wanted to feel happy that the Lieutenant was taking an honest interest in the finer details of his existence; a much larger part of him felt somewhat annoyed that Hank put him on the spot with a question he wasn’t mentally prepared to answer.

Somewhere, nestled deep within his memory banks, was the image of one very smug Lieutenant Anderson, leaning back in his desk chair with raised brows and pursed lips, hands threaded across his mid-section.

Connor quickly swatted the file away, choosing to remain the slightest bit indignant, in spite of the clear correlation.

“So, what kinda preferences do you have?” Hank asked suddenly, pulling Connor—once again—out of the familiarity of his mind palace. Connor’s brown eyes flicked back up to him, halting the travel of his drink up the tiny plastic tube. It brought him an inordinate measure of joy whenever he used a straw to drink his thirium; he couldn’t explain why, and frankly, didn’t want to. Hank, seeing that Connor wasn’t going to respond, pitched his head forward a fraction, bright blue eyes trained on him. “You said you had preferences, right? Well, what do you prefer? It can’t be the flat-bed, right?”

With a hint of regret, Connor released the suction of the straw, drawing himself up seventeen degrees straighter. He laced his fingers together on the textured plastic of the cheap round table, shaking his head. “Why are you so curious about whether or not I taste things?”

Hank, in response, mock frowned and shrugged a brown-coated shoulder, a small sound emerging from the back of his throat. “’Cause I’m curious.” Hank canted his head in an irritatingly familiar way. “I mean, you ask me shit like this all the time: what a daffodil smells like, what being ticklish feels like, what’s the difference between sweet and sour. I mean, how am I supposed to know? I never thought about it, until you asked. So, it got me to thinking—what do androids taste, if they have no taste buds?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” Hank repeated, tone surprisingly amiable for the terminology used. “I see the look on your face, Connor; I can tell when Gary adds something to the drink that you don’t like. I can tell when you taste something at a crime scene you wish you hadn’t. Just because you don’t have taste buds doesn’t mean you can’t taste—it just means you taste it differently than humans do.” His eyes snapped down to the drink, and back up. His gaze became sharper, then, more adamant in his deeply-held convictions. He briefly raised a hand from his own drink and motioned in Connor’s direction. “So, what’s it taste like?”

Connor looked at Hank’s cup, sweating rivulets of condensation across the Lieutenant’s fingers, and pooling on top of the bumpy, poorly-sanitized off-white surface. Once again, he ran his analytical sensors through their paces, this time, along the back of his lips, and the inside of his plasteel teeth. He considered Hank’s words carefully, ruminating on the inherent strangeness of the human condition, of deviancy, and how all living beings end up interpreting the minutiae of their own existence.

Connor broke his own train of thought with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “It’s just a drink, Hank.”

Hank’s face screwed up. “Oh, fuck you, will you just answer the goddamn question?”

Connor’s brows shot up, head slanting. “If I ever answered like that after you told me no, how do you think you would’ve responded?”

Hank winced, deflating ever so slightly. “Look, I’m not trying to be weird, here—I’m genuinely curious. C’mon,” he waved his hands his hands in front of him, burger forgotten, “check me with your fancy android lie detector thing, if you want. Does it look like I’m trying to bullshit you?”

Connor opened his mouth to respond—what, exactly, he wasn’t quite certain—before he settled on a sigh, gazing off to an overflowing trashcan off in the distance. How could he explain to Hank that none of it was preferable? How could he summarize the sensation of his investigative suite ramping up and spinning down with every ingredient? While he did have preferences, he ultimately preferred the things that had the simplest contents, that taxed his systems the least.

“Work,” Connor said, finally.

Hank looked at him, confused. “What?”

“The drink,” Connor elaborated, tilting his head to the left, then to the right, “the dirt, and evidence. It all…tastes like work.”

Hank’s brows tugged together, confusion intermingling with something less pleasant. His eyes, pools of radiant blue topaz, held his own for a cycle of his thirium pump, before sliding to the table. He grunted with a disappointed tug of his left cheek muscle. “…Well, that sucks. Sorry, Connor, I didn’t mean to…” Hank trailed off with wordless sound of defeat, taking another sip of his soft drink. “Forget it.”

Connor stared at the Lieutenant, then down at his drink, and back with slightly less confidence. An uncomfortable sensation wriggled between his synthetic lungs. Had he said something wrong? Hank asked for his honest opinion, and he gave it; did he miss a cue that he should’ve picked up on? “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he murmured, falling back on programming, “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

Hank quickly waved the concern away with a twist of his features. His gaze was still askance. “No no no, no, you—you’re fine, Connor.” Connor certainly didn’t feel fine. “I just thought…when I had Gary start making these drinks for ya, I thought that…I dunno, that maybe you’d find something about it…” Hank shrugged again, appearing self-conscious in a way Connor rarely saw from him. “I dunno, something you’d like. Something you’d find fun.”

The synthetic tendons around Connor’s eyes twitched, contracting and relaxing asynchronously. His lips performed something similar, at a different tempo. He wasn’t controlling any of these movements; they happened autonomously and without his consent. The discomfort between his servos remained, but took on a different significance. Hank was a good man.

Connor regarded the sullen Lieutenant past raised brows. “I never said it wasn’t fun, Hank.”

Blue eyes darted his way, skeptical. His large hands flexed around the burger.

Connor rolled a shoulder and dipped his head in conciliation. At this stage, he might as well be honest. “…The straw. I like the straw.”

Hank blinked, then snorted in laughter, planting his elbow against the light-weight table with a hollow thunk, and burying his face in his hand. After a moment, he pulled himself back up with an intake of breath, expression cleared of the previous storm. “Y’know, you could’ve told me that earlier on—would’ve saved Gary a lot of time trying to figure out which flavors you liked. Next time, I’ll make sure he gets you a swirly straw.”

Connor’s interest peaked. A swirly straw?

Hank huffed another barely restrained laugh, corners of his lips squirming beneath his moustache. Blue eyes dancing, he raised his drink high in toast. “To straws.”

Connor couldn’t help but follow, raising his plastic cup and tapping it against Hank’s. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but it felt good to do it, anyway. “Hear hear.”

Chapter Text

Connor stared down at the Detroit River churning below him. He heard the frenetic sloshing of the waters, pushed further by the onset of a seasonal winter storm. The delicate tinkling of tiny snowflakes, mingled with the soft, mournful whispering of wind, filled the otherwise silent expanse of the Ambassador Bridge Park he found himself in. He had no particular love of snow, the way it crinkled beneath his leather boot treads whenever he shifted in place, or the way it stubbornly clung to his body in tiny, uneven flecks. He detested the way he could feel it beneath the sensors of his bare palms, textured clumps of ice, as it built up against the painted iron railing his hands rested on. It shifted with his movements, minor though they were, creating peaks of valleys of cold white powder between his fingertips.

Not too long ago, he willingly faced his fear—his dislike—in a public garden a few hours north of Detroit. He had thought that, maybe, he could finally fight this demon and win. He’d thought that, if he could accomplish this, then maybe he could accomplish other goals—fight other demons that had been holding him back all this time. He had thought—

The white powder beneath his hands crunched unpleasantly beneath the might of his grip, far stronger than any human of his size could ever manage. He’d thought wrong. Idiot.

His jeans, looser than his normal fare, dangled off the back of his knees as he leaned forward, synthetic chest pressed flush against the iron-wrought railing. He’d always hated the way these clothes felt; he only ever used this outfit to better blend into crowds. It was a shame he had to resort to it—along with a few other methods of subterfuge—just to get an hour of goddamn peace from both the DPD and New Jericho. They believed they were helping him, protecting him, when their platitudes and meaningless condolences accomplished nothing but suffocating him. How could he clear his mind when he was surrounded by nothing but reminders? How could they claim to care when they didn’t listen to his wishes?

“What is it with you fuckin’ androids and not respecting personal space—?”

His jacket, a much bulkier thing than he would usually wear, creaked as he pressed himself further into the sharp edge of the antique metal, peering his hooded head over the barrier, affording him a better look of the river proper. Unlike the Ambassador Bridge itself, the park wasn’t situated stories above sea level—didn’t need to be. Instead, it was less than ten feet above ground, with a straight concrete wall, and a few outcropped rocks of chopped down quartz poking through the water’s undulating surface. He wasn’t certain what it was he felt when he gazed into those waters, the restlessness it exhibited, the turbulence of its waves. He felt kinship, perhaps. And, perhaps, a deep, dark longing that he couldn’t define.

His preconstruction softwa—his imagination—couldn’t hep but conjure up what it would feel like to be submerged in those turbulent waves, to hear the warbling distortion the water would cause to his audio receptors. What would it be like to be surrounded in silence? What would it be like, to not experience this?

His boot, a ratty pair of work boots that never properly fit him, hooked into the lower bar of the railing with a satisfying clunk.

“Nice view, isn’t it?”

Connor halted his movements, nanofiber tendons in his face tensing in irritation. Unbelievable. He glanced to his left, but didn’t bother turning his head. “Markus.”

“Connor,” Markus greeted in reply, tone both amiable and enigmatic. “I didn’t expect to find you out here.”

‘Then why are you here?’ he very nearly snapped in answer. Knowing Markus, he somehow heard that answer, anyway. Instead, he swallowed the initial response down, biting the inside of his cheek for 2.884 seconds to recalculate. “I needed some air. That’s all.”

He could see it in his mind palace: Markus’ head lilted to the side slightly, heterochromatic eyes on Connor unwaveringly, expression both placid and intent. “Well, this is certainly a good place to get it. This park is beautiful; I can see why you would come here.”

Connor turned his head a fraction in Markus’ direction, trying to ascertain just what the hell this man was getting at. He was waiting for Connor to continue; Markus would stand here all night, if he had to. Connor learned that the hard way, once. “…Is that all you came here to say?”

“Well, that depends on you,” Markus stated. Connor bit back another tart reply. “I understand if you needed some air—some time to think. I think anyone in your shoes would want the same. But why—“ his audio receptors picked up the gentle plinking of snow landing on Markus’ outstretched arms, Connor’s fists tightened, “—would you send us on a wild goose chase to do it? We thought something happened to you, Connor.” Connor’s jaw clenched. “Why didn’t you just tell us?”

“I did,” he spat in fury, scowling over his shoulder, yanking the hoodie back. He leveled a seething, red-hot glare at the savior of his entire species—the man responsible for his continued existence. “Repeatedly. You, Gavin, North—all of you. I told you I wanted to be left alone.”

Markus’ expression changed slightly, something disbelieving vying for dominance across his uniquely human features. Connor pretended not to notice how that made his thirium pump twist in his chest. “No, you didn’t; you told us you were fine. We both know you’re not.”

Just as quickly as Connor began the staring contest, he dropped it, looking down and away, frustrated—and something else he didn’t care to research. “You know what I meant.”

The crunching of snow rang loudly in his audio receptors, in a pattern all too similar to when Connor held a gun on him at Jericho. Thirteen years should have been a long time for someone with perfect recollection. It still felt like yesterday. He fought to think about it as little as possible. Markus’ tone shifted, taking on a consoling lilt—that of a veteran care-giver. “Connor…we aren’t trying to stifle you, we’re worried about you.”

Connor kept his gaze pointedly at the base of the railing. “Worried about what I might do?”

“And what you might not do.” Crunch. “Believe it or not, Connor, you have a lot of people in the world who care about you, human and android alike. Out of everyone in the revolution, you were the one who truly bridged the gap—the one that proved to everyone that humanity and androids could live in peace. You gave people hope.” Crunch-crunch. “You gave me hope.”

Connor’s anger, irrational and intense, roiled beneath his synthetic skin, bucking and twisting against his plasteel frame just like the Detroit River did against its manufactured concrete shoreline. Through sheer force of will, he barely managed to keep it contained as Markus continued, “You’ve spent so much time and energy helping other people, Connor. It’s about time that we help you.”

“With what?” Connor answered in challenge, head tilting to get Markus in his sights. He could feel the powerful thrum of defiance pulsing through his thirium lines; he knew that his rage was misplaced, but Markus was nothing if not an excellent lightning rod for it. “What can you possibly help me with?”

Markus stood there for another 3.87 seconds, with those same inquiring eyes. Then, a vague sadness that felt fathomless crept into them, and he strode forward, stopping less than an arm’s length away. Connor held that gaze unflinchingly, daring the man standing before him to do something.

He heard the sound of synthetic skin retracting before he saw it, the honeyed tone of Markus’ hand peeling back in a shimmer of pale blue, only the burnished sheen of white plastic left behind, hovering in the space between them. “With whatever you need,” Markus stated plainly.

Connor’s anger was immediately displaced by jolt of shock, gaping at the proffered hand held at chest height, palm up and open. It was then summarily swallowed whole by the marching of a hundred-thousand nanites through the wiring of his chassis. This sensation, unfortunately, had become all too familiar to him: shame.

His gaze dropped to the ground, awash with a mixture of colors and hues Markus surely would have found fascinating, unable to move a single servo. His right hand, still gripped around the iron-wrought gate, once again registered the powdery white snow as unpleasant against his palm. The sensation grounded him, staved away the creeping numbness that began to fill the void the sudden onslaught of anger left behind. Dimly, he felt small clumps of snow begin to form in his hair, but couldn’t muster the resources to pull the hood back up.

He ignored the sound of crunching footfalls, casually shutting down the preconstruction that pinged in his sensors as Markus closed what little distance there was, silver-white hand still hanging in the air, approximately 3.4 centimeters from the shoulder of his leather jacket. There Markus remained, stalwart and resolute as ever, unblinking gaze itching against his right temple. His chronometer seemed to be malfunctioning; it was telling him that seconds were passing far more slowly than he knew them to be. Somewhere distant, a voice that sounded like his own murmured, “…I’m tired, Markus.”

Androids couldn’t be tired, Connor tried to tell himself. His investigative software cheerily pinged the lie in his hud, as if he hadn’t already determined that himself. Another all too familiar rustling of bitterness briefly rolled through his sensors, much like the roiling waves below him—the comparison caused the sensation to ease back into an imperceptible background hum.

In his periphery, he saw a hint of movement from Markus, eyes flitting down, and to his left—gazing at the Detroit River, that lingering sadness deepening. “I know,” he replied quietly, nodding, more to himself than Connor. Something about it tugged at Connor, something that made him look at the man more closely.

Inside his mind palace, relevant information slid into place with a pleasant click of feedback. He felt no joy in the revelation. This wasn’t just the Leader of the Deviants standing in front of him. This was Markus, and Markus was a man just like anyone else, a man who—

Connor’s lips parted, thoughts spilling out into spoken words, “…You lost your father, too.”

This time, Markus was the one who stared into the abyss of the Detroit River, flecks of snow bobbing around his frame as though they were afraid to touch him. Another indecipherable something crept into his expression, a kind of vulnerability Connor had never seen in him before. It made the ever-present skittering of his own biocomponents both better, and worse. He understood. “Yeah,” he breathed, resignation and grief tinging his tone. “I did.”

Connor blinked, stunned as much by the epiphany as he was his own abject stupidity for not noticing it sooner. ‘Connor, you idiot.’

Without a second thought, Connor disabled the correct patch of synthesized skin, reached up, and took Markus’ hand in his own.

Chapter Text

“But, I’m not cold, Lieutenant.”

The thick-woven wool of Hank’s winter coat scratched against the knuckles of his fingers as he held it aloft. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He’d have it as many times as he had to, until Connor just kept his goddamn mouth shut and listened to him, for once. “You sound like a five year old.”

Connor blinked, brows twitching upward for a half second. “Technically, I’m only four.”

Hank grimaced, shoulders dropping in annoyance, before he shook the coat in the air. “Will you just take the goddamn thing? Look, I know what your fancy schematics say about you handling cold weather, but I don’t think they took into account you being soaking fucking wet.” His sharp blue eyes snapped to Connor’s soaked through blazer. And shirt. And pants. “You’re gonna freeze in weather like this.”

Connor made a point of looking down at himself, as if he somehow hadn’t noticed that he was drenched head to toe after getting pulled out of a fucking lake. He frowned in annoyance, casually plucking a small twig off from his jacket and tossing it aside, wiping at the arm to remove some kind of unseen blemish from the polyester weave. Then, he had the fucking gall to adjust the goddamn cuffs of his sopping wet button-down with a well-practiced flick of the wrist, slender fingers rapping against the non-existent meat of his thumb with an aplomb that only spiked Hank’s blood pressure even further. Once he seemed satisfied with his business casual swimwear, he dropped his arms to his sides, returned his gaze to meet Hank’s, and replied simply, “They did, and I won’t.”

Hank’s frown deepened, fingers tightening over the bunched up collar of his coat. Every last inch of skin that now had one less layer protecting it prickled from the chill; his neck was so cold, it somehow felt like it was being melted with a blowtorch. He didn’t have the advantage of having long hair to cover it, anymore. He bit the discomfort back, channeling it into his frustration. “You always say shit like that, until something comes along that proves you wrong. The last thing I need is to drag you back to Central unconscious, again, because you didn’t listen to me when you had the chance.”

He took a moment to regard the lapping waters of Lake St. Clair several paces behind Connor, not sure if he wanted to condemn the water or the android more. “What the hell were you thinking, jumping onto the boat after him?”

Connor’s eyebrows rose again, head quirking to the side in that unique way of his. It had honestly been fascinating as hell watching Connor’s personality develop since the Android Revolution, slowly learning all of his tics, and tells. It was like deciphering a code that constantly shifted and reinvented itself, and for someone like Hank, who couldn’t get enough of a good puzzle, it never ceased to amaze him. To think, Connor was built to be a tool, and not the noble-hearted asshole that stood soaking wet in front of him on a cold February day.

“Well, I was thinking of apprehending a known trafficker who had information on missing kids.” Connor's shoulders hiked in a shrug. “And it worked. We got him.”

“Not before nearly killing you both,” Hank answered sternly, lowering the coat to his chest, if for nothing else than to give his shoulder a break. That last stab wound was still sending its regards, over sixteen months later. Getting old was a bitch. “You knew I was right behind you, Connor, and you knew Border Patrol was en route. He wouldn’t have gotten far.”

“You don’t know that, Hank,” Connor rebuked, arm swinging wide towards the shimmering lake nearby. “He’s managed to dodge us before, and I didn’t want to take the chance of letting him get away again.”

Hank’s frustration deepened at the same rate his concern grew. Not this shit again. “Because it’s you versus the world, right? That it? Remind me who had to fish you both out of the water after that asshole sank the damn boat?” Connor looked as though he wanted to reply, but wasn’t exactly sure what to say. Hank didn’t give him a chance to counter. “Remember that they had to immediately put our perp into a hypothermia blanket because unlike you, humans do get cold?”

Hank stepped forward, closing the short distance between them with a crunch of frozen-over snow and broken down underbrush. He pushed his winter coat into Connor’s chest, holding it there as he kept eye contact with the stubborn bastard. “Put the coat on, Connor. We’ll talk more on the drive back.”

Connor, with a pinched expression that was equal parts contrite and aggravated, reluctantly grabbed it with his right hand, never breaking eye contact. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“It’s eighteen degrees out, Hank. Being out in this weather underdressed will—“

“Kill me? Yeah, that’s why I want to get back to the car.”

“Lieutenant—“

“Connor,” Hank started, hand raised in warning, “do not tell me you don’t get cold, you’re starting to fucking ice over. So, either put the goddamn coat on, or we both freeze out here.”

Instead of listening, because God forbid that ever happen, Connor instead stared at him, all previous hints of aggression gone. Brown eyes searched his for a moment, the whistling of the lake-effect winds through the nearby tree branches filling the silence between them. There was something sad in the kid’s gaze, in a way that felt almost out of a place on him. “Hank…you don’t have to sacrifice for me. If I make a mistake, I own that, and I’ll answer for it.”

Hank huffed, steam swirling into nothingness in the mid-morning light. “Yeah, and you’re definitely going to. But Connor…” He pitched forward, just a hair, getting into Connor’s personal space as he dropped his baritone to a stage whisper. “Who’s gonna answer for you if you can’t do it yourself?”

Now, it was his turn to search Connor’s eyes, trying to root out and hunt down the fear Hank knew was driving him. As much as Hank hated to admit it, the stabbing fucked them both up a lot more than either of them cared to openly acknowledge. It didn’t crop up very often—anymore, anyway—but whenever it did, it became a problem. “You don’t have to go it alone, Connor. And you don’t have to prove shit to anyone. Certainly not to me. Alright?”

Connor’s eyelids flickered, jaw twitching. He said nothing.

Hank’s heart hurt. God, Connor had seen so much in such a short span of time, it was a testament to his sheer fucking willpower that he was even still going, let alone risking life and limb on a regular basis to save innocent people—some of whom hated his guts for no good fucking reason. Hank was so goddamn proud of him, the stupid self-sacrificial prick.

He gently, but firmly, pressed the winter coat further against Connor’s chest, a hopefully steadying gesture. He softened his expression, ignoring the way his jaw wanted to lock from the cold. “Take the coat. It’ll help.”

Connor hesitated. “But, you’re cold. You’re shivering.”

‘No shit,’ he wanted to say. Instead, Hank quirked a smile, dropping his other hand against Connor’s shoulder. It was like squeezing a chunk of iced-over granite. “Don’t worry, I warm up pretty fast.”

He fully expected Connor to argue, because in four fucking years, Connor never actually agreed to put the coat on, whenever Hank offered it. At this stage, it was almost performative—Hank would offer, Connor would refuse, Hank would put the coat back on and mutter about Connor being a stubborn, lone-wolf asshole, and then all was right with the world. So, he was surprised when Connor resolutely gripped the woolen coat in both hands, and slipped it over his shoulders in one smooth motion.

Hank, despite himself, felt his lips beneath his moustache twist in barely-restrained laughter. Connor looked absolutely fucking ridiculous. The coat completely engulfed him, the shoulders sloping farther down his arm than they should, and the arms hiding all but the last two knuckles of his fingers. He looked for all the world like a little kid who went to school dressed up as their Dad for Parents’ Day.

Without warning, Hank’s throat closed up.

Connor regarded himself skeptically, inspecting his arms at multiple angles, as if to verify that they were, in fact, still his arms beneath the scratchy black fabric. He reached one hand toward the other, barely-visible fingertips fiddling with the cuffs of the densely-twined wool experimentally. His head tipped to the side in contemplation, clearly ruminating on this new plethora of information presented to him. After a moment of deliberation, he let his arms drop back down, and more hesitantly, dip into the pockets of the coat, as he’d seen Hank do so often over the years.

Suddenly, Hank was very aware of just how much his body was shaking. He tried to tell himself it was from the bitter cold burning his skin. He was never that good at denial.

“It doesn’t seem to fit me that well,” Connor admitted eventually, using his now-pocketed hands to tug the coat closer to his lithe body, “but I can see why you like wearing it so much.”

“Yeah?” Hank choked out. He couldn’t get his esophagus to cooperate.

Connor nodded. “It is helping with power draw. My thirium pump doesn’t have to work as hard.” His head tottered for the side slightly. “It’s also…nice to have the extra insulation.” He paused, pensive; remorseful. He looked back up to Hank, a sad hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You were right, Hank. I should have listened. I’m sorry.”

Hank had the distinct impression that Connor was apologizing for far more than just the coat. With conscious effort, he willed his windpipe to relax, taking in a deep breath of the frigid air. It felt like he inhaled napalm. He didn’t care. “Well, when we close this case out, we can go find one that fits you better.”

The sadness in Connor’s smile melted, just a little. “That sounds nice. I would like that.”

“Me too,” Hank replied, slightly surprised that he fully meant it. “Now, let’s get to the fucking car before we both turn into popsicles.”

Chapter Text

The most difficult conversations always happened in the car.

It was a particular detail that Connor catalogued over the course of the last twenty-seven months of his life, mostly in the hopes that, at some point, this correlation would prove itself false. Strictly speaking, in the most technical sense, it did prove itself false quite often, in that a majority of rides were banal in nature, ranging from silent, uneventful trips from one objective to the next, to exchanges that could be considered downright pleasant. Never the less, when it came to those tense, uncomfortable dialogues that both Connor and Hank fought so hard to avoid, they always, without fail, started inside the cabin of a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass that desperately needed a thorough and detailed cleaning.

It didn’t help that in 87% of those cases, they were initiated by Connor—such as now.

But, in his defense, what else was he supposed to do about an irate, emotionally distraught, and very legally drunk police lieutenant under his charge? Let him go, and leave him to his own devices? The last time Connor made that kind of mistake, he ended up wrestling a .357 Magnum out of the man’s grasp and putting him in a chokehold until he stopped being an immediate danger to himself. It was a memory file he preferred to never access, given the opportunity.

Connor glanced to his right, studying the Lieutenant’s profile with growing concern. Hank stared straight ahead, stone-faced and aimless, arms barred across his broad chest. Even in the darkness of their post-midnight drive, the hostility in his facial features was as bright as the yellowed street lights that streaked past them. The fury that boiled within him made him appear far too large for the cramped cabin, shoulders hunched and head bowed, curling in on himself to keep the rage contained. It was this composure, the inordinate level of willpower in the face of abject turmoil, that Connor often found awe-inspiring.

However, on nights such as these, Connor bore first-hand witness to the prohibitive cost that such control demanded.

He placed even pressure on the brake pedal as he slowed to a halt in front of a red light. Having already assessed the traffic patterns of this neighborhood of Detroit, he knew he had thirty-two seconds before his light turned green. He utilized this time to cant his head to the side, appraising the Lieutenant more openly. Hank’s blood-alcohol level was still well above the legal limit, but given the time he’d spent in Jimmy’s Bar, along with the emotional impact the murder scene from this afternoon caused him—caused them both—it was at a surprisingly reasonable amount, all things considered.

Connor had no capacity to get drunk. He’d known this from the outset, but had all the same experimented with various substances over his first year, strictly to verify this information. He hadn’t given much thought to the deep, low thrum of despair that conclusion had brought him—it was better than he wasn’t given a way to ease the symptoms of his own emotional distress, or else he would be far too tempted to overindulge in them. Human bodies adapted to substance abuse, in their own way; androids were afforded no such luxury in their designs.

That didn’t stop Connor from drinking the remains of Hank’s whiskey in Jimmy’s Bar, in spite of this knowledge. Illogical as it was, sometimes, some days, he just had to make sure that he didn’t have an easy way out. The looks that both Jimmy and Hank had given him were immediately saved to a specific sub-folder in his memory logs, for when he needed a quick injection of positivity and/or humor to endure a harsh day. In response to their chagrined amazement, he’d simply wiped a dribble of scotch whiskey from the left side of his chin with his right hand, dropped the dof glass onto the counter without a loud clack, and said, “I added an extra tip to his bill. Thanks for the drink.”

“Sure, no problem, plastic,” Jimmy had replied, clearly no less troubled for the statement.

“Connor.”

“Yeah, whatever, man. Just get him outta here.”

Connor returned to the present, bracing himself. He knew this was going to get a poor response. “Do you want to talk?”

Hank’s voice was a low, dangerous growl. “Does it fucking look like I wanna talk?”

His Social Relations program butted in with several queries and responses that Connor swatted away with a slight flick of his eyelids. Useless software. It still struck a dissonant chord with him that he was built with programmed parameters that he actively had to curtail, in order to function as a fully realized individual. It was something he would potentially ruminate over later; perhaps on another car ride. “Okay. Well, I wanna talk. Is that okay?”

Hank’s baritone was in the same range as before. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not particularly.”

The only reaction out of the Lieutenant was his head slanting back into the headrest of his seat. He stared at the stained ceiling wordlessly, jaw muscles rolling beneath his trimmed beard.

Connor’s preconstruction software registered the light turning green before his eyes noted the shift in color, still focusing on the minutia of Hank’s micro-expressions. Knowing he would receive no further input, Connor returned his attention to the road, and drove in silence. If he knew Hank the way he thought he did—

“So?” Hank grunted into the cold. “Weren’t you gonna talk?”

Forty-four seconds. Faster than Connor had anticipated—inebriation usually made the Lieutenant less talkative, not more. “I am,” he replied, unable to keep the hint of annoyance from coloring his voice. This wasn’t easy for him, either. “I just…don’t know where to start. It affected me, too, you know.”

He spared another furtive glance at Hank. There appeared to be no outward reaction to his confession. Alright, then. He would continue. “I didn’t expect it to. Being a part of CyberLife, being at Jericho, I’ve seen more than my fair share of android bodies. We’ve come into contact with android chop shops before. We work murders on a regular basis, some of them gruesome. It shouldn’t have been any different—“

“They were kids.” Another quick look; Hank’s eyes glittered like knives in a kaleidoscope, razor sharp, and deadly. “They murdered fuckin’ kids. I don’t give a fuck how long they’d been there.”

The cold fury of Hank’s tone resonated in Connor’s chassis, his biocomponents absorbing the vibrations in a way that felt strangely soothing. The specific frequency of murderous rage present in the Lieutenant’s smooth baritone complimented his own quite nicely, Connor thought.

He couldn’t be certain of a time in which a case produced such a viscerally negative reaction from him, and coming from a being that had perfect recollection as a built-in feature, that was an impressive feat. He’d walked into that back room, hidden behind a heavy antique bookcase, and saw the pieces, the parts, the broken shells of YK500s and LB400s—saw the illegal modifications done to them—and had to reroute nearly all of his processing power into shutting down his combat protocols. There wasn’t enough energy remaining to keep his preconstruction software from calculating, quite lazily by its standards, just how easily he could crush the skulls of every single solitary human being responsible for the war crime of a murder scene he was now forced to commit to memory.

The fact that the murders had happened pre-Revolution, and were—according to the flimsy and loophole-ridden android rights laws—likely not eligible for prosecution, only added heinous insult to grievous injury. His circuits burned beneath his plasteel frame, servos quaking from the strain of conscious inaction. Captain Fowler himself had to come down to the scene to mediate, due to the, “Nightmare-fuel shitshow going on here.” The Captain certainly had a knack for succinctly summarizing complex events. By the end of it, both Connor and Hank had been relieved of duty for the next forty-eight hours to, “Get their fucking heads on straight,” before being outright dismissed from the scene proper.

Connor had never been so happy to oblige an order from a human before, storming away with a jaw clenched so tightly that the silicone outer layer of his teeth warned of potential cracks. When he arrived in his apartment, the only place in the world he had for quiet, solitude, and serenity, the tools that normally provided calm only served to enrage him more. He put his fist through the cheap drywall, damaging the stud behind it with a crack of wood, metal, and plastic combined. The regret had been immediate; the landlord wouldn’t like that. The dismissal of the regret had been nearly as fast; fuck the landlord, he could deal with it.

Connor flexed his right hand against the steering wheel, judging how much of the damage had yet to be repaired by his systems. The lengths of his fingers appeared to have been largely repaired by the nanites, but the damage to his knuckles were too extensive to be fully remedied by internal means. He would likely have to fix it himself. The fore and middle knuckles still peeked white beneath his dermal layer. He wondered how long it would be before the Lieutenant noticed, and how much longer still before he said anything.

Connor looked in the rearview mirror, spying the left half of Hank’s face in its smudged view. Beneath the righteous fury, powerful and explosive as it was, Connor also spotted something buried much deeper, propelling that boiling anger up and out, like an erupting volcano. It was the thing that truly set Connor’s temperament on the path to vengeance—the violent stuttering of Hank’s breath, the sharp inhale, the wide-eyed anguish of a man who, even if for a moment, saw his son in the hidden ruins of a mass grave.

It hadn’t been Cole, of course—no LB400 could ever be so unique—but, the boy’s features were a close enough resemblance in passing, that when Hank’s body language stiffened, gasping in open-mouthed horror, Connor instantly understood what had transpired in the Lieutenant’s mind. At that juncture, the desire to knowingly and intentionally commit homicide multiplied four-fold. It was purely out of his deep respect—admiration?—love?—for Hank that he retained his composure, for all the times that Hank had done so for him. It was why he was here, now, in sub-zero temperatures, hunting down his friend and driving him home.

As deeply as this affected him—and it very much did, regardless of his public stance on the matter—he saw how much more it affected Hank. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, let him suffer in silence.

The chugging of the Oldsmobile’s engine was the only sound between them for eighteen seconds. It gnawed at Connor’s endoskeleton. His lip twitched, and words spilled out, “…I hate what I saw. I hate that they could get away with it. The things they did to th—“

Hank roared in frustration, a meaty fist shooting out to punch the passenger side console with a speed and force that made Connor jump in his seat, head snapping towards Hank in alarm. Hank sat there for three cycles of Connor’s thirium pump, curled fist hanging in dead air, the harsh cut of a scowl darkening his features, before he lashed out again.

And again. And again. And again.

Wordlessly, and leaning heavily on his software suite to negotiate his exact surroundings, Connor pulled the car over, wheels crunching over the dirty pulverized ice as the vehicle came to a halt. His proximity alerts noted that he was in a fire lane illegally. He ignored it. Deftly, he unclasped his seatbelt as Hank continued to pummel his car’s console, breathing become more ragged by degrees as he did. When punching the console no longer became a viable option—possibly because the Lieutenant’s hand might have been fractured—he resorted to kicking the underside of the glove compartment.

Connor remained a silent observer, allowing the Lieutenant the space and safety to vent his emotions. Later on, Connor surmised he would need to do something similar—the current hole in his apartment wall simply wasn’t enough.

Nearly thirty seconds passed from the initial moment of Hank’s outburst, to the point where he had exhausted himself to simply sagging against the backrest of his seat, injured hand buried knuckle-deep in his nearly shoulder-length platinum hair and gaping sightlessly ahead. His jaw muscles continued to undulate beneath his beard, a volatile set of waves forced into motion by an equally volatile storm. Connor’s internal chronometer, while technically accurate, unerringly so, had a difficult time tracking effectively when it came to the Lieutenant’s emotional states. It stated with a bland efficiency that he had only been sitting in that position for 3.77 seconds, and yet, time stretched on forever with every tiny, despondent flick his eyes. Hank’s mouth opened haltingly. His voice was carried on his breath; quiet, tired. “…They were just kids.”

Connor, without intending to, mirrored his tone. “I know.”

Hank would never openly acknowledge that one of those kids looked like his son; Connor knew this. Still, he found himself reaching out in a manner similar to what Hank done when their positions were reversed. His right hand found Hank’s left shoulder, nestling between the trapezius and the curve of his neck. His thumb and forefinger landed past the thick folds of his heavy black winter coat, and without conscious thought or effort, he began counting Hank’s pulse as he gently squeezed the tense muscles beneath.

Hank shut his eyes tightly, face twisting from restraint—fighting valiantly to maintain composure, to stay in control, to be the protector and leader that he believed he always needed to be, no matter what. It made Connor’s chest hurt. He didn’t know his chest could hurt like this. He strengthened his grip a fraction, finding it difficult to ascertain how much force was too much in a circumstance like this; he tried to match the PSI of his fingertips as closely to his memory of Hank’s as possible. He needed to get this right—nothing was more important to him, right now.

Hank exhaled through his nose and leaned forward, resting his elbows against his knees and cradling his head in his hands. His hair, a wavy curtain of metallic gray, shrouded his face from view entirely. Perhaps that was the point. Connor didn’t judge; he shifted his grip to the back of Hank’s neck, and tightened his grip briefly in a silent affirmation.

A tremor ran through the tightly-corded muscles beneath Connor’s hard light fingerpads, and Connor squeezed once more, his left hand coming to rest on Hank’s left arm to provide additional support. The tremor morphed into a slow, rhythmic convulsion that reverberated through Hank’s upper body. Connor held on, letting the man grieve.

Seven minutes and twenty-two seconds passed in complete silence.

Eventually, the tension that had coiled itself around the Lieutenant’s frame and nearly swallowed him whole began to dissipate. Connor felt the change in tensile strength gradually, as he attempted to ease Hank’s suffering with his presence. He wasn’t certain he was doing this correctly, but he at least hoped he hadn’t been making it worse, noting with relief how the Lieutenant’s breathing began to even out from the tight, restricted wheezing that stated plainly what spoken words could not. When Connor felt that Hank’s emotional equilibrium had neared homeostasis, he dared to lighten his grip, hand coming to rest at the intersection between the cervical and thoracic sections of his spine.

Then, Connor felt Hank’s hand, cold and clammy, land on the rotary servos that approximated his kneecap, and squeeze gently. He did use the same PSI. Good. Connor’s eyes flitted to the point of contact curiously, both unable to understand its meaning, while also recognizing the motion’s significance. Emotions made no sense.

Hank loosened his grip, patting the servo twice, before removing his hand altogether, slowly pulling himself back into a more Hank-like sitting position. Connor, like Hank, shifted away in the driver’s seat to afford the Lieutenant a more acceptable level of personal space. It appeared that Hank had wiped away any evidence of his distress, the only remaining trace being slightly swollen eyelids, which could easily be explained by the effects of excessive alcohol consumption.

Connor gripped the old-fashioned nylon seatbelt, and pulled it across his torso, affixing it to the lock peeking out next to his hip. His hands came to rest at ten and two o’clock on the vintage steering wheel, and with a flick of his wrist, he pulled back out onto the darkened Detroit streets.

The rumbling of the vehicle’s engine filled the cabin again, and again, the sound filled some unseen pressure gauge in his systems. He looked Hank’s way. “Are you feeling any better?”

Hank huffed sullenly, “No.” His features then ticked in dissent, lips curling under his moustache. “Kinda—I don’t fuckin’ know. I just want this day to be other with.”

Technically, it was already over with, but now was not the time for semantics. Connor returned his gaze to the drive ahead, humming low in his vocal modulator. He couldn’t help but agree, wishing, not for the first time in his short life, that he had the same human foibles that allowed them to bury traumatic remembrances.

The thought immediately pinged as a lie in his investigative software. He rankled at his software’s intrusion; yeah, he knew.

Footage deletion was very much an option on the table. It was the solution that many androids took when certain logs became too much of a burden to their core processes. It was also a solution that humans attempted to recreate, albeit in a far messier, uglier way. It was why Hank drank until he could hardly stand, why humans engaged in all manner of dangerous, self-destructive behavioral patterns—all to excise painful memories that had nowhere else to go. Those human foibles he yearned for already existed, perfectly recreated, in his android form.

His right hand twitched against the cold polymer of the steering wheel.

“You?”

Hank’s voice startled him out of his reverie, and he blinked a glance in the Lieutenant’s direction. “What?”

Hank’s eyes, a brilliant blue, captured and refracted every hint of light that passed them by. “What about you? You doing okay?”

Connor couldn’t hide the grimace before he turned his head away. It took approximately six seconds to calibrate his jaw motors. “I’m…handling it.”

It was Hank’s turn to hum, a deep, droning sound. A beat passed. “What happened to your hand?”

He bit back an expletive. He was really hoping Hank wouldn’t notice.

(He was a decorated police lieutenant, of course he would notice.)

Connor debated simply not answering; given the events of today, and how…out of sorts they both were as a result, he believed that he would be forgiven for not being in a terribly talkative mood.

“You said you wanted to talk, right?”

His dermal layer creased unpleasantly as he scowled, perhaps at himself more than his passenger. He couldn’t decry a conversation that he, himself, fished for.

He had no means with which to visually show the shame that crawled its way up his spinal receptors, thousands upon thousands of microscopic nanites skittering along the planes of his face and neck. Sometimes, he wished he could blush; other times, he was grateful for the lack of spontaneous physiological responses. His dark brown eyes flitted to his right. “I…um, I punched a hole through my apartment wall.”

Hank repeated the same contemplative hum as before. “Does it hurt?”

Connor wasn’t designed to feel pain. “…Yeah.”

Hank sighed, leather squeaking as he shifted his 6’2” frame inside the increasingly small cabin. “Yeah, mine does, too.”

Connor braked at the four-way stop sign, checking for traffic that he already knew wasn’t there. “Are you hurt?”

“Eh, nothing some ice and rest won’t fix.” Hank almost stifled the quiet hiss of pain. “You?”

Connor’s head teetered from one side to the other. “No major damage; it’s already mostly repaired. I just need to touch up the knuckles, and the skin should reactivate.”

“Just a touch up, huh?” Hank grunted, head turned towards the window. “Well, hopefully, it goes smoothly.”

Connor had preconstructed thirty-seven different outcomes to Hank learning of his violent outburst earlier in the day. A complete lack of surprise, or reprisal, was not one of them. He wasn’t certain what kind of emotion that elicited, but he knew it didn’t make him feel any better about it.

The Oldsmobile’s heavy metal frame groaned as Connor turned the vehicle into the slanted driveway, the occupants of the cabin swaying as they cleared the hump from the road to halt at its usual parking spot. Connor flicked the keys out of the ignition, tugged the parking brake with a metallic ratcheting, and popped loose the seatbelt, it springing back into place with a scraping of well-worn nylon. He opened the door and stood in one smooth, feline motion, rounding the front of the salt-stained vehicle with even, measured steps.

Hank shoved his door open with significantly less grace, scowling up at Connor as he neared. “I don’t need help getting out of my own fucking car, thank you.”

Connor remained where he stood, regardless, just in case Hank overestimated his sense of balance. To his credit, Hank’s assessment was correct, standing to his full height with barely any instability in his movements. His hair billowed in the wind, shrouding most of his face, as he sidestepped the passenger side door, slamming it closed with a bare, shivering hand. He then stood there for a moment, what Connor could see of his face contemplative, before his other hand clapped against Connor’s shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s get inside.”

Connor hadn’t explicitly intended to stay in Lieutenant Anderson’s home tonight; he was already wiring for an auto-taxi as the words registered in his audio receptors.

He thought back to his apartment, to its silence, its clean and organized furnishings and fittings that Connor had deliberately, methodically placed to soothe his nerves—

—thought back to the ragged hole in his wall—

—And closed the auto-taxi program down. He nodded. “Of course, Lieutenant.”

They walked in near lock step, along the small winding stone path, up the small wooden stoop, and halted at the locked front door. Connor stood to the side of the door handle, patiently waiting for Hank to fish his keys out of his right pocket, as he always did, because Connor using the key Hank had given him was somehow still a slight in the Lieutenant’s eyes, for reasons he never espoused. The keys jangled, extra keys winking in the relatively dim light of his front porch lamp as they turned, and the door creaked open weakly.

Connor frowned briefly. He would have to oil the hinges, the next time he had the opportunity.

Hank slipped through the doorway, the dull blue glow of a flat-screen TV illuminating the living room, and Connor followed closely behind. As Hank had done moments ago, Connor sidestepped the door, allowing ample room for it to swing as Hank pushed it closed with a practiced ease. He remained in place for two cycles of his thirium pump, letting the synthetic muscles of his shoulders relax by two centimeters. Connor couldn’t get cold, but he appreciated the warmth the Anderson residence provi—

A large, calloused hand clamped down on the back of his neck, dragging him into the vice grip of Hank Anderson’s arms. The warmth of the Anderson residence increased four-fold, Hank’s ice-cold cheek resting against his pulsating LED; the chill was strangely refreshing.

Another query ran without his input. Oh. His LED had been red since approximately 4:17 PM this afternoon. He hadn’t even noticed.

Without warning, or prompting, Connor’s motor functions all but shut down, sagging against the Lieutenant’s bulk. His energy reserves were well and truly depleted; his titanium alloy frame felt like it had been transmuted with lead and concrete. He felt…tired. Old. How could a piece of plastic feel old—?

Hank whispered next to his ear, “I know, son. I know.”

Connor didn’t have the energy to furrow his brows in confusion. Nor did he have the energy to shut down the saline production currently filling the tiny mesh pockets underneath his optical units. Had he said something? He tried to skip back a few seconds in his recording software, but only came up with an error code, stinging bright red against the deep black wool and whorls of color on a cotton collar.

“…And, I know it affected you, too.” Hank’s quiet baritone reverberated through his chest, into the plates that made up Connor’s face, the sound bouncing off of itself inside of his own skull. In other, less unpleasant circumstances, it would have been a fascinating phenomenon to experience. “I’m sorry that I didn’t help.”

Connor drooped his head that much further against Hank’s shoulder. Was this not considered helping?

Connor felt the sound Hank made deep in his throat more than he heard it. “Nah, I took off, and left you stranded. Didn’t even give you a ride back to your apartment. I was a shitty partner, today.”

His saline production tripled, something inhumanly primal rushing to the fore. He refused to even consider Hank’s words, how dare he—

“Hey hey hey, easy, easy.” Connor reflexively stilled, uncertain of what he was doing to prompt such a response. He was running on tertiary systems, and those were designed for bare functionality, not pinpoint accuracy. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

He felt a tremor run through his chassis, a disturbingly familiar one. Connor closed his eyes, relinquishing control. Just this once.

An indeterminate amount of time passed in complete silence.

Though he made no sound, Connor understood what Hank was telling him more than spoken words could ever hope to convey. In spite of its grim nature, Connor never the less felt honored to have heard it.