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By the time they get back to the ‘shithole’ in the RV park it was dark and still outside, only crickets awake. The ride back had been similarly quiet; Stubbs looking out the window at the passing buildings and Bernard sitting with his head in his hands.
“You’re the only one we can’t replace,” Connells- no, Dolores had said. They had a plan to uproot the entire world order, and they were expecting him to be a figure in it.
He knew that the explosion in the building was Connells killing himself and the people that had come to speak with him; the ones working for Serac, Rehoboam’s creator. He could imagine too well Connells sitting in stony silence as a blast cut through his being.
Bernard hoped he’d been programmed not to feel pain, because that blast, the fire-.
He presses the heel of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see stars. A light touch at his elbow startles him, and he jerks back almost violently. Stubbs has his hand outstretched and is giving Bernard a calculating stare, though his voice is dry and amused “We’re home,”
Bernard hadn’t even noticed that the car had stopped; he nods with a sigh and gets out into the cool night air, a shock after the climate-control they’d been sitting in for over an hour.
He watches the car speed off back down the road to its next passenger, following the rules of its coding like it was built to do.
He doesn’t know how long he stands and stares after the taillights, but when he turns Stubbs is watching him, still with that odd, evaluating look on his face. Bernard expects him to say something mocking about how out of it Bernard is, but he just cocks his head towards their unit;
“Let’s get inside.”
*
Once the door is closed Bernard stops in front of the bed that he’d come to think of as ‘his’ and just breathes. Takes in the ugly paint color, the scratchy comforters, the generic art on the walls; anything to calm the pounding of his heart, the mess of thoughts in his mind. But everything here just reminds him of where they are; it’s all so different from Westworld. It’s truly another reality, and it’s beginning to eat at him.
Like in the car, there’s the soft touch of a hand on the crook of his elbow. He turns into it, and only when he finds Stubbs’ eyes in the darkness does he realize that neither of them turned on the lights. The only visibility comes from the outside streetlights shining in through the dirty windows.
The other man stands in front of him for a long moment. Bernard can see how his focus on random things gets more pronounced as his eyes adjust; he’s taking in the bags under Bernard’s eyes, the sweat on his brow. He’d always been perceptive to the moods of those around him. Had to be, given where they used to work. After his eyes have tracked around Bernard’s face more than once he seems to come to some kind of decision.
Slowly, almost methodically, Stubbs’ hands come up to the front of Bernard’s shirt and begin to unbutton his waistcoat. There are only three buttons, so he’s finished in a blink and pushes it off to the floor. He shoots a quick look back to Bernard’s face before his hands rise again and make quick work of the tie around his neck.
The sharp snap of it sliding off is what gets Bernard out of his silence.
“What are you doing?” Even to his own ears he sounds shrill and paranoid. God, he’s tired.
“I’m protecting you, like you wanted,”
“From who?”,
“From yourself. You’re about to start freaking the fuck out about Dolores and you need to calm down. Don’t blow a fuse,” he smirks, and he looks so much like the Stubbs that Bernard knows that it does calm him, a bit, until he shrugs out of his own suit jacket and throws it over the back of the chair at their tiny table. He unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt and rolls his sleeves up to his elbows as he turns back around.
Bernard takes a half-step back to dodge the hands reaching for him. He’s not sure at all what’s going on, but Stubbs is mocking him when the future is actually in fucking danger and he’s been named as a player. Annoyance burns in him.
“We’re not talking about what’s going on in a bubble, Stubbs, in a private island for some rich people to play in, this is the actual world. The implications of what she’s doing, of what I might-“
“Bernard? Shut the fuck up,”
*
It’s not a gentle kiss.
Something Bernard would be thankful for afterwards; it wasn’t tentative or questioning at all. Stubbs steps right into his space with his usual insolence and curls a large hand around the back of Bernard’s neck before pressing their lips together roughly.
At first, it isn’t even pleasant; Bernard had put his arms up when Stubbs had approached and they’re still there, trapped against the solid wall of Stubbs’ chest as the other man holds him still and brings his other arm up to rest against the small of his back. Their lips are closed and the kiss is borderline chaste, easy to walk away from and deny if they did it now.
But then Stubbs tilts his head and presses hard enough to the underside of his jaw that Bernard gasps, and a tongue pushes in past his teeth.
The pace changes abruptly with the difference; it’s no longer harsh or methodical, instead Stubbs turns it slow, drugging, and Bernard relaxes into it, loses himself in it, just for a moment.
*
Before Westworld, before Theresa, Bernard has memories but he doesn’t have memories, he doesn’t have this. He has the haze of sweet touches and poignant moments, but not the sensory memory of hands gripping tightly at his waist, his jaw. He couldn’t truly remember the feel of warm skin (not real skin) coming up through a shirt under his palms.
Of course he doesn’t have any of that, because whatever recollections he has in his mind aren’t him. They’re part of the written backstory programmed into him that gets brought along every time he wakes up in a new body. He didn’t choose it. Just like Stubbs didn’t choose to protect him. Didn’t choose this for himself; he’s protecting Bernard like his new Core Directive dictates.
At all costs.
He pushes away as much as he can, “No, no, this isn’t you. You’d punch me in the face before this. I can- I’ll stop it, I’ll get my tablet,” But Stubbs is already shaking his head,
“Bernard, I’ve killed people, I’ve shot myself in the fucking neck in order to fucking explode, I’ve stood by and watched you get tortured. Was that me? Or was that what Ford made me to be? This isn’t a chore, or something I’m having a hard time with. Probably wouldn’t have even back at Westworld before all this, honestly. Wonder if the old man stuck that in there as well,”
He doesn’t mean that, floats through Bernard’s mind at the end of his little speech, you programmed him to protect you whoever he could, that’s what this is, He’s about to say as much when Stubbs interrupts, “Do you feel, Bernard?”,
“I- yes,”
“Yeah, is it real?”
And he’s back to his thoughts from earlier. Is whatever he’s thinking truly his own? The flash of Charlie calling him “Dad” filled him with a sadness that wasn’t deserved, but it felt like it was his at least. Are any of the moves he’s making now something he would ever do? Dolores had remade him, had been in his code, “together, but not as friends”.
Dolores had let him go.
His conversation with Connells had followed a similar vein, but with him causing the hesitation in the other’s eyes; “Have you ever questioned what she’s asking you to do?”, It sounded too much like what he used to ask the hosts in the park. He shakes his head to banish the thought.
“Regardless of if- how, I feel, we don’t have time for this. We need to know what she’s planning,”
“What are we gonna be able to do tonight, huh? What can you do right now? Right now, when you’re so fucked-up at what’s gone on today that I just watched you spend fifteen minutes standing in the street, staring after a car,” Stubbs’ tone is biting, and Bernard feels a wave of embarrassment at having been witnessed acting so unhinged.
Stubbs continues on, but his tone is surprisingly soft,
“Your hands are shaking, you know,”
Bernard looks down to where they’re still pressed lightly against Stubbs’ chest, resting there as they’d been talking. He could see the light tremors in his fingertips. He’s pretty sure this time it isn’t from a head wound. At least, he hadn’t noticed one.
They stand in silence broken only by their breathing. Like with the car, Bernard is struck still at the contradiction of life meeting with coding. His fingers rise with breaths that were built and programmed to be needed.
He’s questioning the nature of his reality.
The shaking stops as he curls his fingers in and grips fistfuls of the white button-up; the neck is open far enough down that his thumbs curl inside the material and rest against skin. The warmth is a comfort he didn’t know he needed until it was felt.
Stubbs picks up the arm he’d dropped when Bernard had pushed him away and puts it on his face, running a fingertip through the coarse hair along his jaw. There’s something close to hunger in his expression that Bernard doesn’t know how to process, doesn’t think he wants to yet. Maybe tomorrow.
This time, it's Bernard who leans in close. He's the one who reaches for the buttons on Stubbs' shirt. He's the one who lets his mind go blissfully, finally, quiet.
*
“Ok, get up, off, off,” Stubbs’ voice rouses Bernard from where he’s dozed off on top of him. With a grunt, he rolls over to the side and lays there panting, too tired to feel embarrassed. He hears Stubbs inhale like he’s about to start talking and braces himself for reminder of what these past few hours were; “Do you feel calm now, Bernard, do you feel protected?”
But instead all he says is, “C’mon, let’s go to the other bed, this one’s filthy,” and Bernard is so thrown by it that he just nods and follows behind, sliding under the covers next to him. A minute ticks by. Two. Five. The more minutes pass the more the awkwardness grows, becoming a third presence in the room.
He can see Stubbs in the corner of his eye, laying on his back, eyes open and looking at the ceiling. Bernard turns his back to him and faces the other bed, willing himself to sleep, but he doesn’t feel the least bit tired. Twenty, maybe thirty more minutes pass. He can tell Stubbs is awake, and he knows it’s obvious that he is as well.
Bernard doesn’t know what to say about what’s transpired between them, but feels such a desperate need to break the tension that he’s going to throw something, anything out there just to start with, and he tenses up to do just that when Stubbs grunts next to him and turns on his side, sliding a large arm around his middle. He pulls close but not flush against Bernard’s back.
Still, Bernard can feel his warmth.
“Go the fuck to sleep, Bernard,”
And he does.