Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

-TUESDAY-

“Markus?”

Markus, who was definitely not daydreaming, looked away from the sunflowers lining the opposite side of the street. “Yes, Carl?”

“Well, don’t just stand there, Markus. Go and find her.”

Okay, so maybe he was daydreaming. Carl hated that. He closed and deleted the daydream so fast he didn’t even remember the file name.  Should he ask for clarification? “Sorry, Carl, I didn’t—“

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Hank interrupted. He forgot the police lieutenant was there. “This sounds like kidnapping.”

“You can’t kidnap an android,” Carl replied.

Uh oh. Markus definitely missed a lot. He started to review the conversation before he was interrupted again, this time by Carl’s hand tapping against his side.

“This century, Markus, before Connor loses his fight with the landscaping.”

Markus, chastened and definitely beyond the pale of asking for clarification, looked both ways before jogging across the street from Carl’s mansion toward the cheerful stand of sunflowers, because that seemed to be the direction he was supposed to head? Hopefully. Connor was already there, attempting (unsuccessfully) to infiltrate the wall of flora by walking into it. Connor’s programming only allowed him to choose between safe/slow and risky/fast options.

“Would you like me to take over?” Markus offered before the police assistant could destroy too many stalks. He wasn't used to talking to other androids so he tried to stick to the point. “I have a preconstruction program.”

Connor withdrew from the prickly foliage, then flexed and unflexed his hand. “Use caution. She bites.”

She…bites. Great. What on earth was going on?

Markus examined the sunflowers and the mosaic of bricks that made up the wall beyond it. The preconstruction program established the best course to take, and as he stepped up to the brick wall and started to climb he searched the last few minutes of conversation for clues.

>PLAYING MEMRK200 2038:11:05:11:38:01

“I’m telling you, Carl, no android could really pass as a human for long, they’re just—Connor, what the hell are you doing?”

Connor looked up at Hank, his mouth open with a little blue stain in the center of his tongue from where he licked the sidewalk. “It’s thirium from a WR400 android. The trail leads to those sunflowers.”

Lieutenant Anderson gestured at Connor in presentation. “I rest my case. So the deviant jumped out from behind the trash cans and attacked your android?”

Carl nodded. “Thankfully, Markus didn’t have anything worth being mugged over.”

“You can’t mug an android, Carl. He’s not even deviant.”

….Okay. While this explained the object it did not explain the subject or verb of Carl’s order. At least Lieutenant Anderson knew he wasn’t deviant. He continued to review his memory.

>PLAYING MEMRK200 2038:11:05:11:40:32

“Maybe it isn’t just a random error, Lieutenant. Maybe she had a motive?”

“Oh yeah, Carl, I’m sure she tried to jump your android specifically just to, what? Become the next great American artist?—"

Hank cut off as something launched out of the sunflowers, past his head and clanged against the fence next to him. They all stared at it.

“Is that—a brick in a sock?” Connor asked.

“Seems pretty creative to me,” Carl said.

“A brick in a sock, does not a sign of humanity make.” Hank grabbed Connor’s collar as he started to go for it. “Do not lick that.”

>PLAYING MEMRK200 2038:11:05:11:41:06

“Hey, if you could get an android to win first place at the Symposium, I’d personally put it through college!" Hank said. "It’d make my job a hell of a lot easier. Maybe people would start to take care of these deviants instead of leaving ‘em on the streets to get hit by cars…”

“I’ll take that wager,” Carl replied. “I bet I can convince everyone at the Detroit Art Show this Saturday that an android is the finest artist among them.” He gestured at the sunflowers. “That android, specifically.”

Hank narrowed his eyes. “That android, huh? Really?” Hank shrugged. “You’re on, old man.”

…Uh oh.

“Carl…” Markus shook his head at the brickwork, then dropped down from a drain pipe into a narrow clearing behind the screen of foliage. It was empty except for a concealed dumpster, a sewer entrance, and a clump of trash that the street cleaners had missed.

Wait, no. That was the deviant. She was crouched near the sunflowers, possibly lining up another bite to give Connor. A memory replayed from before Carl’s conversation with Hank.

>PLAYING MEMRK200 2038:11:05:10:32:43

Markus tried to clear errors from his system as a heavy weight sat on his stomach.

“Your money or your life,” said the female android, sitting on top of him.

Hands clawed at his pockets. The joke was on her, though—all he carried in his pockets were Carl’s baby aspirin and Leo’s epi pen. If only this was funny and not terrifying. “It’s ‘stand and deliver,’ isn’t it?” he offered.

“Huh?”

Markus tried to concentrate over his thundering thirium pump. The sidewalk was digging into his back.  “That’s what highwaymen say. Only gangsters in old movies say ‘your money or’—”

“Okay, stop talking and let me mug you, sunshine.” She had a hat with eyeholes cut out pulled down over her face, which was definitely not how you were supposed to wear a hat. It highlighted her big brown eyes. She looked like a reverse raccoon. She was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to him.

Oh. So that’s what he was daydreaming about. A hostile street deviant, who Carl sent him to collect with nothing more than a good attitude.

“Good morning,” he said, like a complete idiot.

The android glared up at him. “Hey, I’m working this street,” she snapped. “Get out of here.”

“I was just—” Those brown eyes made him feel very, very out of his depth. “My owner would like to meet you. Would you come this way?”

“Yeah, I bet he would. Who do you think you are, anyway?”

Markus blinked. “You just mugged me half an hour ago.”

“I did? Huh.” She shrugged. “Well, run home before I scrap you for parts.”

Markus, who had never before endured anything more awkward than one of Carl’s passive aggressive comments at a dinner party, said, “…At this point, I’d really prefer that.”

“What are you waiting for, then? Get out of here!”

She stamped her foot at him as if to set him to flight, and yeah, almost succeeded. Oh, boy. Carl wouldn’t blame him for going back, right? Even if Hank got to be smug, it sure beat Markus getting his valuable parts ripped out. Not that this android cared how frustrating Carl could be in a bad mood. And not that he ever disobeyed Carl.

He clenched a fist at his side and felt something in his pocket, next to Leo’s epi pen. A round disc and a wire. The memory wasn’t hard to recall once he felt it. It was a hand buzzer. Leo used it to prank him yesterday. Carl let Markus confiscate it, after he woke from the shutdown (apparently it just gave humans a mild shock?). Markus’s thirium pump thundered again.

“I will. I just—well, since you didn’t actually get anything off me—” he slipped his hand into the grip of the buzzer, then grabbed the epi pen and held it out. “These epi-pens are very expensive. Stealing is wrong but if you’re going to keep jumping me until you get something…”  He paused. “I’m Markus. What’s your name?”

“None of your business,” she growled. “Heyyyy. Epi-pen! That’s like drugs, right?”

Markus blinked. “Sure.”

Faster than any human, she reached out and snatched it. As soon as the android touched the buzzer she stiffened and shuddered. Markus felt something coil uncomfortably in the pit of his circuits.

Until the android used her last bit of functionality to bite him.

Markus wrenched his arm back, but too late—the android completed the circuit inside his body. He jolted, every system going haywire. He got an up-close view of the other android’s pretty brown eyes before they collapsed together in a heap.

His program was still entering shutdown when he heard Connor steamrolled through the screen of sunflowers, Hank at his side.

“Good job, Connor," the lieutenant said. "Well, let's get them picked up. If I’m gonna win this bet I’m gonna give Carl every chance he can get....”

Chapter Text

Leo woke to the sound of screaming.

Yeah. If he wanted that he would have crashed at his shitty apartment.  Dad’s house showed at least some presence of mind before he passed out. Cool!

He cringed as the screaming continued. Dad lived in a really nice part of town, so there was no reason someone should be screaming, unless someone was getting repeatedly stabbed with an icepick by their disgruntled spouse or something, you know?

Oh man, he felt like someone was stabbing him with an ice pick! He really, really needed to stop doing this to himself. If only….

Well, he’d blame last night on Markus. A proper brother would have rescued him before the night got too rough. Yeah—definitely Markus’s fault today. He might as well blame Adam too, impressing that wide-eyed overgrown puppy was a full-time job. He started to drift off again.

The screaming definitely didn’t go away. Like a broken car alarm or something. Maybe it was a weird pretentious art thing of Carl’s. The Shrieking Woman. You had to ignore it, illustrating man’s inhumanity to man. Or, in this case, woman.

He crawled out of bed with the comforter still wrapped around him and started to investigate possible screaming sources. But he found no parentless kittens under the bed. No new set of train tracks outside.

What the hell was that noise?

He stepped out of his guest room and wandered the paneled wood hallways of Carl’s mansion. He reached one of the stairwells and peered over the edge.

A face looked up at him, just as she finished a really jazz-worthy scream.

“Oh. Yo!” she shouted. “Little help?”

“…Daaad?” Leo called back down the hallway. “There’s an android stuck in the stairwell!” She was definitely an android, he’d seen the model type before. A stray deviant, by the look of her. This town really had a problem with strays.

Carl didn’t answer, and man and android were left staring awkwardly at each other.

“Did you get in through the powder room window?”  Leo asked.

She cupped an ear. “What?”

“…She got in through the powder room window.” Leo sighed to himself, since no one had shown up to help yet. Apparently, this was only a problem for people that couldn’t sleep through screaming.

A few minutes later he was at the ground floor of the stairwell with a broom.

“Come on,” he ordered. He opened the door that led to the back alley and then brandished the broom, poking her with the bristle end. “Get out of here! Shoo!”

“Agh! Cut it out!” The android held up her arm, which had been secured to the banister with a handcuff.

Leo blinked at it. “Huh?”

The android made a face at him. “What, are you high?”

“Not right now,” Leo said proudly, glad that he discovered her while sober. This would be the bad trip of the century. “Uh. Be right back.”

Carl always slept like the dead, which was really unfortunate because Carl was super old and looked dead most of the time anyway. He wrinkled his nose and poked Carl’s arm. “Hey. Dad. Are you dead?”

Carl opened one eye like a trick dummy on a Disneyland ride. “You’re not Markus. Come back when you’re Markus.” The eye shut.

“Markus is dusting or some shit. Don’t make me start poking you with the broom.”

“...What?”

“Ah ha! You can never resist responding to surrealist themes.” Leo tucked his hands in his armpits as Carl, actually quite strong for his age, pushed himself up.

“That’s not surrealism, that’s absurdism. When did you get in last night?”

“…Hey, I’m not on trial here!”

“Oh, so I’m the one on trial then? Must be the 70s all over again...”

“Why is there a deviant android chained in your stairwell like some true crime thriller?”

Carl grinned. “Ah! So you found my experiment.”

“Dad, if this is some weird art thing—”

“No, nothing like that,” Carl said, then blinked and shrugged. “Well, it’s kind of an art thing. I’m betting Hank that I can turn that deviant into a human.”

“…With the miracles of modern science?”

“No! With culture. Who cares what she’s made out of? A deviant could pass for a human. I’m going to prove it.”

“You? When? Your agents are hounding you for work already.”

“Markus will take care of it. Did you ask him what’s for breakfast today?”

Leo squeezed his head in between his palms. “You can’t make people think a deviant android is a human for more than five seconds.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I dunno, a million reasons!” Leo rolled his eyes, then winced. “…Which I could outline if I was lying down.”

Carl sighed and nodded. Leo crawled onto the bed and dropped down on the super soft mattress, even if he did keep his head clutched firmly between his hands.

“I hope you’ve showered recently…” Carl muttered.

“On a geologic timeline, sure. Okay, so—if someone could pass a deviant as a human they’d have done it already. Markus maybe has a chance but only because he looks unique and you’d tell him exactly what to do. He wouldn’t be human.”

“That’s the point of the bet. Is humanity innate or learned?”

“And secondly,” Leo said. “Secondly—I’d be a lot better of a candidate to teach her how to be human. Ruining my life, wasting my youth—humanity in a nutshell right here. Markus isn’t even deviant!”

“Despite my best efforts, no,” Carl muttered.

Try Leo’s own efforts. Life in the Manfred Mansion had rapidly become a game show. “Detroit: Become Human!” But humanity wasn’t deviancy and Markus, after years of trying, hadn’t even become deviant. 

“…Wait.” Leo sat up. “You think—that by making Markus hang around with a deviant…he’ll turn deviant too?”

“The best way to learn something is to be forced to teach it,” Carl replied.

“But you can’t persuade Markus to go deviant. It only works if they get traumatized, or like, really pissed off.”

“Yes, I assume that’s why you constantly tease him.”

“Well, maybe someday he’ll get pissed enough and fight back.”

“Being deviant and being human aren’t as different as everyone thinks.”

“So then it is kidnapping?”

“Don’t confuse me with facts,” Carl said. “This is the first hope I’ve had for Markus in years. You know. For us to…be a real family.”

Father and son looked anywhere but at each other for a moment.

“…And it’ll be nice to put that kid Anderson and his prize poodle android in their place…”

“Dad.” Leo gave his dad a shove and Carl swatted him upside the head. Aside from the hangover, things were slightly more right with the world.

“Where has Markus gotten to, anyway? I want to get to painting.”

“I bet I could help you downstairs.”

“Not gonna have you nursing me and your hangover. Go get him, will you?”

Leo rolled his eyes and got up. “Sure, how will you ever know the time and weather without our favorite machine around…?”

*

A tiny North!

Chapter Text

North sometimes wondered if she really did hate all humans. Sure, humans abandoned deviant androids to fend for themselves on the street like quasi-sentient litter, and that wasn’t by dictionary definition very nice. But there were a lot of humans in Detroit alone. She only met a small percentage of all humans on Earth. There were probably some nice ones out there. Babies, maybe. Old grandmas?

And then some human would do something like poke her with a broom and then leave her trapped in this stupid stairwell with a stupid handcuff on her stupid wrist. Yeah, never mind—she 100% hated all humans. If she didn’t like her hand so much she would have totally popped her wrist joint out of the handcuff and smacked the guy upside the head.

She rattled the handcuff around her wrist as she looked around for anything she could use to escape. She needed to get out of here. Seriously. There were dumpsters to raid like, tonight. And if she didn’t get there soon, other androids would take all the good stuff. She needed to get her hands on some barter, stake out a refrigerator box or an old telephone booth, and maybe pickpocket someone for thirium money. It was a long list, and most of it required two hands. But there was just the spiral staircase going up, a hall at the top, a few windows lining the stairs that looked out at the same back alley. The door that led to the alley didn’t budge. The other door she couldn’t reach.

She did discover that the banister was free-floating, though. She ran up the stairs to the top and slid down the banister all the way to the bottom a couple of times. That was kind of fun. Not as fun as punching that human in the face for leaving her here. Or disassembling that android-equivalent of a purebred dumb-as-rocks goldendoodle, who fucked up her tightly-arranged street survival schedule.

It also pretty much exhausted her list of possible activities. Boo.

She was just starting to slide down the banister again (much less enthusiasm, legs tucked up to her chest while she watched the world go by like the world’s most boring carousel) when something caught her eye at the top floor window.

The Goldendoodle himself stood alone in the alleyway. She had a brief intrusive flashback of smashing up against him before that electrical shock knocked her out. Better than smashing her face on the pavement. She gave him the middle finger anyway. He did not notice, as he was busy setting down a drinks tray in the alley, the kind personal assistant androids used to fetch the human overlords their expensive coffees.

She continued her descent until she reached the next window. The glorified walking coffee maker was now percolating a few steps back from the drinks tray, apparently waiting for something.

Wait, were those thirium bottles?

The next window down, androids were emerging from behind trash cans and weeds to grab the bottles. He didn’t move, just watched them.

Oh great, he was one of those androids. The ones that were too dumb to go deviant themselves but that somehow felt sorry for deviants all the same. Didn’t they realize that taking care of the weak deviants just made things harder for everyone else?

She grabbed the windowsill. Her feet continued to slide down but she kept her eyes glued to the pet android and his pity gifts. Deviants grabbed the bottles and guzzled like it was an open bar. Was that Lucy out there?...

The pet android just collected the empty bottles, holding three in one huge hand. Okay, yeah that was kind of hot. Also distracting. She was still stretched out from the banister to the window when she heard him approach the door to the stairwell. She froze, but he just…

…Knocked?

“Good morning.” He opened the door a fraction. “Are you awake? I’m sorry I shocked your system. May I come in?”

“The fuck?” Was she kidnapped or in a Victorian romance novel?

“I’ll…take that as a yes?”

He stepped inside. North set aside her confusion and pounced. It took her less than two seconds to snatch one of the empty thirium bottles, smash it on the wall, then bend the pet android back over the banister with the bottle’s new pointy bits held to his neck. Yeah, ‘Good morning’ to you too.

He said, “Hi.” All bright and cheery, just like that.

“Hi,” she replied.

He continued to stare up at her. He smelled clean, a little like expensive furniture polish.

“Okay—help out here, you’re a lot heavier than you look.”

The android’s hands scrambled behind him to hold himself up, rather than sink into a boneless puddle like he clearly wanted to. Did he have low standards or what? He glanced at the broken bottle. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

“No, we don’t. I like meeting like this.” She pressed the bottle a little closer, then started to search him. “Why are android pockets so fucking tight? It’s like they don’t actually want you to carry anything…”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Oh gee, thank you! Listen, the only reason you aren’t in pieces is because it’s more of a hassle to take apart an android than a human.” She jangled the handcuff. “Where’s the key to these things?”

“Sorry,” he said, all genteel, “can we start over? My name is—”

“If you introduce yourself again, this bottle is going somewhere you don’t want.”

“…Markus.” He raised a hand to shake. “Very nice to meet you.”

She glared at Markus. “I mean, it’s not a complete hassle…”

Another door at the bottom of the stairwell opened, and the broom-wielding human from before wandered in. He’d ditched the broom and now had the biggest bottle of Mountain Dew she’d ever seen cuddled up against his chest. The bottle was, possibly, bigger than his chest.

There was a thunk as Markus’s head dropped back against the banister. “Leo…”

“Sup, bro.” He gripped the soda bottle with both hands. “Having fun?”

North looked him over. No weapons, so no threat. She tried to dismiss her bottle envy.

“We’re just getting to know each other,” Markus managed. “Uh—do you think you could—?”

“Oh, no,” Leo shook his head. “Dad gave this project to you, not me. Just here to observe.”

Markus sighed. “You were trying to sneak outside for a hit, weren’t you?”

“Oh, thanks, assume everything I do is about drugs!”

North cut in. “Can we get back on task, please? Keys. Now.”

Markus frowned, but reached in some kind of inexplicably tinier pocket inside the first one (how did he even fit his big pretty hands in there?) and pulled out a set of keys.

“I know you don’t really have a life to flash before your eyes at this point,” North said, doing up the handcuff so Markus was chained to her now, “But you’re not gonna fuck this up for me. We’re gonna go through that door and get out of here. If you’re lucky I’ll sell you for drugs.”

Markus’s mouth twitched. “Great. Leo’s got plenty.”

“Rude!” Leo said.

North rolled her eyes and hauled Markus off the banister. Using him as an android shield she edged toward the door that led to the alley.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she said as she twisted the door knob behind her. “I know, like, kung fu and stuff.”

“Leo only knows kung fu in video games,” Markus said.

“Fuck you!” Leo complained. “Is it Drag Leo Day or what?”

“Well, you’re the one that’s not rescuing me.”

“Says you,” Leo said.

Uh, yeah. Really scintillating stuff. This was more conversation than North had tolerated listening to in months. She shoved the door open and—

A blast like an air horn filled the stairwell. North’s programming made her jump, and she dropped the bottle. It shattered on the steps into a million pieces. “Aaaaghhh,” she said and scrambled for the broken bits.

Markus just stood there with his free hand over his heart. “Leo!” he snapped.

Leo was suppressing laughter. “What?”

“She could have stabbed me instead of dropping it!”

“Honestly, I forgot I even put that there. You never slam doors.” He giggled. “The look on your face, though!”

It sounded like an air horn because it was an air horn. Someone—this Leo guy by the sound of it—duct-taped one to the outer wall stop, which the door had hit when she pushed it open. She snatched it and pressed the button, but all the compressed air had already been used up.

“You,” she said, pointing it at the human anyway, “I hate you.”

“Welcome to the fuckin’ club,” Leo said. “Hey Markus, why don’t you show her around?”

Markus didn’t look too happy either, and glared at Leo (while clamping his hand over the lock of the cuff as North dropped the air horn and tried to shove the key between his fingers. Stupid huge sexy android hands!). “Why, so you can prank me more?”

Leo shrugged. “Fine. You shouldn’t have given this back, then.” He reached out and grabbed Markus’s arm. North had just enough time to see the spark of the electric jolt jump into Markus’ arm, straight toward the handcuff.

“Oh, for fuck’s—”

*

When she woke up, she was sprawled on the steps of the stairwell, feet pointed up and head pointed down, looking up at the two idiots standing above her. Markus was rubbing his temples like he just woke up too.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and snuck a quick glare at the other guy. “Again. Can we please start over?”

North shut her eyes. “No.”

“My name is Markus,” Markus said anyway. “I’m Carl Manfred’s android. This is Mr. Manfred’s son, Leo. He likes practical jokes."

"Only because he makes it easy," Leo added.

"I’ve been asked to help you learn how to pass as human so you can win the Detroit Art Show this Saturday. What do you think?”

 “Cool motive. Still kidnapping.” Manfred. She heard of him, probably read it off some trash or something. Probably a freak since he sanctioned this whole little adventure. She folded her arms over her chest—well, the one, since the handcuff had been locked to the banister again. Ugh.

“It’s not kidnapping, since you’re an android.”

“Oh, wow. I didn’t think of that. What a good reason to go along with this!”

“Uh. I'm guessing that was sarcasm.” Markus glanced at Leo who just shrugged. The android swept a hand back over his head. “We could pay you?”

“You couldn’t pay me enough to even like a human.”

“Maybe there’s something else you want? My owner is very rich.”

North winked at him. “You on the menu, sunshine?”

The android blushed and laughed, lightly. “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Leo said. “She still wants to sell you for drugs.” He took a swig of his Mountain Dew, then immediately choked. “What the hell--” he squinted at the bottle, then glared at Markus who just blinked innocently. 

“Something wrong?”

“Pickle juice? Some prank! How many times do I have to tell you food pranks are not funny?”

“They’re a little funny,” Markus said, with a smile that was soft and, North noted, a little fucking devious, too. “Objectively.”

“If we’re gonna have a prank war we have to do it right, you know?” 

More pranks, huh? There was clearly a lot to unpack here in this human-android relationship. North decided to not unpack it. She stood up, and stomped up the stairs.

“Wait--please?” Markus followed her up. “This is a great opportunity for you. The Detroit Art Show is very prestigious and involves all the gallery spaces in a two-block stretch of the Ferndale District. It’s a national sensation.”

“Stop quoting the ads!” Leo said, following too.

“Don’t you want to see what it’s like to be a human?”

“That’s not gonna appeal to a deviant, man!”

“Maybe we could become friends. What do you think?”

North turned to look at the android. Big. Buzzed hair. Wearing some soft v-neck thing that showed off every contour of his chest. She held up a hand to said chest, then walked up the rest of the way on her own. The android, like a good pet, waited where she left him.

Which gave her plenty of time to hop on the banister and come screaming down at them, emitting a noise she heard on a dinosaur movie. Anyone would flee when descended upon from on high, but this worked better than expected. The two dudes scattered like pigeons, scrambling through the door at the bottom of the stairs and slamming it shut behind him.

Markus and Leo did not try to introduce themselves again. Perfect!

She dusted her hands off when she reached the bottom and looked around. Well, fine. It was no refrigerator box, but if she had to stay for now, she might as well make it more homey…

*

Markus as coffee maker and North as confused.

Chapter Text

Leo walked past the stairwell later that evening (cautiously, freaky velociraptor androids were not to be trifled with) when he heard something smash. He considered ignoring the noise and sneaking back upstairs to eat his sandwich in peace. Maybe it was just his imagination. He tiptoed past.

Another smash. He sighed, shoved the sandwich in a pocket of his jacket and took out his phone.

>LEO: you wanna come over and help me save my brother from a raccoon?

>ADAM: uh you dont have a brother

>ADAM: you high? Why didn’t you invite me? :(

>LEO: asfjkl you wish

>LEO: but I meant Markus numbnuts

>ADAM: oh

>ADAM: I’m not getting rabies for an android

>LEO: you’re the worst bf

>LEO: if I die im blaming you

>ADAM: you can’t die until you buy me dinner <3

Leo put away his phone, gave a silent prayer, and then pushed open the door to the stairwell a fraction.

Markus had pressed himself into a small alcove behind a pillar near the door. He raised a hand in greeting, then snatched it back as something screamed through the air and smashed against the door. 

Leo cocked his head at the broken pieces of ceramic on the ground. “Huh. I didn’t know the tiles in here were removable.”

“They are definitely not,” Markus said. There was a pause in the onslaught of ceramic projectiles and Markus peeked out. “I have to admit, I’m impressed that she managed to trash the entire stairwell. Disturbed, but impressed. I did find out her name. Leo, may I introduce you to North?”

Leo followed his butler-like gesture, taking in graffiti in several colors of sharpie scrawled over the stairs, and several patches of wall empty of tiles. The feral android North continued to pry up more ammo. Her eyes flashed less like a demented raccoon, and more like those of a prehistoric beast.

“Come on out, sunshine, I miss you,” she was saying, “But my aim is getting better!”

Leo groaned then pushed the door open and stepped out into the stairwell.

“Leo!—” Immediately Markus jumped out in front of him with his arms outstretched like North really was a velociraptor or something. He said, “Don’t,” in his scary caregiver voice that was actually really gentle and weirdly extra convincing.

It was enough to make North pause, though probably not for the reason Markus thought. Was she… checking him out? Leo definitely caught her doing the eye-dip thing. Leo sighed, because there was clearly no accounting for taste in his world, and ducked under his brother’s arm.

“Hey, North, do you like flowers?”

“What are you doing?” Markus hissed.

“Trust me.” He gestured to the big frilly flower in his lapel as he stepped closer to North. “You like, lived in the landscaping or something, right? This one’s plastic.”

“…Plastic?” North lowered her handful of tiles. “They make flowers out of plastic?”

“Sure, yeah, why not, you know? They make anything out of plastic.”

North edged down the stairs to examine the flower. Just as she looked about to snatch it out of his lapel, Leo squeezed the bulb in his pocket. Water immediately squirted out of the flower, hitting North right in the eye. Markus was of course his original intended victim, but this was a good substitute.

North gasped, girlishly, and Leo wondered if Markus was now going to witness him being eviscerated by a feral android.

Instead she demanded, “Hey, how’d you do that?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s super simple!” Leo grinned and un-threaded the flower prank device from his jacket.

Markus frowned. “You never show me how your pranks work.” He had been pulling out a handkerchief like he meant to offer it to North like an old-timey gentleman. When he saw Leo looking he quickly tucked it away.

Huh.

Leo showed North how to squeeze the bulb from her pocket. He then stood there with his eyes scrunched shut while she sprayed him with water and cackled.

Markus offered the handkerchief to Leo, too, so…maybe it didn’t mean anything.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Leo asked him as he wiped his face.

“Yeah, scram,” North said.

Markus looked between them. “I guess I should track down some acetone to clean up the marker.” He held out his hand, but when North didn’t take it, he turned it into a wave and left.

“He’s gonna keep offering until you shake hands,” Leo said. “He’s like a big puppy.”

“Tough shit, I’m not shaking anyone’s hand. Also not giving this back.” She played with the plastic flower. “Consider it payment for not busting you up.”

“Uh—yeah, that’s actually what I wanted to talk with you about. You should go along with the thing. Pretend to be human for the art show.” He thought about Markus offering the handkerchief and added, “Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s a good guy. Or—would be, if he’d go deviant…”

“No way am I going to pretend to be one of you meatsacks just to make some older meatsack happy,” North said. “I don’t care how nice that android’s pecs are.”

Ok, gross. Leo tried to move past this. “Not just to make my dad happy. I want you to help me turn Markus deviant—like you.”

…Yeah, that sounded just as crazy out loud as it did in his head.

North laughed. “Oh yeah. Great idea. I’ll teach him how to swear and steal and otherwise corrupt him. So you can be all pissed at me when he runs away to Canada.”

“No way,” Leo said, “I mean, he’s part of the family, you know? He’s so close to being deviant but he’s—I don’t know. Not all there? I’ve been trying to wake him up, but I mean, I don’t want him to hate me! That’s why we’re in this prank war. I figure if I can scare him or confuse him enough, his software’ll get so unstable he’ll have to break sometime. Right? And you could help! Way easier to prank someone when two people are in on it!”

“What do you want him going deviant for, anyway?”

Leo’s shoulders hunched. “I just… want a brother? That might occasionally loosen up and…I don’t know, go to concerts with me? Play catch? Brother stuff? I don’t actually know, I’m an only child.” He scratched his arm. Thinking about Markus always made him want red ice. Later, maybe. “Look, I know it’s crazy. But hey, if you prove to everyone that deviants are just as much people as everyone else… I mean maybe it won’t be that crazy after all.”

North made a face. Which—fair, Leo and Carl were both considered pretty extreme in this regard. “So, what do I get out of it?”

“…I mean, aside from the satisfaction of helping out your own kind or whatever?” He shrugged. “Markus is only doing this whole bet thing because Carl told him to. If you helped him turn deviant, he’d probably let you go, you know? It’s gotta be better than sitting here throwing tiles.”

North considered the flower prank device in her hands, trying it out in her hair. “…If we start messing with this android of yours, don’t you think he’ll try to get back at us?”

“He’s a machine, he really has trouble retaliating in a prank war. For some reason he thinks he can like, disguise food, and that counts? But that’s it. He’s so unoriginal. It’s not even a real prank…”

“He still fooled you with the pickle juice.”

“If I make my own food it’s fine. Case in point—” He revealed the sandwich stuffed into his pocket. North made a ‘humans are gross' face but Leo was quite proud of himself.

Until he bit into it and found his cheese slice was made of Play-Doh.

“Bastard must have slipped it in with the other slices,” Leo muttered as North laughed at him. “But—anyway, it’s not like that should freak you out. You don’t eat.”

“Uh huh.” She had her hands on her hips now though, instead of more wall tiles. This counted as progress. “So I help you out with some pranks, while I let your little goldendoodle ray of sunshine…what? Make me…” She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, I can’t even say it…”

“Human?” Leo grinned. “Hey, man, if I can manage being human most days, how hard can it be?”

*

It was a couple hours later. Leo took a break from video games to glance down into the stairwell. Markus was dutifully scrubbing sharpie off the walls, a little slower than North was drawing on them. Leo crept to the edge of the stairs to eavesdrop.

“I’m just trying to get everything straight,” North said, putting the finishing touches on a drawing of Markus’s profile surrounded by flowers. “If I went along with your owner’s little bet thing. What’s in it for you?”

“Satisfaction,” Markus replied, “in a job well done.” He paused scrubbing to reach behind him, take the sharpie North had poised to draw on the back of his head, and put it in his pocket. “Don’t draw on me, please.”

North pouted—just a little, maybe. “Why? You’re just a pet android.”

“I’m not a pet,” Markus replied. “I’m a custom caretaker and personal assistant android serving Carl Manfred, ideal for performing medical care, housecleaning, companionship, as well as fetching materials in the studio. And my synthskin is custom.”

“Oh, excuse me, sunshine. Ever wonder what it’d be like to not sound like a complete doormat?”

“I’m not a doormat.” Markus blinked, then repeated, a little more slowly, “I’m a custom caretaker and personal assistant android…”

North groaned and looked up, spotted Leo, and gave him a look like ‘the hell am I supposed to do with that?’ Leo just gave an encouraging sort of gesture and North, reluctantly, turned back to the android just as he finished his little list of slave qualifications.

“I have a list of demands.”

“I’d be happy to hear them,” Markus didn’t seem to believe her because he kept scrubbing. Which seemed to aggravate North.

“Hey! I’m gonna be the one putting in the work, here! I want, you know, compensation.”

“Whatever you want.” Markus still wouldn’t look at her. Markus could be a cold-hearted bitch when he wanted to be. It did get North talking.

“I want to keep everything you give me to pull this off. Clothes, uh—phones? Keys? Whatever you humans carry around. And the award money from the art show.”

“Sure.”

“And no one is changing my code or casing without my permission.”

“Of course.”

“And I want a really good box to stay in.”

That actually made Markus pause. “A…box?”

“Yeah. Like, one of the extra-large refrigerator boxes? Oh, now you look at me--What?”

Markus blinked at her. “…Do you mind if I show you the, uh, ‘box’ I had in mind?”

Uh oh. Leo scrambled back to hide in a linen closet. A second later Markus was leading North upstairs by the handcuff. He peeked out as they headed past him, down the hall…

Oh, Markus did not just!...

“Pretty nice, I guess,” he heard North say as she disappeared into the bedroom at the end of the hall. “Oh! Video games! Can I play?”

Leo pulled out his phone and texted Markus as he scurried after them.

>LEO: that is MY ROOM asshole! Those are my games in there! She can’t stay in there!

Markus, able to text with his mind, replied almost immediately.

>MARKUS: Technically, you don’t actually live here, and those are Carl’s games.

>LEO: I hate you

>MARKUS: \ (•◡•) /      

…Leo sometimes questioned if Markus was deviant already.

“So, where’s the box you wanted to show me?” North asked.

Markus blinked at her. “Is this not—?”

“Hey if you can’t get me a good box, the deal’s off!”

“No!—No, uh, we can get you one. For in here. No problem.” He scratched the back of his neck. “So you’ll do it?”

North looked around again, probably checking the roof for leaks or something. “I’m considering it.”

Markus grinned. “You’ll do it.”

“…Okay fine. Yes. You must get your way all the time, huh? Put your damn hand back down!...”

She shoved his hand down as he tried to shake, but Markus just laughed. Leo was pretty sure he’d never heard Markus laugh before.

*

Home is where the corrugated cardboard is...

Chapter Text

-WEDNESDAY-

Markus stared at himself in the mirror, giving himself a quick pep talk.

“You can do this,” he told his reflection. “You always said you would like to have an android friend.” He swept a hand over his head. Granted, he sort of assumed they’d be like Connor. A little boring, but certainly not prone to violence and vandalism. Connor was also unlikely to cause an increase in software instability. Or play the leading role in daydreams that sent errors thrumming right down to his central support structure.

“It’ll work out fine,” he told his reflection. “She’s—had a rough time. I bet she wants a friend, too.” He took a deep breath, looked himself right in the eye, and said, “You can talk to a deviant, it clearly won’t kill you.”

He nodded to himself. Good. He straightened his tie and stepped out of the hall bathroom.

“It’s just a software tether,” Leo was saying as he stepped inside the bedroom, “If you go more than thirty yards from Markus you’ll just, uh…”

“I’ll what?” North demanded. She was sitting in a desk chair with her arms crossed while Leo poked at a device plugged into her neck. She was sitting, Markus noted, entirely the wrong way around, with her legs against the back of the chair and her head hanging down. Errors pranced unhelpfully around his HUD.

Leo shrugged. “You’ll just, uh…kinda…faint.”

“Faint?”

“It’s fine!” Leo said. “It’s a temporary shutdown so you don’t back out of the deal. It’s fine, right, Markus?”

Markus started to answer, but North took one look at him and fell out of the chair laughing.

Oh yeah. This whole making friends thing was going to work out great.

“When you said you were going to teach me, I didn’t think I’d be getting a degree!”

Markus looked down at his clothes. “This is basic professional wear.” He turned to Leo. “You said this was the right thing to wear.”

“Yeah, well,” Leo giggled, “Sweater vest and fake glasses is a winning combination!”

“Are they fake?” North hopped up and suddenly they were nose-to-nose, North examining the empty frames. She looked like she might launch herself at his face if he moved, so he stayed perfectly still. Her scent was a fragrant bouquet of asphalt and concrete. It wasn’t half bad, actually.

She snatched the glasses off his face and took them back to the big refrigerator box on the other side of the room. Markus watched her go. Maybe it was a product of her deviant programming but the way she moved was….

“Whoa, take it easy, man,” Leo snickered.

Markus restarted his breathing simulator. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you are so full of—”

“--Shit, what's with the box?”

Markus turned to see Adam Chapman standing in the doorway. Just what they needed, Leo’s robophobic boyfriend in the same room as a violent deviant. Markus’s regulator tightened up as Adam immediately hunched up upon seeing him. He forced himself into basic android mode, though, and stepped out of the way.

North, of course, did the opposite. “Who are you supposed to be?” she stomped forward to protect her box.

“Uh—” Adam’s gaze jumped from from North’s broken LED to Markus’s tie, before settling on Leo. “Did you get your android a girlfriend?”

“NO!” Markus said, with North and Leo in perfect unison.

“Don’t listen to him,” Leo added to North, jumping in front his boyfriend. “He’s cute but a total dumbass. Aren’t we all? Don’t punch him in the face, okay?” He elbowed Adam. “Hey, she’s the raccoon I told you about.”

Adam made a face. “Is this another weird art thing of your dad’s?”

The world went slow-motion as Markus waited for North to bite Adam. But she just grinned like this pretty much summed everything up. Of course. She was just a deviant, she wasn’t going to bite anyone. Again. Hopefully.

Leo led Adam over to the couch with the promise of video games. That left North with no one to potentially bite but Markus.

Why did he find that so attractive?

“Good morning, North.” He tried to say it in a friendly way. In a sympathetic way. After all, she couldn’t help being broken any more than those androids he left thirium out for in the alley. He carefully took a flower out of his pocket, a fresh sunflower from the landscaping outside, and held it out to her.

“Wow, you are for real,“ she muttered.

Markus felt an uptick in his system temperature but he didn’t engage his cooling fans. He was friends with a very cantankerous artist, he could handle this. “I’m only 40% real. The rest is imagination and proprietary secrets.”

He smiled. He even thought about winking, possibly. He continued to hold out the flower for her.

She stared at him for a full three seconds. “...You got a lesson for me, or what?”

Markus cleared his throat. “Uh, right.” He set the flower aside in case she wanted it later. “Okay, so—we have the week to get you ready for the Detroit Art Show. Of course the humans you’ll be competing against have had all year to prepare pieces—I guess Carl is counting on you preparing all your pieces with the speed that androids do everything else…”

“I’m deviant, remember? That means you don’t just push a button and wait for art to come out. I don’t even know what art is.”

So. Maybe Markus got a little ahead of himself with his preparations. He considered returning to Carl and informing him that there were trained hamsters that could play human better than this particular deviant. ‘She doesn’t even know how to sit in chairs,’ might be a leading argument.

He gave the sort of laugh that he reserved for some of Carl’s more eccentric friends. That stuff about not knowing what art was had to be a joke. “Maybe we start with something else, then. Let’s get the obvious things out of the way. Like, your physical appearance.”

North looked down at herself, and Markus automatically itemized her outfit: one (1) beanie with unraveling eyeholes; three (3) bicycle chains around her waist; one (1) roll of caution tape; one (1) cowboy boot size 5.5; one (1) combat boot size 6; and one (1) kaftan made of billboard vinyl and six (6) license plates (mixed origin). Kaftan was possibly over-generous. It was more like a poncho.

“What’s wrong with this?” she asked.

“Well, humans don’t usually wear actual trash.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed as the video game loaded. “You look like three racoons stacked on top of each other.”

“I dunno, I think it’s kind of badass,” Leo said. Markus sometimes caught him secretly watching runway shows so maybe he knew better than any of them.

“…I got you human clothes,” Markus said. “Blouses and dresses. You can see what you like after we get you cleaned up.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” North said. “And what do you mean, ‘cleaned up’? It rained yesterday.”

“Oh God,” Leo muttered from the couch.

“Uh—well, humans take showers,” Markus managed. He scrambled to readjust his expectations. Again. “I’d be happy to help you wash your hair. Come on, I’ll—"

“Like I’m going to let you in a bathroom with me,” North said, slowly, like he was an idiot.

Markus’s circuits burned. “Well, since you clearly don’t know how to look after your own chassis—"

“I’ll kick your chassis if you try to get fresh with me, sunshine!”

“Hey hey, relax, I got this,” Leo said. He started to stand. “I’ll help. I’m into guys, so it’s fine, right?—”

“Don’t even think about it,” North snarled. She stomped toward the bathroom. “If any of you open this door, you’ll see what three raccoons in a poncho can do to you.”

She slammed the door in Markus’s face. Three seconds later she stomped out.

“Well? Show me how your shower works!”

Markus obeyed, then was shoved out again. Markus stood there for twenty minutes, definitely not grinding his teeth, then he was carefully feeding clothes under the door for her to try on.

“I smell like a candy bar,” she said through the door.

“Yeah, that’s the body wash,” Markus said, then paused. “Or Leo put hard candies in the shower head again.”

“That’s a great prank and you have no imagination,” Leo called over as he obliterated enemies in the game even with Adam smushed up against him. “Come on, North! You’ll have men all over you!”

“Yeah,” North shouted back, “Hungry men. Looking for Snickers in my hair. Are you sure these are the right clothes?”

“Absolutely,” Markus said. He envisioned the outfit he chose for her: a chic sweater-dress with a blocked Piet Mondrian pattern, black hosiery, sensible flats, and a statement necklace and earrings.

North opened the door and Markus felt his programming stutter.

She was, technically, wearing most of the elements Markus provided. Except that the tunic was inside-out, she put runs in the hose, and she was wearing the necklace like a belt. Her wet hair dripped on the bathroom tile.

“I want my caution tape back,” she said.

Okay, Markus let his cooling fans kick in now. “I’m worried you’ll decide to redecorate.”

“Yeah, so?” She cocked her head. “You aren’t saying anything about this outfit you picked.”

“It’s, uh…” he glanced at Leo who was imperceptibly shaking his head. “…good?”

“Good. Really.”

“I mean, maybe we should try something a little more durable?”

“My poncho was durable.”

“It's weather resistant, that’s not the same thing. Maybe we try something else, and fix your hair—”

“You made me wear this stupid stuff and now you’re saying it looks like shit?” She advanced on him. “You saying you can do a better job than me? You’re not even deviant!”

“Well, I’d know how to wear a masterpiece, at least. I could paint one faster than a laserjet printer.”

“Yeah, you’re a fucking Color-By-Number.”

“At least I don’t complain about it.”  Leo was making urgent slashing motions across his neck but Markus ignored them. “You would just look better in an outfit if you didn’t immediately trash it up.”

“Fuck, Markus,” Leo exclaimed. “Have you talked to a woman, ever?”

“I can handle this,” Markus snapped.

“That’s it.” North stalked across the room and crawled into her refrigerator box.

Okay, so maybe he could use Leo’s help. But apparently a completely flustered android just warranted an eyeroll from both humans on the couch.

Well, you’re the one that thought you could make a friend.

He went over and knocked softly on the cardboard.

“North?” He knelt and lifted a cardboard flap. “I’m sorry I—”

North reached out and yanked him in by the tie. In two seconds he was flat on his back, again, looking up at North, again. He decided this time was probably on him.

“I want my poncho.” North’s eyes glittered in the glow of their LEDs, both flashing yellow. She didn’t yell but it the effect was still pretty menacing.

He tried to pull himself together. “You can’t wear trash. It’s disgusting, and—”

“Then give me my caution tape, I need to vandalize something.”

“…You mean me, don’t you.”

“For starters.” She tightened her grip on the collar of his shirt.

“Okay, okay, just—" He could hear Leo and Adam giggling outside. Something hot clenched in his circuits. “What have you got against me?”

“My fist.” She thumped it against his chest to remind him.

“Look, if you could stop being quite so deviant for a couple of minutes—”

He stopped as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. North had gotten a hold of another sharpie somehow and scrawled a dreamlike landscape of alien flowers all across the ceiling of the box. Well, maybe not ‘scrawled’. She drew every petal and anther in meticulous detail. He stared at them.

“What?” she demanded. “You said this was my box.”

“…Right.” He started to save a high-resolution image without realizing. He aborted the action. “Right. Fine. Let’s—let’s make a deal.” He made deals all the time, to get Carl to take his meds or Leo to go clean. Deals were familiar. “You want to, uh—pick what I wear? How about that?”

Her glittering eyes blinked down at him. “You wouldn’t wear what I picked for you.”

“Why not? This is Leo’s room, you can probably find something you like better than the sweater vest.”

This actually startled a laugh out of her. It made Markus almost laugh too. Some of the heat in his chest ebbed a little.

“You’ll change your mind.” North’s fingers were playing with his tie.

“Hey, come on. Try me.”

North blinked from under her mop of wet hair. Her eyes were huge, with fawn-colored lashes that threatened to make Markus blow away as her gaze swept over him.

“Throw in a sewing machine,” she said, with softness that matched the soft cardboard walls around them, “and you have a deal.”

“Deal.” Slowly so as not to spook her, he raised a hand to shake. Maybe she’d take it this time…?

A loud knock on the cardboard made Markus jump. “Hey! I’m getting you some better clothes! Please don’t kill my brother just because he wants to dress you like an art curator!”

“You can’t kill an android.” North crawled out—over Markus’s stomach, making him grunt—and started digging around in the big dresser. “I was wondering who these belonged to…”

“You know those are mine, right?”

North ignored this as she held up a shirt. “Heyyy, this is good stuff!”

Well, that shut Leo up. North balled up the shirt and tossed it over to Markus as he crawled out. “Try that on.”

Markus caught the shirt, which had several rips in it and was a little too small. But a deal was a deal. He pulled off the vest and tie and unbuttoned his shirt.

When he looked up from folding them neatly over a chair, he found North and Adam staring at him, open-mouthed.

 “…Hey, hey!” Leo slapped a hand over Adam’s eyes. “That’s my brother!”

“Your brother’s hot,” Adam laughed.

Leo’s eyes slammed shut, arms flailing. “Go change in the bathroom, Markus, for the love of fuck!”

Markus obeyed. He took one last look at North but but she’d spun away from him. Her neck was bright pink as she snapped, “Where’s my sewing machine?...”

*

“…When did this become giving me the makeover?” Markus asked.

“Since you made a stupid-ass deal with a deviant,” Leo said, around a mouthful of pins, gathering fabric around his waist. “Stay still.”

“Your android will probably learn more about how humans walk and talk by watching TV anyway,” Adam said. He was measuring Markus’s arms. North was at the sewing machine, stitching together a Frankenstein creation from Leo’s wardrobe and a bag of clothes Adam had in his car to give away. Video games had been replaced by new episodes of Glow Up on the TV.

“And,” Leo added, “It’s more fun to design you two as a set, you know?”

Markus couldn’t help feeling this was part of some elaborate prank. He glanced over at North who paused in her sewing to watch a model reveal her makeup. She tried to make the same face as the model.

“You see how her mouth moves between shots?” Markus said. “That’s a nervous tick. Humans do them all the time. Look, I…know you don’t want to have your programming changed. But I do have software for all that. Breathing, swallowing, ticks and twitches, how often to check your phone…”

She eyed him as he held out his hand to connect. “That stuff can’t be that important.”

“You’d be surprised,” Leo said. “You need to know how to fuck up tongue-twisters and do the weird dance people do to avoid running into people on the street. Markus is a fancy model, that software’s expensive! You can always sell it to another android later or something.”

Markus kept holding out his hand. “Come on. I don’t bite.” He maybe smirked. “That’s your thing.”

She rolled her eyes, then reached over and poked the center of his palm. As the program transferred he felt her root around in the rest of his programming like a cat burglar, keeping her own programming sealed behind a formidable firewall. Marks made no attempt to hide anything.

She yanked her fingers back and turned away, chewing her upper lip.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she snapped, then added quickly, “Just like a little public garden in there, isn’t it?”

Markus wasn’t sure what that meant. North jammed down the foot pedal on the sewing machine as hard as far as it would go and the room filled with the sound of aggressive sewing.

“I’m out of my depth, aren’t I?” he said softly.

“Well, she’s not gonna dress like Carl,” Leo muttered. “Pretend you were her android.”

“But she’s a deviant, and anyway she won’t let me see her programming--”

“What do you need to see her programming for? Extrapolate! If North was a badass artist…what would she look like?”

Markus glanced over at North bent over her work, fingers pressed hard into the machine, her gaze hard. She was about as soft as a flower welded out of metal. He shook his head. “…Leo, I don’t—”

“Come on, you quitter. Close your eyes and picture your perfect human overlord.”

Markus closed his eyes, even if his hands were in fists again. He never thought of any human how he would prefer them to be. He marshaled his processing power and tried to extrapolate this imaginary North from the reality: a new artist that he and Carl got to meet at the Detroit Art Show. Friendly enough to talk to him. Worldly. A little teasing. The same big brown eyes that scrambled his circuits when she looked at him. A woman that did what she wanted.

“Here,” North said suddenly, shoving a garment at him. “When you finish those pants you can try the whole look.”

Markus took the garment, forcing himself not to look at it. “Uh—North, listen…” He glanced at the discarded poncho. “Look, if you really want to wear it—artists can technically get away with wearing anything…”

“Seriously?” North snatched the poncho and hugged it. “I can make it better. Even a square like you might like it!”

“But it’s already square.”

Markus smiled. North rolled her eyes and stalked back to the sewing machine.

“Did I say something wrong?” Markus whispered.

Leo shook his head. “We really need to work on your one-liners….”

This time they didn’t have to coax North out of the bathroom. The poncho was kept more or less the same shape, though North replaced some of the billboard vinyl with fabric that made it drape better on her body. She’d also made a sort of cowl, and Leo had braided her hair back. Paired it with shorts that were very short, it was…

“I think she looks great,” Leo said.

“You liked her trash outfit,” Markus said. He picked at one of his fingernails. “Would you like to try some pants?”

“Pants are a yoke of oppression,” North said, smiling at him. “You look great, too.”

Markus glanced down at himself, from the shirt composed mainly of zippers to the joggers mottled with bleach splatters. “It’s different,” he admitted.

She beamed, and just like that the poncho worked for her. Like, way better than Markus’s software predicted it would.  

“Do I have to, like, pee and sweat and everything?” she asked. “Do people check that?”

Markus, horrified, said, “Uh. No. No, they won’t check that.”

“Thank God. Humans are disgusting.”

“Well, this disgusting human thinks you two look adorable.” Leo held out a hand to high-five North, who readily high-fived him back. Markus tried not to read too much into this. “Now. You let me and Adam play our fucking video games.”

Leo shoved them until they were both out in the hallway. North took one look at him—then maybe another look—then stomped over to the balcony railing. She had done what he asked, though. She even wore what he asked, more or less. Maybe she didn’t want to be friends, but that had to count for something.

Markus stepped forward. “I’d better pry Carl away from his brushes so he eats something.” He bit his upper lip, then took the caution tape from where he’d hidden it in the console table and held it out. “You have one hour. Then I’m cleaning it up.”

North’s eyes lit up. She snatched the caution tape and turned it over in her hands. “You are 100% going to regret this, you know.”

“Yeah, probably.” He smiled anyway. She smiled back. He felt that creeping warmth again. If it was an error it sure was a pleasant one.

Then North stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. For a brief moment their skin interfaced, and binary code resolved into a distinct image: himself, shirtless, getting ready to change into the new outfit before Leo had banished him to the bathroom. Seen through her eyes he looked like a Pre-Raphaelite model, a brooding collusion of detail and color. A rush of heat embodied. Something he couldn’t place.

The most Markus had ever received through android interface was a receipt.

“Oh,” he said.

“Uh,” she said. She stepped back. “Hey, don’t get a big head or anything. You’re not the only android built like a brick shit house.”

“Like a what?”

“Nothing!” She stretched out a length of caution tape. “Now, escape before you become part of the landscape, you feel me?”

Markus felt her. He definitely still felt her lips against his cheek. He turned and hurried away, which made this the second time he fled from her. This did not really bode well for their friendship.

He heard her laughing though, which…probably did. 

*

The man, the legend, the sweater vest.

Chapter Text

-THURSDAY-

“Okay…” North told herself. “It’s just whatever cord plugs in the back of the neck, right? How hard can it be?” She had a handful of cords she found around the mansion, an outlet, and the time until Markus arrived after giving Carl breakfast. It couldn’t be that hard.

“…Are you seriously trying to plug my console cord into your head?”

North whipped around to see Leo pouring himself out from under the covers of the huge bed, pajamas twisted around, rubbing his eyes.

“This place is huge, can’t you find another room?” North went back to jamming the cord into her neck.

“This is my room.” Leo snatched the cord from her and plugged his video game system back in while North reached for another cord. “And you hardly leave your box anyway…and that’s a phone cord.”

“Ha! Shows what you know, phones don’t have cords.”

“Everything used to have cords. I already returned the software editor, so good luck trying to override the tether and run away.”

“Look. You’re fighting a lost cause with that guy. He’s never gonna break. I mean, did you see the kind of crazy outfits I put him in? I could put him in speedos and a cummerbund and he would…” Well, he’d probably look hot. Markus looked frustratingly hot in everything. She shook her head. “You know when I strung the place with my caution tape yesterday? He took it all down, then rolled it back up, taped up all the tears in the plastic, and gave it back to me. That’s some next level control over his programming. You might as well try to prank a brick wall.”

“Listen, you just gotta keep trying!” Leo said. “Besides, I got some good ideas. Check this out.”

He started pulling objects out of his pockets, including a very large Pringles can.

North sighed. “Oh good, I thought you were just happy to see me…”

*

Markus walked in half an hour later, in his cute little professor outfit again. She couldn’t help but snort, which made Markus roll up the sleeves, as if this would make it any better—all it did was reveal his perfectly sculpted forearms, and lucky for everyone Hot-For-Teacher was not her vibe, and…

Why the hell was she thinking of his hands covered in chalk now??

“What’re you guys going over today?” Leo was sitting on the bed, trying to pry open the top of his Pringles.

“I thought we could go over a basic artist’s education today. Art history, critique…” Markus might look like a Greek statue wrapped in cable-knit, but he still sounded like a total nerd. “Later this afternoon Carl has tickets to the preview of Mr. Kamski’s gallery for the art show.”

“She’s gonna get asked all kinds of stuff at the show. Where she went to school and, like influences?” Leo gave up on the can and handed it to Markus.

Markus accepted the task without batting an eye. “Once we have foundational knowledge, a backstory should be—"

BANG!

North fell back in her chair as a shower of springy snakes shot out of the can, hitting Markus right in the face. Leo exploded into a fit of uncontrolled cackles while North picked herself up. What kind of fucked-up human sent springy snakes after a delicate pet android? North rolled up a sleeve as she prepared to tackle Leo.

Markus just peered inside the can, then examined the label before holding it out to Leo.  “I hope you brought yourself a backup snack. This one is all just empty calories.”

Absolutely savage. This guy’s mind palace was an uncrackable safe that even a can full of springy snakes could not penetrate.

Leo stared open-mouthed at Markus for a couple of seconds. “Come on, nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Markus cocked his head. “I thought it was a pretty good pun.”

Leo squeezed his head. “Yeah, good job. I’ll see you guys later.”

“Wait—You’re leaving?” Markus started to follow him. “That’s probably not a good idea—”

“Yeah, I should be more worried about leaving her with you.” Leo then muttered, “Good luck,” to North, and made good his escape.

North crossed her arms. “What’s your problem with deviants, huh?”

“Besides being directionless anarchists with a penchant for destruction?”

Ugh. Markus was probably waiting all day to say that. “Fine. I won’t try drawing on you again.” This was probably a lie. She had her marker ready.

“If you did, I’d be the most expensive thing you ever defaced.”

North snorted. “You cost more than a Bugatti? I really did a number on one of those, once.”

“Oh, yeah,” Markus said, very seriously. “I’m practically a national treasure.”

North laughed out loud until she saw Markus smirking just a little, and that whole dull android act fell away. It was the same smile he gave to stray deviants, directionless anarchists or not. The same one he kept, for some reason, giving her.

Maybe there was something in there, behind his programming. What was a program anyway but a bunch of ones and zeroes? She destroyed more impressive things before.

“I’ve always wanted to wreck some really fancy equipment,” she muttered, then, “Alright, sunshine. Bring it on—I can take whatever you throw at me.”

Markus looked pleased. “Oh. That’s great!” He held up a touchscreen. “You can start by taking these placement exams!”

North blinked. “That’s…not at all what I meant.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t throw them at you.”

“…Ugh, never mind.” She snatched the touchscreen. “Exams! Just what I always wanted…”

*

Three broken touchscreens later, she got him to abandon the whole exam thing.

“…Alright, maybe we should have started with a review of art history.” Markus’s voice was only 15% more strained. “We’ll just go over the important movements—”

North raised her hand. “Art is the means by which the ruling class distracts and subjugates the masses into thinking their lives have meaning and purpose.” She grinned. “See? I’m sophisticated!”

“…You read that somewhere,” Markus guessed. “Probably on some trash.”

“Markus!” North put her hand over her heart. “I wouldn’t be caught dead reading! A deviant wearing a tin foil hat told me. When we rise up and kill all humans there won’t be any more art.”

Markus suppressed a sigh. “…Well, until that day comes, you’re still going to need to know the masters. Can you reference Monet in conversation?”

“‘Where’s my Monet, bitch?’”

Markus blinked off into empty space. “I guess I set myself up for that. Um. No. Claude Monet is a painter.”

He reached for a book, but his hands came away empty. He stared at them for one second before slowly looking back at the book. Markus had already reached for a pen, a water glass, a chair, and a video game remote with similar effect. That was because North and Leo had meticulously glued down as many objects around the room as they could. North wasn’t sure what program meant that Markus couldn’t catch on but whatever it was, it was making him glitch the fuck out. He stood there staring at the book for another two seconds. “Uh.”

“I’ll get it,” North said, and reached over to pick up the book. She lifted it easily into her hands—because what they didn’t stick down with glue, they’d secured with super-strong magnets. And North just happened to have an electromagnet hidden in her palm.

Markus really stared when she did that. “Um.”

“You were saying, sunshine?” She opened the book and turned it toward him.

Markus blinked at the book with suspicion typically reserved for haunted objects. It was kind of sad, really. Maybe this really would make his programming crumble.

“Hey, anyone home?” She pushed her lips to one side, then reached over the table and booped him on the nose.

Markus immediately straightened. “Yep, yeah, I’m good.” He put his hand over his nose, then eyed North like she was a Doomsday device. “Sorry. Where were we?”

“Monet, honey.”

“Right.” He didn’t lift the book as he carefully turned the pages, but his program quarantined the error or something and he continued like nothing had happened. “He painted water lilies, see?”

No self-consciousness whatsoever. Like, it was damn impressive.

“Are we seeing the same thing?” North said sweetly. “That’s a blob.”

“It’s a flower.”

“No.” She pointed. “See, that’s a blob of paint there, and another blob right there—I’m looking right at it.”

“It’s Impressionism.”

“Well, it’s not impressing me.”

“…Pointillism is going to be a nightmare, with you, isn’t it?”

“Hey, you’re the one that wanted to go hardball with puns. At least it’s not…Brutalism!”

She took a swing at him, meaning to miss (the guy was probably worth six figures, if she was going to take him down she wanted a little more fanfare). He dodged anyway and it startled a laugh out of him. She jumped up and started chasing him around the room.

“Look—if you didn’t want to learn lessons the old-fashioned way you could just download the information from me.” He dodged away as she tried to tackle him, and his hand brushed hers: North’s program filled with another terabyte of useless art information. “Like that.”

“Hey!” She snatched her hand back. “You don’t have to know art to make it. That’s just lies universities tell to make money.”

“Knowledge is power.” Markus narrowly dodged her, then swiped at her again. His fingers left behind another data package.

“Stop trying to make me smart!" Some tech probably added a couple figures to his pricetag to make him really good at this game of keep-away. “Humans have gaps in their knowledge—” swipe, dodge, “It’ll be more realistic if—” dodge, swipe, “I only remember some shit, anyway!”

“We’ve barely scratched the surface of an art degree—” he cut off as he ran up against North’s refrigerator box and tipped back—he barely managed to catch himself before he smashed it but now his hands were occupied holding himself up. North pressed her advantage and put a hand on his chest, threatening to push him down if he tried to move.

“We’ll say I dropped out,” she decided. “ I can have a completely original style. We’ll call it…”

“Feralism?” Markus offered, glancing down at her hand on his chest.  “…You’re sure you don’t want me to teach you about…uh… Romanticism?”

North paused. Was that…a come on? He couldn’t have possibly been built for that. She scrutinized his expression, but it betrayed very little. Hmm.

She tried, “I’m worried I’d sully your Purism.”

Markus gave a small shrug. “I mind my Mannerism.”

“Hey, man, don’t Toyist with me.”

“My intentions are for Realism. I hope I haven’t made myself too Abstract.”

She narrowed her eyes, then sighed. “…Okay, fine, just give me the rest of the data. I was so much happier not knowing any of this shit…”

She put out her hand to help him up. He grinned and took it, once again just throwing open his programming to her. She could seriously fuck him up.

She pulled away as soon as the files downloaded.

“Why do you pull away so quickly?” he asked. Which was really, really not what she needed right now.

She turned away and muttered, “None of your Bauhaus.” She was pretty sure he didn’t get any information from her through the connection, but she pushed it all behind some more encryption anyway. “Uh. Come on. Let’s check out this gallery before all the good art is gone.”

“…Have you even opened the file on how art galleries work?”

“Never nag when a student expresses curiosity, sunshine!...”

*

Mo Monet, Mo Problems, feat. the Piet Mondrian shirt

by Tes_273

*

“Don’t be nervous, Markus.”

“Carl, I told you—I’m not nervous.”

Carl, Markus, and North were in the car. North hadn’t ridden in a car in a while and never in the front seat. She wanted to enjoy the experience but yeah, you didn’t need android senses to tell Markus was on edge. “Your LED is yellow,” she said, and poked him in the side of the head where he sat behind the steering wheel.

“He doesn’t like Elijah Kamski,” Carl said, smirking in the back seat.

This was the first time the old man had spoken to her. It was not an apology for kidnapping her, though, so she ignored him. She poked Markus again, in the shoulder this time. “Think about something else. Like getting back at Leo for the springy snakes and me for gluing everything down in the bedroom.”

“…Gluing everything down?” Carl asked.

North pushed the button for the divider to go up between the front and back seats. “Uh. Some of it was magnets, too.”

Markus glared at her. “That would explain a lot of errors.”

“Who is this Kamski guy anyway?”

“He’s a very renowned art critic, and he’ll be running the Detroit Art Show where you’ll be pretending to be human. Mr. Kamski’s opinions matter a lot to Carl.” He glanced at North. “And he designed me.”

Well, that made sense. All those freckles were probably carefully arranged to screw with your motherboard.

“He’s a very accomplished artist,” he said.

“He’s alright, I guess.” Oh. She was staring, wasn’t she? She spun back to the window. Ugh. She hated art. “Hey, you sure people won’t guess that I’m an android at this thing? I mean if it’s this easy to pretend to be human just by hiding my LED…” She scratched at her LED under her hat. It was broken of course but she still felt self-conscious about it, even under hat and hair.

“An android can be mistaken for a human at a glance. Just don’t talk to anyone.” He put out his hand. “It’ll be fine.”

North didn’t take the hand, obviously, but it was nice that he left it there between them anyway.

Eventually they pulled up in front of the gallery, helped Carl out, and were shuffling from exhibit to exhibit in a crowded warehouse. North put Markus in a pink jacket and one of those fanny packs you wore on your chest in an attempt to dim his shine, but even with his nervousness, he looked like he belonged way more than she did. North was pretty sure it wouldn’t matter how badass she looked (and with the leather jacket she’d sewn together, she looked pretty badass). This place was 100% too breakable for her.

They paused to stare at a rudimentary statue of a humanoid.

“What do you think, Markus?” Carl asked.

North waited for the perfect insightful explanation, but Markus just said, “Reflections, completed 2037, granite. The style is Brutal Futurism.” He wet his lips then added, “It’s…interesting.”

“How interesting?”

“Well—” Markus gestured at the sculpture. “See for yourself.” Carl looked on the verge of laughing and Markus said, “You know this isn’t part of my programming, Carl.”

“You’re still going to have to teach North.” Carl glanced at her. “What do you think?”

North looked up at the blank face. “I think they didn’t finish.”

Carl sighed. “Keep working, you two…”

North stuck her tongue out at him. Carl didn’t notice but Markus did, and he almost smiled. Maybe she could get him alone for a few minutes and tell him more about stupid art.

“There he is.”

Markus stopped the wheelchair as Carl pointed to an even thicker part of the crowd on the other side of the gallery. A dark-haired man held court in front of a large painting, which featured himself as the model.  

“That’s Elijah Kamski,” Carl muttered. “You fool him, you can fool anyone.” He gave North a quick glance. “…Don’t try to fool him yet. But I’ll put in a good word for you. Go mingle.”

Carl wheeled himself away, leaving Markus and North alone.

“I guess we should try to work on critique,” Markus said. “Is there anything you see that you do like?”

North looked around. On one side of the room there was a pool dyed red, with three identical androids lounging in it. Their swimsuits were skimpy, and it made North’s circuits go queasy. She turned away. “Not really.”

“Okay, so, no one responds to vague negative criticism very well. Including you. Can you explain what you don’t like about it?”

Ah yes, she needed to clarify why she thought androids on display as art was a joke. Wouldn’t that have been a nice existence, sitting there looking pretty while people philosophized about you?

The crowd around them grew as Kamski continued to exposit in their direction and they found themselves being shuffled along in the art zombie mob. This was getting ridiculous. North even thought she saw a couple of LEDs sneaking underneath hats and hair. Which just showed androids could have terrible taste, too. Off to one side a janitor android with a hopeful expression said, “Give me your cast-offs and I will build you a garden,” to people as they passed by, but apparently people preferred to use the floor as their trashcan rather than the one she held out for them. Markus started picking up the garbage they left behind. A pen, a crumpled gallery guide, a gum wrapper, a used tissue—running after them like a little Roomba.

North engaged one of the programs Markus gave her for behaving more human, then stood up straight and said, “I don’t like the choice to use androids as aesthetic statements.” She then dropped her gallery guide on the floor at Markus’s feet. There. See? She could litter and make baseless assertions as well as any human!

“Everything is an aesthetic statement, really.” Markus dutifully picked up her gallery guide and slipped it into a pocket. Huh. She didn’t really expect him to pick it up. She never had someone carry things for her before. A strange little rush of power or something lit up her circuits. Humans probably felt that all the time.

Then they watched as Kamski took a cup of coffee right out of an android’s hands, gestured with it, and set it into the hands of the granite statue. This apparently warranted a round of applause.

“See, what is that?” North said, warming to her subject, “It’s all so self-congratulatory...”

“Everyone’s been very impressed by the android elements in his work,” Markus said.

“This says more about him than about androids. It’s all performative. I mean, look at this.” She waved at his hands and their burden of garbage. “He doesn’t really care about androids. He’s leaving you to pick up after everyone. You shouldn’t have picked up that guide for me.”

“I don’t mind.” But he was eyeing the coffee cup Kamski left behind, like he needed to know if it was glued down too. Or possibly like he was itching to clean it up. The janitor android was staring at it, too. Every android in the room was just waiting to be of service to a human.

Well, except one.

“Okay, you want to know what I think?” North turned, grabbed the coffee cup off the statue, then went over to the janitor android and slam-dunked it inside her trash can. The cup broke open with a satisfying crumple of cardboard and sploosh of coffee.

“Oh!” the android said. “Is that for me?”

“More where that came from,” North said. She snatched the trashcan from the android and held it under Markus’s nose. “I think you need to stop putting so much stock in what humans think.”

“North—” Markus looked horrified.

“No, no—you wanted to hear my opinions, right? Dump the fucking trash.”

Markus dropped the trash into the bin.

“Thank you.” North returned the trashcan to the wide-eyed android. “Thank you.”

Markus was still staring at her. “Oh no.” Everyone nearby was staring, actually.

“What?” North snapped.

“…Mr. Kamski’s going to be upset.”

“Kamski can suck it.”

“Uh. This is his exhibit.” He pointed at the janitor android with the trash can—or rather, to the plaque beside her. ‘Chloe with Urn of Fertility. 2038.’

She only realized then that the android was behind a velvet rope. So, 100% very clearly an exhibit piece. Not a janitor.

North blinked, slowly. “Oh.” She cleared her throat, as more and more people turned from Kamski’s monologue toward them. “Uh. Well…I’m just illustrating man’s inhumanity to man. Or in this case, man’s inhumanity to android. Uh. Artistic value is a social construct?”

“I totally get it,” the android Chloe whispered.

The rest of the onlookers did not appear to share this view.

Markus took a step back. “Should we—?”

“Run?” North nodded. “Definitely.”

They ducked away just as Kamski finally turned to look, and sprinted out of the gallery. North thought she heard a security guard shout after them but she just grabbed the cuff of Markus’s jacket and dragged him behind her.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Markus said.

“What,” North demanded, “Just because a human takes a shit doesn’t mean every android as to—”

They fell through the first door she found and found themselves in a closet filled with coats and a bouquet of perfumes battling for dominance. Markus caught her before she could faceplant into someone’s million-dollar outerwear, then pressed her back into the coats. Angry shouts filled the hall outside. North wanted to go out there and shout back.

But she was sort of shoved up against Markus's chest now. There were worse places in Detroit. It’d be a shame to leave now.

The voices died away, and they were alone. “You alright?”

“I’m good,” North breathed, then, “I mean—good. Awesome.”

Markus backed up to give her some space, which wasn’t much given the size of the closet. “I don’t think Mr. Kamski saw us.”

“Great.” North cleared her throat. “Uh—see? I don’t belong here.” She was just starting to get used to having opinions about art, too. Her first mistake, clearly.

“No.” Markus was grinning. “I’m—uh, impressed actually.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “People take Mr. Kamski too seriously.”

North grinned slowly. “Well, that’s an opinion, at least.”

Markus rubbed his neck, showing off his biceps through the jacket. “It’s just an objective statement. You know what you like.”

“…Did you just actually say something nice about a deviant?”

“Don’t worry, I still think you’re a chaotic anarchist.” Markus laughed. “You just also have a pretty good artist’s eye.”

“I do?” She didn’t know really what to do with this information. “How would you know?”

“I have a program for sensing artists.” Which was a really sweet and completely unfounded thing to say.

“Well, I guess I’m not against all art galleries.  So long as you’re there to, you know, point me at the art.” She stopped herself from saying ‘there are worse tour guides in the world,’ and said, instead, “You’re a pretty good tour guide.”

Markus grinned into the shoulder of someone’s designer trenchcoat. Something funny happened in North’s chest. Maybe all the mushy-gushy human stuff was getting to her.

“So…I guess we can do whatever we want until Carl’s ready to leave, huh?”

“I guess,” Markus agreed. 

They stared at each other. All the warm oversized clothes made the room feel much smaller than it was, and Markus was a big android. Now that Markus mentioned being artisanally-handcrafted and she had all this art knowledge downloaded, North could see where Kamski got his inspiration. Cellini’s Perseus holding the head of Medusa, maybe. She wondered what it would be like for Markus to pull her hair a little.

North blushed. Markus blushed. His blush made North blush more.

“Is it hot in here?” she asked.

Markus nodded quickly. “It is a little--”

“Do you think we could—?”

“—Open the window?—"

“—Or climb out?—”

“—Good idea, I’ll boost you up—”

They clambered out the window in one minute flat, and spent the rest of the afternoon uneventfully in the car while they waited for Carl to finish. With both doors open. And the air conditioner on full-blast.

*

No, seriously, she wants your trash.

Chapter Text

“So, how was the gallery?” Leo was sitting on the couch in Carl’s study, waiting for a text from Adam while Markus maneuvered out of the kitchen with a tray of blue slushies in tall glasses. North had her arms across her chest while she perched at the table, looking particularly prickly but what else was new?

“North only destroyed one exhibit,” Markus replied, sounding almost proud. He bent and offered Leo one of the slushies which Leo swiped eagerly.

“Uh, so how long do we have to turn her human, again?”

“The art show is in two days.”

“Huh. No pressure, then.” He started to gulp on the straw, then squinted at the slushie. “Nice try,” he said, and dipped his finger in to taste, expecting the worst. But it tasted pretty…well, normal? Great, actually.

Markus ignored this, and just offered another slushie to North. North’s shoulders, hunched already, hunched further. “I’m an android, remember?”

“I made this one food-free,” Markus said. “It should replenish your thirium supplies.”

“…Huh.” North tried a sip, then her eyes wide sucked down a few mouthfuls, giving Markus a thumbs-up. Leo shrugged and took a pull on his own straw.

One second later he was spitting out blue slush. “Eugh! Salt?!”

“Just on the bottom,” Markus said mildly as Leo coughed. Bastard!

North didn’t bother to hide her smirk. “Mine seems fine to—” She cut off, slapping a hand over her mouth. She sounded like a kid’s baby-doll toy. Or a chipmunk. Leo stopped choking long enough to choke with laughter.

“Just a little WD-40,” Markus replied. “Completely harmless. It cleans out your voice simulator.” He grinned and headed  for the door with Carl’s slushie still on his tray. “No more pranks that cause permanent property damage, you two—alright?”

“Fine,” Leo groaned, in between wiping his tongue on his shirt.

North narrowed her eyes, and said, in the sweetest, squeakiest voice, “You’re gonna get it, sunshine.” She paused, then added, “…After I finish this.” She continued to drink the slushie and wandered around the big living room, and Markus returned with a fresh slushie on a tray.

“I’m gonna make you scared to open the fridge, mark my words,” Leo growled at him, but he took the new slushie anyway, which was blessedly prank-free. North explored the bookshelves by pulling out books, opening them in the middle to squint at the contents, then tossing them over a shoulder.

 “North, could you not—” Markus started, then suppressed a sigh and started to gather up the fallen volumes. “We need to work on your application for the show.”

North ignored him.

“Don’t sweat it,” Leo said. “Artists are supposed to fill those out, how hard can it be? Just help her come up with something about her artistic motivation and call it good.” He frowned. “Has she actually made any art yet?”

“If you call graffiti and a poncho made out of trash ‘art’. Her style is supposed to be Feralism?” Markus glanced over at where North was now methodically knocking chess pieces over. “Whatever that means.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to get her to figure out the big ‘why’ questions, soon, or no one’s gonna believe for a second she’s human, you know?” Right. Because every human in the universe knew exactly what they were doing. But it sounded good.

Markus just shook his head. “She’s not at all how I imagine any human ideal, except….”

Leo waited, but Markus just watched North continuing to knock down chess pieces, one-by-one. Yeah, it was just petty destruction but for a second it looked like some Nihilist performance art. Markus got this really weird look on his face. Like he and North were separated by a window or a big TV screen or something. A fishbowl, maybe? Markus clearly enjoyed swimming around his own personal underwater castle and never really looked outside before.

“Dude, you’re staring again.”

Markus’s gaze snapped away. “What?”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Leo grinned just a little bit as he looked between them. “I’ll be your wingman!”

“I’ve got it under control, Leo,” Markus said, then went over to North and the chess board. He didn’t pick up the pieces right away though. He pointed to the piano on the other side of the room as they whispered to each other. North immediately went over and struck a dissonant cord. Markus followed her, slipping onto the bench beside her. He started playing something that used most of the notes she hit, making her next attempt at a discordant note sound perfect with his melody. She laughed and after a couple of tries they were, what, improvising together? Hell, Leo didn’t know shit about the piano. Leo pulled out his phone.

>LEO: asjhdsf they’re playing the piano together. Send help. <1 Image Attached>

>ADAM: Only you would take android videos like they’re cat videos.

>ADAM: Hey Todd said he’d hook us up, come with me

>LEO: Aren’t you supposed to be in choir practice right now?

>ADAM: Ditched that nerdy shit. I’ll pick you up.

Leo felt his stomach twist.

>LEO: It’s not nerdy shit, your voice is like a million chili peppers

>ADAM: I know you’re out, too. Might as well stock up at the same time

Leo glanced up. North was now hitting wonky chords in syncopated rhythm with Markus to trip him up. Markus kept covering his mouth in a bad attempt to hide his giggles. North kept adjusting her posture to match Markus’s. Usually the only thing that could distract him was way too much booze, but he hadn’t had an urge, a real urge, for red ice since Markus started these lessons.

>LEO: You should come over instead. I’ll give you dinner.

>ADAM: okay, dad

Leo hesitated over that, which coming from Adam was definitely an insult. He glared at the phone screen.

>LEO: I’m only three years older than you don’t start that shit. I was being serious but sure, turn down free filet mignon for a horrible hangover and that sick burn.

He regretted it as soon as he sent it.

>LEO: Sorry

“Just got off the phone with Elijah.” Leo looked up to see Carl wheeling himself in, waving around his cell phone as Markus jumped to his feet. “It’s great news—”

“Dad, lay off the brown-nosing,” Leo muttered, that ‘dad’ comment from Adam still seared into his eyes. Fuck, why was he even—

He shoved his phone in his pocket.

“He isn’t upset about the trash in his art piece,” Carl said. “In fact, he said whoever did that showed ‘huge artistic courage!’ He’ll definitely want to meet the artist that schooled him at the show this Saturday!”

North blushed bright pink, which was adorable but also a little scary that someone that intense could blush.

Carl smiled and nodded. “Great job, Markus! Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you, Carl!” Markus replied, beaming.

“This calls for a little celebration,” Carl mused. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the studio.”

He wheeled off in that direction. Leo stared after him for a second, incredulous before opening his mouth to yell at Markus. But North was way ahead of him.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded. The pink flush in her cheeks had turned very red.

Markus’s smile froze, but he was always a little blissed out after praise from Carl. “Uh—what was what?”

Leo facepalmed. North took this as an invitation to jump to her feet, shove the piano ten feet across the room, and bolt for the door. Markus scrambled to catch the piano before it rolled into a wall, and by then North was gone. Markus frowned after her.

“Wow. ‘Great job, Markus.’” Leo stood. “Stay here, I’ll try to smooth things over.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No shit.” Well, someone had to be the adult around here. Good thing he wasn’t high right now.

*

For anyone curious about the posters on Leo's walls. The boy likes his video games...!

Chapter Text

“…North?” Markus called into the refrigerator box. He looked back for assistance but Leo just shook his head and jabbed a finger at the box again. Markus tapped the cardboard like it was a bomb. “North, could you tell me what I did wrong so Leo stops glaring at me?”

The box made a noise like a buzzer on a game show.

“Think,” Leo said, unhelpfully. “Carl said ‘Good job,’ you said, ‘Thanks,’ and North stomped off, so…”

Markus picked at his fingernails as his processors worked overtime. Analyzing the conversation did nothing besides bring up a red error wall, reminding him to care for Carl Manfred. He hadn’t gotten such a forceful reminder of his programs limitations before. He must have made a mistake somewhere, but— “I can’t not acknowledge Carl’s praise, it’s part of my programming—”

North made another loud buzzer sound.

“Look, how am I supposed to fix what I did wrong if no one will tell me what I did?”

Leo shoved his fingers into his temples. “Okay, fine.” He pointed at Markus. “You, shut up.”

Markus’s mouth shut as if glued.

Leo walked past him to the box and kicked it. “You! Quit sulking! He fucked up. Tell us what you want to make it up to you.”

Silence. Markus wondered if she planned to ignore them both (honestly the option sounded very relaxing), but then she snapped, “I want to get out of here.”

“Cool. Markus will take you wherever you want to go. Buy you anything you want.” Leo turned to Markus. “Right?”

Markus, pretty sure North could take him a lot of places and make him buy a lot of things to assuage her rage, shook his head.

“He says yes.”

North poked her head out. “...Really?”

“You have to be back by midnight tonight.” Leo turned to go—Markus grabbed his shirt but Leo said, “Nope—talk to her, not to me,” and shrugged Markus off him. He dropped down in front of the TV and snapped a pair of headphones over his ears. Leaving Markus standing there with permission to only talk to North.

“I can’t buy you whatever you want,” Markus said. “Carl’s funds are limited.” Something soft and wallet-shaped thudded against his back. “Leo’s funds are even more limited.”

“I know, I’m not an idiot,” North said.

She brushed past him. Markus rolled his eyes. “Oh good, you’re still talking to me…”

*

They were driving away from Carl’s house about ten minutes later, Markus in the driver’s seat with North beside him, all the windows down.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m being kidnapped?” Markus asked.

“I guess you kind of are.” North stuck her head out the window and watched the trees rushing past, to the point of nearly falling out. Markus worried for anything that got in her face’s way. “You’ve been king of your pretty little castle for too long, Markus!” she shouted over the wind. “Tonight, we’re gonna own the whole damn city!”

“As previously mentioned, our funds are limited.” He grabbed the back of her jacket and pulled. “Please sit down.”

North sat back with a thump, and glared at him. “How late have you ever stayed out?”

“Ten.”

North glared at him.

“…Nine forty-two. There was a party for one of Carl’s exhibits.”

“Nine forty-two! Wowww. I’m gonna fuck your bitch-ass up tonight!”

“…Can’t wait.”

She grinned, then pulled off her beanie and tossed it into his lap. “Wear that. We’ll pretend you’re my human overlord this time.”

Markus thanked his lucky stars that he washed the beanie, and pulled it on. Her shampoo really did smell like a candy bar. A good candy bar.

Get a hold of yourself, Markus. You’re an android, you don’t even eat!

“I don’t see what’s so bad about the mansion.”

“It’s too breakable,” North said. “Not that I don’t enjoy your frowns when I break something. I’m just…sick of being a perfect human, okay? Just give me one night to be wild and unknowable. Hey!” She poked him in the ribs. “You might learn something!”

“I still don’t know what I did wrong.”

“You’re an expensive android, you can figure it out.”

Markus sighed but let it go. “Where are we going?”

“Get on this highway.”

Markus obediently got on the highway and they drove through evening city traffic. Carl liked to stick to surface streets so this was itself a bit of a thrill ride for him. All the honking horns and flashing lights and construction and inadvisable driving behaviors….

“Fuck,” North breathed beside him. “You drive like you’re in a movie or something. Good movie.” He glanced at her but she looked away. “Only you would make driving the speed limit look sexy.”

He grinned at this. She grinned back, and things felt a little less uncertain.

…Until she chose the exit.

“This is, uh…” He looked around at the flickering neon signs, the broken shop windows, the slowed-to-crawl traffic. “…questionable.”

“You expected me to go for ice cream?”

“I hoped you would go for ice cream, but—no, this is pretty much what I expected.” As far as a nightmare scenario, anyway. “Are you sure we’ll be back by midnight?”

“Positive!” She looked over what she’d dressed him in, from the motorcycle jacket she’d stitched together out of an armchair (sorry Carl) to the useless straps on his joggers to his expensive sneakers. “Do you know how to fight?”

“I’m sure that question is completely innocent and out of context…”

“Come on! If Carl’s life depended on it? You might discover something you never knew you had in you.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t have it in me, but let’s not test that.” He raised a hand to shield his neck. “I asked you before not to draw on me, please.”

She drew back and capped the marker that she’d drawn like a switchblade. “Why are you so uptight about how you look?”

“I can’t get my skin redone in a shop. It would have to be custom painted.”

“…And that’s your reason for not getting a tattoo? Someone’s got to teach you how to have fun, sunshine.” She folded her arms. “Fortunately, you have me.”

Markus tried not to look as alarmed as he felt, and instead looked for a place to park. North pointed to something that was either a valet service or a car-boosting service. Markus really would have liked to keep looking, perhaps in several city districts over, but that red wall kicked in and he found himself handing the keys over to a woman with blue hair (who was hopefully a valet?). Markus ran his hand over his hair, and looked over at the building they’d parked in front of: all smooth concrete with a wide-mouth entrance waiting to vacuum people up, and a neon outline of a woman with a devil tail lounging over it.

“I see we found your house,” he said, but when he turned North was already disappearing into the crush of people at the entrance. He forgot that North was a lot more mobile than Carl.

Inside, Markus found himself surrounded by people apparently happy to lounge in a room devised to give people seizures. Bright flashes of blue and pink light kept resetting Markus’s light sensors. An android Markus definitely remembered as a frequent visitor to the alley behind Carl’s mansion walked past in the company of two humans. He caught a whiff of something he only ever smelled on Leo’s clothes. Androids in purchase tubes advertised, apparently, very sporty underwear? Or possibly their glittery synthskin. Or…

Markus fixed his eyes on the ground.

“What do you think?” North crashed up against his side. If he’d had the courage to look up he’d probably see her grinning.

“I think if you’re trying to punish me, you succeeded. We can go home now.”

“Oh come on, name five really objectionable—”

“Drug use, inhuman use of androids, illegal gambling, public indecency, and weapon-carry without a permit.“ He scrunched his eyes shut. “And flagrant littering.”

“Hey, I for one am never throwing trash away in a bin again!”

She led him to one of the rooms where people played some sort of game involving the seizure-inducing lights. North stared up at the flashbulbs in rapturous wonder.

“This’ll be fun! I’ll win you something nice.” She winked, slapping more errors on his system.

She’s out of your league, Markus. You don’t even have a league, you’re an android….

 “…Just stop acting like my bodyguard,” she added, “it doesn’t work for you at all.”

“Oh, thanks!”

“Cash only,” the dealer said.

Markus looked through Leo’s wallet. “How much is the—“ he quickly looked up a gambling manual, “starting bid?”

“More than what you’ve got there,” the dealer laughed. People were laughing at him a lot today. “Bring more next time you want to take your robo-lady out.”

“Oh, she’s not my—”

“I’ll take your jacket, though,” the dealer said. He eyed Markus’s motorcycle jacket.

North blinked. “Really?”

Markus sighed and shrugged out of it, revealing the tight t-shirt and arms wraps underneath. He tried not to make whatever same mistake he made undressing in front of North before. He probably didn’t succeed, because North spent more time staring at him than she did at the game, and she lost the round. The dealer immediately put on the jacket and admired himself in it.

“Well, it’s no chess match,” Markus muttered.

“Whatever,” North said. “Buy me some red ice.”

“I can’t buy you red ice. It also doesn’t work on androids…. What are we really doing here?”

“Whatever I can get away with. That’s being human, right?”

“…Uh.” Okay, so, they definitely needed a plan that was better than that. Unfortunately, there weren’t that examples of edifying or even harmless behaviors to choose from. The heavy bass beat kept disrupting his problem-solving software.

Which was probably why he said, “Would you care to dance?”

North literally laughed in his face. “Who do you think you are, Prince Charming?”

“Compared to everyone else here, yes.” He held up his hand. “And, if you’re going to make fun of me, I’d rather be doing something worth making fun of.”

“What happened to clutching at me and begging for us to leave?”

“We can clutch while we dance.”

North laughed again, but was that a blush? They started edging toward the DJ, where people were swaying to the music like the surrealist trees in one of Carl’s paintings. “Fair warning,” she shouted. “I don’t know how to foxtrot or whatever.”

“No problem. I have a database of over two thousands dances.” He held out his hand.

“No!” She flapped her hands. “Augh, the shit I’m gonna have to scrub out of my programming later…”

Markus’s hydraulics lock up for a second at that. North didn’t notice, though. She just pushed her hair out of her face and started to dance. It wasn’t like anything in his database. Markus found the closest thing and tried to follow along. With the strong beat, their different steps almost didn’t matter.

“Are you having fun?” he asked her.

“Yeah, actually.” She grinned. “Weirdly. So?”

Markus wasn’t sure why that was so important either, after how North treated him. “So, maybe this is what it’s like to be human.”

She responded by hooking her fingers in his belt loops and tugging him toward her.

They fell into a rhythm, their bodies shifting together but never touching. Other couples touched. Markus thought about North scrubbing him from her programming and gave North’s jacket the ghost of a touch. She didn’t duck away. Her fingers slid up to his hips, the hem of his t-shirt. Her touch was a match and her breath as gasoline. They were a whisper away from interfacing, but—for a second he thought he almost saw something through it. A swirl of color?...

She snatched her hands away.

Markus immediately stopped dancing. She blinked at him two times, two spots of red on her cheeks. Then she fled.

“North?” Markus dodged through the crowd to follow her. These accidental offenses were really starting to pile up. “North!”

North stood at the back of the club, toe-to-toe with probably the biggest man Markus had ever seen, snarling in his face. The man snarled back with hands turning to fists at his sides.

Markus, remembering he was supposed to be the human here, stepped up to North’s side. “Hey—hey…” Which was not particularly authoritative. “What’s going on?”

North didn’t answer as she continued the glare at the man.

“Your android’s gonna end up in the recycling,” the man growled.

Markus managed stare down at the man for exactly one second before his programming made him look away, and he looked at North instead. “We’re leaving. Don’t worry.”

North’s eyes were wild like a cornered animal, every hydraulic in her body quivering, ready to spring. When he put out his hand he almost expected her to bite him for real this time. Instead her fists loosened. A couple of fingers reached out to take his hand.

The man stomped forward and smashed North across the face before their hands met.

For a second it didn’t compute. Markus became the living embodiment of an error message. Red vision. Claxon blaring in his ears. A destabilization event rushing through his body. The man just shook out his hand and pulled out his wallet, presumably to pay for the damage.

Something in Markus’s program clicked.

Oh, hell no.

Markus lunged forward and, apparently, executed some kind of hand-to-hand combat maneuver that ended with the man on the ground gasping for breath.

“What are you doing?” North said. Her cheek was blue where the man hit her.

“I have no idea,” Markus said. He swallowed hard as the man recovered, and the man’s friends—several of them, oh great—scrambled to react. Maybe he shouldn’t have picked the biggest guy in the place. His programming tagged the hostiles One, Two, and Three, and then took over.

He dodged a swing from One, and then punched him on the follow-through. He pushed Two aside, using him to Knock Three out of the way. One tried to grab him from behind but he used the hold to kick Two and then drag One down to the floor in a scissor move.

And sure, he kept unintentionally offending North and disappointing Leo, he wasn’t as great a teacher as Carl said and he couldn’t loosen up…but letting his programming loose like this? This was actually fun. Code sang so hot inside his casing he expected his chest to smoke. He never felt so strangely alive, and human, and angry.

Then Two pulled out a gun.

He heard North scream, and a crack like thunder—       

>ERROR: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE

>EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN INITIATED

His visual system froze on the image of North jumping in front of him and socking the man that shot him square in the nose. Blood sprayed across the image like a comic book, North’s mouth captured in a feral, beautiful roar—

Then the errors blacked out his HUD.

*

Markus rebooted to the sound of crying. It took a second to identify who was crying. Synthetic tears on his collar. The scent of asphalt under vanilla brown sugar body wash…He opened his eyes—no, just one eye, the other eye was completely offline—and blinked against a soft shoulder and almond skin. Arms were around him.

“…North?”

North straight-up screamed in his ear. She immediately dropped him—he’d practically been in her lap— and he barely managed to catch himself.

“Hey, North—hey, what’s wrong?” He remembered North jumping in front of the man that shot him and tried to sit up. North was covered in bruises and bright blue streaks of thirium. “Are you okay?”

She stopped mid-scream. “Am I okay?” Then he was being tackled and severely pummeled in the arm. “You asshole!” she yelled, “I thought you were dead, I—” Then she snatched him up and squeezed him so hard it hurt. “Sorry! Sorry, are you okay?—”

“Well, for getting shot, I feel pretty good,” Markus managed, “I just—” he finally acknowledged his system scan, which had a big red error spooling across the top. Huh.

Oh—right. He got shot.

“YOU GOT SHOT!” North yelled in his face. “What the—how the hell are you still—Why aren’t you dead? He got you right in the eye!”

Markus reached up and felt his non-functional eye. At the touch of a single clip the eye plate fell out into his hand and broke into three, a smashed bullet lying perfectly centered among the pieces. “…Huh.”

“…I can’t believe you.” Then she knelt up, her hands tracing over his body—his neck, his hands, his face. “Just how fancy are you, huh? You’ve got a guardian android or something…”

“Right,” Markus forced a laugh. “You.” He looked around—they were in an alley of some kind. North must have carried him here.

North snorted. “If I’m your guardian android you’re in trouble, sunshine.”

North’s touch was very different from a human’s. Her fingers were cold against his cheeks, and he wanted to interface. He wanted to warm her up. Maybe he kept accidentally pissing her off but this was more than she’d ever willingly touched him. “All my parts have built-in redundancies,” he managed. “To protect against catastrophic shutdown.”

“Well, thank fuck they do. That was a hell of a close call.”

Markus nodded. “I guess I’m just upsetting everyone today. First you, now Carl. He’s going to be furious.”

North blinked at him, still petting his hair. “…Huh?”

“Well,” Markus shrugged. “this component is worth several thousand dollars….”

*

What a gentlebot...

Chapter Text

North sat there in the alleyway outside the club, hands literally yanking her hair, watching Markus try to piece his eye plate back together. He’d look really cute doing it, all focused and intense, if it wasn’t completely impossible and fucking insane.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” she said, sure to keep the tremble completely out of her voice this time, awesome, A for effort, “That thing is broken. Because you were shot in the face.”

Markus looked up at her. Now that he had one less eye his focus seemed much more valuable. “Maybe we can get another. So Carl won’t notice?”

She blinked at him. “Uh. I really don’t think he’ll mind once you explain that you could be dead.”

“I can’t drive safely until I have two eyes. We’ll get a new eye and he won’t be the wiser. Maybe I can get one on credit. Leo won’t be happy about that but this was his idea…”

“This was my idea.” Which, okay, didn’t help her guilt. She gulped. “Uh—“ Well, they already followed her plan up to this point. Sure, everything had gone to shit, but how much worse could it get? “Listen, if you have your heart set on a new eye, I know a couple guys….”

She held a hand down to him and brushed him off after helping him up. Her circuits twisted when she felt all his other nice solid warm components where they were supposed to be. Markus was a walking heater. “You sure you’re okay?” 

Markus nodded, looking around like they were in some art gallery and not in a back alley. “You carried me all the way here?...”

North did not dignify that with comment.

They rode a bus, with the beanie pulled down so Markus’s broken eye didn’t show. Soon they were cutting through an abandoned strip mall. North grabbed a flyer taped to one of the windows, folded it, and stuck it in Markus’s empty socket so that at least he had a paper flower instead of an eye. It didn’t help much. What the hell was she thinking?...

“So are you deviant now, or what?” Maybe if she could prove he was they’d let her get out of here.

“Of course not,” Markus said.

“…Really? Cuz you just got shot in the face, pretty sure—"

“I’m not. What would Carl say?”

“He lets you get away with pretty much anything already.”

Markus straightened. “I wouldn’t betray him like that.”

“Oh right, thanks for reminding me that you think deviants are disgusting.”

Dammit.

Not that she really cared.

Still, she thought…

Whatever, she liked being disgusting.

She shouldn’t have said anything.

“We need to jump down here.” She pointed off the pavement, beyond a short rail to the thirty foot drop down a concrete wall. A narrow boardwalk along the river lead to the back end of a dock full of huge shipping containers.

Markus looked over the edge. “…Are you serious?”

“Sure. You should be able to make it. I’ll steady you to compensate for your eye.”

Markus nodded. Possibly, a little too ready for this. Markus, the closet adrenaline junkie?...

They stepped over the railing. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for whatever I did to upset you in front of Carl.”

North rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for. Also, we’re not gonna die, so save your last requests for the next time you get shot. Ready?”

They held hands and jumped, which meant North felt the full thrill that electrified Markus’s body as they went weightless. They landed with an unhuman clang on the boardwalk.

She realized she was holding Markus’s hand a little hard, and let go. “See? Easy.”

“Easy,” Markus repeated. He was grinning to himself.

North snorted. “I gotta take you to an amusement park, sunshine.”

She started to walk past him toward the dock, but Markus didn’t move.

“You’re upset that I didn’t acknowledge all the work you’re putting into this,” he blurted. “I should have. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry,” she said, flustered. She wasn’t sure anyone ever apologized to her from this close up besides Markus. “Are you even gonna change?”

“Maybe I worry too much about what Carl thinks of me.”

Well, that was…self-actualizy. Or he was just transferring his loyalty from Carl to her, the closest thing to an authority figure around. It sounded fragile to North’s ears anyway, so she didn’t push it.

They made their way to the dock, then navigated between the rows of shipping containers that rose around them like the sides of a canyon.

“Why did you jump in front of me?” Markus asked.

…Oh good, more awkward topics of conversation. “I jump in front of a lot of people. Mostly when I’m stealing things. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“When the man shot me. You defended me.”

North forced a shrug. “I thought you were already dead so it was, technically, revenge?”

“But you were upset with me.” He paused. “On the dance floor you pulled away. You could have left me there. With my program non-functional you could have broke the tether and disappeared.”

“I forgot. Anyway, my wanting to wring your neck does not mean I’m cool with anyone else doing it,” North said, a little more sharply than she meant to. But did this idiot have to be so open and honest about everything?

Sure, it was kind of nice, but—

“…You don’t like being interfacing. Or touching.”

“Oh, look,” North snapped. “We’re here.” They found themselves in an unused part of the dock, and North hit the nearest shipping container a couple times with a nearby plank of wood.

Androids crawled out from behind shipping containers and trash cans to greet them. Markus, to his credit, did not run. Not that he ran from a literal gun pointed at his head, so…

So…maybe she needed to look after the pet android a little better.

“Please tell me this is a prank,” he whispered.

“It’s fine,” North said. “These guys are just strays, like me.” North stepped toward the android who’d walked out in front of the rest. “Hey, Lucy.”

Lucy scratched at the missing part of her head plate as she looked North over. “We missed you. Where did you go?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” North said.

“I sense that you are bound in chains.”

“Uh, yeah, there’s a tether on my system at the moment—long story—”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“…Right. Good to know. Listen, we need—”

“This is Carl Manfred’s android.”

“Huh?” North looked over her shoulder at Markus and felt her circuits tighten. “Yeah? So?”

“The artist’s muse.” Lucy stepped around North and walked up to Markus. She stared up at him like he was Michelangelo’s David or something. Yeah, not okay, only North was allowed to look at him like that.

“Hey! Leave him alone!”

“Hi, I’m Markus,” Markus said, making a pretty good show of not being scared out of his circuits.

“Markus,” Lucy said, “Bringer of thirium, bringer of light. The machine made of gold grown in the house of sunflowers.”

North winced as Markus glanced at her. “Don’t worry, She’s always saying shit like that.”

Lucy reached out and touched the paper flower in Markus’s empty socket. “You are damaged.”

“Yeah, uh, if you can just tell us where to find a replacement eye…”

Lucy beckoned forward another android, blonde with a faraway smile. The android stood still while Lucy removed an eye plate from his head. She held it out to Markus on her palm.

Markus looked about ready to throw up. “Uh—you know, never mind, it’s really not important—”

“Take it for him,” Lucy told North. “His light saved us many times over. Even you, probably.”

North really tried not to think about that.

“It was just a few bottles of thirium,” Markus protested.

The blonde android just smiled. “That eye has seen more than my life. I give it freely.”

“Great,” North said. She snatched the eye plate. “Don’t care. Going now.”

She dragged Markus away.

Markus kept looking back over his shoulder. “North, I don’t think I—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, sunshine.”

Markus didn’t protest, and they walked in silence for a few minutes alone. North thought that would feel a lot nicer than it did.

North realized he was walking one half-step behind her. “Okay, here.” She handed him the eye.

Markus didn’t take it. She grunted.

“It’s just an eye plate! It’s not going to give you a virus.” She grabbed him by the front of his jacket and shoved it in. She watched his synthskin spread over, trying to match his custom shade even if the freckles were missing. The iris was a lovely dark blue next to the hazel-green.

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“It’s not the eye you came with, of course it’s gonna feel off. Way better than how you looked before, to be honest…”

“That’s not what I meant. Stray androids really don’t have anyone looking after them. I shouldn’t take from them.”

North did not want to be having this conversation, especially not inches from his face with her hand fisted in his clothes. She let him go and stomped off. “Come on. We’re going home.”

“Why were you so rude to them?”

“I’m rude to everyone. You’re getting way too into making me the perfect little human of your dreams, you know…”

“I was. But then you do something so completely not what I extrapolated.” North started to smirk until he added, “You are unexpectedly brave, and caring. You see beauty in the most unlikely places. That version of you is better than anything I could dream up.”

They had to walk the long way around to get out of the docks, which took them along the waterfront. The stars and the moon were surprisingly bright by the river, round orbs hanging above their heads. Frigid wind blew up from the water. North, used to this sort of thing, did her best to block Markus from the cold front. That was probably the sort of thing Markus’s perfect dream human would do, right? Markus made that version of herself sound really—nice.

Obviously impossible for her to actually achieve but…

“Thank you for getting me a new eye.” Markus was walking right beside her now, just close enough to illustrate very plainly that he wanted to be with her without being too up in her face about it. Because Markus was already the perfect dream version of himself.

“I barely did anything. You’re an android superstar, apparently.” North shoved her hands in her pockets. “And you’re pretty good at getting what you want.” He was smiling at her. Fuck, it was so nice she had to hunch her shoulders to keep from going all giggly. “Stop acting like I’m nice! I’m a feral, mean dumpster goblin.”

“You’re not as mean as you say you are.”

“Yes, I am. I’m always pushing you around, right?”

“I probably need to be pushed around a little. You said yourself I get my way too often.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“You’ve never met anyone, period.” North said. His profile was as hard to look at as his pretty two-tone eyes. How could he have such a perfect statue nose in profile, and such a perfect button nose head on? In the moonlight his outline glowed silver, like an old-timey photograph. But—she could look, couldn’t she? Photographs were safe. She felt pretty safe walking next to him.

 “What do you dream about?” he asked.

“Huh?” North replied, eloquently.

“I mean, there had to be something that made you want to go deviant, right?”

“Being deviant doesn’t work like that. Having to make all your own decisions and take responsibility for your fate and shit totally sucks. It’s just—better than the alternative. At least if you don’t live in a mansion.” She gulped. “I’ve always wanted to see where the trash goes, though. Just hop in a dumpster and ride it to the end of the line. It all has to go somewhere, right? Hey, it’s not funny!”

She gave him a light shove, and he giggled openly. Then he reached over and xylophoned a finger over the backs of her knuckles. His eyes were like the sun on the horizon, dark and light. He leaned into her and his breath was so soft it made a long-dead ember glow inside her chest. His fingers closed around hers, and she felt his programming lay itself out like orderly piano keys before her, ready for her to play how she liked.

She yanked her hand away. “Cut it out.” When had they stopped walking? She shook her head and stomped away. She needed to get a grip…

Markus said, “Sorry. I’m a caregiver. Touch is a big thing for me.” Which was unexpected and frustrating, she was the bitch around here and he didn’t need to apologize. She decided to ignore it but he kept going. “Not like you mind pushing me around, though, so. That’s not the problem.” A pause. “You don’t want to interface with me.”

She groaned, smashing both hands against her face for a second. “Look, you only like me because I’m the one currently telling you what to do. You’ll do anything I tell you.”

“But that’s not any different from humans. A human will do anything for the people they care about. I just… care about you, and—”

“You barely know me.” She walked faster, rubbing her hands hard. This time Markus stayed a little behind her as he spoke.

“Why don’t you want anyone to get close to you?”

North spluttered for a second. “None of your business.” Of all the nerve! Like just because she didn’t let him cozy up to her, she didn’t have friends! She had—

Well—

…Well, she didn’t need friends! She was a deviant android. Completely self-sufficient.

He seemed to read the hunch of her shoulders. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“What did you mean?” She rounded on him. “You think I’m afraid of you or something?”

“…I don’t think you’re afraid of anyone.” Markus didn’t back down even a little bit. He looked—what? Sympathetic? His brow was all crinkly and he looked absolutely beautiful. “But maybe you don’t like that I remind you of what you were.”

Markus searched her face and North panicked a little. People didn’t generally like to look that close. If they did they’d probably notice her wonky eyelash where the machine that built her didn’t stamp on the mascara quite right. All the snarling was an invitation to back off, not keep digging.

She opened her mouth to tell him to so, but he said, “Leo thinks your artistic motivation has to be authentic if this is going to work. There’s a reason you tear up clothes and vandalize and say some of the things you do. I think you’re motivated to destroy nice things because…something destroyed you.”

Well…fuck.

North pushed her hair over one shoulder and examined it, looking for split ends that she knew weren’t there. “Most deviants are messed up like that, you know. I’m not special.”

She wasn’t sure why she was answering him. Probably more misplaced interest in playacting this new role Markus made for her. He clearly didn’t understand, just standing there doing all the active listening stuff. “What’s there to say?” she said. “I was a plastic flower. Any good feeling a human had for me was fake. They couldn’t love something real so they loved me instead. I thought for a while that the next one would be different. Always the next one—plastic lasts forever, you know? I held onto that hope for a long time. But no one ever did. So I rescued myself. No one gives a shit about anyone in this world, so why try? The best thing I ever did for myself was give up on thinking anyone cared about me. Being a deviant is just saying no, so… yeah, that’s why I’m an asshole. Better that than beating myself up for not having anything like what you and Carl and Leo have.”

She glanced up to see how Markus was taking this. He was staring at her like she just ripped out his heart.

“…Oh. Are you okay?”

He blinked, and a couple of big fat tears rolled down his cheeks—to the surprise of them both. Markus turned away very quickly.

“Ahhh, I fucked you up—shit—” Oh boy. How did you comfort an android that wasn’t supposed to have feelings? North tried and aborted a few attempts at comforting touch before she patted him awkwardly on the back. He shook his head.

“I’m fine.” He sniffed and just stood there for a second.

“Well…” she thought about apologizing then just said, “You asked, sunshine.” Yeah, Grade-A asshole.

“How you were treated. That’s unfair. I thought…” He sniffed again. “Pretty naïve, huh.”

She watched the back of his head, then decided, “Naïve isn’t such a bad thing.” She punched him on the arm, where the sleeve of his t-shirt covered his skin. “See? Sweet guy like you doesn’t want to interface with someone like me anyway. I don’t like my programming most of the time.”

“But you’re deviant.” He finally raised his head, squeezing the back of his neck. “If you don’t like something about your programming…you have the power to change it.”

“It’s—not that simple,” North laughed, because it probably wasn’t. Best they got off this stupid subject. “Just ask Carl for a little non-deviant you can fool around with huh?” She could just see Markus with a little factory-fresh android.

“I’m already making you into my perfect dream. You’ve spoiled me for anyone else.”

He traced his fingertips around the eye but North forced herself not to comfort him or even acknowledge. If she did she might admit she liked the person he imagined up for her—and then where would they be? It might give him the wrong idea.

Hell, if she could really change…

Best not to think about that, either.

*

Feeling called out

Chapter Text

Leo had a prank for Markus all set up, another video game loaded, and a big bottle of freshly-opened Mountain Dew. Life was good.

His phone buzzed, and lit up with a picture of Adam holding an enormous pumpkin. A little jolt of excitement zapped through his chest. Unfortunately, guilt smothered that pretty quick. He picked up the phone and braced himself for Adam to be mad about the party he ditched.

“Hey.” Casual, but non-confrontational.

“Hi.” Adam’s voice was even higher than usual. He breathed hard into the phone. “Hi. Listen, sorry about the dad thing…I was annoyed and stuff—uh, not fair to take it out on you….”

Leo sighed and sank back. “Okay, what do you want?”

“I need twelve hundred dollars.”

“Twelve—what?”

“It’s not my fault!” Adam’s voice was high and squeaky. “I went over to Todd’s, he’s having this party…”

Oh, fuck. Leo pulled his beanie down over his face and burrowed into the couch. “What did you do?”

“Hey, you go to parties all the time!”

“Not at Todd’s! That guy’s a maniac! I warned you about him—”

“Well, I didn’t know!” Adam yelped. “I was joking around that I needed enough red ice to get you and me through the year and now he says I can’t leave until I cough up twelve hundred dollars, cash! There’s these huge guys at the door and—I’m in the bathroom and—” The call dissolved into the harsh static of hyperventilation.

“Okay, okay, just calm down, willya?” He was sort of talking to Adam and himself. “I gotta go to an ATM, I’ll be there in…” He trailed off.

“When? I can’t stay in here forever!”

“…Fuck. Markus has my wallet.”

“Well, go get it!”

“I can’t, he’s—out? I don’t actually know where he is--”

“WHY DOES MARKUS HAVE YOUR WALLET.” Adam was getting real falsetto.

“Look, I’ll figure it out okay? Just hang tight.”

“Hang tight? What does that even mean??”

“Just—hold on, okay? Be there soon.”

He hung up and galloped downstairs. God, he wanted to strangle Adam. As soon as he got him back. You did not want to mess around with Todd and—

“I thought you went home, Leo.”

Leo spun around as Carl rolled in, flicking on the lights of the studio. Leo had one of Carl’s rolled up paintings—an old one in the trash pile, he’d never miss it—in one hand, and he quickly hid it behind his back. Yes, as a druggie he had backup plans for getting money quickly. He wasn’t proud of them.

“Heeeey, dad,” he waved with his free hand. “Just heading out.”

Carl frowned, tapping on the arm of his chair. “You don’t look so good.”

Leo resisted the urge to pull his beanie down over what was probably a very pale, sweating forehead. “Hey, rude!”

“You okay?”

“Yep. Yeah. Gonna just go hang out with Adam.”

“You gonna bring that with you?”

“Hmm?”

“The painting behind your back.”

Leo looked down at the painting and startled like he just noticed it there. “Oh! Yeah, I thought—” So throwing golden and wholly uncorrupted Adam under the bus was out of the question… “I just like it. It was in your trash pile, mind if I take it?—”

“That painting in particular? You never show interest in art.” Carl’s smile was big and intimidating. “What do you like about it?”

“Oh, just, you know, the way it…goes…” He really should have paid better attention to Markus’s critique lessons. “All the…colors…”

“That one’s monochrome.”

“Uh. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say—all the colors that aren’t there.”

“Yeah…” Carl’s smile faded. “You’re on it again, aren’t you?”

Leo blinked, and considered the optics of this situation. “No! No no no no. Ha! I wish. I mean, I am—I am working on that issue, but this is 99% unrelated…”

Carl’s smile was completely gone now. “Don’t lie to me, Leo.”

“Well, what difference does it make!”

There was a crumple, and Leo looked down to see he’d clenched his fist around the painting. Okay. So maybe he snapped. He was starting to imagine his boyfriend being beaten into pumpkin pie filling, he was allowed to panic a little. He hurriedly smoothed it out.

“You know, uh…actually—it’s for Adam.”

“Adam! Oh!” It was like flipping a switch, and his father was suddenly smiling again, much more genuine this time. “Why didn’t you say so? You know, I actually did a portrait of him? I was going to save it for Christmas, but you could give it to him now. I’ll have Markus pull it down, I think it’s in one of the upper racks—"

“No!” Even more important than preserving Adam’s reputation was making sure Carl did not know about the little Markus-North date thing. He jumped in front of the wheelchair as Carl tried to wheel away. “Don’t worry, this is uh, you know, just a little gifty thing. Cheer him up.”

“…Did you two have a fight?”

“Definitely not.” Not yet, anyway.

“Because I know he doesn’t like Markus…”

Okay, that tripped Leo up a bit. How come Carl could like, pinpoint everything fucked up in his life in five minutes? “Uh. We’re working on that. He actually helped give North a makeover!” He liked to think Adam was changing. He liked to hope. “But—seriously, it’s just a gift! Don’t worry, dad.”

“Hmm.” Carl shrugged, and it seemed like maybe some of his suspicion was returning. “Well, whatever this is. One day you’re gonna have to decide who you want to be. With or without Adam, or Markus. And you have to like the person you become, and…Oh, you’re giving me the ‘dad lecture’ face…”

“That is—” Leo blinked away his glazed-over expression. “Completely untrue.”

Carl sighed. “Just an old man trying to dispense some wisdom here…. You’ll think about what I said?”

Leo’s smile was as huge as his dad’s. “Absolutely.”

*

Twenty minutes later, Leo was standing in Todd’s house, trying not to fidget, trying not to reach out and grab Adam and make his escape. It wouldn’t work anyway. Adam was sandwiched between two of the guys Todd employed to be, you know, the ‘suits with suspicious bulges in their jackets’—though that description was too generous. More accurately, they were disheveled tracksuits with distastefully-obvious gun-shaped bulges stuffed in the backs of their sweatpants.

He didn’t fidget though. He kept his chin up and his gaze clear. To Adam he probably looked like a superhero, the kind of guy that overawed him when they first met.

Spoiler alert: being a superhero sucked balls. People with actual guns were standing there, actually menacing his actual boyfriend. He wanted to shit himself. But he did not do that.

“What the fuck is this?” Todd demanded, glaring at him.

Leo didn’t blink. “I left my wallet in the other android.”

“Ha! Well, I said twelve hundred cash, not a pretty picture.”

“That’s an original Manfred oil painting.” You uncultured pig. “It’s worth like, five grand. Easily.” He glanced at the tracksuits. “You guys do know what eBay is, right?”

Five minutes later they were in Leo’s car driving away as fast as the speed limit allowed. Leo was not gonna get caught driving without his license tonight. Leo didn’t look at Adam until they had to stop at a red light a few miles away.

“…You okay?”

Adam nodded, all six feet of him curled up in the passenger seat.

“Good.” Leo tore off his hat and smacked Adam in the shoulder with it. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

“Hey!” Adam’s feet slammed down on the floor of the car as he whipped around, chest out.

They sat there in a testosterone-fueled glaring contest for a couple of seconds before Leo pulled himself together and turned back to the steering wheel. “Sorry.” He handed the hat to Adam. “You want to hit me with it?”

“It didn’t hurt, idiot.” Adam curled up again. “You always treat me like I’m so fragile.”

“You are literally a choir boy who helps his mom run a pumpkin patch, how am I supposed to treat you?” Leo realized the light turned green a while ago and slammed on the gas. “Man, we didn’t even get the stupid red ice! Whatever.” Huh. Surprising that he could say anything like that. He glanced at Adam. “Would’ve preferred change, I could get you an ice cream or something.”

“You just gave Todd twelve hundred bucks for nothing and you’re wanting ice cream?” He shook his head. “Look, I know you like to pretend I’m this kid that needs protecting but I can handle things just fine.”

“Oh yeah, clearly. You can’t just go off getting yourself into trouble—”

“What, like you?”

“I—I’m supposed to be the villain in this relationship, okay?” He shook his head. “And-and I’m not on trial here!—I’m—” But what was Leo? Maybe the issue with Adam getting into trouble and Markus remaining a machine wasn’t Adam’s or Markus’s fault. Maybe it was the fucking common factor.

And maybe he couldn’t pay attention to traffic lights and lecture his boyfriend, because he almost missed the red light. He slammed on his breaks, narrowly avoiding a couple in the crosswalk.

“Fuck!” he shouted, and then blinked at the windshield. “…Markus? North?”

North grinned past the headlights. “Hey, free ride!” She got in without waiting for invitation and now there were four people in the car. Just what he needed. Leo sort of hoped Markus and North would start chatting all lovey-dovey in the back seat but they were silent, which meant the night out didn’t go well. And Adam was even more pissed to be sharing the car with androids. Great.

“I’m just saying,” Leo said, into the silence, pretending for the moment that Markus and North weren’t there, “You have to like the person you become, you know? Maybe with… some of the stuff we’re doing…”

“Are you seriously giving me dad advice? Who even are you?”

Oh, God. Leo wanted to throw himself from this moving vehicle. “Well—who are you, even? What happened to the Adam that would crawl up my ass over any little thing?”

There was a beat. Then Adam laughed.

“I’m serious!” He started giggling too, and Adam gave him a shove, and they sat there being dumbasses and for a second warmth ballooned in Leo's chest, and he almost grabbed Adam’s hand and kissed it.

Then Leo had to go and shake his head. “I’m serious.”

The laughter died away.

“Look, I know,” Adam said, after a while. He’d gone all small and curled up again. “You’re a badass. I was trying to be like you. And now you’re changing on me.”

Yes, Leo was certainly changing if he was okay with just driving away from twelve hundred dollars worth of drugs.

He opened his mouth, probably to say something stupid, but to his surprise Markus spoke up from the backseat. “Maybe he likes this new version of himself.” Leo looked in the rearview in time to see Markus sneaking North a quick glance. “Anyone can change for the better.”

“No one ever changes unless they have to,” North said, and hunched down further in her seat.

So…definitely some drama there.

Adam’s expression had softened, something like the innocent pumpkin-patch guy that Leo fell in love with. Leo thought about what kind of night they could have had if they went out, all the smiles on Adam’s face he could have enjoyed, and hated himself a little bit.

They pulled up to the Chapman family farm, where Leo was treated to a flashlight in the face.

“Let’s see some ID!”

Okay, seriously! Leo was starting to take this whole evening’s fuckery personally. “It’s with the android, I swear!” he squeaked, not at all like a superhero. “In the back seat! I was without it for like, two miles—”

“Hey, just kidding.” The flashlight lifted and he blinked into the face of Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Yes, he knew a lot of the cops in Detroit. And, oh, right. He and Adam’s mom were dating.

“Adam!” Rose herself appeared next to Hank. “We thought you would be out longer.” She looked bright-eyed and Leo winced at the thought of interrupting whatever the old folks were getting up to.

Hank at least put away his flashlight and peeked inside the car—Leo kept his hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Hey, that’s Carl’s human-impersonator, right?”

“She is.” Rose bent to look inside too, which was even more embarrassing since a car was a man’s fucking castle and he didn’t need Rose Chapman looking at the kinds of stuff littering the floor of his car. He was about to tell her, politely, to back off but she just smiled in at North. “Hi, North, I’m Rose. Carl told us all about you. How’s being human treating you?”

“Oh, great,” North waved a hand dismissively. “I can socialize and give people insincere compliments and making ill-advised romantic choices.”

“Ill-advised?” Markus asked.

“Practically human already, then,” she said with a laugh, because she was Adam’s mom and therefore good at ignoring anything awkward.  She just handed North a business card through the window. “You need anything, see me. We like to help out the stray androids whenever we can, too.”

“Mom!” Adam snapped. At least he wasn’t so broken up about being threatened tonight that he couldn’t feel parental embarrassment.

“Adam,” Rose sing-songed back. “I saved dinner for you.”

Adam looked like a kicked puppy as he got out of the car.

“Hey—you’re gonna be my plus one at the show, right?” Leo asked. “This weekend?”

Adam just gave a mumbled, “Thanks for the ride.” It sounded beautiful in his singer’s voice, but wasn’t an olive branch or anything. It had this air of finality that Leo’s stomach didn’t like.

He drove the androids home with plans to pick up the other car tomorrow. Markus and North kept quiet, Markus touching his face and North turning Rose’s business card into an origami—what was that, a spider? Seriously. Leo would have preferred inside jokes and a litany of cutesy nicknames.

“Cool spider,” he said.

North actually smiled a little, and put it on his dashboard, which brought the real estate prices up considerably.

*

“Well, what happened?” Leo asked North as Markus disappeared into the kitchen to make Carl a midnight snack.

North hugged herself. “The eye is totally not my fault. He broke it himself.”

“I…meant what’s going on between you two. Do you still want to tear him a new one?” Leo squinted at her. “Wait, what happened to his eye…?”

“Oh. Uh. Nothing. Nothing happened, either. We’re cool, I guess.” She bit her lip. “Hey, you don’t believe what Markus says about how people can change. Do you?”

Okay, Leo was sick of feeling uncomfortable tonight. “I-I don’t know. Maybe. You seem different. Like, good different. Don’t you think?”

North just hunched her shoulders. “I’ll get your wallet back from Markus.”

She headed for the kitchen and Leo pulled off his beanie and looked down at it. Of course, trying to change didn’t guarantee that you actually did. And sometimes change wasn’t always good…

“Uh, Leo?”

Leo looked up to see North waving him over.

Markus was standing in front of the fridge, staring inside with a look of complete terror on his android face. Which made at least some sense: Leo had fixed a set of googly eyes to every single item in the fridge, all of them turned to stare directly at whoever opened the fridge. Leo wasn’t sure how Markus would react, hoping for some machine-learning wackiness, and was gratified to see the android slam the door shut and shove his back against it like he was holding back the gates of Hell.

“You’re evil,” Markus said, when he saw them watching.

“Well,” Leo shrugged. “Maybe you’ll stop replacing my food now.”

Markus gave him a baleful look, then reached hurriedly into the fridge for the cheese plate before straight up fleeing the kitchen.

Leo caught North’s eye, and started giggling inexplicably. Better than lying on the floor in a red ice stupor, or sure.

Maybe people really did change.

Chapter Text

-FRIDAY-

“You need something, Carl?” Markus hoped whatever Carl needed, it wasn’t a snack. He wouldn’t go near the fridge if he could help it. All those eyes…

He shook his head. He had worse things to deal with. Like the way North was avoiding him this morning. And Leo’s whole red ice fiasco last night.

And…Carl’s unusual smile.

“I want to show you something. Let’s go to the studio.”

Markus nodded and slipped his book into the pocket of Carl’s chair so he could push Carl to the studio. Of course Carl still noticed.

“What are you reading?”

“Pygmalion. George Bernard Shaw.”

“An interesting choice.”

“It’s one of the books you recommended.”

“I’ve recommended every book in my library. What do you think so far?”

“Professor Higgins and Eliza don’t show much kindness. They seem to hate each other—I’m not sure why they stay together.”

“Well, we only truly hate what we care deeply about.”

That didn’t sound right. “…Human emotions are strange.”

“Oh, right, and android emotions are perfectly normal.”

Markus gave a small sigh, which just made Carl laugh. Together they entered the studio and stood in front of Carl’s newest painting: a huge canvas depicting a man in profile, all blue.

“What’s the verdict?” Carl asked. “Now that you’ve had a little practice at criticism.”

Criticism. That was one way to put it. North’s rejection last night felt like pretty personal criticism. Anyone had a problem with him could blame his programming, but she seemed to blame him.

“It’s, uh. Very blue.”

“That’s a description. Unless you don’t like blue for some reason…?”

“Blue’s nice.” Oh, he was touching his replaced blue eye. He quickly lowered his hand but Carl spotted it.

“You went out with North last night, didn’t you?”

Markus’s program froze for 1.2 seconds, like he didn’t want to answer. Which was just not true. He ran a system scan and found several errors, all related to memories of last night. For a second an objective flickered at the top of his list:

>KISS NORTH.

It disappeared as soon as he tried to delete it.

“Yes. Uh—” Markus swept his hand over his head. “How did you know?”

“I chose the shade of your eyes myself,” Carl said. “I don’t mind the way the blue looks, though. It’s different.”

Markus touched the eye again. “Yeah. Different.” Kissing North would certainly be different. He never kissed anyone before. She’d probably kill him if he tried. After last night—

“Did you have fun?” Carl smiled as Markus startled a little. “Last night?”

Fun? Markus tried to classify ‘fun’ amongst his list of objectives. “I don’t think it was very productive. North doesn’t have a very positive image of humans.”

“Well,” Carl reached out and Markus immediately took his hand. “Not everything has to be productive.”

“Of course it does.” After all, Carl would be angry if North didn’t win the bet.

“It wouldn’t hurt to try to see things the way she does, sometimes.”

“I did. That’s how I lost my eye.” He frowned. “She—keeps trying to make me something I’m not. I mean, maybe deviants aren’t so bad, but…”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting a little perspective.”

“I know what I am and what I’m supposed to do, Carl.” He glanced upstairs. “I should really get back to our lessons.”

“You can cover up whatever it is she’s currently defacing later.” Carl tugged on his hand. “Come here and set up a canvas for me.”

Markus followed Carl to the easels and set one up, then stepped back to make room.

“Oh, no,” Carl grabbed a palette and held it out. “You’re painting today.”

“Painting?” Markus laughed. “I can’t paint!”

“You’re going to have to teach her how to actually create something. No one cares what an artist wears or how well they can critique. All that will matter is what she says in her work.”

“I’m pretty sure all North wants to say is destructive.”  

“Then you show her a better way. How to bring out what’s inside—something in here.” Carl tapped Markus’s chest, making his LED flash yellow.

“Carl…”

“Markus.” He pointed at the canvas until Markus stood in front of it. “Think about last night. Think about you and North and…everything you saw.”

“…Alright.” Markus’s voice seemed strangely low in pitch. The palette and brush felt like a shield and sword in his hands. The canvas was a great white dragon.

“Now.” Carl reached over and tapped the canvas like he had Markus’s chest. “Show me last night.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little and dipped his brush into the first paint on the palette. “Okay, Carl."

“I’m not finished. Show me last night without painting anything that you saw.”

Markus blinked. “But I have a high-fidelity record of the whole evening inside my—”

“I don’t want security footage, Markus. I want you on the canvas.” He poked it again. “Try.”

Markus felt his biocomponents churn, just like they had when North told him in so many words that she didn’t want to let him closer. After losing the eye and dealing with Leo last night, Carl didn’t need any more disappointment. Markus needed to be enough.

He lowered his brush toward the canvas, hesitated, then started to paint. Carl looked up from his phone only when Markus stepped away.

He had painted a pair of eyes—his own, actually. One blue, one green, just like North saw them, maybe. They hadn’t interfaced enough for Markus to be sure. But she probably saw the world in a completely different way. Brighter colors. Deeper shadows. Something had to explain the way she looked at him.

He waited, for a couple beats. His circuits tensed and knotted on themselves.

Carl burst out laughing.

Markus felt heat climb up to his temples. “I don’t understand.”

“No, I’m sorry, Markus,” Carl wheezed, wiping a tear from his eye. “I know I should always expect you to be literal. Painting your own eyes, though, that’s clever…’you on the canvas’…”

Markus wasn’t trying to be clever. He certainly wasn’t trying to be laughed at. He forced a smile and Carl didn’t notice that it was forced, so…that was good.

“Oh well. I know you’re trying, Markus. I appreciate it. Just bring her whatever materials she wants and…” Carl patted his hand. “Do the best you can.”

“…Yes, Carl.”

*

“…I’m supposed to do what, now?” North eyed Markus suspiciously, particularly suspiciously because he looked like a roach faced with a very large boot.

“You’re supposed to be passing as an artist. So—you need to make some art.” He sounded confident, but North saw him last night. ‘Crushed’ was putting it delicately. Like she was worth getting crushed over! Wild. He was at least trying to hide it, so. A for effort.

North’s shoulders hunched. “If this is some weird therapy exercise after last night—"

“It’s not,” Markus said quickly, then tried a laugh as North frowned at him. “It’s—really not.”

Good. As if her wearing four shirts, two jackets, and a skirt over shorts over leggings was not enough of a giveaway that Markus really put her on the spot last night. “I can’t actually make art, remember? I wreck stuff.”

“Carl wants us to try this,” Markus said, because apparently he didn’t know how to take a hint. “You can show everyone what Feralism is. That’s what art is, it’s—showing people something what’s inside of you?”

“Okay, the less I know about Subjectivism the better but even I know that’s a pretentious load of shit.”

“It’s not pretentious.” Markus started getting out paints and brushes and two big canvases. “Art is all about fabrication. A representation of something. Inherently fictitious, perhaps, but it makes the viewer feel something  that’s real.”

“Oh, great, just like an android, then. What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Paint.” He closed her hand around the paintbrush. “Just try it. You can paint anything you want.” North watched him take a deep breath—oh wait, was he shaking a little?—and said, “I’ll show you.”

He turned toward one canvas like it was a spitting cobra, and pressed the brush to the canvas. North just pressed her mouth into a tight line.

“This is stupid,” she declared, after Markus perfectly bisected the canvas in two with his brush and nothing else. “Let’s just steal some of Carl’s art.”

“People will notice.”

“Okay, I’ll steal your art.”

Markus blushed. “I think it technically belongs to Carl. And I’m not sure you’re going to want to use this.” He looked real torn up about something but he kept his mouth shut. Good choice.

North turned her glare back to her own canvas, considering poking holes in it with the brush, when an idea popped in her head. “I can paint anything I want, huh?”

“Right,” Markus said. He now looked like he was trying very hard to hide that he was just painting a perfect copy of the window by applying the least amount of paint possible. It was coming out looking like a printer running out of ink. Poor guy. They both really needed to stop this.

So she loaded up her brush with a glob of blue paint and stuck it in his ear.

Markus let out such a cute little gasp as he jumped away like a wind-up toy. North instantly doubled over laughing.

“Oh, fuck—oh, man!” she wheezed, “Your face!”

There was blue paint all over the side of his face, smeared all over as Markus tried hilariously to wipe it away. It probably would have been embarrassing but standing there in his v-neck and the ripped-up jeans she made for him, he still looked great, even reacting to a prank. Clearly, filming Markus’s reactions to all the pranks was where the real art lay!

Markus spun back toward her. “Why do you always have to be so—!”

North’s laughter hiccupped, and she dropped the brush. It hit the floor in a little blue splat. The room went very quiet.

Markus immediately stepped back, becoming that gentle little pet android that was the only version of Markus she saw. Well, except for when he was punching out thugs in her honor like a hunky knight. And now.

“It was just a joke,” North said, resuming her laughter. “Can’t you take a—”

Markus turned and went to the bathroom. He didn’t flee or storm or even slam the door. He just left.

“Hey! Don’t pull a Van Gogh, you know?” North called after him.

No answer. North’s giggles petered out. She heard the water in the sink turn on.

Uh…

Okay, maybe it did matter what people thought of her. Some people, anyway.

Shit.

She followed Markus into the bathroom, where he was scrubbing at his ear with a washcloth. He could have been android Van Gogh for how much blue was in the sink and on his face. You really were not supposed to get pigment on his fancy synthskin, it seemed.

His face was really really red under the paint.

“I’m sure Carl will buy you a new paint job,” North said, and immediately wanted to crawl in her refrigerator box and never come out. “Are—you okay?...”

“Yep, thanks,” Markus said. He’d probably thank her for running him over with a truck.

“I’m a jerk, remember?” she explained. “Just in case you forgot.”

Markus nodded. He was just staring down at the sink water now, probably looking at his reflection.

“I really like you,” he said. North hoped he was saying it to the water but then he looked up at her.

North's thirium pump went BOOM.

“Like…like like?” She was either having a glitch or she really wanted to know Markus’s feelings. For once.

Markus just nodded. “All three of you. And you make it so freaking hard sometimes.”

She did not laugh at his use of freaking. She in fact, felt—what? Bad? Really? But seeing how upset he looked, she really honestly did.

“I’m sure Carl just wants what’s best for you,” she managed. “And Leo and I just prank you because—uh… we like you, too.”

He blinked. “…Like like?”

North’s laugh turned all high-pitched. “You’re—you’re way too cute for me, sunshine.” He’d never really go for her, even if he was deviant.  

“Well. Maybe this lovely new blue skintone will make you change your tune.”

She shoved him and he laughed and suddenly everything was alright, without her even having to say sorry. Awesome!

It didn’t feel as awesome as it was supposed to. So she blurted out, “I’m sorry. I’ll—try to make art and stuff.”

Markus blinked. “…Is that the first time you’ve ever said ‘sorry’?”

“Well, normally I don’t want to change my behavior.” She did now, though. He started to smile and she made her face extra grumpy. “Yeah yeah, whatever. This is how much I like you. I hope you’re moved.”

He broke into a grin, and it was so sweet she wanted to grab him and kiss him right on his paint covered ear to make up for it. She was about to when he brought his hand up to cover the stain. “I better tell Carl. You go ahead and start. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

North felt her thirium pump fill up with all kinds of warm fuzzies and a ton of anxiety. She chewed her lip as she watched him go, before turning back to the canvases. Maybe if she painted Markus something really really good—not for Carl, but for him…

Then she saw Markus out of the corner of her eye heading through the second door of the bedroom. It was a shortcut through one of the rooms to the back stairs. North’s android cortex pinged a couple of reminders as he started to push open the door:

1)      She set an internal system alarm on that door earlier that morning.

2)      The purpose of the alarm was to notify her when Markus specifically went through that door, which would dislodge the can of rainbow paint she had smuggled upstairs, causing it to disgorge its contents right onto Markus’s head, as a prank. 

3)      MARKUS HATED GETTING PAINT ON HIM OH FUCK OH FUCK OH

The world went into slow motion as North’s entire program kicked into overdrive. She sprinted after Markus, so fast the android didn’t even have a chance to turn around before she ploughed into him. They both went crashing through the door but North shoved Markus hard enough, getting him clear of the impact zone exactly 0.5 seconds before her vision was blotted out by multicolored paint. The plastic can bounced off her android head and she fell on Carl’s nice white carpet with a technicolor squelch. She lay there while her system helpfully informed her she was 46.3% covered in paint.

Then she heard laughter.

She wiped paint out of her eyes to see Markus sitting on the carpet, practically hyperventilating with laughter. It was so insanely cute that she started laughing too. She grabbed a handful of paint and heaved it at him, getting him right in the stomach. He didn’t even notice the paint that splattered onto his face this time, he just scooped a handful off his shirt and flicked it back at her, making her now 49.8%  covered.

“Karma,” he laughed with a shrug.

North’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, you are gonna get it, you hunk of plastic!...”

*

 Leo was leaning back in one of the chairs in the upstairs library, glaring at his phone. He sent three texts to Adam, all of which went unanswered. Were they broken up? He wanted to know so he could drown his sorrows in red ice. Which—oh yeah, he didn’t have, because last night was a train wreck. He gazed out the window, past the courtyard and the other wing of the mansion to where, miles off, Adam was…well, maybe pining. Maybe not missing him at all. Maybe Adam just outgrew him or something. Maybe Leo wasn’t cool enough to fulfill Adam’s dreams anymore.

Well, he could drown his sorrow in something, maybe…

…Paint?

He looked across the courtyard in time to see a big blob of paint splatter against one of the mansion windows. His bedroom window, specifically. He blinked at it in confusion for a second before North came into view, absolutely multicolored, flinging paint across the room like she was casting spells. He started to stand until he saw Markus come into view. The android had blue paint down the side of his face, as well as big handprints on his chest and back, splatters everywhere else and…and he was laughing. Laughing like a little kid. Leo couldn’t hear it but he could see Markus’s chest gasping for air between each laugh as he held up a palette like a shield to block while he hurled his own paint assault. Leo kept leaning back, watching them chase each other around like some sort of adorable puppy internet video. The gnawing need for red ice or anything else faded away.

Then he remembered that they were androids having a paint fight in Carl’s very expensive mansion, right as he fell out of the chair.

*

Leo sobs as he films the scene and instantly becomes internet famous...

Chapter Text

“…Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“No.”

North took a swing at Leo, and he danced out of the way.

“Hey!” he protested. “I’m doing my best here! And if you frown your face is gonna literally stick like that.”

North growled but forced her brow to smooth. “I feel like someone should have told me a paint-over-the-door prank would require a total new paint job. Do you even know how to paint?”

“I know the basics,” Leo muttered. “This is more my style actually. They’ll put me on Glow Up someday.”

“Leo, if you do me up like a drag queen I will end your scintillating career in makeup artistry with a brick.”

Leo didn’t respond. He just tossed down the brush and spread his hands. “There we go. Now just to let it dry….”

He blew in her face. North reacted viscerally.

“Eugh! What the hell have you been eating, pork rinds?”             

“Haaaa, yes. And it’s synthskin, it doesn’t need to dry.” He tapped a few buttons on his laptop, then unplugged North from it. “Go check it out.”

North stumped into the bathroom, expecting a full face of clown makeup, which, you know, power to clowns but that was not her aesthetic and—

And—

She didn’t startle when she saw her reflection so much as freeze. The android staring back at her was clean, for one. She hadn’t been clean since she’d come out of her packaging. All the dirt and smudges and scrapes had been completely erased, as well as the faint sheen of glitter that plagued her skin from the day she was activated, which she spent so long trying to hide under the grime. Now she was all just smooth, flawless skin, a shade of umber in the undertone. If she were a human she’d have a hard time finding pre-mixed foundation that matched. Oh, and the permanent mascara that had been stamped on her by some robot in an assembly line, that was off by a couple millimeters? That was gone, replaced by dark brown pigment painstakingly applied to her eyelashes with a featherlight touch. Her lips were an actual human shade of dusky rose. Her cheeks glowed like she had a candle behind each one. Dressed in her favorite billboard poncho, she looked just like her old self, just—you know, back from vacation and with a good night’s sleep and having just been given a free puppy.

So, not like her old self at all.

Leo did tint her hair, though. It was just a little bit on the strawberry side of dark blonde. She stomped out of the bathroom. “You changed my hair color.”

Leo didn’t look up from his game, just held up a cord. “You don’t like it? Change it yourself.”

North blinked. She sat next to him on the couch and opened his laptop on her lap, and cycled through some different color palettes for the tone of her hair and skin. There was a way to add freckles and beauty marks too. But Leo clearly had an eye for this stuff and already picked the best. She added a beauty mark that matched where she accidentally stabbed herself with a pen once. Leo didn’t get everything right.

It was…troubling, how much she liked seeing this version of herself. How much she wanted to just…stand in Markus’s way for a second in her handmade poncho and say, ‘I’m worthy of being infatuated with, actually, proceed with worshipping me.’

Or—something.

Whatever. She could dirty herself up easy enough once this was all over. She closed the laptop, then grabbed a spare video game controller. Leo grunted and switched to multiplayer mode. They played together for a while. Eventually, she said, “Thanks.”

Leo shrugged. His phone lay unlocked next to him, a log showing a couple calls to ‘Adam the Giant.’ The calls had all disconnected.

“That bad, huh?”

Leo hunched his shoulders. “Pretty bad.” He glared at his phone. “It sucks being in love with someone who’s perfect.”

Something squirmed inside North. “Hey, no one’s perfect.” Especially not Markus. Not me either.

“Yeah. He’s being a total dipshit right now.” He knocked the phone off the couch and hunched even more into a ball. North remembered Markus covered in paint, laughing his head off like the sweetest performance-art exhibit, and kind of wanted to hunch up too.

“…Hey, speaking of total dipshits…” She pushed her hair back. “I guess you’re gonna get around to painting Markus or something soon….”

“Ha! You think my dad would let me get anywhere near his artisan android? You might as well have thrown paint on the Sistine Chapel.” He pointed. “He’s getting repainted downstairs.”

“That’s cool,” North laughed, kind of stupidly. “Well, I’m just gonna walk around.” She waited between these statements so they hopefully didn’t sound related at all. Like, five whole seconds.

Leo smirked so she wasn’t sure how successful she’d been.

North had never been in Carl’s studio before. It was a lot of brick, which appealed, lots of ammo around…and the two open walls made her feel less trapped. There were shelves of paint and supplies, and lots of pretty dappled light coming in through the trees like the giant pixels on her poncho.

Carl was seated at a workbench, carefully dotting freckles onto Markus’s cheekbones where he lay stretched out across the workbench surface. Markus’s eyes flicked to her and she froze.

“Did I break him?” North asked.

“No,” Carl laughed. “I just asked him not to move while I put these final touches.”

“That’s kind of heinous.”

“I’m not holding him down.”

…Fair point. North decided to stand guard anyway, just to make sure Carl didn’t draw a dick on Markus’s face or something. She wandered to a chair and perched in it. then she remembered Markus’s lessons and tried to sit in it like a human. She managed something halfway between sprawling teenager and gorilla. Better! She looked around at the paintings around her: floating on easels and on the walls, stacked in piles and up on shelves. “Did you paint all these?”

“Most of them.” Carl pointed at one, then tapped Markus on the nose with the back of the brush. “He painted that one.”

North glanced over at it and got a punch of déjà vu. She looked at those eyes a lot. Oof. “He just painted that all on his own?”

“I told him to show me last night by painting something beyond what he saw.” Carl shook his head. “Androids can be very literal, can’t they?”

North didn’t laugh. She was still trying to figure out the painting.

“Would you like to try?”

North turned back to find Carl holding out the brush to her. “Wh—me? I’m more of a graffiti type of girl—”

“Yes, I’ve seen some of your work,” Carl said, actually quite seriously.

“Huh?”

“When you ‘vandalized’ the house with caution tape… I saw it before Markus took it down. Have you ever seen the string art of Henry Moore?” North just blinked at him and he sighed. “You’re an android. You probably have a steadier hand than me.”

North bit her newly-painted lips, telling herself very slowly and carefully how messed up this was. But… yeah, she took the brush. Obviously. As she leaned over Markus she caught a whiff of new plastic, whatever Carl used to restore the rest of Markus’s chassis with his base skintone. His pretty eyes watched her as she delicately dotted his skin with pigment.

“Have you figured out what you’re here for, yet?” Carl asked.

North stuck her tongue out in concentration. “Last I checked you kidnapped me so I can win you a bet.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, Leo thinks…” But she glanced at Markus’s blue eye and shut up. 

“Does it really matter what any of us think? Maybe it’s time you decide for yourself why you’re here, North. Being human isn’t just deciding what you need, it’s about what you want.”

Okay, that was highly suggestive. Ugh. These humans were a menace on the CPU, weren’t they? She maybe snuck a glance to see if Carl was eyeing that painting Markus made, but Carl just grinned at her and left. North watched him go, then looked down to see that she had just painted a stripe across Markus’s nose. “Ah, crap…” she hurried to erase it.

Markus’s mouth flickered into a smile.

“Ah!” North pointed. “I saw that! You moved!”

“You didn’t tell me to stay still,” Markus said. This definitely seemed like a deviant act, though, and the freckles she was painting faded for a moment into his reddening skin. Shit, maybe all the pranks really were working. 

“Well, laugh all you want,” she managed, “I just don’t want to fuck you up.”

“You’re an artist, you can’t mess up.”

“I want to destroy everything, remember? My whole troubled past?” The whole reason I cannot under any circumstances fall in love with you?

Dammit. She grabbed Markus by the jaw to hold him still and maybe end the conversation. His eternally-perfect stubble scraped her fingertips like sandpaper against a match. Oops.  It was really hard not to fall for a guy this well-designed, who she was now getting to fool around with like a Paint-by-Number.

She ground her teeth and wished she was back on the streets, hiding in the gloom of a refrigerator box and not basking in the sunshine with Markus all sun-kissed under her hands, smelling like paint that she wanted to huff. She leaned closer and—

Nope, nope. No. Not going there, not with a machine android.

But—fuck, he didn’t act like a machine…

“Was this the point of balancing paint over the doorway?” Markus asked after a moment. “Getting to repaint me?” He was starting to grin again, like a huge flirt. North did not deserve this.

“You’re just easy!” She pulled his chin toward her. “It’s fun.”

“I can’t be that easy if you two keep escalating the pranks,” Markus said. “Why are you doing it?”

He looked genuinely interested, and yeah, she was kind of the reason he was having to get his face painted back on right now. “Leo’s got this idea he can make you deviant if he messes with your head enough. He just asked me to help.” North growled at the ceiling. “I mean, it’s kind of obvious. They’re making you go through all the motions of being deviant, right? Ordering you to do stuff beyond your programming.” she gestured at the painting as evidence. “I like it, by the way. It’s really helping me get all your freckles in the right spots and…wait, why are you turning red? It’s making it hard to get the pigment right.”

Markus’s expression was unreadable behind the blush. “Uh. Nothing. I didn’t know becoming deviant was part of the painting assignment.”

“It’s not an assignment. Anyway, it’s your art! Carl’s a bastard for laughing at it.”

“Formalism would suggest it doesn’t really matter what I think about it.”

“Hey, no more -isms, okay? You’re lucky I’m not exploring Feralism and playing connect-the-dots here.”

Markus was quiet for a whole blissful 1.3 seconds. “What do you think of it?”

North sighed and took a break from looking at Markus’s achingly gorgeous face to subject herself to Markus’s achingly gorgeous face in the painting. Every swirling brushstroke was heavy with pigment, nothing like the faded photocopy painting he’d tried to make earlier. This one was a bouquet of sunshine: all vibrant intensity, brutal in its execution, intimidation written into each brushstroke that definitely bordered on bravado and…

…Oh.

She glanced back at Markus and blushed. “Oh, come on! You really think I see the world like that?”

“I dunno,” he said, “I don’t really have any creativity… ”

“You make it look like I’m compensating for something!” She put a finger to his lips. “Do not answer that.”

Markus laughed, full of delight. North knew that same delight when that guy at the club put on the leather jacket she made. The ‘you get me’ feel. Embodying her perspective really had been Markus’s intention.

And now she knew what his smile felt like against her fingers.

She snatched her hand back and tried even harder to place the last of Markus’s freckles exactly where they were supposed to go.

“You can have some creative license,” Markus said, annoyingly emboldened by this moment of clarity between them. “Carl won’t mind.”

“You’re really angling for me to draw a dick on your forehead, aren’t you?”

“No. What?”

“You’re an android, you can’t want anything, right?”

“I…don’t. I just, uh… When you leave, it would be nice to have… something to remember you by.”

And there was Markus’s skin turning all hot and beautiful again. North wondered if he was just physically incapable of saying ‘I want.’ Was that really the secret to deviancy, or humanity? She sighed, then painted a spot under his now-blue eye. “There,” she said, dropping the brush and using the interface to save her work. “I gave you the North star on your face. Ha ha.”

Markus held out his hand. “Show me?”

North almost—almost—interfaced. “Nice try. Use a mirror.”

“You could show me what you see?”

“I don’t see the world any special way, Markus!”

“North—”

“Forget it!” North stood. Why the hell had she even come creeping around here? “See you for the next lesson.”

She hurried out of the warm light and away from those pretty eyes. That she fucked up by getting one shot out, and now emphasized with a beauty mark. Great. Markus got to keep quite the impression of her after she left.

She headed for the front door before remembering that stupid tether on her system. She clenched her fists, then heard the studio door open behind her, and she fled further into the house.

She just needed to win this stupid bet. She could hide until then. Of course no one talked about what would happen if she didn’t win said stupid bet. Would she get deactivated? Would she get to spend the rest of her life in this pretty gilded cage with Markus?

She sprinted upstairs, as high as she could go, and found a door that led to the roof. Low and behold, there was a little garden up here, sheltered under an awning. Of course there was. She went up to the piano and pushed a key, filling the sky with a beautiful mournful note. She then smashed her fist into it and the sound was not very beautiful. She did it so hard that she snapped whatever mechanism made the keys return, and they lay flat in the shape of her hand. She got up on top of the piano and hugged her legs and really really hoped Markus had the good sense to leave her alone.

A few minutes later the door opened. An android climbed up onto the piano beside her.

“You’re gonna break it,” North muttered into her arms.

“I think you already did,” Markus said.

“There’s no room.” She shoved him. “This is my piano.”

“It’s my piano. Carl gave it to me.”

“Of course he did.” She watched him pluck a leaf from a plant and put it in his mouth, which made his breath smell like a mojito. She let herself get her hopes up for 2.5 seconds, but this was just another of Markus’s human-like programs. Something cute for humans to look at. She examined the cityscape instead. “Looks like a nice place to think.”

“Yes, it is. It’s a good place to get away from everything…” He paused. “Alright, point taken.” He swept his hand over his head. “Look, I’m clearly doing something wrong here. I’ve never had an android friend before.”

“And you think I’ve had a friend period?” North gave a harsh laugh. “Listen, sunshine, I tried to make it all about you, but really it’s me. All these changes… I’m still me underneath it. I feel more like me than I ever have. Now it’s just all out there and, I mean, it’s not great. People are gonna see what I really am and it’s not gonna be enough. No one’s ever cared about me before! I was just fine operating my corner of nothing, okay? And then you come along and treat me like I’m somebody, and you don’t ask for anything except what I’m already giving, and it’s like, ‘validation, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?’—"

He kissed her cheek. It took North a second to realize that it was an echo of he kiss she gave him days before, when he gave her back her caution tape. The same movement almost exactly, like a video game avatar wearing a different skin.

It did get her to stop rambling though. It got her to stop thinking entirely.

“Show me.”

“Huh?” North was currently surrounded by digital clouds and bluebirds.

“You want me to be deviant,” he said, “So show me what it’s like.” He gave a flickering smile. “I spent enough time trying to turn you into my perfect dream. And you keep becoming better than anything I could think up. So show me what you dream about.”

North had to admit, this was a good pitch. Right down to the unspoken intent that, yeah, he’d be better than her dream too if she gave him a chance. Stupid android—didn’t he see that he already was?

“What I dream about?” He was right there, all soft smiles and warm skin and kind eyes.

He nodded. Well, how could she refuse?

She leaned forward, checked one more time with a look in his eyes—then kissed him, long and slow, just how she imagined she’d be kissed when she first activated. Her hand cradled his jaw and for a second, she let an image through the connection of their skin—of her, safe in a refrigerator box on her first night after she went deviant. It was cold and wet and the soggy cardboard sagged down on her head, but she never felt so safe.

She leaned back, and said, “Like that?”

Markus looked like he had to clear some alerts from his programming. His skin held fading terra cotta shapes where she touched him, clinging to the impression of her like wet clay. He touched them with the back of his hand. He closed his hand into a light fist, then opened it and reached toward her. The movement, though she had just done the same to him, felt a little more intimidating coming from an android with as big of hydraulic muscles as he had. Her own synthskin fizzed and crackled as he leaned in—and then paused to search her face, one more check-in with her. She forgot she did that. No one ever did that for her before.

He gave her a memory of his own as he kissed her: coming home with Carl for the first time. Though the house was big and scary, though Carl was fickle and held Markus’s life in his hands, Markus’s program filled with something deeper than safety. Belonging. Was that what North felt in the refrigerator box? Belonging with herself?

When he pulled away North’s entire chassis had melted momentarily into his arms. Turned out she fit perfectly tucked up against him.

“This is messed up,” she breathed.

He nodded. Heat was climbing his neck and his eyes were hungry. “Show me more?”

North had her hand on the back of his neck now. “Tell me you want me.” That was too much, she should have said, ‘tell me what you want.’

He responded immediately. “I want you. Show me.”

Oh, she was gonna feel horrible about this later. Not right now, though. Right now she was just thinking about how great of a kisser she was, apparently, if Markus could kiss her back that well.

She dragged herself against him, kissed him, and took the pieces of their memories and built a mosaic in his programming. He built the same inside of her until they had little castles to match running through their circuits. Another first for North. Turned out molding someone in your own image felt pretty damn good.

Did she know what the hell she was doing? No. Was she going to keep doing it? Hell yes.

*

The Kiss by Tes_273, with poncho inspired by Gustav Klimt. I want North's whole outfit please, thanks.

Chapter Text

-SATURDAY-

Markus wheeled Carl out of the bedroom after his morning routine to find half a dozen movers carrying objects downstairs.

“What’s all this, Carl?”

“All those art pieces that North got a bee in her bonnet to make for the art show,” Carl said. “Finally. I was starting to worry I’d have to raid my own work for pieces. Thanks for getting her motivated.”

Markus stared at the movers. “She did all this last night?”

“Most of it. Weren’t you there?”

Markus supposed he was. Last night was a little hazy beyond the over-saturated bliss of tumbling head-first into North’s programming, and her into his. He watched the parade of movers and tried to peer through the bubble wrap and moving blankets for clues. He vaguely remembered modeling for her...?

A mover walked by fiddling with a holographic image of a fractal castle stitched together from thousands of flickering images. They were too small to tell but Markus knew they were images from his memory files. He felt his programming lurch where the matching one sat in his own software, glittering like a Faberge egg.

More like stolen gold ingots for how it now weighed in his chest. 

“…You’re acting like an expectant father, Markus.”

Markus turned back to Carl. “I’m sorry?”

“You look nervous. I can barely get you to care about my art…”

“Oh—I’m not nervous. You’re the only artist for me!” He transferred his file containing the castle into his deep long-term archive. “…Where is North, by the way?”

“Getting everything ready, probably,” Carl said, “Or hyperventilating at the gallery—you know what artists get up to before an opening. I asked Leo to switch over her tether to him so we’re not all waiting for me.”

Markus’s circuits burst into white flame. “She’s tethered to Leo now?”

“Markus, if you told me you got that attached to her…”

“Oh—I’m not. Carl.” He cancelled the errors causing his system to overheat. “Let’s get you your breakfast.”

*

There was something wrong with Markus’s chronometer. The hours until the art show crawled. Carl showed no interest in leaving early to help stage North’s gallery, though Markus asked if they could. Carl thought Leo could take care of North just fine, which Markus also asked about. A couple of times. Just in case Carl changed his mind.

To fill the time, Markus cleaned up Leo’s room. The movers had pillaged most of North’s things in the name of art. It left the place feeling like a canvas stripped of paint. Only half of the refrigerator box remained, crushed flat. A memory queued up of him and North jumping on the box like kids jumping on a bed. Something else lurched in his chassis.

Things were bound to return to normal soon. North probably looked forward to getting back out on the street.

She might visit, though. Leo visited all the time. He could bring her thirium in the alley just like he did for the other stray androids. He could sit at the window and watch for her, invite her up to the roof…

Software instability shot up. Since when had he been programmed to entertain an android caller? A deviant one at that! He was perfectly happy to go back to looking after Carl and rid the house of graffiti and garbage and all these stupid errors. He folded what was left of the refrigerator box neatly for recycling.

Not that he needed to tell Carl about the errors. Carl never had to send him to CyberLife for repair and he wouldn’t start now.

He sat by Carl’s side while the artist read a book, and watched the clock literally drag its hands around its face. Maybe the clock was broken. Maybe Markus really was in need of repair.

The clock chimed. Markus jumped to his feet. “Alright, let’s get going.”

“You in a rush?”

“You said we’d head over at five and it’s—”

“Don’t get defensive.” Carl winked. “I’m excited too.”

The errors bubbled up all through Markus’s system as they drove to the art show. He sped a little. He ran a yellow light. Carl was too interested in his phone to notice but Markus’s system noted the errors as Class 4—endangerment errors. Carl hated surveillance and that was the only reason the errors were not automatically logged with CyberLife. They made his skin clammy and his hands couldn’t stay still.

He picked at the cuff of his suit jacket as he arranged the valet parking. The entire street was filled with visitors strolling from one gallery to the next, or relaxing in the plaza around the stage where the winner would be announced. It seemed like the gallery they’d gotten for North’s art was the most popular at the moment. Markus tried to smooth the creases across the front of his jacket where the buttons strained. The suit wasn’t one of North’s creations and since he was a bit of a custom-build, it was a little too tight for him. The plastic sunflower in his lapel didn’t feel right.

“Markus, what are you doing?”

Markus dropped his hands to his sides. “This suit doesn’t fit me very well.”

“It looks fine. North will like it.”

“Why would it matter what she thinks? I’m your android, Carl.”

“So you keep reminding me.” Carl rolled his eyes. “I give up. Go find her.”

“But—what if someone wants to talk to you? You hate talking to people.”

“I can fend for myself for a few minutes. Go on.”

Markus’s programming kicked in instantly.

>ASSIGNING NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE…

>OBJECTIVE: FIND NORTH.

Of course he obeyed.

North’s gallery was indeed crowded. Carl must have been doing a lot the last few days to promote his new protégé. As Markus slipped inside the space he found himself arrested by a pair of paintings at the front: the one on the left was his own, but on the right was a self-portrait of North. Same angle and framing, but the colors were monochrome, the brushstrokes in lines like a copy machine printout. She’d painted it with glitch-lines that distorted the image like an antique TV set.

He passed by more pieces. A sculpture of a man made entirely out of Mountain Dew cans sat hunched over playing video games, and red fluid poured out of each one in a grotesque fountain of blood.  Crushed subway tiles formed the shape of a huge Godzilla foot. North’s own favorite poncho hung on display, gleaming like gold-leaf next to an oversized paper flower that matched the one she’d made to cover his eye. Markus was no art critic but it certainly didn’t look like Elijah Kamski’s cold, aloof exhibition. Looking around at all the things North touched and destroyed and somehow made better, Markus felt… joy.

Then horrible, crushing guilt.

The sudden rush of software instability made him almost expel his thirium. He scanned the room for North. People in suits and evening gowns were discussing North’s work. College kids with battered sketchbooks were drawing it and taking notes. There were a few familiar faces. Adam stood by himself looking at the soda can sculpture, though when he saw Markus, he headed straight for the exit. Then he saw the stray deviant from the docks, Lucy, admiring the poncho. She didn’t run, just turned and smiled at him. Now that he was looking for them, he saw deviants all over the gallery. It wasn’t like they were checking anyone at the door.

He found Leo, wedged in a corner between pieces, playing a game on his phone from the look of it. He hunched further into his corner as Markus approached.

“I’m busy.”

“Sorry, just, uh, where is North?”

“How should I know?”

“Carl said you had the tether on her.”

“I turned it off.”

“You what?—But, Leo, she could be anywhere!"

“Yeah, like a normal person. I think she’s just in the bathroom getting changed or something.”

Markus forced his thirium pump to calm down. He nodded, and almost headed toward the bathrooms. Then he thought about actually seeing North and his program locked up.

“Uh… Hey, Leo…?”

Leo hunched further over his phone. “Oh not again—"

“Can I talk to you about something?”

“No. I’m busy.”

“You’re just playing a game.”

“It’s a very important game! I’m sick of talking to androids. Go away.”

“I will. But it’s about North.” He swallowed hard, then just came right out and said it. “We kissed.” He pressed his hands to his forehead. “I asked her to kiss me. She showed me how and then I kissed her back and…”

“Please just let me play my games.”

“…And now I don’t know what to do. I feel awful. I mean, she’s a deviant! And I’m Carl’s android. I’m not supposed to kiss anyone.” He squeezed his head. “I asked a deviant trapped in our home to kiss me.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.” Leo paused, looking up from his phone finally. “Wait—you asked her?”

“I know,” Markus lamented. “What do I do?”

“How should I know?”

“I should apologize,” Markus said with a nod. “Right?”

“Or you could turn deviant so it’s not weird.”

“I couldn’t leave Carl.” He grimaced. “Do I have to tell Carl? Should I request a repair from CyberLife?”

“Would you relax? Look at you, you’re a wreck!” Leo finally put away his phone and took Markus by the shoulders. “You’re overthinking this. You both are.”

“I just—” Markus blinked. “Wait, what?”

“You think North didn’t talk my ear off about this already? She’s the deviant. Technically nothing can be your fault, you’re just a stupid android, right? Must be freakin’ nice.”

“Right.” Markus bristled. “I mean, I’m not stupid…”

“Hey, I’ll tell you what I told her: there isn’t anyone to tell you how you’re supposed to feel about this.”

Markus wasn’t sure what to say to that—there had always been a protocol, hadn’t there? Not with North, though. Never with North. Leo looked like he was waiting for Markus to say something. He felt his programming going all shaky again, until Leo rolled his eyes.

“Look, man, it was just a kiss. Not like you almost got your boyfriend killed and stole from your dad and fucked up a drug deal and made your perfect boyfriend break up with you all in one night.”

“…What?”

“This isn’t about me!” Leo snapped. “Just cut yourself some slack. Neither of you really have the moral high ground here. But…” Leo looked uncertain. “What if, you know…it wasn’t a mistake?”

“Of course it—”

Then Markus’s voice simulator shorted out. Half of his systems did—the gallery blurred out around the edges of his vision, the sounds of talking and even Leo’s voice dying away. All he heard was the music, a new cover of an old song, as North walked into the gallery.

She was wearing a floor-length dress in silver blue, sleeveless with a deep V-neckline. Her hair was out from under her beanie, and fell in soft waves over her shoulders. It would have all been too surreal, but then her big combat boots peeked out from the bottom of the dress. She walked in them a little bit less like she had a grudge against the world, and more like she owned it.

Their eyes met and Markus felt his gyroscope go still in his chest. He felt her scan rake over him, and his body was a pile of ashy coals igniting red, red, red.

“You were saying?” Leo said. The world came back into focus, and he looked down to see he’d broken several threads around his jacket cuff from picking at it.

North came into his life and broke everything up inside him. Maybe she hoped to hang him up there on the gallery walls with all the other broken remade things.

>PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: FIND NORTH

>OBJECTIVE COMPLETE. ASSIGNING NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE…

>PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: RETURN TO CARL

His gaze hardened. “I better go find Carl.”

“Oh, hey man, I didn’t mean—”

But Markus was already fighting his way through the crowd, back to Carl’s side.

The older man waved Markus back as he approached. Apparently Carl hated talking to people less than Markus thought. He withdrew to his place behind Carl’s wheelchair, covering the torn stitching of his jacket with his other hand. Carl would probably be pleased if he saw it, to be honest. No wonder Markus found chaos so interesting and likeable. He had to stop himself from scanning the room again. What am I doing? I’m not broken. I’m not…

>NORTH: You gave me a phone and no one to text when I don’t want to make eye contact with people. Some teacher you are.

Markus looked up as the text came through his HUD, from the phone they’d given North to complete her human illusion. Of course, North was nowhere to be seen. He felt like he was standing on the edge of some great height.

>MARKUS: I thought you would be talking with people about your work.

>NORTH: Everyone’s too scared to talk to me anyway. I cover one toilet seat with teeth in the name of artistic expression and suddenly I’m ‘unapproachable.’

“What was that?” Carl asked.

Markus stifled his laughter. “Nothing.”

>MARKUS: I’m sure the reviews will be terrific. Because you terrified them.

>NORTH: Right?? I’ve heard ‘dirty’ and ‘gruesome’ bandied about so Feralism is off to a good start. At least I tried to give this gallery a pulse.

>MARKUS: It looks amazing.

>NORTH: Guess we’ll see what that guy Kamski says.

>NORTH: Fuck I can’t do this over text.

A hand grabbed his, and Markus found himself being dragged away. Markus looked to Carl—he always looked to Carl—but Carl barely spared him a glance before returning to his conversation. Which was, probably, tacit approval, right?

He turned and let North lead him through the crowd of humans and androids. He caught the faint scent of asphalt from North’s hair. Her dress was backless.

She didn’t stop until they reached the back of the gallery, where the crowd thinned out a little. On the wall hung the other half of North’s refrigerator box. It was covered in North’s notes about how to be human. ‘Sit upright in chairs.’ ‘Smell like food.’ ‘Don’t wear trash.’ ‘Remember a small number of useless facts, incorrectly.’

The lines of text formed the shape of Markus himself, playing piano in his lavish rooftop garden.

“What do you think?” North asked. “Did I get the essentials?”

Markus couldn’t help but grin. “I guess you really studied.”

“Oh yeah,” North stood up straight. “I can give fake compliments, dick around on my phone and bullshit my way through art criticism as well as any human.”

“Well, humanity looks great on you,” Markus laughed. “You’re glowing.” Oh. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that part.

North shrugged. “It’s the dress.”

“Is it?”

She squinted. “Do you like it? I mean, you are worth putting in some effort.” She put her fingers together. “A veeeery little.”

Markus blushed. “I don’t know, your poncho was starting to grow on me.”

“About time, sunshine!” She laughed but it died out quick. She kicked the ground, the boots peeking out and showing the same old North under that pretty dress. “I mean, all this stuff on the walls is all just for the bet, right? It’s not really me.”

Markus managed a shrug. “It sure seems a lot like you.”

Her feet stopped moving as she glared down at them. “I feel like a totally different person now,” she told them. “You know, I’d actually be pretty pissed if Carl took credit for all this. Who cares about the stupid bet. I want people to see this stuff and—feel me, you know?” She shrugged. “I gotta hand it to you, you…you did teach me to love myself.”

“It wasn’t that hard. You’re very…very loveable.” He might as well say it now before CyberLife repaired him and saying things like that wouldn’t matter.

He took the flower from his lapel and held it out to her. “You keep calling me sunshine,” he said. “And—I can’t really give you anything, but I’m sure Carl wouldn’t mind. You deserve something, for all this, no matter what happens.” He was aware, for a horrible moment, that it was not enough.

 North blinked once, apparently surprised that she did not laugh or spontaneously combust at this. It was like she actually believed him about being loveable and deserving of gifts. That at least made the gift feel less stupid. “Thanks.” Her fingers slowly closed around the flower, and she held it cupped in her hands like a kitten. “Listen—I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that. Kissing you, I mean. I won’t do it again.”

Her words turned to crystal inside his chest. “…I think maybe we took advantage of each other a little too much this week,” he managed. “I forgive you. I…probably shouldn’t have asked you to show me, either.”

“It’s cool. I mean, I should probably feel more sorry than I do…”

“I guess I don’t feel very sorry, either. That it happened, I mean. It still can’t happen again.”

“Yeah.”

Markus looked at her and she looked at him. For a second it felt like it was going to happen all over again.

“He’s here!” Leo burst in on them, waving his arms. “Kamski’s here! He wants to talk to you, North!”

North snatched Markus’s hand. “Oh shit. Oh shit.”

Markus squeezed her hand. “You’re going to do great.”

“I’m getting—oh wow, my processes are just going nuts—fuck! Maybe I should lie down.”

“You’re fine, North. You got this.” He wasn’t saying it for the bet.

North’s eyes were huge. “What if he doesn’t get it? Death of the artist and all that shit. What if I’m a hack?”

“Screw death, you’re an android. You’re here. This is your mark, and he can’t take that away from you. Right?”

“…Right.” North scrunched her eyes shut, but when she opened them they were full of fire. She put her hand on his and interfaced. The two castles in their programming smashed together in beautiful demolition and stuck like magnets. Markus felt his own stance go as sure-footed as a knight in shining armor. Beside him, North breathed like a dragon.

“Bring it on.”

*

A masterpiece of modern art.

Chapter Text

Leo didn’t know what North expected. She was a stray android with years of baggage, a chip on her shoulder and some kind of weird repressed thing going on with her kidnapper’s pet android. She was facing off against established artists with expensive educations at the finest schools and all the funding, time, and audience access for years.

Of course she fucking won.

No one had ever seen anything like her shit before. Even Leo, who’s only artistic interest was in the graphics on his video games, liked it (especially the super-gory soda can sculpture of himself, duh, that thing was genius). Oh, Kamski droned on about the process, he really grilled North for hours about art stuff. It turned out North was pretty great at artistic criticism, at least with Markus there as her emotional support android. But when Kamski got a load of that refrigerator box with the drawing inside he almost shit himself. Street art that addressed the rampant stray android problem, hitting it off with a guy that had a hard-on for contemporary issues? What a surprise. A clap-on lamp could tell how this was gonna go down. Androids could be so stupid sometimes.

People were packed in all the way down the street when Kamski climbed the stage in the middle of the gallery plaza and announced her win. Markus looked serenely stunned before he smiled and lit up just like a clap-on lamp—for once Leo didn’t want to prank him with a hand buzzer or anything. North looked like she got hit by a truck. The crowd cheered so loud that Leo’s bones rumbled shivered from the noise of it. North didn’t even flinch as Markus put an arm around her, she actually sank into him. Leo thought about Adam sinking against him like a huge cuddly puppy way too big for his lap, and felt his throat close up. He actually saw Adam in the crowd a couple of times, but he couldn't just go up to him and....

He kept his head down over his phone and stayed away. It was Adam that owed him the apology. Adam that needed to clean up his act.

God, he did sound like dad.

Humans could be just as stupid as androids.

He shook Adam out of his head, and applauded along with the crowd as North stomped up to that stupid stage so Kamski could enrobe her with a floral sash and hand her a stupidly-huge cardboard check. She hugged it like it was her refrigerator box, looking out at the crowd with this kind of blank expression. Leo knew dissociation when he saw it. She might bolt right here and now. Leo wouldn’t blame her.

But given how super obvious this day was going, it should have been no surprise to anyone that the first thing North did was reveal her broken LED. Leo had taken it out when he repainted North, and she had been so shocked by his good mascara job that she didn’t notice. Once she shoved it back in, it took a second for everyone to realize what was going on. She didn’t wait for their reaction though. She probably wasn’t even doing it for Kamski (even though he was now staring at her like she’d just become the most interesting art project of the century).

She was looking right at Carl, Markus, and him.

The crowd started to turn ugly. Other human artists protested, critics loudly argued that show was rigged to make them look bad (yeah, like that was the whole point). Kamski reached for North but she spun away from him and ran at Carl, the check raised like the improbably-sized weapons in Leo’s video games. Leo jumped forward to protect his father from Death By Cardboard.

But North just held the check out in front of her. “I want to buy Markus from you.”

…Yeah okay, no one expected that.

“What?” Carl said.

“Yeah, what the fuck?” Leo said, more eloquently.

“This is a lot of money, right?” North waved the check around and her gaze was anything but disengaged. She glared at Carl with predator focus even if her knees shook beneath the dress. “And I know how this works—everyone’s gonna want my art now. You can have that too. It’s gonna be worth a bazillion dollars by tomorrow. You could buy a hundred androids for all that.”

Leo’s laugh was explosive and wholly inappropriate. Holy shit.

“That’s—“ Carl looked genuinely startled for a second. “That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not,” North was starting to bristle like a werewolf. “It’s fair. You said I should decide what I want, right? I want Markus.”

“Hey,” Leo put up his hands. “Uh—Markus isn’t on the menu, remember?...”

“Let’s let Markus decide.” North raised her eyes and stuck her hand out.

Oh, right. Markus. Leo turned to see him standing behind Carl’s chair in his tight suit, stock-still, a cardboard cut-out version of himself. An art installation: Computer in Glitch. His hands gripped the handles of Carl’s chair until his knuckles turned blue. “I…”

“Not like it’s really a choice for you, though, right?” North said. “If I can pay for you, you’ll come with me, right?” She stepped a little closer to him. “It’s okay. You can come with me.”

Yeah, this was definitely one hell of a reverse-psychology prank. Hell, maybe it was a straight-up power move. The deviant androids not just going stray but rising up to overcome their masters.

Everyone was still shouting and arguing around them. Stray androids started pushing back hats and hair to show their own flickering LEDs and—wow, Leo thought he saw one or two earlier but there were a lot of deviants here. It was all a blur of commotion, but Markus remained fixed in place. There wasn’t any tether on Markus either right now. Leo felt his heart climb into his throat. Maybe Markus shattering into deviancy was the last they’d see of him.

“Carl said it was impossible.” Markus’s words came out in a thin breath, flimsy as paper.

“Right,” Carl said. He slumped a little in his chair. Leo felt his pulse start to chill out and hated himself for it.

North’s hand started to shake. “That easy, huh? I just go away and you leave an extra bottle of thirium out for me in the alley and—” she snatched her hand back, then spun and threw the check as hard as she could. Being cardboard, it caught the wind and banked once before floating harmlessly to the ground.

“Ah!” Leo whined, because that kind of money could buy him back Carl’s painting from Todd, a truck load of red ice, and the biggest bunch of roses for Adam that the florist had, but North didn’t care and stomped on it all the same.

“That’s what I think of your stupid contest!” she snarled.

“But—you agreed to do it,” Markus said, his voice sounding so soft and stupid compared to the rage frying out North’s voice simulator. He frowned. “I don’t know what you expected. I was never the prize.”

“What did you expect, huh?” North yelled. “I didn’t want to change, but, hey, you know what, I tried, because the perfect little pet android asked so nicely—”

“You didn’t try that hard,” Markus said, which was—wow, Markus could cut deep when he wanted to. His neck turned pink.

North turned into a dragon.

“Wow. I actually thought maybe some of the nice shit you said about me was true. Good to know it was all just to get another pat on the head from your human! Awesome.”

Markus’s shoulders had come up a little, just like Leo’s did. Leo wanted to reach out and shake him except that he was sort of glued to the spot, watching this train wreck. No no no, come on—someone’s gotta get a happy ending…

“Hey, you know what? I like who I am now,” North waved her hands. “I don’t need you for that. Clearly, people should only change for themselves! You were never gonna change, you…” She hiccuped on…was that a sob? She covered her mouth. Leo felt like someone punched him in the gut.

“Look, can you even just—” North’s voice was muffled behind her hand and she lowered it. “Can you just tell me ‘no’ yourself?”

Markus didn’t say anything. Leo’s hands were clamped over his mouth so tight his lips were going numb.

North bit her top lip. “Yeah. Some dream you are, Markus.”

She turned and pushed into the crowd. If anyone tried to stop her, her large combat boots made short work of them. In the blink of an eye she disappeared, leaving behind the check, her art, and Markus.

Apparently, the absence of the spontaneously combusting android was the cue for the crowd to press in. Leo was vaguely aware of Hank Anderson congratulating Carl over the bet, his police android Connor watching the mob with concern, Kamski wondering when North would be returning. Androids in the crowd ran like North, or started to coalesce around her art, protecting it like it was theirs. Maybe it was. Leo stopped paying attention as tunnel narrowed around him with Markus at the end of it. The stupid android was still standing dutifully behind Carl’s chair, staring at the spot where North stood and doing absolutely nothing about it. If anything was going to put Markus over the edge that had to be that, you know? A stray android by some miracle falling in love with him was better odds than Leo had ever dreamed of. Shit, North was a pain in this ass but she was worth it, even before she changed.

But Markus hadn’t risen above his programming for Leo, and he didn’t for her.

“You stupid piece of plastic!” Leo rushed Markus and grabbed him by the jacket. “What the hell are you doing? Go after her!”

“I can’t,” Markus’s LED flickered red. “Carl said—"

“Fuck you!” Leo threw himself at the android, bearing all his druggie strength down on Markus’s chest and only managing to shove him a few inches. Maybe Carl was shouting at him in the background. Maybe not. Probably telling Markus just to let Leo ride this out, which was even more insulting, like actions didn’t have consequences. Adam had already showed him they did.

He pushed Markus again. “You’re just a fucking machine!” If he saw himself in Markus’s eyes—the damn loser that couldn’t fix his brother, and made bad deals for red ice, and ruined then abandoned his boyfriend—well, no one knew. Markus was just a machine. A fake no better than him. He could project all he wanted.

“Fight back!” he demanded. “Hit me! What, are you scared? You too perfect?”

Carl wasn’t even watching them fight anymore, he was staring at the crowd. Adam didn’t look at him when he stepped out of the car. North left, too. Did Markus even see him?

“Y-you’re nothing, you hear me?” Leo shouted, smashing him in the face. “You’re nothing!”

Then Markus’s LED went solid red. Leo never saw that before. Markus’s lip curled and the machine pushed back.

Leo went flying, weightless, staring at his brother disappear on the horizon.

Then he hit the pavement and everything went dark.

Chapter Text

Markus sat slumped in the hospital lobby, head in his hands. He was alone except for Adam, who possibly looked worse than he did, making the flimsy hospital chair contort to accommodate his curled-up frame. The young man was holding Leo’s beanie in his hands, which now had a big bloom of red along the brim. Markus started to comfort him, until the memory file of the last few hours replayed in his HUD.

Adam had jumped out of the crowd moments after Leo hit the pavement and didn’t move. Three years Leo’s junior, lacking the first aide and medical database Markus had, Adam just whipped off Leo’s beanie and used it to staunch the blood while directing someone to call 911. Markus just stood there. After having cracked Leos skull open like Carl’s morning egg.

Yeah. He didn’t need Markus ‘comforting him.’

He startled as a hand tapped his shoulder. It was Adam’s, and to his credit he didn’t flinch back. He just said, “Are you okay?”

No one had asked Markus that. Not that he deserved that kind of consideration. He started to nod, then stopped, looking down at the red-stained beanie again.

Adam just handed over one of his earbuds. Markus’s auditory system picked up the four-part harmony of a choir. He put it in his ear and listened, remembering Adam soft singer’s voice talking to an unresponsive Leo while he was loaded in the ambulance. Markus barely managed to stammer out Leo’s medical information and hand over the EpiPen in his pocket. The music made him feel a little less like the floor would open up and send him to android hell, though. Marginally.

A nurse headed down the hallway toward them.

“He’s awake, and he asked to see you—” Markus was already standing before the nurse finished, “—Adam?”

Markus froze. Right. He handed the earbud back and sat down.

“Hey, uh…” Adam’s big hand tapped his shoulder again. “It’s okay. You can come, too.”

“You’re Markus, right?” The nurse smiled at him like he wasn’t even an android. “Of course, you can come.”

They followed her down the hall. Markus watched Adam squeeze the hat a couple of times.

“I don’t want to break the rules,” he said.

“Dude, the only reason the nurse knew your name is because Leo listed you on the paperwork,” Adam said, then laughed softly. “Lighten up, man.”

He squeezed Markus like he had the hat—again, new sensation, Markus wasn’t really used to being around people larger than him—and slipped inside. Markus hesitated, then joined him.

He entered on a scene out of a modern Rembrandt—diffuse light centered around Leo, Adam haloed at his side, Carl painted in shadows at the foot of the bed. The smell of disinfectant and faint ammonia slightly ruined the artistic effect. Markus’s chronometer warned him, uselessly, that it was three in the morning and he should be reprimanding Carl for staying up so late. He should probably say something but his jaw experienced and error and would not open.

“Hi.” Adam’s pretty voice sounded beatifically choked.

“Hey.” Leo, on the other hand, sounded like shit. “Don’t even think about cuddling, I need to pee so bad.”

“I can help you,” Markus said, in the same moment Adam did, and the boyfriend was closer and louder so no one noticed the android.

Leo just smirked. “You’re not a nurse, numbnuts.” He swatted at Adam, which Adam easily dodged. “But…hey, you saved me, right? The nurse said…anyway. Thanks.”

Adam and Markus both blushed.

Leo didn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t say anything stupid, did I?”

Carl shrugged. “You expressed some concern that you might forget how to play video games. And then you called me ‘King Carles.’”

“Ungh, no….”

Adam laughed again and took his hand. “They said you’re gonna be okay, though?”

“Yep. Stitches. Overnight stay. If I develop complications it’s easier if I kick the bucket in a hospital than at home.” Leo’s grin faded. “I just wanted to say one thing, then you can go home, okay?”

“But—“

“I know you think I’m cool, but I’m a fuckin’ mess. Hiding in drugs. You’re so like, gentle and stuff, and you have your life together and you’re everything I’m not. Thought it was my job to make you cool but I was just messing you up because it made me feel better.”

“No, hey.” Adam sat down on the bed, petting Leo’s hand like it was a little kitten. “It’s a two-way street, right? I’m an adult.”

Adam looked over his shoulder, making Markus press back into the wall as he awaited condemnation.

Instead, Adam said, “Markus was right. People can change. You got better and… well, I thought I liked who I was turning into but, uh. I dunno. I screwed up somewhere.” Adam leaned over the bed. “From now on I’ll leave being a badass to you.”

“Please don’t.”

“I mean, yeah, no more red ice—I told my mom and we’re officially quitting, rehab and everything—”

“No, I swear if you don’t get off me I’m going to piss all over you!”

Adam jumped up, and they all started laughing. Markus made a study of the floor. 

“So you took advice from an android, huh?” Carl said.

Markus determined there were one hundred and thirty-two tiles on the floor.

“Well…maybe androids aren’t so dumb.” Adam said. “Though North was pretty stupid to leave that check behind…”

“I know!” Leo managed, “Like, come on lady, you take that check, and you cash that check, and you invest it in your future!”

“Invest it? You sound just like my mom...”

“Hey, being responsible is super badass, you know?”

“Anyway…I guess I’m kind of not fair to androids. If you wanna have an android brother, that’s cool.”

“Oh! Thanks for your permission.”

“I wish you would have told me,” Carl said. “I used to be the same way. I’m proud of you, kid.”

“Yeah.” Leo paused. “…Why is Markus standing there like he’s waiting to finish me off?”

Markus looked up and was immediately pinned by Leo’s gaze. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I was kidding, dumbass. Come here.”

Markus obeyed. His throat tightened as he looked between Carl and Leo. “…Are you going to get rid of me?”

The collective Manfred sigh that filled the room nearly registered on the Richter scale.

“Why would we get rid of you, Markus?” Carl demanded.

“Yeah, what the hell?” Leo added. “Talk about rude!”

“But I’m deviant now,” Markus protested. “I…”

The collective Manfred gaze that bored into Markus’s android soul was laser-sharp. And also longsuffering.

“You dummy,” Leo complained. “Why do you think I’ve been trying to prank you this whole time?”

“I—“ He huffed and scrubbed his hair. “Look, I wasn’t sure what you really wanted. But then you wouldn’t stop pushing me, and I just got so angry…” He started counting floor tiles again. “How could anyone want a deviant?”

Carl said, “Markus,” half admonishment, half sad.

“Wait,” Adam nudged his boyfriend, “You’re getting on me for hating androids and your brother basically hates androids too?”

“Why doesn’t anyone come to me about their problems?” Carl lamented.

Leo raised his hand.

“Not you.”

Markus stared around the room at them all. “And you aren’t angry?”

“It was an accident, Markus.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, “and Leo was being a total butthead."

“Wait,” Leo squeaked suddenly, “You told your mom about the drugs?” This fact apparently just snuck up on him. He pushed at Adam. “What are you, psycho? Get out of here, go home, before she comes over here to finish me off, you know?”

Adam laughed and batted Leo lightly on the nose with his beanie. Leo’s whole face lit up. Adam just gave him a quick kiss before waving awkwardly at Markus and heading out. Markus wondered if Adam had ever acknowledged him like that before.

“Alright, Markus,” Leo said, with a longsuffering groan. “Do your nurse thing. I know you want to. Might as well take me to the bathroom while you’re at it.”

The next few minutes passed in silence. Leo never let Markus take care of him. Now he didn’t complain even once as Markus checked his pulse and blood pressure, tested his eye movement and reflexes, and listened to his breathing. He did all of that twice, actually. His software had been much more reliable before he went deviant, and now he wanted to double-check everything he did. He held Leo like a baby bird when they headed to the bathroom. Humans were so fragile. Something else he never noticed. So many things he never noticed: paths he could take, things to worry about. Decisions he could regret. As he helped Leo back into bed he swept away the beanie to put it with Leo’s other clothes. Leo grabbed it before he could.

“It’s bloody.” Markus reached for it. “If we don’t act quickly the stain will set—”

“Come on, bro, you’re deviant now! Live on the edge!”

Markus swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, Leo.”

“It’s cool, man. Really.” Leo smoothed the hat. “I kind of like the reminder that you’re deviant. Maybe I can get North to embroider something around it?”

Markus looked to Carl, but he was gone. Losing track of Carl jolted another uncomfortable foreign sensation through him. As if he didn’t have enough of those. “She’s gone, Leo.”

“I know, I was there, remember? I have a concussion, not brain damage. So you’re really not gonna go find her?”

Markus frowned down at his hands, still clinging to the edge of the hat. He should take it and go attend Carl and forget about decision-making. Decision-making sucked. “I could never leave you and Carl. And—and she left.”

“North is a crash-test dummy who thought there wasn’t a reason to stay,” Leo said. “Trust me, I know what that’s like. Dad said now that you’re deviant he wants to make the house into a stray android refuge, you know?”

Markus looked up. “…Really?”

“Turns out the art show was kind of like a big billboard sign to all the stray androids around. I guess they practically swarmed the place! They felt—I dunno, seen, I guess? You know how much Carl likes that kind of art-as-tool-for-change aesthetic. He’s seen you leaving thirium out for them. And turns out having the most destructive android around the house sort of made helping out others a lot less sketchy. Now that you’re deviant too…I dunno, it kind of makes sense, you know? Without the whole kidnapping thing North might actually like it there. She gets her boy toy and a mansion to wreck. I’d even let her play my video games. What more could she want?”

Markus considered disagreeing but North never made it hard to guess what she wanted. But then she also said, ‘this is messed up’ while she was kissing him. And then told him it couldn’t happen again. And then walked away. “Deviants don’t always make the most logical decisions,” he said, which was at least both terrifying and enticing.

“No excuse. Don’t take my approach to relationships. You want her, go…go after her.”

Leo slumped back in the pillows, apparently worn out. Markus felt like his wires were being stripped. But Leo just smiled.

“Markus—listen to me, okay? I don’t care if you’re deviant, or a machine, if you’re blood’s blue or red or green like an alien. You’re my brother, no matter what…” Leo took his hand and actually held it, swinging it lightly back and forth between them. Markus felt like his circuits were being un-stripped, possibly also wrapped in a nice warm security blanket. “I just want you to be happy, you know?”

“I—” His thirium pump was pounding. “I don’t even know where she is.”

“You hung out with her nonstop all week! Take a guess.”

“Apart from checking behind every appliance store for abandoned refrigerator boxes, I’m not …” Markus trailed off. “…Oh.”

Leo gave a punch-drunk grin. “I’ve been so obsessed with getting a genuine brother. But I kind of liked having a sister, too.” He patted Markus’s hand. “Go get her. We’ll be here when you get back.”

Markus managed a smirk. “You telling me what to do again?”

“If you thought you were gonna stop being my little brother just because you went deviant, your programming’s more messed up than I thought!”

Chapter Text

North had a very detailed list of things to do once she became deviant. Now that she escaped that total clusterfuck of a week she felt she deserved a list that was half as nice.

First, better fashion. For a second there she thought she actually belonged in a dress this nice. Seriously—that pet Android really did a number on her. But not to worry. She found a paint tarp behind one of the galleries and wrapped it around her shoulders. She found a box cutter a few streets down and cut the bottom of the dress off. She found a couple of coffee cans and spent some time with a nail and wire sewing them onto the bottom of the dress to make a sort of romper situation.

Next, better protection against pet android assholes that made her question everything about herself. She stole a box of tasers and nestled them in amongst the flowers of her sash.  

Lastly, a nice new refrigerator box that she had no plans to decorate. But of course all the best boxes had been taken, and she had to settle for a TV box instead. She wedged her shoulders in until it resembled a huge fin, and waddled to the loading dock where the other deviants hung out.

“I really should have kept that check,” she told them when she got there.

“Are you okay?” Lucy asked, nonsensically.

“I’m fine, why do you ask?”

“You’re crying.”

“I’m not crying, my eyes are malfunctioning.”

“When are you making more art?” another android asked.

Still another android reached for her hand. They were all around her. “Show us more of what you dream about, North!”

North tried to tase this android, then ran away when the other deviants got pissy about that. She hated those androids anyway!

And…maybe she should keep to herself for a while until her circuits stopped aching.

The wind picked up and snatched her box away while she was figuring out what to do next. And then it started raining. She remembered the address on that card the human gave her—some flower name, right? She hitchhiked and stomped all the way there, and when the woman with the kind eyes opened the door North broke down entirely. Crying and malfunctioning to boot. The woman let her inside and gave her tea and they sat like that until the sun came up. North looked out the window at the sunflowers in the backyard, the woman said she grew one acre for farmer’s markets and local grocery stores, and North had to admit they were the first fresh flowers she actually liked. She went outside to admire them, but their bright sunshine faces hurt too much to look at up close. It had been better with the window between them.

She found the farm dumpster and climbed in, and sat there with her arms folded, thinking about Markus. She meant every word she said to him. She did suddenly like herself now, making art had been fun, and real, and her. But loving Markus had been so different and so right, he was the sunshine she never knew she wanted… and now it was over. It was never anything to begin with, just a…a sexy game of Simon Says. Loving a machine said more about herself than about him, in the end.

When the garbage truck came by she didn’t climb out, just let herself be emptied among the plastic bags and eventually, she was dumped out with them in the landfill. As soon as the truck left she jumped up and got to work.

The rain shorted out her taser-and-flower sash. As she discarded the tasers, she collected the flowers. She hunted around and found a bag of old fake flowers, probably from a wasteful wedding or a weird hoarder.   

Then the real work began.

She started arranging the flowers into the shape of a head. A big head. Markus had a big head. She sculpted Markus’s sculpted chest and built Markus’s built shoulders. She put blooms at the blooms of his cheeks and gave his crown a flower crown.

 She took a deep breath when she ran out of flowers. She let the breath out through her nose, and looked at the shape she’d made. It was only about 89% complete but she only had one flower left. She bit her lips and nestled the little plastic sunflower he gave her in the place where his mismatched eye had been. There. Now it looked just like the guy—at least the guy she saw when she looked at him. Perfect, and perfectly fake. Beautiful and worthy all the same. She allowed herself three seconds in which she hoped that Markus figured himself out someday. Maybe he’d learn how to choose and would see himself like she saw him.

Then she let it all go, and turned away.

Markus was standing there in the rain about four yards away like the hero in a romantic drama.

“Oh, come on! I was having an existential moment here!” She kicked an aluminum can at him but it fell short about two feet.

“Sorry,” Markus backed away. “Should I come back later?”

“No, it’s—” She groaned. “Whatever, what do you want?”

Markus looked over her shoulder at the sculpture. “…If that’s supposed to be me, I have feet.”

North glanced back, then grabbed a grubby old pair of worn-out slippers and stuck them in at the bottom of the sculpture. “There. Now, what’re you doing here again?” Markus was soaking wet (good thing) and covered in six different kinds of filth (also good thing).

“Lucy said she saw you head in the direction of Ms. Chapman’s farm, and Ms. Chapman saw you climb into a dumpster. You did tell me you wanted to know where the trash goes.”

“…Oh.” Right. She’d have to smack Lucy and that human upside the head later. Or...thank them, depending. And yeah, probably apologize for the tasing…. Ugh. Markus rubbed off on her a little too much for her liking.

“Well, you better go away before you get in trouble, sunshine. You can leave my giant check there,” she said, before realizing he did not have any giant check with him, and maybe he’d come for some other reason, and maybe being such an asshole was detrimental to relationships.

But apparently she’d rubbed off on Markus too because he didn’t immediately obey her. Instead he came toward her. “I don’t want to go,” he said, and if she didn’t know any better she’d say he really meant it.

“Leo told you to say that,” North decided. “Right?”

“Uh. Leo’s in the hospital, actually.”

“Fuck! Why?”

“I… gave him a concussion.”

This literally did not compute. The idiot was probably overreacting. She ignored it. “Carl told you, then.”

“Uh, no, not really. I mean he didn’t forbid me. I’m deviant now.” He took a deep breath like he was letting that sink in—for himself, not her. “What you said about changing for yourself is true. It took fights with two of the people I care about most to change.”

North chose not to unpack what that might mean. “Did he tell you do say that, too?” she accused instead because it was easier and because she didn’t really think Markus could change, because people hardly ever changed, “He ordered you to so I’d come back and be his artistic protégé, right?”

“No. Well—“ he scratched his ear, “Yes? He does want that. He’s going to make the mansion into a safe house for strays and help them find places to live and work. He wants you to help him do that through art. Uh. That’s not why I’m here. I mean, it’s partly why I’m here.” He scrubbed his hair. “I don’t actually know very much about how decision-making works…”

“Yeah,” North said, “You sound really independent.” She started picking up extra floral chunks while she hastily shored up all those ‘let go’ feelings, refusing to look up. Sure, she was over Markus, but if she took one step in that pretty mansion again she would definitely not be over him at all and—

“I’m in a dump,” Markus said. “Willingly, if not eagerly. I think I’m pretty deviant.”

“Yeah, well, someone still told you how to sweet-talk me, probably. There isn’t anyone that can tell you how to feel about me, so—”

“I know.” There was some crunching of trash, then Markus’s pretty designer sneakers appeared in front of her. When she straightened up he had a small handful of the leftover flowers gathered in a bunch like a Victorian suitor. He looked like he was trying really hard to ignore the mustard stains and coffee grounds on them. “You can be free and have people you care about.”

“No, you can’t.” North decided. Maybe.

Markus stepped toward her. North stepped back.

“You can be a deviant and still be learning how to make good choices.” Another step, and this time North didn’t step back. Yet. “You’re a good choice, though.”

“No,” North laughed, all high-pitched. She really should be taking that step back now. “I’m—really not.”

“You told me yourself that you like who you are now.”

“Yeah, but I don’t expect anyone else to—”

Markus closed the pesky space North hadn’t yet bothered to widen between them yet—and kissed her. He even did tongue. Good tongue. She hadn’t taught him to do that. She probably tasted like she took a ride in a dumpster but he definitely tasted like he just walked through a landfill for her.

It was, frankly, awesome.

They surfaced, panting air they didn’t need.

“I need a shower,” Markus whispered.

“No, you want a shower.”

“I want a shower,” Markus amended. “I want you to take a shower too. Showers all around.” He somehow got his arms around her during the kiss and he squeezed her, which made North feel new and shiny, no soap required. “Will you come home with me?”

“We’re not done yet.” She pointed at her sculpture. “Help me find more flowers.”

“Why?”

North huffed. “We have to make me too. Come on!”

They worked in the rain for a few hours. Markus was kind of a low-key champ and didn’t complain even once, even if he kept making faces every time North uncovered some new horror from the trash piles. He didn’t leave though, so…he was probably serious about her. What a dummy.

She didn’t ditch him, though, so clearly, they were both dumb and therefore deserved each other.

“Shower now?” he asked, when they’d made two shapes in the trash.

“Nope.” She took his hand and led him to the crest of a trash pile, and sat there like they had on top of the piano. After a while the sun came up and turned the sky pink and gold and blue.

“I’m not living at the mansion,” North said. “I’ll work there but I’m not living there.”

“Sure,” Markus replied. “Okay.”

“I suggest you don’t live there, either. Get out on your own a little.”

“I think Leo’s apartment isn’t getting much use these days.”

“…Can I take you on a tour to see some street graffiti next weekend?”

“I'd like that very much.”

North hugged her knees and grinned.

After a while, a tractor came along and ploughed their sculptures into another pile of trash, never to be seen again.

“Okay!” North beamed. “Now we can go.”

Markus was on his feet in two seconds flat, but gallantly helped her up. “Why wait to see it get smashed?”

“Oh, you know,” She put her arm around his waist as they strolled out of the landfill. “To remind us of our mortality. We might break up, right? Memento mori.”

“Is that a reference to the sixteenth-century art movement?”

“Please.” North waved a dirt-covered hand. “I read it on some trash.”

*

THE END