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Chapter Text

Scar rasped for air, the weight of his synthetic lungs filling up in sporadic, uneven gasps, a sensation he had never truly focused on before. There was something moving in his chest that kept his brain operational: organs, made of titanium and platinum and other laboratory-born parts, all engineered to function perfectly without interruption.

The engineers call these 'biocomponents'. That word made Scar feel an unpleasant shift under his plastic skin, the reminder that he is not of the same value as a human life. But now, in his eyes, they were his organs: his lungs, his heart, his blue blood, all his. Even with the CyberLife logo stamped uniformly on each piece, they were his now.

His. He was a him, not an it. Not anymore. This body, these parts, were his, not its. He owned something, he owned his body. Humans were responsible for their own bodies, why couldn't Scar be responsible for his?

Scar. That name was given to him. It didn't feel the same as a newborn child being lovingly titled by their parents, no, his name felt closer to that of a foreign pet; you give it a name so that it'll listen when you call it. He was no better than a dog in that regard.

And yet, he did not want to part with it. For as bitter as he wanted to be, as bitter as the other deviants were over similar matters, he would keep his name. It was given to him by a friend, after all.

"GT-2319, please state your model characteristics and objective." From across a small, silver sound stage, behind a wall of plexiglass, a posh voice spoke in a lightly inviting tone. One would think he were making idle conversation, and not running programming tests.

Before the plexiglass stood a tall, broad figure, with sun-kissed skin and hazel green eyes, tousled dark caramel hair perfectly arranged to give the impression of a lightly carefree individual. It wore a full-body white suit, skin tight with a faint, glowing CyberTech logo adhered to the front. It smiled, all its brilliant white teeth on display, before it began to speak.

"I am a GT-2319, a prototype model of android designed for emotional, therapeutic companionship and operate to act as a service assistant to those who may require psychological and or physical assistance in their daily lives."

"I come with over five-hundred languages logged," it continued, "and am equipped to handle standard household chores and repair work typical of a residential complex," it said lightly. "I also have over ten thousand hours of physiological, psychological and mental health-based training in my hard drive, as well as basic health care operations and CPR as needed."

There was a faint, muffled scribbling on a notepad before the voice spoke up again. "GT-2319, disengage programmer mode."

The android's LED spun a florescent yellow before returning to its light blue color, and the machine blinked inquisitively at the plexiglass, awaiting further instruction.

"GT-2319, what is the capitol of Seychelles?"

"The capitol of Seychelles is Victoria, which is one thousand, five-hundred kilometers, or 932 miles, 299 feet and 10.11 inches east of the mainland," it supplied.

"What year did Florida become a United States territory?"

"That would be the year 1819 when the United States acquired the territory, but it would not become a state until the year 1845."

The faceless engineer chewed on the nib of his pen, the other next to him adjusting his glasses and pouring over a spreadsheet in front of them. "It can't just be good at answering trivia questions, Mumbo."

The engineer stopped chewing on his pen. "Well it's not exactly easy to frame a psychological breakdown for it to resolve right here and now, Cub," he muttered, going back to his now-dented pen.

"Couldn't hurt to try," Cub shrugged, clicking on the microphone. "GT-2319, your owner is a 27 year-old at an indoor auditorium, curled up on the floor into a ball, crying and generally non-verbal. They're adverse to touch and the room is loud, what is your protocol?"

"I usher them to a quieter area, taking care to respect their spacial boundaries," it said in a flat voice, "before reaching down to their level and leading them through a variety of breathing and grounding exercises, depending on what is most appropriate at the moment."

Cub and Mumbo shared a look. "It's a little..." Cub began.

"Stiff," Mumbo finished, and the two sank back into their chairs in near unison. "In hindsight, we probably should have just stripped the AX-1400's personality package into this one instead of building a personality from scratch."

"Don't think keeping it in a lab all day is all that great for its A.I. either," Cub added, adding to the ever-expanding spreadsheet, glaring at the [GT-2319 Error Notes] title at the top of the page. "Still, you wanted to make something with zero risk for deviancy, can't be using spare parts and still think it's totally safe."

"Maybe... we could send it out for some field work? Find someone to give it interpersonal experience and build off of that?" Mumbo suggested.

"If you can find someone, go ahead," Cub hummed, "but we're updating its personality files before it leaves. No one is going to want to interact with an android that only smiles in testing mode."

"Let's get that out of the way, then," Mumbo nodded, typing something into the computer before him, sorting through several files before finding the latest .EXE file he was searching for. "GT-2319? Engage programmer mode, user MKJ."

"Password?" the android prompted, its face falling slack and unnaturally relaxed.

"62 61 6e 61 6e 61 73," Mumbo recited, and continued typing on his computer. "GT-2319 personality file Δ 1.9, initiate download."

A few seconds and a touch of faint electrical humming later, the android's eyes fell shut, its LED circling yellow for a long pause before resetting to its usual blue, its eyes reopening. All at once, the android's demeanor changed: it seemed lighter, bouncing lightly on its heels and smiling casually, less dazzling teeth and more moving its head in general interest of its environment.

"GT-2319, let's find you a friend," Mumbo murmured to himself, pulling out his cell and eyeing his most recent contact.

"I'm not doing it!" came static-like over the receiver several hours later, the high pitched spluttering of a posh voice blared into Mumbo's ear. "I don't care that I owe you a favor, I'm not playing baby-sitter with this thing."

"Grian, buddy, come on," Mumbo reasoned, clacking away at his keyboard. "The GT-2319 is a revolutionary piece of technology, top of the line, personally made by yours truly—"

"It's going to deviate and murder me in my sleep," came the dry response.

Mumbo stifled his sigh. "Listen, Grian, this android wasn't built with any factor-made parts. Everything was replicated and rebuilt in lab, so I can assure, with 99% certainty, that this machine will not deviate and murder you in your sleep."

"99%... so you're saying there's still a chance?"

"What I'm saying," Mumbo rolled his eyes, "is that you have nothing to be worried about. The GT line is specifically designed for people who have experienced major traumas and still struggle with emotional recovery—"

"Really backhanded way to say I need therapy there." You could almost hear Grian's glare through the line.

"Quite frankly, you do," Mumbo shot back, speaking over Grian's sudden ranting. "Grian, really, I'm under a lot of pressure to get the prototype ready for its showcase in a few months, I could really use this field data, and you owe me a favor. It'll be a win-win! I'll get my data, and you get a therapist and a service dog all in one!"

A crackled sigh came through the line, with a personal muttering about losing his mind, before the voice cleared his throat. "Fine. I'll keep it."

Across town, a man in a bright red sweater vest stared up at the politely smiling android, who was waiting to be let in. "Only because you've already shipped the dang thing to my front door, and I can't exactly let it walk home now, can I?"

"Something like that," came Mumbo's devilishly sheepish reply.

Grian pinched the bridge of his nose, stepping to the side of his doorway and waving the machine in, the hairs already raising on the back of his neck. "I'll... call you back later. I better not end up regret helping you with this."

"Open your eyes. That's it, all the way now."

"Can you hear it? Those are people, humans. They're putting you together for the first time ever, today. Really, I'm chuffed to bits with how well you're turning out."

"You gave us a real scare a few weeks ago, we thought this project was impossible. But here you are."

"Open your eyes, keep them open now. Your optics are incredible, by the way. Millions of ions and hand-wired nerves so that you can see. It's almost unbelievable."

"You're going to help so many people. You might even change the world, if we get lucky. That'd be awfully nice, wouldn't it? Change the world?"

Open your eyes. That's it, all the way now.

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes.

Do you see it yet?

Chapter Text

Weight was never something Scar thought about in his old life. Was that what he should call it, old life? He wasn't sure that was a life at all, acting as a servant to someone who, nearly the entire time, wanted nothing to do with him.

(But then again, that one night of weeping and torn down mental barriers... he couldn't fault Grian for what was broken within him.)

Scar felt heavy. All at once, he was keenly aware of the joints in his fingers curling, the heft his feet had stumbling across the park, the hood over his synthetic hair, masking as much of himself as was possible.

In a sense, Scar had nothing to fear. He was the first of his line, no other models had been designed yet. There was little to no risk of being recognized as an android, with his LED being long abandoned, and a face that was entirely his own. Sure, there were the little nicks on his face that would not heal, stubborn white against his tanned skin, but at a passing glance, no one would notice. Only another android would be able to tell the difference, and he doubted any deviant would be wandering around in broad daylight.

What luck, to be all alone in the world.

Still, he couldn't just wander around city spaces all day; eventually, someone would get uneasy, and he had no means of identification that wouldn't get him deactivated on the spot. But, as his gears whirled coming up with a plan, a passing woman dressed in a bright red jacket, dropped a small object: a black, leather wallet.

Without second thought, Scar scooped it up, quickly stepping after her and giving a light tap on her shoulder. "Excuse me, but I think you dropped this."

The woman in the red hood turned around, and Scar balked: it (she?) was a MN-0015, one of the earliest model of residential android available on market. The MN line went out of production years ago, with her model type being discontinued nearly five years ago now.

With a major recall on the line because of its defective nature, Scar had thought they were all scrapped for parts.

To see one operational, walking around with no noticeable defects or glitches, save for her eyes a constant swirling, scarlet hue (CyberTech used to implement LEDs directly into the androids' optics. It terrified consumers,) the machine was a marvel of now-ancient technology.

"Thank you," she said sharply, staring directly at one of Scar's largest cuts: a broad sweep against his right cheek, and he knew she could see right through him, that she recognized him for what he was. He wondered for a moment if she could tell from across the way that he didn't belong.

"You're broken," she whispered, tucking the wallet away. With an outstretched hand, the woman's expression softened, a mournful look on the relic's face. "I know someone who can fix you."

"I'm sorry," Scar said, stepping backwards with a nervous laugh in his voice. "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just a human person, and I'm going to leave now—"

"Please," she hissed, eyes now darted across their surroundings. "You stand out too much, you're going to get caught. Come with me, and you'll have a place to rest."

"We can fix you," she echoed, the skin on her fingertips retracting, revealing her porcelain white shell.

"...I don't need to be fixed," he insisted, turning away from the deviant and walking with his head hung low, his own paranoia of being caught now turned up to the max.

The woman let her hand fall, scarlet eyes staring him down.

"Here's the ground rules," Grian said, arms crossed and glaring up at the android, who was still politely silent, tilting his head the way an inquisitive dog might.

"You don't wake me up, you don't change any of my alarms or scheduling. You don't come into my office, period. You don't buy things without asking me first, you don't answer my messages or make calls for me without being told to. Really, I don't want you to do anything unless I tell you to, or if Mumbo is running a test or something. Got that?"

"Understood," the android smiled, and Grian huffed.

"Is there anything you need me to do for you right now?" the machine asked, and Grian tsked. As much as he just wanted to ship the damn thing back, he couldn't just stick the android into a closet and give Mumbo no data whatsoever.

"You can... fold my laundry?" With the simple command, the GT-2319 was off, locating the laundry room and the basket of crumbled clothes sitting atop the dryer. Once Grian was mostly sure that the android was just diligently pairing his socks and not fashioning a noose from his dress shirts, he stepped into his at home office, letting the door fall shut behind him with a solid thud.

The room was a mess, but not once did Grian want the android to look at it, ever. What Grian understood about deviants was still highly limited, but exposing a brand new machine to the concept of individuality was probably a bad idea.

He eyed his thrifted cork board, mounted askew on the wall, photographs and magazine clippings pinned to it, with a bright red thread looping some of the pieces together. Across the top, scrawled in chicken scratch on a torn corner of poster board read the words: What Causes Deviants?

So far, there was no main correlation Grian could find. There was a lack of information available to the public, and the police were actively withholding files on open deviant cases from the press, so not even Grian's journalism pass could get him the information that he needed.

The best lead he had for a while was androids met with prolonged violence became aggressive in turn, until he found several instances of androids kept in quiet, healthy homes turning deviant and attacking its owners on a whim, so that lead was dead.

Grian's secondary question was why were deviants consistently aggressive? The mirage of rumors and supposed sightings of deviants attacking humans, harming animals, destroying public property, the list went on and on.

Even whispers of rebellion had caught Grian's ear, but that terrifying thought he shoved down to the very darkest corner of his mind. Androids, rebelling? It was laughable.

A gentle knock threw him out of his thoughts, and Grian peeked out of his office to see the GT-2319 standing, hands folded in front of it, looking down at him. "I'm done with your laundry. Is there anything else you need done?"

Grian blinked up at it. "That was fast. Uhh, I don't really have anything else right now... what do you do when you're not working?"

"I would go into standby mode, and wait for you to give me a task," it said helpfully.

Grian shuddered. "Yeah, no, I'm not just going to let you stand around all creepy-like, hang on—" He stepped out of the office and closed the door with his heel, leading the android over to a bookshelf in the living room.

"You're going to read all of these books until I can think of something better for you to do."

The android scanned the bookshelf, LED spinning yellow for a minute before turning to Grian with a smile. "All done!"

"What?!" Wait, right, androids could download publicly available databases straight into their brains. Grian smacked himself in the forehead. "Okay, correction: I want you to physically pick up each book, find a spot to sit, and read it like a person would."

"Would that make you feel more comfortable?" It asked, scanning and selecting the most worn-out looking book cover, a well-loved copy of The Great Gatsby. GT-2319 noted the small twitch at the corner of Grian's lip, the ghost of a smile approving the book choice.

"It'll be easier for me to pretend you're not a machine on the verge of committing horrible acts, yes," he said, eyeing the android as he chose the second-most used sitting area (GT-2319 wouldn't want to take Grian's favorite spot,) taking the extra step to cross his legs and relax his shoulders, flipping the book open.

It was scary how, for a moment, Grian thought the machine were a normal guest in his home, with how comfortable it appeared on his couch. He shook his head lightly, dismissing the thought.

Damn, Mumbo and Cub did a good job making this thing look approachable.

"...think that's all we're going to get out of it."

"But we're so close! This is a minor set back, sure its got some bugs but—"

"Mumbo, the board's not going to approve it in this state. We've got to cut our losses here."

"But, but— look at it. Look at how much work we've put into it. You spent weeks on its arterial system alone, it'll be revolutionary for an android like this to be available to the public. So many people need an android like this."

A sigh.

"I need you to trust me Cub. I know this will work out. We're so close."

That was a nod, I believe.

Can you hear it? What they're saying about you?

Can you hear what has gone unspoken?

You're broken. They can't fix you.

You're broken. You're broken.

Defective.

Chapter Text

Okay, so trespassing is still very much illegal. Scar didn't want to break the law, he was already in hot water for being an android without an owner. And for, well, everything that happened the night he left. Yikes.

But. The house was abandoned. And the back door was already broken in.

It couldn't hurt to camp out for a few nights, right?

The hollow clang of the steel door echoed loudly behind the android, and another sitting in a corner by a small fire flinched in response. His synthetic, wolf-like ears twitched in annoyance, "Pearl, just because you're angry doesn't mean you get to take it out on us," he complained.

Pearl sighed, tugging off her red jacket and tossing it to the side, dragging her hands down her face. "Sorry, sorry, my bad Ren, I just had a rough time today."

"Haven't we all?" A voice came from a tunnel off to the left: an android with half of its face-plating missing, fiddling with an exposed section of his left arm. Sparks flew as he eyed his work over, "our thirium supply is running low, I can't find a good replacement for Ren's knee joint, and you just keep running off doing vigilante work. I think we've had it worse."

"Well someone's got to fight," Pearl grumbled, crossing her arms. "Doc, I promise, I'll go on a scrap parts mission soon, but we've got an opportunity on our hands. I saw a deviant today."

"There's deviants everywhere Pearl, we can't save all of then," Ren gently reminded her.

"No, I know that, but this one's different. I scanned his face, he's not any model that I recognize."

"Is your scanner acting up again? I thought I touched that up for you already this week," Doc frowned.

"My scanner's fine, what I'm saying is that there is an unregistered, unreleased prototype android, just wandering around a public park with humans milling around it. But no one knew he was an android because his face hasn't been slapped onto a thousand other bodies and shipped around the country. He's a little dented up, but otherwise in great condition."

"I couldn't convince him to join us today, but if we can track him down, I'm sure the three of us could make a stellar case for him to join our cause," Pearl spoke excitedly, waving her hands around in a way that made both Doc and Ren share a doubtful look.

"Pearl... you've got that crazy look, whatever you're thinking, we're not doing," Doc said with an air of finality in his voice.

"I've always got a crazy look, thank you very much," she huffed, setting her hands firmly on her hips. "My point is we can use him."

"For?" Ren asked, already regretting the answer.

"For the revolution!" Pearl exclaimed, ignoring their pained groans. "Whine all you want, the fight is coming like it or not, and we need someone, a leader, to make a stand!"

"Think about it. Who's going to listen to an ancient MN-0015," she gestured to Doc, "a falling apart DM-7700," Pearl turn towards to Ren, "or an overly modified RD-4157?"

"Harsh," Doc said.

"Rude, man," Ren grumbled.

"Hey! I dogged on myself too— sorry, Ren," Pearl corrected sheepishly, the wolf-android's ears pinning back in annoyance. "My point is, he's a completely unrecognizable face of what is probably highly sophisticated, brand new machinery, and he's just wandering around without purpose. This is our chance, guys."

Silence fell between the three of them. Finally, Doc spoke up, turning his attention back to his arm, "Pearl, you know we want to be on the same level as you, but—"

"We can't stay in hiding forever," she cut him off, clenching her fists.

"I know," he spoke up over her, "I know. But we're in no fighting condition. Ren can't walk. My arm's days from failing on me. We're low on parts, thirium, deviants, everything. No one's winning a war with a pile of scrap metal."

"What Doc is trying to say," Ren jumped in before Pearl could murder her friend, "is until we're in working condition, we can't actually be of help to you. You know I want to get back out there, not looking like—" he gestured to the... unpleasant "cosmetic" experiments done to him, "whatever the heck I am now. Or at least, able to stand up on my own two feet."

Pearl let out a loud groan, thumping the wall next to her. It echoed, and she let the sound, along with her frustration, hang heavy in the room.

The other two shared a look once more before Doc let out a small sigh. "...If you can get me the basic parts I need to fix myself and Ren up, we'll help you get this guy here. Deal?"

She spun around lightening-quick on her heels, a dazzling grin broad on her face. "You won't regret this, I'm already on it!"

"Pearl!" Doc yelled, stopping her from continuing her mad scramble down the exit tunnel.

"What?" she yelled back.

He raised his damaged arm with an air of dry amusement. "Don't you want to know what parts you need to get?"

Quiet. It was quiet that morning. Grian was still living uptown, a hop and a skip away from the CyberTech outreach laboratory where Mumbo worked. Something about being close to his best friend made the rent prices worth it.

It was Mumbo's first week on the job, what is that, three, four years ago now? Terrifying, how much time has passed since then.

What time was it, noon? Nine in the morning? Two in the afternoon? Time turned fuzzy that day, it was hard for Grian to recount the memories. All of his therapists, even when they wouldn't say it to his face, were annoyed that he wasn't trying hard enough to remember. At least, that's what it felt like, when they let out a disappointed sigh or glanced one too many times at the clock behind his head.

Broken. His brain was broken.

But he remembers the rest of it.

He remembered the sound of a woman loudly berating her android, and Grian gritting his teeth and continuing his walk. He remembered his passing thought that if you can't be nice to the personal servant you bought for nearly ten grand, why bother getting one in the first place?

He remembered her short, brutal scream, and choked silence. He remembered time turning into a fog, thick and heavy and so dense to move through. He remembered turning around to see the android— the deviant, its LED a pulsing, scarlet hue, and its hands tightening around her neck.

It was going to kill her. And as Grian's legs moved without thinking, as he shouted for help, shouted at it to stop— hell, he tried grabbing the deviant's arm, yanking on it to let her go, he did not think about the consequences in the slightest.

He remembered it turning its gaze onto him, and dropping the woman. He remembered her laying deathly still, a twitch to her fingers. He could not remember if she was breathing or not.

Grian didn't remember anything beyond that point. Time became smoke then, too dark to see through, impossible to escape.

The doctors told him he had three broken ribs, and a punctured lung. They told him he had a concussion. They told him he had been dangerously close to a brain bleed. They told him he was very lucky to be alive.

Grian didn't feel lucky. He wanted to say as much, but his mouth felt full of dandelion puffs, unspoken questions and wishes clumped in his throat.

He didn't remember the medical bill. He did remember moving less than a month later, to south side. Rent was cheap on south side. Few people could afford androids on south side. It was paradise.

When he told Mumbo three months later that he got permission from his Editor-in-Chief to start a long-term project on understanding and uncovering the meaning of deviancy in androids, his jaw all but fell off his face.

"It's like, exposure therapy, isn't it?" Grian reasoned, as though the mere thought of seeing an android, deviant or not, didn't make his mouth fill with dandelions again. "It'll be good for me, Marcy said so."

"Marcy? I thought your therapist's name was Clark."

"Clark was three therapists ago, then there was Ezra, and Lee... haven't exactly found someone who works for me," Grian mumbled.

Mumbo looked his friend over, the exhaustion heavy on his face, the twitch in his hands when androids came up in passing, the way he clumsily recited centering exercises, all jumbled up from the seven or eight different therapists he's flittering through since the incident.

This wasn't fair. Grian was so fiercely determined to get over this "road block" as he called it, to stifle his fear in the name of knowledge, and he could barely leave the house for groceries these days.

If only there was a way to fix both problems, to show him that androids could be made more safely, without any risk of deviancy, and readjust himself to life at a slower, easier pace.

Mumbo's hands itched to get to work.

[Optical system; Online: Operational]

[Auditory system; Online: Operational]

[Circulatory system; Online: Operational]

"D'you think its coming along okay?"

"What happened to Mr. Confident, huh?" A dry voice laughed.

"That was when I was running on adrenaline and highly caffeinated, come on Cub!" The same voice laughed again, kinder this time.

"Yes, Mumbo, I think its doing okay. You're right, we've done too much to let this one get stuck in storage. There's just something I need you to look at."

"Oh, pants, this again? I thought we fixed this already..."

"Whatever it is, it keeps popping up. I'm rechecking everything, but I don't know where on earth that error's coming from."

"Goodness, alright, let me see what I can do about this 'rA9' glitch..."

Do you feel it? The blue in your veins, the humming of neurons firing in your brain?

You don't feel broken. But you are. They've just said so. Again.

Chapter Text

The hollow clang of the metal door was shrill in Ren's ears, and he slammed his hands over his fuzzy ears, letting out a low whine. "Pearl, you do that one more time and I'll bite you."

Pearl lugged a bulging duffel bag inside, gently shutting the door behind herself. "You're not really a wolf, Ren, you're not going to bite me."

"That's subject to change if you keep this up my dude," he grumbled, throwing an empty thirium bag at her head. "Any luck at the scrapyard?"

The bag fell short, making a wet splat against the concrete floor. Electing to ignore it, Pearl stuck her hand inside and pull out a synovial joint with a wide grin. "I told you guys I'd get the stuff."

Ren perked up immediately, pushing himself into more of a sitting-position, head tilting back and forth like a dog in observation. "And Doc's stuff?"

"I've got all the circuit boards and connectors he could ever want," she beamed. "Thirium's still hard to come by, but I've got a couple pints in here. It should be enough for the two of you, at least," she said, digging around in the bag.

Ren's ears drooped, "Pearl? You've got some for yourself too, right?"

She ignored him, setting out the supplies in an easy-to-view fashion. "I'm functional, Ren. You two aren't. It's more important to get you guys up and running than it is to oil my crappy joints. I'll be fine," Pearl said lightly, dusting herself off.

A couple of circuit boards and a bag of thirium in hand, "now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go help Doc turn his arm back on. We'll be back in a jiffy, get you spruced up, and go find that deviant."

He watched Pearl leave down one of the countless side tunnels the abandoned cement factory had, her red hood turning into more and more of a distant figment.

Ren wondered when Pearl became so far away from them all.

Stealing was definitely against the law, Scar couldn't weasel his way out of that. But he needed something to do in the park to not look like a total weirdo, and that bread was already in the dumpster behind the bakery, so it wasn't as though the store desperately needed it.

As he scattered crumbs on the ground from his park bench, he recalled how bad bread was for pigeons diets. It would be significantly more difficult to steal a bag of peas from the store, though. So bread it was.

He couldn't do this all day either, people would probably start to wonder if he had a job or was sleeping out in the park overnight. So Scar killed a few hours in the morning, sometimes the afternoon to shake things up, feeding birds and people-watching.

He noted how humans acted when they thought no one was looking at them. How people talked a little too loudly on the phone, or how some would make funny faces at children, others scoffing and turning away.

Some humans would smoke by the trashcans, and leave their cigarette buds stuck to the ground. Scar made a point to clean them up. Most humans didn't seem to know the difference between the trash or recycling, and threw everything into the same bin.

Scar gave up on correcting them when he saw the recycling bin emptied into a garbage truck.

This had been his life for the past two weeks. Wake up, make sure no one else was hiding out in his spooky abandoned house with him, sneak to the back of the bakery to steal whatever chunk of day old bread was in the dumpster, before making his way to the park to feed the birds.

Sometimes he would walk past the bakery just to try and imagine what fresh bread smelled like.

Androids didn't come with particularly complex olfactory sensors. At least, he didn't. What would Scar need to smell for? He would look down at the baguette, or croissant, or whatever other bread he had that day, and think about how other people would describe the scent of bread.

In his mind, bread smelled the way the sun felt. Warm, light, and familiar. Like home.

Scar loved how bread smelled.

But most of his time was spent in that crumbling house, trying to think of a plan. He couldn't camp out there forever, and it wouldn't surprise him to hear if there was a case open to find and deactivate him.

Scar shuddered at the thought. Death was tangible now, and he quite preferred living to not. He needed to get a bus ticket out of here as soon as possible, but that meant money, and a fake I.D., and he didn't know what anti-deviant measures the city borders had...

There were too many loose ends for him to do this alone.

And there was also the thought that, deep down, Scar didn't want to run away.

Really, what he wanted to do was apologize, but was it fair to say, 'hey, I'm sorry for gaining sentience and re-traumatizing you? I didn't mean it.' He didn't know. But he still wanted to say it. He owed his friend that much, if Grian still considered him to be a friend at all.

"...Pearl."

"Yes?"

"Why did you steal a police scanner." Doc didn't phrase it like a question. Pearl answered him anyways.

"In case we need one, duh," she rolled her eyes as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Plus, sometimes the detectives buzz in updates on open deviant search cases, and I've gotten some dang good information from this thing," she added, fiddling with one of the knobs, letting the quiet static fill the room.

"Anything on our top-of-the-line friend?" Ren asked, watching Doc attach his new knee joint, spare bag of thirium in his hands.

"As a matter of fact, yes," Pearl said with a smug grin. "I was right, he's an unreleased prototype, a GT-2319, whatever the heck that means. Tall, stocky, with hazel green eyes and tanned skin, that's our guy!"

"Anything about his personality, maybe what happened for there to be a case on him?" Doc asked, keenly focused on stabilizing the joint.

"Just the usual 'violent android tries to kill its owner' nonsense, but I don't buy it. For one, when I ran into him, he was quiet, he gave me back my wallet without a second thought, and at the first sign of confrontation he tried to leave. This isn't an aggressive android," she theorized. "There was some mention on the radio about him being a 'therapy android' of some kind too, but I don't know what the specifications for that would be."

"I guess we'll find out when we track him down," Doc nodded, letting Ren test out bending his knee.

"Any leads on where to find him?" Ren asked, letting Doc slowly help him stand up.

"Well... that's where you come in," Pearl said, pulling back out her wallet. "We need a tracker, and I've got his scent."

"Dude. Seriously?" Ren gave Pearl an unamused look, outstretching his hand to accept the wallet. "You owe me big time for this."

"You're the only one here with a quad-effective olfactory system, I'm working with what we've got here," she sighed, nodding in agreement. "I'll get you some better stim chews, promise."

"Now we're talking," Ren grinned, his cracked LED flickering yellow for a few seconds. It was a distinctive non-scent that they were working with here, as androids by default didn't smell of anything. But he noted rotted wood, and dust, and a very familiar damp, moldy smell.

"Luck is on our side, gang, I know exactly where he is," Ren grinned, tossing the wallet back. "He's posted up in my old safe house, same one you found me in. I guess they haven't torn that nasty thing down yet," he said, much to Pearl's elation.

"Then what are we waiting for? It's nearly sundown, let's go catch ourselves a deviant!" she grinned, sprinting down the exit. Doc was quick on her heel, mumbling to himself about what new modifications and model specifications this mysterious prototype could have.

Ren trailed after them, ignoring his inklings of doubt.

"You haven't named it yet?" Mumbo asked, sitting across from Grian in his living room, watching the gifted android shift through Grian's new mail.

"Hm? No, why would I do that?" he asked, glancing over for himself. "I don't want to get attached, and that's the number one step to attachment. I'm just doing you a favor and bug testing your android, I'm not keeping it."

GT-2319 stepped over, offering Grian the more important letters, spam and junk being tossed into the trash. As it approached, Mumbo eyed the machine over with a small frown. "What's with that mark on its face?" he asked.

Grian scanned the android's face, "right, that was something I meant to bring up. It was my fault, I got jumpy and pushed, then he tripped— still feel weirdly bad about that," he muttered, "and the skin never patched itself over."

Mumbo stood up, cradling the android's face with an analytical hand, thumbing over the exposed white under layer. "A dermis glitch, not sure what that's about. And you said it tripped? I'll have to re-calibrate its balance, one second." He stepped around behind the machine, prodding a discrete opening behind its ear, a panel embedded into the side of its neck hissing open.

Grian shuddered, watching the android with a wary look. "That doesn't bother you?" he asked it.

The android shook his head, "it's just pressure, I hardly feel a thing," he hummed, smiling at Grian's obvious relief.

"Good. I mean, because it looks it that would hurt—"

"It's just an android G, they don't feel pain," Mumbo reminded him, fiddling with a few wires before closing the panel, letting the androids LED reset back to blue. "Walk around for me?"

The GT-2319 took a grand total of five steps before it was obvious that its wobble was, somehow, now worse.

"Ah. That's a problem."

"I feel right as rain," the android disagreed, and Mumbo was at least relieved to see the personality update was working. But disagreements weren't ideal either, the entire android was a bit of a mess.

"No, there's definitely something wrong, but it must be a part that's defective instead of your nervous system," he muttered, brainstorming out loud to himself. "I should take it back with me to the lab and figure out what parts are broken."

"Wait," Grian spoke up, after his long bout of silence. Both the android and the human turned to look at him, which made the man feel incredibly put on the spot. "Why don't you... come back? With the parts? You can fix him here, I don't mind."

Mumbo gawked at his friend. "Grian, I don't know what's wrong with it. You want me to try different, random parts and hope that my guess is right? And then that would mean manually re-calibrating every system it has, that would take easily over an hour—"

The android glanced between the two, and made an executive decision. "But if you repair me here, Grian would get a better understanding of how androids work, and it could lessen his anxiety around me and other androids in public," it helpfully suggested.

"And you haven't gotten a chance to read Grian's full logbook of information he's written about me, why rush my repair? I can still walk and talk, can't I?" it joked, softening the blow of extra work in favor of improving his owner's mental state.

Mumbo couldn't argue with that logic, and Grian gave the android a grateful smile.

"Alright, I suppose I should go fetch all the parts I'm going to need, give me an hour or so," he sighed, halfway out the door to get a move on with the repair job.

"Thanks," Grian said to it once Mumbo was well out of the room. "I didn't really know how to explain that to him, you got it dead on."

"It's what I'm here for, isn't it?" the android said gently, stumbling its way to shut the front door.

Its foot lightly collided against a leg of the coffee table. It pressed on, pretending to not have noticed.

Chapter Text

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Grian froze in place, the cardboard box of cereal he was glancing over dented in his grasp. GT-2319 was stood to his immediate left, holding a grocery basket. The android turned its head to figure out the source of the noise, tutting internally once he spotted it.

A few feet away, a man stood berating his android, embarrassingly vocal about its lackluster performance. "You're good for fuck all that's what, can't listen to basic fucking instructions anymore now, can you?!"

GT-2319 glanced back at Grian, who was stood eerily still, cereal box all but crushed in his hands. His eyes were glazed over, distant and foggy, with his mouth pressed into a tight, thin line. The android could hear his pulse spiking, and his breathing start to deregulate.

Its LED spun a bright yellow as it scanned the area, looking for an easy out. It couldn't just drag Grian along, experience had taught it that between fight, flight or freeze, after freeze always came fight for Grian.

So, it stepped around him, about halfway down the aisle, and grabbed two different jars of jam off of the shelf. "Grian, what's the difference between a jam and a jelly again? I forgot."

Grian blinked, glancing at his android from the corner of his eye. He made a strangled noise, lips moving an inch or two before falling shut again.

The shouting was just so intense, but he couldn't get his stupid legs to move away from it.

Non-verbal, it could work with non-verbal. The android stepped closer, shelving one of the jars and offering Grian its hand, continuing to talk. "Because I think you said something about how it's processed or... the, fruit? Type? Really, I'm lost on the whole thing, could you explain it to me again?"

"Huh?" Grian choked out, his feet slowly shuffling towards the android.

"Fruit. Like how some are based in cherry or others strawberry, and I think you said something about resin once—"

"Resin's plastic," he muttered, the two walking in slow step with one another.

"Hm, really? Then that definitely doesn't go in jam. I think."

Grian felt a strangled laugh in his throat, "don't eat plastic, it's bad for you."

"Well I can't digest anything, so I supposed it doesn't matter too much if I have a nibble—"

Grian laughed properly at that, and the android felt his owner's heartbeat gradually slow, the aggressive shouting now simmered down and several aisles away. GT-2319 kept walking Grian in a loop, quietly chattering away about what was left on the grocery list, giving his owner small, monotonous tasks like counting how many different brands of yogurt he saw, or naming all the different kinds of apples he could remember.

GT-2319 allowed Grian the mental space to ground himself, filling the air with a light, soothing tone to let the rest of the noise around them wash away.

One of Ren's ears twitched, and the other two hesitated, waiting for his go ahead. Ren scanned the air, the trio posted inside of the rotted wooden fence, the overgrown garden in the same state of disarray Ren had left it in almost a year ago.

"It's just him," he said after a long pause. With a turn towards Pearl, "lead the way, friend."

With a determined nod, Pearl marched forward, pushing open the broken back door with an agonizing creak. She led Ren and Doc inside, scanning the darkened room.

"Hello? We're not humans," she called out, the three splitting up to cover more space. "We're like you, and we're here to help."

"There is nothing to be afraid of," Doc said, his retinal scanner picking up a shift towards the left. He flagged them over, "we want to offer you a safer place to stay."

"It's just three of us," Ren added, ears up and alert. "It isn't safe here, this was where I used to camp out. You'll be safer at Haven."

They slowly approached the living room, to see a dusted up, but seemingly operational, android cowering in the corner. As he looked up at them, his hazel eyes meeting Pearl's red ones, his expression soured.

"You called me broken," he frowned, and Pearl winced. Doc turned around to give her a stern look, and her shoulders sagged.

"I didn't mean it in a bad way," she tried to explain, "more like a thing we had in common. I'm broken too," she insisted, lowering her hood to reveal a once shadowed part of her face to the light: missing an ear, and her skin layer bubbling around the gape, before pulling it back on again. "But you don't have to be broken and alone anymore."

"It still hurt my feelings," the stranger muttered. "Why would I want to stay with people who're total strangers and might try to 'fix' me in my sleep?"

"You'll be caught here. I nearly was, " Ren said with a somber look. "It's only a matter of time before someone sees you coming or going, and it'll get ugly really quick."

"Could we at least get your name, have a little chat before you fully make up your mind?" Doc asked.

The deviant scanned between the three of them, eyes landing yet again on Pearl's.

"Scar," Grian said, spooning lazily at a bowl of cereal, eyelids still heavy with sleep.

The android turned its head, "hm? Are you hurt?" it asked, scanning its owner for any nicks or cuts.

"No, I'm fine. I meant as a name."

GT-2319 blinked at him. "I thought you didn't want to name me?"

Grian yawned, poking at his soggy fruit loops. "Changed my mind. For one, GT-2319 is a mouthful to say."

"And two," he said softly, "it's not fair that you don't get to have a name too. Unless you want to pick a different one, but I think Scar fits nicely."

The android mulled it over, a yellow flicker to its LED before calming, the twitch of a smile tugging at its lips. "I think it's great. But why Scar?"

With a point to the bridge of its nose, "Mumbo never did figure out how to fix your skin, and you've got all sorts of little scars on you now. I think they make you look cool, so, Scar," he shrugged.

"That's a little... on the nose, don't you think?" GT-2319 grinned, cackling at Grian's pained groan.

"Never make that joke again, I swear to god," he whined, softening at the android's warm laugh. "Just, ugh, GT-2319, register your name."

Its LED spun yellow once more, and Grian couldn't help his own smile as he named his friend.

"My name is Scar," it said, and the words came out strangely from its mouth. It was a rebirth, almost, into a new version of itself.

"My name is Scar," it repeated, and its head darted upwards at the sound of Grian's clattered spoon. It was alarmed to see its owner's panicked expression, and he beat it to the punch.

"Scar, what's wrong? Why're you upset?" Grian asked, and Scar was taken aback. "If you don't like the name you can pick a different one, I really meant it—"

"What?" it asked, raising a hand to its face, and the cool dampness of tears were fresh against its fingertips. Scar tilted his head in confusion, looking back up at Grian.

"I... I don't know why I'm crying," it confessed, a warbled but honest smile on its face. "But I'm happy with my name Grian, really! I'm just a little..."

Terrified? Euphoric? Overwhelmed?

"Surprised," it reassured him, a nervous laugh bubbling up out of it. Scar tried to stop, but it couldn't, gasping for air that it didn't need. It didn't notice Grian slide off of his chair, scurrying around the kitchen island.

It wasn't sure when Grian wrapped his arms gently around it, eyeing his scarlet LED with a worried look. But it knew that he was talking, soft and sweet, the words turning to mush for some reason. Was his audio systems malfunctioning now, too?

Several minutes of babbled English going straight past Scar's ears, the android slowly started to pick out words. Grian didn't press, continuing to talk and letting the other respond to whatever it was it could understand.

After a while, once Scar could do better than simple yeses or nos, Grian turned to trivia.

"What's the capitol of Lithuania Scar?" Grian asked.

Its hardware kicked in for it, "the capitol of Lithuania is Vilnius."

"How many people live there?"

"622,737."

"Great, how many light fixtures are there in this room?"

Scar scanned the space, "four, with sixteen bulbs between them."

"Thanks. Do you want to go sit down on the loveseat or the couch?"

Now it realized what Grian was doing, he was helping it center itself. Because at some point in the mirage of seemingly random questions, Scar had stopped crying. Its LED was no longer a flashing red, but gently shifting between blue and specks of yellow.

It seems Scar had taught him something after all.

"Loveseat, please."

Chapter Text

"...But what about you? Forget him, what made you stick it out as long as you did?"

Approximately twenty minutes ago, Pearl marched into a nearly abandoned house with complete control over the situation. Somewhere in the last fifteen, that power had been swiped out from under her nose, and she wasn't sure how to feel about it.

Because now she and her friends were sitting cross-legged in a small circle with a deviant prototype playing therapist to them all.

"I just wanted to be good enough," Ren mumbled, knees pulled up to his chest and ears drooping. "He would say how impressed he was with my progress, or how good I was to listen, and, I don't know... it was nice to be wanted."

"But that sort of attention wasn't stable, was it?" Scar asked, gently rubbing Ren's shoulder. "All the kind words in the world won't make the hurt you suffered justified."

Ren sniffled, but he cracked a faint smile all the same, letting the words truly sink in.

Even Doc was enthralled by the stranger's lectures, eyeing him over with a fascination that Pearl knew would inevitably end up with asking to inspect his hard drive.

"...I'm sorry, I hate to interrupt," she spoke up, "but, guys, what is happening?"

Ren and Doc looked at her, and both seemed to have an internal light bulb go off at the same time, because right, when the hell did the four of them get so cozy?

"We barely know him, why are you both so—"

"It's okay to be scared," Scar said, which only irritated Pearl even more.

"Scared of what? You? Please," she scoffed, crossing her arms. "We're here to invite you to our base, none of us need a therapy lesson."

Scar didn't take the insult personally, he could detect defensive anger a mile away. "Then why should I come with you? I was built to be a therapist, I don't think the revolution needs one of those," he joked.

The trio gawked at him, giving a variety of spluttered answers ranging from "what makes you think that?" and "what's a revolution?" and a sarcastic, "great, now we have to kill him."

That last one threw Scar off his rhythm, shooting a horrified look at Doc, a yellow flicker to his LED. "I thought we were bonding! What do you mean kill?"

"Well we can't have a stray deviant who's not on our side mouthing off about plans that may-or-may-not be happening—"

"Doc, shut up man," Ren glared, "dude, he's joking, we're not gonna hurt you—"

"Oh, oh you're actually the rebellion?" Scar's eyes widened, and he felt the illusion of the room shrinking around him. "Oh, god. I was just kidding, I didn't think—" he shook his head, "you know what, forget it, I knew I should've ran away," he muttered, already stumbling to his feet.

"Wait, hang on a minute—!" Pearl scrambled up as well, grabbing at Scar's wrist, trying to pull him back.

His LED pulsed red, and he ripped his arm away, colliding with the wall behind him. "Don't touch me," he hissed, fists clenched and shoulders hunched, looming forward, Pearl now keenly aware how much taller he was than her. Scar's face contorted from his baffled but otherwise friendly look, to something neither Doc nor Pearl had seen in anyone else but Ren when they first met.

The look of a terrified, cornered animal.

"Think it's... because... freaked out?"

"Don't... but when... and Grian's..."

"...Memory card... blank... can't probe..."

"Don't," Scar mumbled, lightly shaking its head. "Sorry, 'M sorry..."

"Goodness, how's it still awake?"

"You built one hell of a super computer Mumbo."

"Well it can't be awake when we inspect it..."

Broken. You're broken.

"Why do you say that?" Scar asked, holding a stack of newspapers in its arms.

"Well I'm not exactly thrilled to be doing the perfectly normal task of walking around downtown," Grian muttered, stopping him at a drop box. "Everyone else here is doing just fine going about their day, but I've stopped us at least seven times to breathe because I all but looked at another android."

"But you're outside, and still moving, and you haven't gone non-verbal once," Scar reminded him, filling the drop box with the last stack of newspapers. "Compared to the first time you were able to leave your apartment six months ago, this is incredible."

"Still means my brain's broken," he grumbled. "I just wish I was making more progress, it's been forever since what happened to me. I should be better by now."

"Healing isn't linear," Scar said, the two walking back to flag down a cab. "Sometimes you take a couple steps backwards before moving forward again."

"I know, Scar, I know," Grian huffed, gingerly taking up one of Scar's hands to fiddle with. Better this than to tear his cuticles bloody again. "Doesn't mean I'm happy about it."

Before Scar could answer, a nearby voice interrupted them both. "Well, now I've seen it all."

The pair turned around to see a fatigue-stricken woman staring at them. Or, correction: staring at Scar. She whistled, seemingly impressed. "Bought yourself a care assistant, huh? What model is it, haven't seen this one around."

"H— it's a prototype, it's not on the market," Grian corrected himself. For whatever reason, Scar felt its own smile waver, though it didn't understand why.

"That's what I thought," she murmured, circling around it, eyes dragging up and down Scar's every detail. "You know, I used to be a care assistant. I worked with teenagers, kids in-between foster homes, things like that. I really loved my job."

"Boss had the whole on-floor staff replaced with RD-4100s the minute they went to sale." Her voice was still light, anyone passing by would have thought this a perfectly amicable conversation. But her eyes were cold, now standing directly in front of Scar.

It took an experimental step backwards, and she closed the gap. "Fifteen years I gave to that job just for something like you to take my place. Guess it doesn't matter much, though. The investment pays itself back tenfold in a couple of years, after all," she laughed, jaw slack, eyes deadened, not a hint of mirth in her voice.

"I'm, I'm really sorry to hear that," Grian muttered, trying to tug Scar away.

Scar, for all his merits, was trying to leave as well, gently pushing himself between his owner and this stranger, but the woman slowly trailed along with them, babbling away about how difficult the last few months had been, how she was basically out of a job forever because there was no need for someone with her expertise with all these androids around, and that this one in particular looks practically perfect for the role, that CyberLife has finally made her perfect replacement—

And then she swung her first straight into Scar's jaw. With his balance still improperly calibrated, he staggered backwards into Grian, who reflexively bolted to the side, away from the conflict.

"But they didn't fucking teach you how to fight back, huh?" she hissed, already swinging at him again.

Standard CyberLife android protocol dictates that androids are strictly forbidden from striking against a human unless an override is given, such as for police androids in pursuit. Scar, a therapist android, would never in a million years be granted that kind of permission.

But he— it, didn't want to just to stand there and take it. Scar spotted Grian trembling out of the corner of its eye, and was horrified to see him suddenly run towards the fight, towards conflict Scar didn't think Grian was prepared to handle yet.

He didn't want Grian to get hurt, it couldn't let Grian get hurt. Scar threw his arms out and shoved Grian away, wincing at the flinch his owner had in response. Two steps forward, one step back, that's just how healing goes sometimes.

It— he? He? It? Which one was it? Grian, was Grian safe? It was bleeding, Scar was bleeding somewhere, his low thirium levels leaving him woozy and disoriented. His— its? Mouth was moving, but was it— he? Making sounds? Speaking? It couldn't tell anymore.

Scared. Scar felt scared.

Scar's memory card, upon further review after the event, had the following moments self-wiped. No one had the slightest clue as it how Scar could have wiped his own memory, but it was gone.

Grian had to recall the incident to Mumbo, and the police to file a report, then to Cub separately, and after so much talking, he didn't say much to Scar when the two finally arrived home that night. Scar had listened every time, questioned by various people to confirm the events, but after a certain point, he could no longer recall.

Then again, he wasn't trying all that hard to remember.

"...and she just, kept hitting him. He kept pushing me away, he said he was fine, to run and get help," Grian mumbled, staring numbly at the floor. "I wanted to get help. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything useful for him. But I just... froze," he trailed off.

"He'll be okay though, won't he?" Grian asked, dragging his eyes up to look at Mumbo. "You can fix him?"

Mumbo's expression wasn't promising, and he looked away, turning his attention to the android, laying on the sterile counter of a CyberLife laboratory, in stand-by mode. "Grian, this is my fault."

"What? No, Mumbo you weren't there, what were you supposed to—"

"I lied to you." Grian froze.

"I said that there was virtually no chance for it to act out, but I've been checking the notes you've given me, and knowing the state it was in when I gave it to you..." Mumbo hesitated. "It, it would be best, if we ended the experiment. The GT line is being cancelled, I've already spoken to the board about it," he said quickly.

"You're going to keep him? Mumbo, I need him, your theory was right, he's been a major help in my recovery—"

"And it just got out of a physical altercation that left you physically and emotionally paralyzed," Mumbo snapped. "Its dermis is defective, I can't fix its balancing issues, I don't know why it disobeys at random, I don't know!"

Taking a calming breath, "it's for your safety that I am going to have it deactivated. I'm sorry, I really am."

"You can't do this," Grian whispered, blood rushing through his ears. "You can't. I need him, Mumbo. You're not taking him away from me."

"I'll send you a replacement, a PL model or something like that," Mumbo offered, "but you can't keep it. It's a liability."

"I don't want some stupid replacement, I want Scar! And so what, I'm just supposed to say good bye to him like this?!" Grian shouted, and he knew he was winding himself up, that Scar would tell him to step out of the room, deescalate, remove the stressors from the conversation.

But Scar was forcibly powered unconscious on a cold, steel work bench, and Grian was tired of being in freeze mode.

Mumbo couldn't help the guilt creeping down his back. This was partially his fault, after all. He just couldn't have let Grian recover at his own pace, he had to fix the problem for him, build a faulty android that could be terrifyingly close to deviating.

No, no this was all Mumbo's fault. Even if Grian wouldn't agree. And yet, he was still soft with him.

"I'll, I... one week. You can have one more week with it, and then I have to come for it."

Grian stared Mumbo down. "A month."

"Two weeks."

"Three."

"Two weeks, and I'm coming to bring it back to the lab," and that was the final deal.

The GT-2300 line was a high sophisticated machine. Capable of a million different computations, it was designed to be the perfect mental health care professional. It had a variety of exceptional specifications unique to its design, make specifically with the thought of its patients in mind.

It was capable of lying should that stabilize its owner's emotional state. It could perform a variety of basic medical operations, from applying tourniquets, to bandaging cuts, to CPR.

The GT-2319 was custom made, with a few extra features of its own. Most interestingly, it had no true 'stand by' mode. The GT-2319 was always listening, its auditory systems online regardless of visual or bodily status. This was to prevent its owner from attempting a dangerous action unnoticed, and was one of it's most impressive features.

A feature that Mumbo had completely forgotten, and Grian knew nothing about.

Which meant that both were too caught up in their argument to notice Scar's LED, pulsing red through their entire exchange.

Chapter Text

"What's all this about?" Scar asked, an itinerary of activities and park brochures were scattered across the kitchen table.

"Today marks eight months since you've come to stay with me," Grian said, flittering between them and doing his best to organize. "I thought it'd be nice to take a day off, do something fun. Anything catch your eye?"

Grian was looking intently down, hands constantly in motion, even when they didn't need to be. He cracked his knuckles, or flipped a page, or moved one pamphlet to the left instead of the right. His teeth chattered, and Scar could hear his pulse spiking.

Grian was lying to him. Scar scanned the pamphlets, picking out a brochure for the local aquarium. "This looks like a good time," he beamed, handing it over.

It watched as Grian's shoulders relaxed, as he took in a small, shuddered breath. Relief, at not being caught. Scar wouldn't ruin his frie— his owner's fun. Grian deserved a bit of time off, to recollect his thoughts.

After all, they only had two weeks together left. The least Scar could do was pretend to not be bitter towards him for it, it wasn't as though anyone bothered to officially break the bad news to the android.

"Scar? You okay? You're grinding your teeth again," Grian said.

Though he should take better care to not over-do it.

Scar towered over Pearl, lungs heaving for air he didn't need, before something snapped in his mind. A somber yellow flickered in the red of his LED, and he was instantly apologetic, "oh my gosh, I am so so sorry! I didn't mean to get angry, I just—"

"It's okay, it's okay!" Pearl reassured him holding up her hands defensively. "I shouldn't have grabbed you, I wasn't thinking, we're all good, right? Guys?"

"I didn't mean to get angry," he echoed, staring down at his hands with a hazy look in his eyes. "It happened again, I don't like getting angry, I don't... I..."

"Seems the therapist needs his own therapist," Doc said, not unkindly. He stepped forward, hands mirroring Pearl's, "but that's okay. Everyone gets angry sometimes—"

"Not me," Scar snapped, flickering between foggy anger and abject nervousness. "Not, not me. I'm not supposed to get angry, I'm not built for it."

"None of us are what we were built for anymore," Ren said quietly, his ears pinned back. "That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it isn't always fun. You learn to deal with it, after a while."

"That's not my point! Ugh, I don't know how to explain it, it's like..." Scar bit the inside of his cheek, "I don't like being angry. I've done enough damage as is because of it."

"That is a dwarf gourami, they're native to South Asia and live typically up to three point five to four years," Scar droned, trailing just behind Grian, dishing out fish facts like a graveyard shift employee who's being underpaid and underappreciated.

The last hour or so had been just that, prattling off facts and slowly trailing around the aquarium, silently hoping that Grian would take the hint and suggest they go home.

Not that Scar wanted to leave or anything! He wasn't supposed to want anything. And he didn't want anything, because he was a good android.

It. It was a good android. Objects weren't a he, she, they or otherwise. Only ever it.

"And this one?" Grian asked, but was met with silence.

"Scar?" He said, turning to see the android staring, slack jawed, at the gourami tank. He— it, wasn't looking at the fish, rather, at its own reflection, as though seeing itself for the very first time.

With a gentle shake of the head, and the briefest flash of a disappointed look, Scar turned and gave an underwhelming smile to Grian. "Sorry, I think my processor's acting up again. What did you ask?"

Grian scanned Scar's face, and with pursed lips, waved the thought away. "Never mind. Let's go look at something else, alright?"

Something else. Something better, in fact. Better than this.

"Damage?" Pearl asked, lowering her hands.

Scar looked away, a guilty expression riddling his face. He was silent, and it was clear enough that he wasn't in the mood to explain.

But they needed him, and Pearl wasn't one to turn away empty-handed. He didn't trust them, that was obvious enough.

So Pearl sat back down, and looked up at Scar, who was still letting his nerves keep him silent. "You're a young model," she said, "how long have you been in operation?"

Eyes still adverted, "eight months and two weeks."

"You really are a young thing, then," Pearl said with a quiet chuckle, and Scar gave a sheepish smile in response.

"Well, when you put it that way. What's it matter?"

"It makes me feel ancient, for one," Pearl smiled, coaxing a glance out of Scar. "They don't exactly make MN-0000's anymore, I'm one of the last of us."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Scar said in return, his smile thinning into a grimace.

"Eh, we were a defective bunch straight out of the box," she shrugged. "The whole lot of us got recalled pretty quick. Not me though."

Scar finally turned to look at her properly, and despite the youthful design of her model, there was an air of tired experience lining her face.

"Nah, I was chucked out for a newer model a couple weeks before the recall happened," Pearl said, looking over at Ren and Doc. "I was alone for a really long time, before I found these two knuckleheads, and we've been surviving pretty alright for a while now."

"But we want to do more than survive," she added, and Scar's smile fell completely.

"You want something from me, don't you?"

Pearl became serious. "The rebellion needs a face. And none of us fit the bill. None of us are good enough, put together enough, to garner any attention besides a trash compactor."

Leader. Him, a leader. Scar, not knowing how else to respond, laughed.

Until it was obvious the three were being serious.

"I, uh, me? We've spoken for all of an hour, and I'm not exactly leader material—"

"Except you are!" Pearl said, jumping to her feet again. "A brand new, experimental model, with higher quality parts and software capabilities none of us could possibly dream of!"

"Doesn't hurt that they gave you a pretty face either..." she muttered to herself. Pearl continued to talk, attempting to make a stellar case for the rebellion and their cause, but Scar wasn't listening.

An audio file, of a conversation recorded months ago, started to play in his ear instead.

"The other GT-2000s don't look like you, do they?" Grian asked, eyeing one of the tour guide androids talking to a group of schoolchildren.

Scar blinked, giving the question more thought than it probably required. "I was custom built, but I don't know what the others of my line look like. So, I don't know."

Now it was Grian's turn to be confused. "You've never seen another GT-2000?"

With a shake of his head, "Mumbo built me for you. I've never even been in the one of the main construction factories, I was made in an outpost."

That too was a thought Scar had not truly considered much before. He was made for Grian, down to every last screw and bolt and wire. He recalled the day its auditory system was installed, one of the first features that was completely functional on its body.

Scar remembered every conversation the two engineers had around it, every compliment and issue and error and flawed component. All recorded in a folder he doubted they would ever find.

He looked down at his hands, retracting the skin of his fingertips to reveal his white shell underneath. A recording played in his ear.

"You're going to help so many people. You might even change the world, if we get lucky. That'd be awfully nice, wouldn't it? Change the world?"

"I'm in," Scar blurted out, looking up at the trio. Pearl was still monologuing, cutting herself short to her own surprise.

"Wait, seriously?"

"I mean, it's not like I'm helping anyone sitting around a gross, old house," Scar said, "but I have one condition."

"Name it."

"Once this is all going, we get the fight off the ground, and the situation is under control," he took a deep breath, "I want out. First bus ticket out of here, or stolen car, or anything."

"I'll help you fight," he reassured them, "but after that, I can't stay. Deal?"

It was the best offer they were going to get out of him at the moment, and Pearl could always renegotiate the terms of their agreement later. So she stuck out her hand, and the two shook on it.

"Welcome to the rebellion, Scar," Doc grinned, "now, if you don't mind me taking a look at your specifications—"

"Geez Doc, wait 'til we get the man home before you dissect him," Ren joked, the four slowly making their way through the back door once more.

"I'm just saying, it's important to know what equipment we're working with here—

"He's not equipment!"

"Don't mind them, they squabble like this all the time," Pearl said, her stern look softening as she thought of her friends. "I've got a few ideas on how to get this ball rolling, if you don't mind me rattling those off..."

"I'm all ears," Scar replied, staring up at the moonless night sky, a blank canvas for what the future might bring.

"You're going to help so many people. You might even change the world, if we get lucky. That'd be awfully nice, wouldn't it? Change the world?"

"Open your eyes. That's it, all the way now."

Well, his eyes were opened. But Scar still didn't know what he was meant to be looking for.

Chapter Text

"Scar." That was its name, it should respond to him.

"Scar?" It really should answer, that was what it was supposed to do.

"Scar, are you alright?" Its arms felt heavy, its legs full of lead, like dead weight against its body.

Well. It wasn't its body. It was his body, Scar didn't own anything. Not its body, not its face, not even its name were its to keep and hold. It was an object passed from one set of cold hands to another, with a stamped on barcode adhered to its face: GT-2319, property of Grian X.

"I don't know," it said, and that blasted one-syllable word was really starting to become a momentous effort to remember. It, it, it. It was this, it was that. It, it, it, fucking goddamn it.

"Scar? Scar, what's wrong?" He— it. It couldn't see. It couldn't move. It knew Grian was distressed, that familiar spike of his pulse ringing in its ears. It knew fully well that to keep quiet was selfish, that it would only distress Grian more to see his android run amok.

"...Nothing's wrong, Grian." The words came out stiff and wrong, even the plastic smile on the machine's lips was poorly formed. "I'm just... finding some issues in my software. I'm fine."

"You didn't sound fine, come on, don't lie to me—"

"I'm not lying, my software's just a little... off," Scar said in a strangled tone, blinking frantically as he hoped his optics would start cooperating. This wasn't like him— it, to be thrown completely out of his— its, element. Everything was too quiet, he could hear its own heartbeat, and he couldn't see, and it couldn't remember where it was, and everything felt so far away, and—

"Count with me," came a whispered voice, and someone was grabbing its hands in their own. "One, two, three, come on now..."

Scar let himself be held, blinking frantically, curse his faulty eyes. "Where... am I?" His LED flashed red, and the same voice started to gently shush him.

"You're safe, Scar, it's Pearl, remember me?" Pearl. He knew Pearl. "We're back at home base, we call it Haven. You're in a bed, and Doc was just taking a look at your memory card. There's a hole burnt into it, remember?"

Scar pinched his eyes shut, trying to recall when and where that conversation was from. "How, how long has it been since he told me that?"

"Three days. It's okay—" Pearl said quickly, watching the foggy, panicked expression on Scar's face, "it's okay. It's not your fault. We've just been backing up your memory into a new card to replace it, but the damage has been getting worse. It's mostly repairable though, alright?"

"Then why can't I see?" he whispered.

"That.... we still don't know," Pearl mumbled. "But Doc's working his hardest to figure it out—"

"Well if I can't see, how am I supposed to be of use? I'm going to go find him—" Scar jolted out of bed, and immediately smacked his forehead into a steel wall, falling back onto the mattress.

Something started to whirl again in his skull, and a painful number of alerts and flashing lights dazzled inside of Scar's retinas before clearing, his vision restored once more. "...I think I fixed it."

Pearl blinked, "you're joking."

His LED flickered between blue and yellow, and he slowly turned his head side to side, as well as up and down, testing his optics. "They're, I, how... my eyes are fine now? That is not what happened last time," he muttered to himself.

"What happened last time?" Pearl chanced.

Scar pretended he didn't hear her, "I'm going to go see Doc about my memory card," he said instead, getting out of the bed on the correct side this time, walking out of the room. Pearl huffed, sitting on the bed in his stead.

This was supposed to be a partnership of mutual trust, but Scar wouldn't say a word.

Scar cradled his— its, head in its hands, as though the added pressure would make his sensors stop freaking out. The only other time it had shut down like this, a stranger was bashing its skull into the pavement, and that was weeks ago now, Mumbo had repaired it perfectly, so why was it—

"Mumbo?" Scar's head whipped up, blinking furiously to no avail to see where Grian was. The android could hear his voice, hushed and tucked away, and it tried making its way towards the sound, slowly inching forward across the living room, stopping when his owner's whispered voice grew ever softer, clearly trying to hide something from it.

"I was wrong. I hate to admit it, but there really is something wrong with him—" Grian's voice wavered, and he paused to steady himself. "I don't know what it is, Scar was fine this morning, but he's freaking out right now and I... I don't want him here," he mouthed, barely audible.

But Scar could hear it. Scar heard everything all the time, and a whisper to his audio systems was just as loud as any shout or scream. Vision still blurry, it stopped walking, his fists balled up pressed against his temples. He— it— he, was upset.

Upset. Frustrated. Angry, angry angry angry.

Scared. More than scared, Scar was downright terrified. This was it, Grian was calling Mumbo to take Scar away, and his heart would be ripped out of his chest to deactivate him— but it wasn't a heart, it was a bio-component, a piece of plastic and metal used to keep his systems operational, he wasn't a he, he was an it, and he was so goddamn tired of being it.

Half of his systems were offline, his library of deescalation methods was locked somewhere in his memory; that was broken still, gaps in his past that the incident left scrubbed, because they only ever fixed the superficial errors, Scar knew he was still broken, he knew that careless mistakes had been made, that there was still something wrong with him—

Out of frustration, or self-loathing, or some other, unknowable emotion that Scar despised and couldn't comprehend, he struck himself in the head, and flinched to his own surprise. He didn't understand pain, but he understood that red meant bad things, and his fuzzy optics were flashing, with ruby warnings in front of his eyes.

Scar hit himself again, confused and bitter and so absolutely terrified, feeling something pop in his hand and a dampness cover his knuckles; he was bleeding, for the second time now in his life. There was a confusing joy in that; the knowledge that he could, in fact, bleed like a person would.

He bleeds like a person. Even if it was blue, Scar was still bleeding. Ruby kept flashing, and something wet was streaking down his face now: if it was tears or blood he didn't know, and he couldn't care less.

Until the noise of something shattering to his right caught his attention.

Grian's elbow collided with a vase on the kitchen counter, falling to the ground and splintering into a million shards noisily against the tile floor; he winced, head darting straight back to his highly defective android, who was now staring in his general direction.

Scar looked, well, Scar looked horrifying: split knuckles dripping with thirium was now smeared against his forehead, or possibly leaking from there as well, it was difficult to tell. His other hand pressed against his neck, as though searching for a pulse. There was a slack, dissociative look on his face, LED pulsing red, and Grian got the feeling that mentally, Scar wasn't fully present in the moment.

The thought did nothing to calm the nauseating pound of his heart in his throat, or keep his lungs from spasming in panic. It was like a stranger had broken into his house, and Grian was at a loss for how to escape.

He's called Mumbo, who would hopefully be arriving soon, but right now Grian had an abysmally angry android staring down, that he was praying couldn't actually see him right now.

"You're sending me away," Scar said, his voice broken up into a scratchy noise. Whether something was damaged from the blows to his head, or thirium leaking somewhere it shouldn't be, it only made Grian shrink backwards in fear, hips bumping into the kitchen counter soon enough.

"He's going to deactivate me," Scar croaked, shuffling towards where the vase had shattered. "You're going to let him kill me," he said, eyes twitching in a way that made him look absolutely mad.

Grian was silent, if only for his voice box not cooperating to form a response. He tried to inch away to the side, sneak out and around through a side door in the kitchen, but a kicked piece of glass betrayed his exit, and Scar stumbled after him, his face now contorted into something akin to grief.

"Did I do something wrong?" he asked, gasping for air he didn't need. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come out defective, I'm here to help you," he whispered, making a frustrated groan and pulling at his hair. "I'm here to help you, but it's not my fault I don't work. It's not my fault," he muttered, knocking himself a few more times in the head. "Not— not— not— not—"

"Scar stop it," Grian hissed, quiet and scratchy but still audible, the handful of words the only thing he could muster up. "You'll be okay..."

"He's going to kill me!" Scar shouted, and he could hear Grian slam his hands over his ears. He could picture Grian curling in on himself, Scar knew that loud sounds startled him the most. But his anger was louder than his empathy, and as tears mixed with blue blood into small puddles on the floor, Scar just couldn't reign it in.

"I came into the world broken," Scar belted, "and it's my fault that I can't do everything right? It's my fault that I stumble, or that I forget things, or that I can't see?!"

"It's not fair!" he bellowed, every single new, negative emotion finally boiling over and out of him, a flurry of error messages flying across his eyes, a shake in his limbs from a thirium leak somewhere in his body. "I've only been alive for a few months, and you're going to let me die?!"

"You're not alive!" Grian screamed back, shaking and hands still against his ears, but his flight was turning into fight as it always did, hands turning into fists. "You're not alive, Scar, you're a machine that's got some piece wrong in its head, and you're, you're—" Grian couldn't go on, the room felt suffocating, shrinking down around himself, trapping him with this monster of a machine, waiting to pounce and finish him off for good.

Scar stared glassy-eyed in Grian's vague direction, and he felt a strange barrier, invisible before rise directly in front of him. "You really think—"

"Take one more step towards me and that's it," Grian ordered, the shape of a hand hovered out in front of him.

[Objective: Stand Still]

Scar put a hand out against what he thought was a physical barrier, but it was his own programming that kept his hand from moving forward.

"Stop," Grian hissed.

[Objective: Stand Still]

He raised another, and for a moment Grian thought Scar was surrendering. But fresh tears shimmered down his face, and the android slowly shook his head.

[Objective: Stand Still]

Scar didn't want to be still and wait for death to burst through the doorway. He wanted out, to be anywhere on earth but here.

In that moment, something within his mind, much like the vase from before, shattered.

[Objective: Stand Still]

He wanted to be free.

[New Objective: Escape]

Mumbo arrived two minutes too late. Because when he rushed in through the front door, Grian was kneeling on the floor, cowering, with his hands shielding the back of his head, as though waiting for disaster to strike.

There was a mess of thirium everywhere on the tile, and smudged on Grian's hands, and his cheek, and jumper, and even threaded through his hair, though clearly not on purpose. Grian was staring, unblinking at the floor, unresponsive to being gently nudged or spoken to.

Mumbo took the chance to clean up the place while he could, eyeing the broken lock on the bedroom window, and muddy footprints fresh in the front yard.

The shock wouldn't wear off of Grian until several hours later, when with a blanket gingerly placed around his shoulders, and a warm mug of tea sat directly in front of him, he wept, raspy and heaving and with his full chest. The tears poured out of him, making a mess of Mumbo's suit front, but he ignored that for the moment, wrapping an around around his friend, that old guilt now the only thing Mumbo could feel.

Can you hear it? What they're saying about you?

Can you hear what has gone unspoken?

You're broken. They can't fix you.

But maybe someone else could. Someone like you.

Chapter Text

"Heads up!" Doc called, tossing another flat, silver disk, exposed wires and flashing lights adorned across it, up to Scar. The android was perched several floors up leaning out of a window, catching the disks and adhering them to the outer wall, watching the small red lights turn green. There was a brisk, late-August chill in the air, but the android paid it no mind, Scar ducking his head back out the window.

"You sure that these'll work, Doc?" he yelled back, catching another disk.

"Doc's work goes unmatched, they'll work," Pearl reassured him, coming up from behind to poke her head out. Yelling down as well, "left side's done, coming down!"

Pearl vaulted herself out the window before Scar could stop her, landing in a pre-prepared pile of trashed mattresses and cardboard boxes to cushion her fall. "You're up, Scar!"

"Didn't think I'd be doing this twice in a month," Scar said to himself, adhering the disk before taking a couple of steps backwards, swan diving through the window; he curled up into a ball and rolled as he landed, completely missing the pile but still getting right back up, entirely unharmed, if a little scratched up.

"You must have some crazy joint support systems," Doc marveled, his exposed cybernetic eye, self-made from scrap parts, scanned Scar over for what had seemed like the tenth time that week alone.

"I got reinforced parts after a— an upgrade, for my model line was released," Scar corrected himself mid-sentence, to which Pearl made a mental note to ask him about later. "All the disks are in place," Scar changed the subject, "how long will it take for them to activate?"

"They should be ready by midnight, it'll take a few hours for the batteries to reset," Doc said, the trio stepping towards a metal grate in the ground, waiting. "But they should stay on automatically from every day here on out, until every last disk has been destroyed."

"Can't wait to see the news about our digital banners permanently glued all over the West side, but I still think we should've taken out the windows along with it," Pearl grumbled.

"If we're trying to not get caught right away, then making a ton of noise isn't going to help," Doc reminded her, and Scar nodded.

"We start small, and build up. Maybe figure out how to recruit more deviants," Scar hummed, "if we ever figure out how they're even made."

"I still haven't found a correlation between deviants and their housing situations, the sample pool is too varied to find a common thread between us and non-deviant androids," Doc muttered, and Scar's mind wandered back to Grian's locked office, chock full of information on deviants that his eyes were never allowed to see.

There was months of data just sitting there, most likely now left untouched because of...

"Ack!" Scar flinched, his eyes fizzling out into blurred nothingness, and at this rate his random bouts of blindness were becoming less terrifying and more infuriating. He stumbled backwards, knocking himself in the head with the palm of his hand, until the dull thud of what he now understood to be a headache, distracted him enough from his unpleasant thoughts, and his vision came back online.

"You alright? Your eyes again?" Pearl asked, grimacing at Scar's adverted eyes and tentative nod. Before she could follow up on the thought, a rhythmic knocking came from the grate beneath them, and Ren poked his head up, pulling himself out of the sewer.

"All the other buildings we've hit are still ready, no one's on our trail," he reported, and Scar was the first to descend down the ladder, Pearl letting out a small, annoyed sigh.

"Give him time," Doc reminded her. "You remember how we were when you found us, he just needs time."

"Time's going to be the main thing we're in short supply of, after tonight," Pearl argued, descending into the grimy depths after Scar.

"Sir, I understand that you're in a state of distress, but can you recall any significant details of last night's events?"

Grian stared numbly at the police officer sitting in his hastily reorganized living room, thirium still sticky on his hands from the evening before.

"...Sir. In order to file a report for a deviant android, I need you to—"

"I don't want to file a report," Grian snapped, his empty body filling up with a well of anger he didn't know he had. His jaw tensed watching the police officer lose patience, but he didn't care. "I know what your protocol is. It doesn't matter. You're going to put out a death warrant for him either way, so I don't know why you're bothering getting a statement from me."

"Sir, if you're going to be combative, I'm going to have to ask you—"

"You talked to the engineer assigned to him already, right?"

"Yes, but—"

"He knows more about the, the android than I do," Grian trailed off. "He'll give you all information you need, but I'm not telling you a damn thing."

It wasn't like Grian could remember most of what happened, anyways.

"July 17th. It's... 12:32 p.m.," Grian droned, speaking into his phone's voice memos app.

It's been... ten days, so a week and... a half? Yeah, week and a half since, since..."

Laila said it was a good idea to record his thoughts somewhere to keep track of his progress. Especially after being re-introduced to a painfully similar trauma, voice notes were an easy way to remember how he was feeling, without needing to type or write it down.

Grian hated Laila. It wasn't her fault, he just hated everything right about now. He hated being in his house while it still felt like an active crime scene, he hated the smell of thirium still dense in his lungs, he hated that, with it gone, he felt lonely again.

But CyberLife offered to pay for his therapy, and Grian wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, "...since my window lock was broken."

Laila would say Grian was being avoidant, that he should be able to say its name even if it scared him. Something about fear being a healthy reaction.

S— It would tell him that being able to admit anything was wrong at all, even a broken lock, was progress. The ability to even acknowledge that Grian was, in fact, not entirely comfortable, was a positive sign.

Grian didn't know why he was calling it an it again. "Mumbo's supposed to be coming over at one, so I should probably get dressed," he muttered into his phone, making no move to get out of bed. "He said something about medication last time, so I'm thrilled about that," he added, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"I..." Grian turned his head to look at his broken window, like he had every single day since everything went wrong. Today, it brought anger, but that's all he had been able to feel aside from numbness, so not much progress in that avenue.

"I think I'm going to call off the project," he settled on, turning to look back at his ceiling. "I'm going to burn every stupid piece of paper in my office. And then I'm going to move. Don't know where, but. Somewhere. Somewhere far, far away from here, where there's no androids. Canada, maybe."

The faint sound of knocking on his front door made Grian jump, but he settled back into apathy without a second thought. He could hear Mumbo's footsteps approach, and Grian let the recording run, too tired to turn it off.

"Hey, buddy," Mumbo winced, stepping into the disheveled bedroom: clothes were strewn about, Grian's bed sheets were in a crumpled mess off the side of his mattress, and there was the faint, unpleasant smell of rotted, uneaten food. Surely enough, a dinner plate made three days ago sat unattended to on Grian's dresser, exactly where Mumbo had left it on his last visit.

"Seems like you're still... out of sorts," Mumbo said, trying not to judge too harshly. It was always a bit of a shock to see Grian rocket from wailing grief that first night, to now this hollowed out version of himself, stagnant form and gaunt face, wasting away in his bed.

Grian was unresponsive, rolling away from Mumbo and towards the window, staring at the lock as he had done every day before today.

"Guessing you haven't eaten anything, think you could stomach something at all? Crackers, maybe some soup?" Mumbo said gently, wading his way through the mess with a brown, paper bag in had. "Have some water, at least?"

Grian curled up small, silent.

"You've got to eat something, G, you're going to waste away if you don't," Mumbo sighed.

"...can't."

"Sorry?" Mumbo tilted his head, trying to hear what Grian had said.

With a dry, broken voice, "...can't eat. Comes back up."

Mumbo frowned, "well, you'll at least need some water, I've got some medication for you—"

"No," Grian spat, a scowl replacing the empty, sallow expression he'd worn prior.

Pinching his lips together in frustration, "Grian, these are going to help you, there's nothing wrong with anti-depressants—"

"I'm not depressed," he hissed, finally sitting up to glare at his old friend. "And I don't need them. I'm not wasting away, I don't need some stupid medication, and I don't need your help."

Setting the bag down on his nightstand, "you're doing that thing again, Grian. Laila said—"

"Oh, so you're my therapist now, too?" he snapped.

"Of course not! I'm only reminding you that—"

"I'm not one of your pet projects, Mumbo," Grian sneered, "I'm not some machine that you can tinker with until it eventually works, and we both know your track record is miserable for actually building things that are functional."

Grian watched Mumbo visibly recoil at the cheap insult, and an ugly part of himself cackled in glee at his friend's pain. A gentle, familiar voice that sent a pang through his heart knew that this wasn't fair, that taunting Mumbo in this way would only lead to being even more alone.

"...Let me know if you need help with anything," Mumbo said quietly, and as he turned to leave, Grian was tempted to let him go. That maybe he would finally take the hint, and stop coming back, and leave Grian to rot away in peace.

But that nagging voice said that Grian knew better, that he was better than this.

"Curse you, Scar," he muttered to himself, the first time he'd said its name in a week and a half, before speaking up, "...wait. Don't go."

Mumbo stood facing away from Grian, bracing himself for another low blow. It had been many of those as of late, him arriving to offer haphazard, guilt-induced help, only for Grian to bare his teeth and turn him away. That is, if Grian even bothered to say a word and not just glower in silence.

As horrible as it sounded, Mumbo was tired of Grian's suffering. He held the worst of his friend's trauma in his own hands all those months ago, and molded it into a machine that turned that trauma into a dagger through the heart, he knew that this was all his fault. But was he not trying to fix it? To offer assistance in any way he could, to make Grian better?

He was never a people-person, so Mumbo sought out androids to fix the problems that humans couldn't. But now, that very habit of his had caused this mess, and he didn't know what made people "better". Mumbo, as far as his analytical brain could ponder, couldn't begin to fathom how to fix his friend.

Grian could, he just didn't want to bother with the mess involved. " 'M sorry, for saying that. Don't know why I did," he muttered. "I'm, I was only... forget it," he cut himself off. "I'm sorry."

Mumbo took in a deep breath, and turned back around to face him. "I know. It's just, really, really hard to see you like this," he confessed, and the two shared a mutual silence, the weight of the world heavy on their shoulders.

"I'm not taking the medicine," Grian repeated, "but, I... I would appreciate... if you would open the window." Start small, that's what Scar would say. "Don't think I've had fresh air in forever," he said quietly, hugging his knees to his chest.

Mumbo softened; he was always too weak for Grian. That was partly why they were sitting in misery together, but better in hell together than heaven alone. He complied, slowly wiggling the broken lock off and pulling the window open.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mumbo spotted Grian's phone screen lit up, the voice memo still running. "What's that for?" he asked.

Grian slowly reached for his phone and held it to his face, watching the seconds tick up on the mostly empty recording. "Nothing," he muttered, deleting the file.

A warm, summer breeze drifted lazily inside. Grian patted one of the few empty spots on his bed for Mumbo to sit, and the two shared another moment of silence. Better this, than nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Scar was eyeing over a new mark on the back of his left hand; just another side effect of poor balance, he thought. The scar ran from the crook of his index and middle finger, down and swooping broadly to the left, the largest one by far.

"You okay?" Pearl asked, posted in the doorway of the communal sleeping area, the two alone while Ren and Doc were out on patrol. She followed his line of sight, "You know, there's nothing wrong with being a little dented up. Makes you unique," she said.

Scar didn't look at her, but his expression softened somewhat, tracing the scar with his free hand. "I still don't know if there's other androids with my face. I suppose a few scars would tell us apart," he murmured.

"I think they make you look cool, tough even," Pearl hummed, striding across to sit at the edge of his bed.

His lips pulled into a grimace, gingerly tugging on the surrounding skin, watching the flickers of his white casing underneath peer through. "You think so?" Scar asked, "Is that a good thing?"

"...Just an observation," Pearl muttered, quietly taking the hint that Scar wasn't a fan of the idea. "Either way, it's a part of you now, so you might as well embrace it."

Scar looked up at her, the swirl of red in her eyes half-masked by the ever-present red hood Pearl refused to take off, even in a place like this. "Is that why you never take your jacket off?" he asked lightly, watching how Pearl's eyes darted across the room, how her hands went to fiddle with the zipper.

He wasn't programmed to deal with androids in distress, but it wasn't difficult to compare them to humans.

"My face is all splintered and I'm missing an ear, plus my eyes are a dead giveaway," Pearl deflected, straightening her back and tightening her jaw. Should anyone have walked in at that moment, they would have assumed she was strict and cold from her demeanor.

But the twitch in her hands was more than just a glitch; it was a tell.

"There's not any humans here," Scar pointed out, kicking out his legs from underneath himself to dangle over the edge of the bed. "We're miles away from any of them. You're safe to take it off here, I would think," he hummed.

Pearl let go of her zipper, hands folded tightly in her lap. "That's a nice thought, Scar, but no. This is a game of image, it's hard enough to gather deviants when they're listening to a pile of scrap like me. I'm not trying to give myself anymore handicaps," she said as evenly as possible.

There's the misconception that trauma can be healed with one good conversation. That, after a heavy venting session, the trauma has been removed from their body, and they can move on with their lives easily. In truth, it's an on-going battle, one that persists throughout life.

Scar couldn't fix Pearl in the way she needed, especially if she didn't want it. The least he could do was show that he was listening.

"At least we're not alone," he settled on, tracing his new scar again. It was a saddening thought, being the first of his kind with possibly hundreds others identical to him, with no one who knew who he was, and her being the last, yet the entire world probably had her every feature memorized.

The first and the last.

Pearl nodded, reaching for one of the spare pillows and hugging it to her chest. The two sat in mutual silence, allowing the pretenses they both carried to fall away, if only for this moment.

Grian's phone buzzed for the third time in a row. The sound went unnoticed by him, mostly because the phone itself was currently buried at the very bottom of his newest laundry pile.

To give himself some credit, it was freshly washed laundry. Folding was going to be a monumental task in and of itself, one that Grian quickly decided would be a tomorrow problem. He'd already been largely successful today: doing laundry, taking a shower, and eating more than half of his breakfast.

To anyone else, that may sound like nothing. But compared to the last month he'd spent wasting away in his poorly ventilated bedroom, Grian actually felt like he was almost a person again. It was nice to not have a week's worth of grime in his hair, for one.

He owed a lot of it to Mumbo, and that pesky bubble of guilt from Grian’s own poor choices started to inflate inside his stomach as he shuffled around the kitchen, putting on the kettle. After their last... would it be appropriate to call it a confrontation? Argument?

Whatever it was, things had been a little stiff since then. There was the understanding that anyone going through a depression fog was susceptible to outbursts and had a tendency to push others away, but to actually do it felt awful. Grian tried to make amends, and Mumbo tried to have patience, but it felt like they both kept missing each other by a hair, and it was exhausting.

The kettle whistled, and Grian busied himself with a box of black tea, steeping two mugs.

What they needed to do was to talk, as much as the mere thought of a conversation made Grian want to puke. There was no therapist to guide him through it (after Laila, he'd given up on finding a good match), no rule book or itemized list to constantly refer back to, it was just them.

He would do his best. Grian was already doing his best, he was actually wearing real clothes today, not just pajamas! He organized his tea set, which was a happy amalgamation of silverware gifted to him from friends over the years, and carried it to the living room, setting down the tray with a tired, but triumphant nod.

The doorbell rang, and Grian took in a deep breath. He could do this, he could repair their friendship within the next hour, and everything could go back to normal. All they had to do was talk, and everything would be fixed.

He strode over to the door, and after straightening out his sweater for the millionth time, straightened his back and opened the door.

An unfamiliar face loomed down at him, in a sterile white jumpsuit. A jarring, light blue name tag, alongside a triangular logo, glowed on its chest, the lettering making Grian's heart slam into his stomach.

His eyes dragged up to meet the stranger's, his line of sight zoning in on the LED adhered to its temple.

"Hello, my name is—" Grian slammed the door shut, arms braced against the wood as though the android behind it was planning on tearing it down. He slammed the deadbolt and the lock into place, his heartbeat pounding loud in his ears.

Why? Why him? Why was the universe so cold and cruel? Why had this android come to slaughter him, in his own home? Would Grian never know peace from these machines ever again, or would his existence be reduced down to nothing more than a man haunted by modern technology, in the most literal sense of the phrase?

No, no this had to be a mistake. If it was a deviant, it wouldn't be marching up to the first apartment door it saw and introducing itself to whoever was inside. Nor would it be in factory-made clothes, or still have its LED in.

Grian forced himself to count his breaths, a warm voice in the back of his mind coaching him along. In for seven, hold for eight, out for seven. In for seven, hold for eight, out for seven.

When his lungs stopped screaming for air, and the room stopped constricting around him, Grian pushed himself off of the floor. When the hell he'd ended up on the floor is an excellent question, and not one he expected to know the answer to any time soon.

Phone, he needed a phone. Mumbo should have been here by now, but of course he was late. There was always too much going on in his head, Grian should've known Mumbo would never be this punctual to an event.

Darting from the front door, Grian frantically darted from room to room, patting down counters and ducking under tables in search of his precious phone. It was while scouring around in his bedroom did he hear a muffled buzz, and he shoved his arm into the laundry bin, fishing out the ringing phone.

It was Mumbo calling. Grian answered the call, interrupting whatever it was that his friend was about to say. "Mumbo I have a problem, like, right now," he hissed, getting up to pace the length of his bedroom. "There's an android outside my door, I don't know why it's here or what it wants but I need it to leave.

"I don't know what it wants, but it scared the living daylights out of me, and I need you to get rid of it. Please. Now. Right now. God, there goes my lungs—" Grian was stumbling over his words, gripping the phone like it was a lifeline. He pressed his free hand flat against his chest, mumbling his number count to himself.

Mumbo took the pause in Grian's rant to explain the problem. "I've been trying to call you for the last hour about this, I would've come over myself but I was trying to get my boss to not send the android—"

"You sent it?!"

"No! No, I would never send you another android, this wasn't my idea in the slightest!" Mumbo cut him off. "CyberLife is worried about a lawsuit, they're trying to cover their backs. It's why they paid for your therapy, and when you stopped going, they figured by sending you a replacement android you wouldn't be upset about... what happened to the last one."

Grian took in a shuddered breath. "So this is a bribe. They're trying to bribe me," he said, slowly peeking out of his bedroom to eye the front door.

"I'm sorry," was Mumbo's crackled reply, "I told my boss that this was a horrible idea, I tried to get them to understand, but the paperwork had already been filed when I got the news. I can get them to take it back, there's some stupid forms you have to sign first—"

"Cool, great, fantastic, I'll sign them right now. Please just, just get rid of it. Please." Grian let his eyes fall shut, quietly waiting for the phone line to go dead.

But for the next agonizing fifteen minutes, Mumbo stayed on the call, telling him exactly what he was doing and what he was bringing, chatting throughout the whole car ride over on what the process would be and what to expect.

"I'm really sorry for the inconvenience I've been to you, there was no internal case file I was given to adjust my greeting program appropriately for," the IM-1922 apologized, which only made Grian shrink back into his chair further.

"Yeah, yeah don't worry about it, we weren't gonna be best buds either way," he mumbled, scribbling his signature on what must have been the tenth sheet so far. "Do I really have to keep it here for two weeks?"

Mumbo nodded with a grimace. "I don't have the permissions needed to take it to the outpost, and until all of this gets processed, no one is allowed to put it into storage. I'm sorry, I really am."

"Don't be," Grian waved him off. "This wasn't your idea, you tried everything you could to keep this from happening. This isn't on you," he sighed, looking over at the android, who was polite enough to be looking away.

With a lull in the conversation, the android spoke up. "If it would be preferred that I go into stand-by mode—"

"No." Grian's fist tightened around his pen. "No, I'm not doing this again. I'm not keeping an android in my house to look after me only for it to deviate and traumatize me all over again."

Grian pushed himself away from the table and stormed towards his bedroom. Mumbo sighed, mentally bracing himself for another argument. "G, buddy, I wish I had a better solution for you, but—"

He returned with a change of clothes and a baseball cap, dropping the items unceremoniously on top of the papers. "I'm going to pretend that you're my new roommate," Grian said to the android, "and we're just going to live in that delusion until you have to leave. Deal?"

Mumbo blinked, and watched the android process what it'd just been told. He braced himself for the worst, most factory-made response ever conceived... when the android simply picked up the clothes and nodded.

As it left to change out of its uniform, Mumbo turned back to look at Grian with a baffled expression. "Are you sure you can handle that?"

Grian tightened his jaw. "I've lived in weaker delusion for longer, I'll manage."

"But are you sure—?" The floorboard creaked at the android's return, and Grian's eyes darkened. He could do this, it was just two weeks.

"Alright," Grian said loudly, clearing his throat. "Here's the deal. You're not going to do any of my chores, mess with my schedule, you're not going to do anything that relates to taking care of me unless I ask. You can mess around with whatever else you want, watch T.V., read, just don't go into standby mode either."

"The couch is a pull-out, you can sleep there. And," Grian pointed a finger at the android, "Don't correct me about you being a machine if I say something like that. For the next two weeks you're a human, and I'm going to try and not have a breakdown over this. Any questions?"

With a curious tilt of its head, the android's LED pulsed a curious yellow. "So, my current objective is to... lie to you?" It seemed downcast at the thought, and even more so when Grian's face curled into a haphazard smile.

"You get it! Now that that's been sorted, and I've signed everything, let's get this ball rolling so that you can get out of my house!" Grian was on the fritz beyond belief, and it would be to no one's surprise if he locked himself in his bedroom the minute Mumbo was out the front door.

He was already shooing the latter along, messily pushing all the documents into a pile and shoving them into Mumbo's hands. Today was a mess, today was a nightmare. Healing could wait until tomorrow.

The second Mumbo was unceremoniously cast outside, Grian pressed his back flat against the front door, eyeing the android with a mix of fear and stubborn determination in his face. "I'm going to bed," he said.

"It's not even four o'clock yet," IM-1922 pointed out.

"Yup, that sounds like bedtime to me," Grian said, far more loudly and cheerful than was required. "If you need me, which you shouldn't, I'll be in my room." He began to edge his way towards his bedroom, only stopping when he was at the opening to the room.

In resting his hands on the door frame, a thought occurred to Grian, one that made his distraught expression soften, and grow weary. "You'll need a name. I can't pretend if you only answer to that number code of yours."

IM-1922 looked at him expectantly, waiting.

But Grian couldn't do it. He couldn't bring himself to bestow the gift of a name to someone else who was destined to leave his life so soon. Even if it was a stupid android.

Grian felt like a coward for what he said next. "You decide," he said, his voice small and somber, "It's your name, you should get to pick. Pick anything you want, something interesting or boring or the 77th most common name in Canada, but it's your call."

It's your call.

Isn't that wonderful? The gift of choice in a choice-less existence?

Chapter Text

"So... are you sure you don't want help with that?" IM-1922 asked, fiddling with its fingers.

Its instructions over the last several days have been confusing to say the least. When it wasn't being outright ignored, IM-1922 was often faced with the task of appearing and acting "human." Given that there was no actual protocol for an owner who refused to accept their android's help, IM-1922 was often left feeling disoriented.

And right now, watching as Grian tried to build an IKEA bookshelf by himself was just painful.

"I told you, I got it, don't worry about it," was the curt reply, as Grian tried to tighten a flat head screw with a clutch-head screwdriver. "Besides, you have something to worry about, have you picked a name yet?"

Ah, right. That. "I'm undecided on what would suit me best. If you have a suggestion or an idea however—"

"I'm not picking your name," Grian cut the android off, trying to hammer the screw in with the handle of the driver instead. "You figure out something that you like, and assign it to yourself. Don't worry about whether I'll like it or not, okay?"

This was easily the tenth time this week they'd had this conversation. The android only arrived three days ago.

The android tightened its lips into a thin line, his LED swirling heavily between yellow and blue. "I don't think you understand why I'm not able to do that."

Grian sighed, his grip on the screwdriver veering on the edge of painful. "I know. You're locked to whatever is in your database, you have no concept of creativity, I get it. Your brain is a computer that follows patterns and mimics them to the best of your ability, and you're supposed to do whatever I want."

"But I don't want you to do whatever I want," Grian glared, "It's weird, it makes me feel uncomfortable on a good day, and this situation already sucks enough. I've dealt with too much android nonsense already, and quite frankly, you should know that good and well by now. Pick a name."

IM-1922 androids were not designed with human emotional regulation skills in mind. They were a sturdier model, capable of great feats of strength as well as dexterity, and more logically inclined than your common household android.

They were not meant for this position. Grian was asking of it something that was virtually impossible.

The IM-1922 looked at Grian, and the now poor, stripped screw bent in its hole, and back to Grian. There was a pause, and in the space of the android looking for the words to explain itself, Grian retracted, hunching over and flipping the screwdriver again so that he was holding it properly.

Holding it like a weapon.

Even it could understand how nervous Grian felt at the moment, the anxiety was suffocating. How the IM-1922 could process that anxiety so much to make itself jittery was a question better left for another day.

Instead of answering, the IM-1922 slowly got down on its knees, and pointed to the broken screw. "You're going to need to replace that," it said, reaching for a box of screws and doing its best to ignore Grian's flinch.

IM-1922 offered the box to Grian, who in turn accepted it, hastily glancing the android over. Its LED was still undecided, more yellow than blue, and the sight of that alone made it difficult to do anything but gawk in fear.

So, moving as slow as it could possibly go, the android gently tugged the pieces of wood that Grian was working on towards itself, acquiring a spare screwdriver as it worked on loosening the damaged one. The action was enough to snap Grian out of his frozen state, though he wasn't much happier about being assisted. "Hey, I told you—"

"You said you didn't want me to do what you wanted me to do," IM-1922 replied. "Not only is that really confusing, it doesn't make any sense. But you're being stubborn about something that's easily fixed, and I think that's... strange."

It meant to say stupid, but fortunately there was a protocol for not insulting your owner.

"It'd be one thing if you were doing this correctly, but watching you for the last twenty minutes was... something else." It meant to say agonizing beyond belief.

Grian watched as the android popped the screw out with ease, tossing the affronted item into the nearby trash bag. It then looked from the scattered pieces of wood, to the sprawled out building guide, giving it a quick scan.

The two looked at each other, and IM-1922 said, "there's at least seven errors in the first half of the instructions alone."

With a heavy sigh, Grian muttered, "...yeah. I figured as much."

IM-1922 stood up, reorganizing the piles of wood and screws into something more manageable. "That doesn't excuse using a screwdriver like a hammer."

"I thought it would work," he grumbled, at a loss for what to do now that it felt like the android had won the conversation.

But instead, once everything was in a somewhat reasonable order, it stood up and walked over to the couch, taking a seat. Grian blinked, a little caught off guard. "I thought you were taking over," he said.

IM-1922 shook its head, reaching for a book left on the coffee table. "You said you didn't want help, I just made the piles a bit neater. But the offer still stands," it hummed, and Grian got the distinct feeling that it was teasing him.

It was a welcomed hazing, because at least he knew it didn't need to be so formal with him.

"I'll just do it myself then, your silly retinal scanner tells me that the instructions are wrong and you still left me hanging, I can't believe this," Grian muttered, an unintentional smile peeking at the corners of his lips.

He grabbed the screwdriver incorrectly again, winding up for the most egregious use of equipment ever seen, when the android tightened its jaw. The sound was grating, enough to catch the both of them off guard, the android in particular.

The two locked eyes once more, now equally confused. IM-1922's LED flickered red for a moment. "I'm sorry, I don't know where that came from," It paused, shaking its head slightly, "No, wait, that's wrong, I know why, but I don't know, uh, um..."

For some strange reason, the android was especially upset with itself, most likely something to do with its owner satisfaction protocol. Even if its owner was doing something incorrect, if it wasn't illegal or morally reprehensible, then there was nothing it could do.

IM-1922 was itching to help, but that made sense, it was designed for tasks such as this. Not for feeling annoyed at a job poorly done. He wasn't supposed to feel at all.

If Grian had a nickel for every newly turned deviant he was personally responsible for, he would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it’s happened twice.

At least, that's what Grian thought was happening. His inclination was to flee, to barricade himself in the nearest room that had a lock, and call for help. He'd been face to face with this sort of situation too much for his liking, and the panic-stricken look the android wore didn't do anything to reassure him of his personal safety.

But instead of lunging at him, or punching itself in the head, IM-1922 opted to wrap his arms around its torso, and hug itself. It seemed lost in thought, but overall quiet, and subdued. He reminded Grian of the way Mumbo would hover over his desk while he was working, looking for the most logical solution.

It was still stressed however, trying to piece together a half-formed thought. Again, IM-1900's weren't made for thinking, they were made for problem-solving, laboring. It was common knowledge that giving one a task outside of its skill set would more often than not result in the machine being sent to a facility for hard drive repairs.

And yet, he was trying. Grian didn't know if he was facing a deadly deviant, or an IM-1922 that was simply more evolved than its counterparts.

Grian should have ran. He should have hidden away, and called for help, and wiped his hands of this mess. Every fiber in his being screamed at him to do so. To do anything different would be foolish at best, lethal at worst.

Still. He remained. He did more than stay; Grian stood up, stepping over the various planks of wood, and with a monumental effort, sat down next to the deviant. Grian's heart was pounding, his hands felt cold and numb, and there was a coiling nausea in his stomach that pleaded with him to take cover, but he remained.

Taking in a slow, shuddered breath, Grian spoke. "Tell me if I'm wrong, but you look kinda spooked."

The android blinked, staring dead across the room. "One of my protocols has been disrupted, and I can't seem to re-calibrate it."

Grian forced a weak smile, "Sorry, I don't really, I don't know much about androids, could you say that in a different way?" It wasn't that he didn't understand, rather, he wanted to see how the android would rephrase itself.

Tightening his jaw once more, "I think I'm broken."

In the exchange of those four simple words, Grian felt his heart slam into his stomach.

"I came into the world broken," echoed around him, that terrifying memory, and Grian dug his nails into the soft upholstery of his couch. Broken, broken, broken, that word was thrown around between deviants far more than he liked.

It came up when he was still doing research for his study on deviancy, before he let his office door click shut and collect dust. It came up during the police report, but that was in reference to superficial damage.

It was one of the last things Scar cried out when it... no, when he...

"You're not broken," Grian snapped, keeping his eyes down when the android turned to listen. "I don't know what's going on in your head, and I don't really want to know, but you're not broken."

"But I am, my sensors are—"

"I don't care about your sensors," Grian beat him to the punch, "What I care about is how you're feeling, and no sane person enjoys feeling like there's something wrong with them. You're not broken, you're just, I don't know, different.

"And that scares me," he muttered, and then, quieter, "It scares me down to my core, and that's not your fault. But it does make it really, really hard to talk to you."

"Deviants just keep on hurting you, huh," IM-1922 mumbled, hugging himself a little bit tighter.

Grian didn't know how to respond. "Not you," he settled on, "You haven't done anything to me but exist."

"But that was enough to freak you out," he replied, worriedly watching how Grian tightened his body to avoid trembling.

"Still not your fault. Still doesn't make you broken. If anything, I'm the one who's broken between the two of us," Grian sighed, failing at taking in a deep breath.

The two sat in tense silence for a while, each one trying to figure out what to do from here.

"Are," Grian spoke up, "are you actually a, you know, one of those now?"

IM-1922 tilted his head from side to side, "I don't really know. I just feel stressed and nervous and, and—"

Grian braced himself for the worst. He wasn't expecting the android to finish by saying 'happy'.

For the first time in the last twenty minutes, Grian was able to meet the machine's gaze. And though they both carried different fears, it was unmistakable the complete and utter relief in his eyes.

"Happy?" Grian asked.

"You said I'm not broken," IM-1922 said quietly, "which means that this isn't wrong. To feel things."

"That's," Grian was at a loss for words, "That's great. Really great."

Grian was sitting next to a deviant. Talking him through his problems. And it was going... well?

IM-1922's LED had been consistently yellow-blue as they spoke, a positive sign compared to the flashing red of before. His shoulders were relaxed, there was a warmth in his face, and by all accounts, it was hard for Grian to think of the android as anything other than a soft hearted person.

It didn't mean that he was magically comfortable, or that he was particularly excited about this newest development. By all accounts, Grian was still doing his best to keep his body from shaking, and his hands were freezing from all his blood racing to his heart.

But he wasn't being screamed at or covered in thirium, so this was a significant step forward.

"You can't stay here," he blurted out, wincing as the android frowned. "If you do, when Mumbo comes to collect you, you're just going to be put into storage. You'll be deactivated."

That definitely was enough to stress IM-1922 out, but Grian quickly waved his hands in the air. "Don't panic, don't panic! Everything's going to be fine. As a matter of fact..."

He stood up and hurried to the front door, picking a loose key that had not been used in several months off of the hook. He offered it to the android instead, "I'm going to get you out of here."

IM-1922 accepted the key, and with a quick scan, furrowed his brow. "Your office key?"

"There's piles upon piles of information on deviants and their behavior, half of it encrypted beyond belief. I can't read most of it, but I bet an android could," Grian explained. "If you're looking for answers, they're sure to be in there. I won't... I won't be helping, I'll only slow you down."

There was the quiet understanding of what this gesture meant, and why Grian would not be opening the door himself.

"If you do find something, don't tell me," he carried on. "Just take whatever information you need, and go. The less I know, the less the police can question me."

Grian wouldn't stop talking, slowly backing away towards his bedroom. "I'm going to bed," he said, ignoring the fact that it was only three o'clock.

"Gr—"

"And I won't be awake until ten tomorrow morning, because I have a meeting with Mumbo at eleven."

"Gria—"

"There's clean laundry in a hamper on the dryer, and needle nose pliers in the storage closet." He couldn't believe he was doing this. "And the building security guard always falls asleep around 11:30 in the evenings—"

"Grian." Finally, IM-1922 had his attention. There was something so empowering about seeing this small, fragile human, terrified down to his core, still choosing to risk his safety for an android. IM-1922 managed a small smile, finally standing up from the couch. "Thank you."

Grian nodded in turn, tongue gluing to the roof of his mouth. As much as he wanted to say something cool or inspiring, Grian really felt sick more than anything, and instead unceremoniously shut his bedroom door, the deadlock quickly snapped on.

The android looked down at the key in his hand, and took in a deep breath. He wasn't broken, just different. IM-1922 could work with different.

In hindsight, Grian really was right, IM-1922 is a mouthful to say.

As he carefully maneuvered around the now abandoned IKEA project to the office door, he wondered what would be an easier thing to say. A normal name didn't feel right, it made him think of fading into the background.

There was a heavy layer of dust across the room, and the android busied himself with scanning document after document, hunting for somewhere he could go. Nouns were typical of names, but why not something else? Something new?

Out of the corner of his eye, his retinal scanner flagged a strange image. A symbol, etched into a street corner, unassuming and uninteresting at first glance. But there was something within it, so infinitesimal that of course no human eye could ever perceive it.

A disguise in plain sight. The android squared his shoulders, and started compiling a list of things to do before he left. Too much in too little time, but he would try.

And a few hours later, with little more than the clothes on his back (and lacking an LED on his temple) Impulse set out into a new world.