• • •

Mia groaned, throwing away the broken pencil holder she had bent over to pick up only to discover its integrity had been completely compromised. The living room around her was an utter mess. All her compulsive cleaning from earlier had been rendered useless as most of the appliances she installed had been thoughtlessly damaged, leaving shards on the ground and on the couch, papers on the floor and... her eyes stopped on her wrists where the sight of an already ugly bruise made her sick to her stomach.

It hurt, sure, but it hurt even more knowing that this disaster could have been avoided had she only been smarter.

But she cried enough already; the tears on her cheeks were yet to dry, and she wanted them to have the time to do so.

Mia pushed herself back to her feet and walked over to restart the systems. There was nothing in this world that could calm her down quite as much as working did, so she focused on worrying about why Connor wasn't back yet. He was charming, built for social integration, but she couldn't exactly imagine he had that much work to do on only his second day as part of the local police force.

He's probably on his way back right now, she considered while her computer was taking its time turning back on again after a forced shut down. Looking around, she struggled to form a series of white lies that wouldn't sound too absurd to an android made to tell lies from truths. Having programmed some of his protocols and fine tuned Elijah's base code, didn't suddenly make it easier to find weaknesses in Connor's analysis capabilities. In fact, it only made her more nervous, knowing so well who she will have to fool with her lies. Truth was out of the question — she couldn't phantom trying to explain everything to him, not when she could still solve it all quietly.

While looking at her living room though, Mia spotted a small pool of blue blood right next to the carpet, sticking out from under the couch. She could go about explaining the mess which was the living room, but the sight of that stain froze her heart in her throat. That she couldn't explain, so it had to go away. And it had to go away fast. Thirium evaporated to the human eye in a couple of hours, but to androids, the traces of it remained visible.

Mia left her computer to reboot and retrieved from the kitchen a handful of those paper towels she had doubted she'd ever use. Now was their time. She wiped the floor clean, absorbed every single drop of that Thirium into the paper towels until they turned into a blue smudged ball, ultimately meant to be dropped in the kitchen bin.

Connor has no reason to look in the trash for anything, she convinced herself while straightening up again.

There wasn't another moment left for her to find any other incriminating samples laying around that would throw off the credibility of the story she had started settling for in her mind, because her phone started ringing.

Right, she grimaced, spotting the phone as yet another poor victim of her truly unfortunate night. She picked it up from a little closer to the entry door and made out through the cracked screen that whoever was calling was not a saved number.

"This is Mia Wilkins. Who's this?" She answered.

"Good evening, ma'am," the warm voice of an old man greeted her on the other end. "Apologies for disturbing at this hour," he continued, thus making Mia check the time and realize it was almost eleven in the evening already. "I'm calling on the behalf of Brothers' Cleaner Machine. Do you happen to own an android of the... RK800 model series?"

Mia scrunched her nose up at the word choice, but sighed — it was too late and she was too tired to argue on the phone with anyone, far less an old man who probably was just as tired as her. "I am responsible of such a model, yes. What is this about?" By that point, she assumed this was an advertising call. Her mind was scattered, so though it didn't make sense to her how an advertising company could consider Connor as her android in their records as he wasn't even registered as CyberLife merchandise, it was her best working theory.

"It is company policy that I alert owners of found faulty models before I get their androids in the trash compactor, ma'am."

The world was swept from under her feet. That's not possible, the thought flashed through her mind. Her free hand flattened against the door and caught her from falling forward with the sudden dizziness that dawned upon her. Faulty model? Trash compactor? Her right hand gripped the phone just a little tighter.

"Is this some sort of joke? I'll have you know I am in no mood for jokes-"

Her growing anger was cut short by the man who kept his calm, "Your RK800 model android was found on the outskirts of the town with critical damage. It was reported to us for collection. If you do not wish to retrieve it for repair, we will be taking care of its destruction process in full."

"No!" Mia exclaimed before fully processing the words that were being burdened onto her. Her knees were barely holding her up with their constant trembling and she felt as if she needed to finish that second, abandoned coffee now or she might die. "I mean... just wait, please." Her lips trembled with questions she didn't have the time to ask, "Give me the address, I'll come pick him up right now."

"We can schedule you for tomorrow," the man answered her, once again irritatingly unalarmed. Could he not hear she was losing her mind? Did he not care? Did he often call people about their androids just to hear their panic? "There will be, of course, a fee as androids are made out of plastic and it is considered littering to abandon one in any state of malfunction—"

"I'm coming tonight," she interrupted decisively, already out of the house, searching online for the company name she was given at the beginning of the call. If the damage was substantial, time is crucial for the full recovery of his memory.

"We are closing in thirty minutes, ma'am."

"I'll be there," Mia almost shouted, reading on her phone that the address was only a fifteen minute walk away. She could make it there in ten if she ran maybe. "Please, just wait for me."

Running the distance wasn't the wisest of choices, but she much rather preferred reaching the wired fence of the junkyard near the end of the town with her lungs on the verge collapse than to risk getting there late.

She couldn't have walked even if she tried - to walk in silence with only the absolute noise and disarray of her mind for company was as close to suicidal thoughts as she ever wanted to get. Running, in that sense, was good. She had been in too much physical pain for the majority of the way there to realize what was truly happening.

Only once her hands grasped the wired fence and she leant forward to catch her breath did one glance at the piles of trash grouped on material category strike her with the truth: Connor was in there. Her Connor. Wounded and tossed with the trash. Someone hurt him.

The burning ache in her chest grew and Mia grabbed a better hold of the front gate, trying to yank it. "Come on!" She cried out, breathless. "This wasn't thirty minutes, please! I can't..."

Bright lights switched on above her from a pillar she hadn't even noticed.

"Jesus," sounded the same voice that spoke with her on the phone, from somewhere further inside. A light turned on and she noticed a security cabin there. With a bit of squinting and a whole lot of shielding her eyes from the bright light above, Mia made out the silhouette of the old man as he made it out of that cabin. "Miss... Wilkins?"

"Yes," Mia almost didn't let him finish wording out her name. "Please, can you open the gate?"

"Heard the tugging on the gate and thought them raccoons were back," the old man went back inside his little cabin to press on the unlocking button. Mia felt the gate give in beneath her grip and she finally managed to open it, rushing inside the yard. "And we called this expert on keeping raccoons away. Cost us a damn fortune...," he kept on talking, walking back outside at a snail's pace.

"Where is he?" Mia stopped the man before he could take the last step out of his cabin. She didn't want to imagine how she looked in that moment. Given the night she had, that run couldn't have possibly made her look better either.

She looked at him with expecting eyes, but it took him a moment to understand what she was asking him about really. "You mean your android?" His fair eyebrows furrowed downwards.

"Yes, where is he?" Her patience was gone and Mia was on the verge of doing things with her hands she truly shouldn't consider — it wasn't proper to grab an old man for just not being as fast as one wants him to be. Instead of giving in to her desperation, she crossed her arms over her chest and dug her nails as far into her own upper arms as she could endure the pain.

"Right over there," the old man pointed in a vague direction leading further in the junkyard. "We have a labeled pile for the new arrivals."

"Thank you," Mia was promptly out of his way and looking at the direction he had pointed into. It had just occured to her — the damage to Connor must have been substantial if he had to shut down; and he had to have shut down, otherwise he wouldn't have winded up there.

"Wait," he held her back with a call. "You still gotta pay before you take him."

All out of patience, once she had to turn back around towards the man, she marched herself into his little cabin, even if she had to push past him. She identified the little palm scanner on his desk for processing transaction and without a second thought pressed her right hand down on it, keeping her eyes fixed on the old man until the tablet margin lit up green. Without any more stalling, Mia ran out of the cabin and towards the direction she was pointed in before.

The labels for the piles helped, but it felt a century had passed before she found one plaque with 'New Arrivals' written on it.

Her eyes raised from the letters only momentarily, but as soon as she did, she could no longer feel her heart in her chest. It was a small death to her, striking out of the blue, falling onto her head like a hammer.

Years of working together translated into instant recognition and to see Connor torn into, lifeless and still, covered in blue and staring ahead with eyes emptied of everything that made him himself, was more painful than ripping her own eyes out, there and then. She wished she could do it and not have the image of him gone burned into her mind; she feared it was too late to spare herself the ache in her chest, too late to spare herself the scar on her thoughts.

Her feet acted on their own and within moments she was knelt over an old and stained in layers mattress, hands shivering in a hover just centimeters above his face.

"Connor?" Her voice trembled in the night air, carried by wind into a lament waiting to happen.

Mia gave in to the heartbreak and let her hands actually touch his synthetic skin. Her thumbs rubbed into his cheeks, brushed back through his hair and she called his name again. "Wake up, Connor. Please."

She hadn't realized she was crying until she heard herself. It was as if her awareness of her senses had left her until that point of realization, because immediately after it, she felt a salty taste on her tongue from all the tears she had already shed since reaching him. There was also a damp feeling on her fingertips. She removed her right hand from his hair and stared in horror at the Thirium stain she now had on it.

The more rational side of her guessed he had sustained damage to his processing unit, while her emotional side, the human one which was burdened to take the reigns, cried out internally what would turn into a chant dancing around her thoughts — Who could ever do this?

"Connor," she dropped her hand defeated onto his chest, trailed it down an inch only to follow it with her gaze and work up the courage to see all his wounds. Who could ever do this? What she stared at was the product of a clear lack of humanity.

She's never been fully satisfied with her choices, with her decisions in life or with the certain trajectory she took at some points in her past, but she had never wished more than in that moment, when her hand held his and she tugged on him without a single reaction other than the heaviness of a clear absence, to turn back time and return to the safety of their lab at the tower, where nothing bad could have ever happened.

"I'm sorry," she whispered at last, her shoulders dropping. Mia tugged again, only this time she reached down and pulled Connor closer, hugged him to her chest. His head dropped heavily on her shoulder while she wrapped her arms around him. "I got you. Don't worry. I'm here." She squeezed one last time on his unmoving, destroyed body before pulling together all her strength for what was to come: she had to bring him home.

If running there had been challenging on her endurance, then the mere thought of walking home while carrying the lifeless carcass of Connor felt impossible. She couldn't remember if she begged for the help of the old man in whose junkyard she had lost a good chunk of her heart to pain alone, or if he had offered out of some confused pity to give her a lift since he was closing down the place and heading home himself. All she knew was that she sat in the back of that man's pick-up truck, with Connor's head still on her shoulder and by the time she started blinking again, she was sat on her lab chair in her half wrecked living room, with the silence of the house deafening her. Her ears were ringing then, when she realized she had Connor laid down on the outstretched surgical table, all cables connected to him. Her hands were shaking.

His memory had to be uploaded on the external drive manually since he couldn't be restarted — she tried everything, and the stains of Thirium going up to her elbows proved that —, an otherwise lengthy process which she had to sit through before finding out just how much had been lost due to the damage and the delay of getting him back.

There was a chance that they had lost everything. That the project was over. That he will not remember her. And that chance... It ruined Mia.

Somewhere in the house, a clock was trying to mock her that even with all the curtains pulled, the sun was still going to be rising over the horizon soon. Her ignorance of it won't shame the time into stopping on her sake.

What the clock failed to understand was that there were too many thoughts behind Mia's barely blinking eyes for her to think of time or the building exhaustion in her bones. She's been staring at him, but her mind was far away, trying to piece together a story without knowing nearly enough of what had happened. Who did this to Connor? Where was he found? How did he get there? Who called for him to be taken to that junkyard?

Sitting in her chair, elbows on her knees and back hunched with all the weight of questions she couldn't answer even if she tried, the pain in her shoulders finally made Mia release some tension and drop her head.

That's when she noticed she was covered in it.

That darn blue stain corrupted the fabric of her shirt, of her jeans, it stuck to her skin and dried on it. There was just so much of it on her hands that she dared not move a single finger anymore, not even a joint, far more content with growing numb than closing her hands into fists and having to feel the Thirium dried on her. His blood, on her hands.

Everything that could have gone wrong did that night. If the clock thought she didn't want the sunrise to be there already, the clock obviously didn't know much about her at all.

There was a thought at the back of her mind about how she couldn't stay this filthy, about how she should wash at least her hands, but the strongest part of her mind was the one affirming that she'd rather die than leave Connor's side for something as trivial as cleaning his blood from her hands.

At exactly 5AM, her tablet registered a request for a voice call. With the thing vibrating right on the desk near Mia, she spared a glance and read it was Elijah calling her. Whatever part of her consciousness was left to drive her actions forward decided just then that she could use hearing a familiar voice. Mia answered the call and left it in speaker.

"Mia," Elijah sighed out relieved. "I saw the invoice you issued for a new model. What happened? Is everything alright? How's RK800?"

"I don't know," Mia answered with honesty, all her energy could muster then while keeping her tone quiet and even; the last thing she wanted was to start crying while on the phone with Elijah — they might have been friendly, but at the end of the day, he was still her boss.

A thought occured to her then: she couldn't even recall when she issued the request for a new model to be brought for the memory transfer, but since Elijah was mentioning it, she supposed she followed the protocol to the letter by instinct.

"You sound... shaken up."

What could she possibly answer to that statement? Nothing crossed her mind but silence, so that was her response.

"Are you alright?"

"I will be," Mia nodded, starting to doubt that talking is what she needed. "When I know for sure how much we've lost from his memory." Anything from total memory loss to none was possible and once again, to be reminded of these odds disturbed her — to even consider looking Connor in the eyes again and not being recognized was torturous.

She almost expected Elijah to correct her again about how she chose to address the android, but fortunately for her, he didn't. In fact, much to her surprise, he seemed to understand it wasn't a good time to talk about business or the project progress. He let her be and closed the call sooner than she had expected, leaving her with a realization that a headache was brewing in the back of her head.

The only good thing that came out of Kamski's interruption it seemed was that now, with her eyes no longer forced to remain on Connor by a sense of duty and guilt, she could sit up, stretch her sore muscles and drag her feet to the open kitchen.

The cold half a coffee left from before her evening had turned to an absolute nightmare was unsatisfying and hardly helpful, but it was something other than pain for her to feel. Bitterness tasted better than the saltiness of tears. Those tears... Mia's hands grasped the edge of the counter remembering them. She knew what they meant but she didn't know if she was ready for that meaning to be acknowledged.

Looking back at Connor over her shoulder, she bit her tongue. She had grown awfully attached to him, hadn't she?

Perhaps it was easy to excuse her excitement to get to work every day, the carelessness with which she worked overtime even without getting paid for those extra hours at the lab. She had been given no raise to move her lab with him for this field trial, she had volunteered for it, though she could have made it work by offering support remotely too. But any dedicated individual with a gram of her passion would do that and more for a job they love. What a professional wouldn't do though was what she did that night, after that phone call telling her where Connor was.

Running all the way there, crying over his corpse, holding him as she had... Even thinking of his destroyed body as a corpse was unacceptable. Those weren't normal things a professional would be caught doing, not when there were clean slates of the very same model ready to take Connor's memories and his place should anything happen to his body that would deem it unrepairable. They prepared for the dangers of the job, and yet she lost her composure. She was compromised.

The truth was easy to spot, but hard to accept: she cared about him more than one should ever care about a supposed "project". She cared about him as one would their partner, their friend, their closest acquaintance and that was dangerous territory that she's been threading towards all along, like some blind fool walking head first into death.

A knock on the door almost made Mia jump out of her skin.

Even with light now outside, she gulped, remembering how wrong things went last time someone knocked on her door, events which happened not all that much time ago. The bruises around her wrists started hurting as a distant background noise the moment she checked the door scanner's sensors and realized, once again, there was an android outside. Barely breathing, she took a knife from the kitchen and approached the door. She reached forward, grasping the edge of the curtain of the window nearest to the door. Tugging ever so gently onto it, she glimpsed outside.

Her hand was shaking on a knife she doubted she would have had the strength to use, but she soon dropped her defensive stance because the androids outside her door were ones recognizable enough, those sent by CyberLife in regards to her issued request. Or so the delivery truck from the company behind them would tell her.

She tucked the knife in her jeans' back pocket and worked up the courage to open the door, though she knew now that it would have looked a lot better on her part had she cleaned up when she had wanted to the first time. They would scan her and they would send the report with only the objective facts back to the company - she knew how they were programmed and that it won't be a good look for her to look this dishevelled before them.

But whatever words of explanations she wished to give knotted in her throat when she saw the container two of the three androids at her door brought in. There was the replacement model in there. The new Connor, merely asleep, spotless like nothing had ever happened. Nothing happened to him.

Oh, she hadn't just gotten attached. She started to see it then, in the echoes of her heartbreak, she's gotten willingly fooled by the make belief: she saw him as human.

It hurt because death is final for humans. And it ached because his lack of finality shattered her little fairytale illusion.

"Careful," she broke herself out of her crisis when the two androids reached out to collect the previous model's remains. "Let me check the memory upload first," Mia walked over to her computer and only once she confirmed everything in terms of memory had been taken from the old body, she unplugged him from the terminal herself.

Before allowing them to continue their instructed jobs, Mia interjected once again, "May I help?"

She needed to be there when they moved the old model, devoid of anything that had made her consider him alive. The coin fell out of his pocket when they moved him. She wanted to be the one helping with placing him in the emptied container, to be able to brush the hair off of his forehead one last time. She had to be the one to wipe the table clean of Thirium, the one to hold the head of the new model while he was being eased down.

Connor was unchanged. He looked identical.

But she felt strange pairing the memories of the night that had just passed with what was laid before her eyes now. All the horror on her hands, the proof of it soaked into her clothes... It wasn't until the CyberLife transport left and she was alone again that she build the courage to walk to the table and look down upon the replacement model, trying to force herself to spot any differences when engineering ensured there would be none.

Shy, or perhaps more so scared, she reached her hand out to his face, ran her thumb across his cheek, over the freckles and the moles, then down to his adorable imitation of a stubble cut permanently short and clean.

She closed her eyes and kept her hand there.

It was all the same. He was the same.

How she wished then she could just delete her memories of last night. Pluck them out of her mind, bury them with the damaged model.

One last tear threaded down her cheek before her reason kicked in gear - You're being ridiculous. What makes him himself is on the hard drive. What you want him to be doesn't change what he is. Androids do not die. Connor didn't die. He's right here.

Opening her eyes made one thing certain though: she needed to hear him again in order to go to sleep knowing she hadn't lost him at all. After a good sleep, she'd feel better about this too, maybe she'd even find a bright side to her now obviously inappropriate attachment to him.

Mia removed her hand from him and fell into a bit of a instinctive routine. She plugged him into the terminal as she always would, gentle and careful, then she started the process of the memory upload. Knowing it would take at least another hour before the upload is complete and she can wake him up again, she went for that shower supposed to wash away the night. It didn't work, but it helped ease the pain in her bones and muscles. Changing her clothes didn't help either, not immediately, but not seeing the blue blood, even as it was just about to evaporate, she guessed would prove beneficial soon. After all, she wanted so badly to forget everything, to pretend too that nothing ever happened.

Cleaner now, she returned to Connor's side and picked up his coin from the ground, placing it on her desk.

A true statement to the rare downsides of curiosity came up as, sitting back at her desk, Mia couldn't resist opening the optical processor data recorded by Connor last night. The files were all there, promising the unbiased truth, all a mere click away. She couldn't resist it.

Even when everything she saw through his eyes and analysis about last night appalled her deeply, she couldn't stop watching until the very last frame of it had played.

There he was, between the glitches of a system shutting down: Officer Owens, looking down on Connor. He smoked so leisurely from the last bits of his cigarette, not a care in the world. "How's this for a case?" He asked him, exhaling out smoke, before tossing the remaining bit of his cigarette down on Connor, "Fucking android."

The recording closed to a black screen and Mia was boiling with the one thing that seemed capable of pulling her out of her lethargy, of her unreasonable sorrow and dismay: the disgust she harbored for this sort of people who dare call themselves humans.

There was no turning back then.

She wanted to wake Connor up, but before she could do that, scores needed to be settled. Someone had to do the right thing and it wasn't hard for her to make a few calls, nor to that the walk to the police station once the calls have been made and the results were about to be seen.

It was around half past seven in the morning and she got there in just the nick of time. Officer Owens was fuming, rushing out of the station, a stain of coffee on his blue shirt, dripping down to his belt, over a worn out badge. "They'll be so far up our asses on this, we won't see the end of the questioning. Who in their right mind alerted the Detroit Police Department about the crackhouse down east?"

"That would be me," Mia approached Owens and the other officer accompanying him, showing them her ID badge from CyberLife. "I made the call myself this morning, after carefully reviewing the footage recovered from Connor."

After having been initially stunned by a direct approach, Officer Owens glared at her, "Do you have any idea what you have done, you fucking corporatist?"

"I also forwarded the whole report to my superiors and they agreed on your liability for all the damages brought to our prototype," Mia didn't look at him, resorting to hiding her hands in the pockets of her coat just so she could clench them into fists. She looked over Owens' shoulder, somewhere in the still foggy distance of the cold autumn day, especially as he decided to step closer to intimidate her.

"Excuse me?"

He sounded offended and she sure hoped he was.

"They were going to bill you for the damages, as per policy, but I advised them to withdraw the cost of repairs from the funds we've allocated to your town and your police station as payment for your cooperation," Mia let her nails dig into the bridge of her own palms. "He may not look like much to your ignorant eyes, but I assure you, Connor is a one of a kind android worth a small fortune. Should you damage him again, I am afraid your town would no longer qualify to receive compensation from CyberLife for aiding us in our field trial. Consider it an undeserving kindness, of course, that I did not allow you to go into so much debt that your children and their children alike would hate your guts."

Officer Owens grabbed a handful of Mia's coat collar, pulling her closer. It was only then that she finally looked at him, or rather down at how he gritted his teeth at her.

"You'd ruin us for a pile of plastic?!"

"That 'pile of plastic' is more of a man than you'll ever be," she answered as one would answering the most basic questions in life — without hesitation, bored by the assumption she could have ever said anything else.

He let her go by pushing her away, but she regained her balance just in time to not break her stance of authority and make a fool out of herself by falling over from all the exhaustion accumulated in her bones working against her. Quickly correcting her posture, Mia continued, "If there were more men like him in our current police force, we wouldn't be needing this project now, would we?"

"Those are kids you just got arrested, I hope you realize," Jackson pointed at her accusatory.

"Kids who needed help, not more drugs, Officer."

Officer Owens seemed on the verge of resorting to more meaningful violence, which perhaps he would have, had it not been for the man with him grabbing his arm and reminding him they had to be present when DPD's Red Ice Task Force raided the place, they had been requested to be there specifically.

"This isn't over," he shook his head at Mia.

"Well aware," she smiled, albeit not sincerely. "Connor will be back at work tomorrow." It was only when reading the shock and confusion on his face that her smile turned a little realer, "Androids can't die, Officer. But nice try anyway."

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
This was too emotional of a chapter for me to break its narrative flow just because it got extremely long, so here it is, the first 5k+ chapter of the book lmao.

I just had to soldier through it because tbh, this is one of the most significant early moments for Mia as a character. Any theories on what went down in the house while Connor was away? 👀👀

In the grand scheme of things btw, this is a case of 'she falls first, but he falls harder' ordeal too, which is one fun and nice conclusion to draw after this chapter, I guess.