• • •

She didn't believe what was happening to them at first. She simply couldn't bring herself to.

But like most things which have occurred since they started that field trial, life was adamant in changing every limit and boundary she had drawn around how much she can actually take, physically, mentally and emotionally. It turns out, Mia Wilkins is a lot more resilient than she herself would have thought a couple days ago, and that... She wasn't quite sure if she should be proud of it just yet.

Very little was anchored in certainty after seeing for herself the bag of biocomponents had been opened. The passage from that bottom-of-the-freighter dark room to the top of the ship where the control room was became but a blur that acted against all odds to bring her there, locking a strange door while her own lungs tried their best to keep up with her heart turned into some burn trying to escape out of her ribcage. Her temples were drumming with this rapid pulse, ears ringing and taking away one more sense that would have otherwise added too much stress on her mind, but most importantly, she was there.

Though eating would have given her back some strength in the long run, Mia was almost glad she hadn't really dug into that soup, because now, she had nothint her nauseous sensations could force her to puke out. She was left instead to sway her steps away from the door, advancing in a far from straight line to the control panels of the freighter's bridge section integrated in the medium sized room. Completely ignoring the maps on the table to the side and deliberately avoiding the bright light coming off of the bunch monitors broadcasting the security footage from all across the ship, Mia made a beeline for the central desk.

As soon as her hands met the edge of the control panel, she looked up and sought some comfort in the sight of the ocean, or at the very least as much of it as she could see through those dirty windows now that the sun was beginning to set.

Her eyes filled with tears for a reason she couldn't quite grasp from behind the walls of her denial of the situation she's found herself into. Only a couple of rapid blinks later, Mia had to detach her right hand from gripping the edge of the console and drag it across her face instead, stopping to rub that blur out of her eyes.

"Get it together," she commanded herself with a wavering tone, pulling her thoughts into whatever order she could find when all her mind spun around inside her brain was how trapped they actually were — out in the ocean, hours away from their destination, with nothing but freezing cold water around a ship now filled with danger. "Get it together...," she repeated weakly, bowing her head and dropping her right hand back to that cold metal edge.

After a sharp, deep inhale she forced upon herself in order to bring in all that oxygen she required to clear out some of her more fatalistic thoughts, Mia opened her eyes and focused on reading the name tags under all the buttons before her. Or at least the tags that haven't been damaged by time and have turned totally useless in the meantime. Most of the buttons, she discovered, were in that advanced state of usage, making whatever was left a puzzle of abbreviations she simply didn't have the time to begin solving.

Though she hadn't stopped to acknowledge and believe what was happening outside her locked door yet, she was aware of the urgency of the matter, so she cursed under her breath and gave up on doing this the way a worker there would.

Promptly, Mia turned her attention to the one chair in the room, currently left in front of the single computer she could see in there. It was an old thing, from back when monitors were as thick as a box and their screen was curved forward, buzzing through as soon as you switched it on. Those were the only type of monitors that winded up in her father's garage for fixing and she now had the proof that it so seemed those rust buckets were yet to go completely out of style.

Most things in life followed the rule that once one has the knowledge required to do the most complex and advanced thing in a field, its previous, less advanced models and forms are also available to them. Computing, Mia believed, was the opposite — once one knew the basics of terminal programming on one of these old pieced, nothing that came and innovated after would be too difficult to understand as well. After all, the goal of programming advancements is to simplify and grow efficiency, not grow in complexity and compromise on time.

Her bones told her she wouldn't have the stillness required to sit down, so Mia pushed the chair away, letting it roll to the side and opened the computer, pulling its yellowed out keyboard forward, even dragging the mouse to her reach. The control panels may be a mystery to her, but she knew she could brute force her way past them.

With her shoulders dropping, it was undeniable that having this opportunity to hide behind her work again helped her in her goal of ignoring the security camera footage playing to her right, far enough in her peripheral vision that she couldn't really make it out, but unfortunately just about close enough for her to know there is movement on most, if not all cameras.

Delaying the unavoidable truth about their current situation was all that was keeping her standing at the time, no matter how short lived the peace would turn out to be once she opened the terminal and ran the lines of code needed to gain access to the communication lines she needed to switch off.

It was almost no time at all before she went through systematically shutting down everything that connected the ship to land, wherever that may be.

Just as she was about to escape her fear of those cameras and wipe clean the network in preparation to shutting them off, banging on the door had Mia's hands draw away from the computer. In that moment, she couldn't quite remember if she had locked the door, so every banging attempt to get it open made her flinch.

"Open the door!" A man shouted from the other side, the muffled state of his voice stringing Mia's sense of hearing out of the claws of that treacherous ear ringing.

"Someone's in there?" Another voice inquired, albeit a bit more mindful of his tone.

"The door is locked, what do you think?" The first man barked back, continuing his banging on the door and thus cutting Mia off eavesdropping on a good chunk of their conversation while turning around. "...I haven't a fucking clue," was the frustrated response she heard next.

"Don't you have the damn key?"

"It's locked from the inside, you fucking idiot," he slammed his fist into the door again, hard enough that Mia simply had to grimace. "Whoever you are in there, you're a god damn coward, you know?" A gulp stuck in her throat as she listened on, eyes locked on the unmoving door, but unfortunately still petrified to her spot, unwilling to take the risk of makint a single sound. "That thing is killing us all out here, buddy."

No, Mia immediately closed her eyes, trying to preserve her denial's veracity. There was no undoing the damage those words have done though.

All she managed to do was have each syllable echo inside her skull, bounce off of what she already knew to be true when she watched Connor grip that gun of his. No matter how hard she tried now to hide again behind her own tasks, or even behind her fear, her body turned on its own and got her facing the camera footage. She opened her eyes, and oh, she immediately wished she hadn't.

Though Mia was almost certain the two men outside her door kept talking, the sight of the cantina turned into a grave for seven bodies had returned to her the ear ringing that gradually numbed away her best senses.

The broadcast was spotty and she couldn't quite make out the faces of the dead past the interference, but that was perhaps the single mercy to find in facing the storm head on, at last.

Flashes drew her attention to the monitor right below next. Interrupted by spaced out frames, she made out Connor's pixilated silhouette, walking with his arm outstretched, hand wrapped around his pistol and trigger finger squeezing incessantly, methodically. Not one bullet he fired had been wasted and nothing about his demeanor showed a single second of hesitation sneaking through his programming.

It hurt to watch, but Mia was rather certain it hurt for all the wrong reasons.

After all, she knew exactly what interface he might be seeing, what protocol would have taken over to get this specific type of movements from him. While witnessing those deaths, all Mia's brain could conjure were explanations, like she would have to return to the lab tomorrow and file in a field test report.

She could already hear herself — The processing unit has been overwhelmed by the precarious conditions. The freezing temperatures brought down the processing capacity to power saving modes, while the spotted pattern of criminality amongst the crew members painted the picture of an unsafe environment. The introduction of a nee danger in these conditions skyrocketed the probability for mission failure, thus causing an immediate activation of the combat protocol as a method of regaining more favorable odds. He felt threatened on all fronts, so the protocol engaged lowered his other system inputting more than it should have. And had she known about his humanity when working at the lab, she woule have perhaps added into such a report one more line, Similar to how humans seek to cope with stressful situations.

Mia should have really known better than to be surprised just then that her own mind would fire back at her the only argument which, upon considering, her whole personal attempt to calm down would crumble into ruins and degenerate back into panic. You allowed his program to consider lethal force as a viable option, her mind accused her. Look how many people you got killed just because you cared more about him than safety and rules.

And I would do it again, Mia realized, though she had no time to think of the implications of such an admission.

"It's you, isn't it?" The voice outside her door asked, bringing Mia back to the present and forcing her to look right across the monitors to find the live feed of the corridor on which the two men stood. "You're the one who brought that android here."

There was no question attached to his last words, and the accusation fell heavy on Mia's chest. She gulped down the feeling the best she could, but all that did was bring her a sensation of suffocation.

She knew all too well that looking at those screens and seeing what Connor had done should have awakened in her some sorrow, some guilt, perhaps even some fear or at the very least regret, but instead of any of those, she found herself drowning in the reality that, given the chance to go back in time and stop herself from changing those protocols in his base code around, she would have simply done it all the same. Despite all the dead bodies piling up since, Mia found it hard not to focus on the fear she saw in Connor's eyes after he had saved her life by killing that man in her father's house. She changed his code not for her sake, but for his, to spare him the terror of guilt, and that mercy, she was willing to admit she'd never take back, no matter how cruel that made her seem.

And yes, she was scared out of her mind just how much more her love could make her complacent to.

"I'll kill you, you bitch," the man outside the door spoke. "I'll bring down this door and kill you for what you've done."

"How are you—?" Even the man besides him seemed perplexed by this anger infused claim, though some of the confusion diluted once he watched his colleague step away from the door and turn his attention to the axe stored in a box just a few steps further down the hallway, near the fire exit, instead.

Mia watched him break the emergency glass with his elbow and take that axe, but she couldn't bring herself to feel afraid. Now that she was certain the door was locked, she had confidence an axe made for chopping down the wood of the fire exit door, should it get stuck or blocked during evacuations, didn't stand a chance in bringing down a solid metal door with its good days still ahead.

More importantly though, she had no time for being afraid, not when the very sight of the axe had given her a much better idea on what to do next.

Getting back to the terminal while the man outside started swinging at the hinges of the door, Mia focused on gaining access to the fire alarm system.

No more than a couple of seconds had elasped before she entered one final sequence of code and triggered the fire alarm across the whole ship on. There were no radio communications available, so the part of the program which would have had the fire alarm's trigger automatically alert the closest ship or land outpost for help was rendered inactive. All the alarms did was blast inside the ship and hopefully get those few members of the crew still unaware of the situation at hand to evacuate in orderly fashion to the elected meeting points, or even leave the ship altogether. This freighter, much like all currently running ships, may have been old but still benefited of pre-programmed routes. Mia found the exact mapping that had been canceled for a reroute once they entered international waters and reinstated Greenland as the ship's next destination.

"Martin," the voice came from outside, now far too muffled by the alarm for Mia to properly make it out from so far away. With careful steps since the banging on the door continued restlessly, she approached the door and slowly inched her ear closer to its cold surface.

"What?" Martin asked, exasperated and tired, stumbling back with his axe in hand now lowering down.

"The alarm," the other man pointed out. "We still have the emergency boats, right?"

Mia sighed out her relief — the men reached the exact conclusion she had hoped they would, and with that stone lifted off her chest, she felt able to return to the control panel and the old computer to finish what she started. She couldn't delay any longer deleting the security footage and stopping the network from adding any more to those files. Once the ship reached Greenland, it will draw all the attention upon itself, but most importantly, whoever will step on board to find answers, will only find corpses, which will prompt them to, of course, check the cameras. The least she could do in getting rid of evidence was making sure neither her or Connor show up on any recordings on board.

Before pressing in those final keys though, she looked up again at the live broadcast. The two men outside her door were gone and the lack of an axe left behind told her they took it with them. However, they were not what Mia was worried about just then. She searched diligently until she finally noticed Connor, standing in the middle of a hallway, looking up at the flashing red lights joining in with the blasting fire alarm.

Making note of the location showing up in the corner of the security footage, Mia clicked the final buttons, shutting off the security network and wiping it clean in the process. That's one more thing to add to the list of things that love can make you do, Mia thought to herself, exiting the safety of the control room.

Connor lowered his gaze down from the fire alarm's flashes. If his red LED were to be believed, his processing unit was uncomfortably crowded, on the very edge of overheating on him, yet he would argue then that there was nothing he could do about it. Someone had triggered off the fire alarm and, according to his interface pop up keeping track of the crew member list, he only had two more men to worry about neutralizing beforr they made it off the ship and compromised his mission.

The involvement of the fire alarm forced him to add another process to his compiling list, thus seeing before his eyes a 3D rendition of the ship's map, re-routing him on the fastest way to the nearest emergency boat. There were four of them across the freighter and Connor only hoped he would have just a pinch of luck in getting to the right one in time, especially now that the security system had been shut off, most likely by Mia, he hoped. The thought of her tightened his right hand around the pistol and spurred him on, moving the '2 Threats Remaining' message to the center of his interface view.

The moment he reached the first evacuation boat, he realized luck was indeed on his side. The two remaining crew members of the Euryalus were there, struggling to make sense of the mechanism supposed to be engaged to deploy the boats and drop them onto the waves below. They made eye contact and Connor's scanners overwrote his processing unit's priorities of keeping him from overheating, outlining instead in red the axe held by one of the men and the anger levels detected from everything about his expression to his posture.

The average human reaction time was eight times slower than the reaction time embedded into androids. Even with his processing unit overheating, Connor snapped his arm forward and shot the armed man before he even had the chance to fully lift the axe. He dropped to the floor and Connor moved the barrel to the still standing man, individual whose hands flew up once his back met the wall behind, a physical attempt to show that he had no intention of reaching for the weapon himself.

"Connor!" A much too familiar voice shouted over the whimpered begging of the man and though his arm remained outstretched without an attempt to immediately shoot, Connor was unable to back out of the scanning already commenced. Raul Castro, he identified the man, as he had every single person he shot in the past twenty minutes before storing them away in a file dedicated to the whole operation. Thirty-nine years old, he continued the profiling though he could now see Mia was there besides him, coming from his left into his field of vision. His eyes remained trained on the target, Divorced. Two children he lost custody of. Multiple charges of assault, driving under the influence and destruction of private and public property.

Connor closed the case by squeezing the trigger and much to his dismay, seeing Mia flinch at the gunshot sound marking a quick death for Raul Castro, he remained stuck in the combat protocol, 'Threats Remaining' warning flashing before his eyes while he tried to look down at her. His arm was unwilling to lower the gun and his hand remained petrified, wrapped around the weapon, and just to prove his worries, a prompt covered his field of vision, warning him the processing unit failed to run a self-diagnosis due to excessive overheating.

There he was, paralyzed into standing still while Mia worked her way past the momentary startle to get hold of his arm and look up at him. Her left hand wrapped around his wrist, then gently trailed to his hand, but even with her warm skin caressing him, the most he could get out of his hand was a shiver.

"We're safe now," she muttered and if his combat protocol could just disengage already, Connor would have perhaps come close again to crying. That was simply how moving it was to him to know that she knew exactly what he needed to hear in that moment. "I'm safe," Mia continued.

Her soft-spoken words were challenging his protocol through direct contradiction, yet it so seemed to him that his circuitry would sooner completely melt down than let go of this state he had wanted to seek relief into before. Connor was unafraid to admit he was wrong to want his sensitivity turned down low and his processing unit prioritizing efficiency over everything else, and not entirely simply because his overheating was uncomfortable, but rather because he scared Mia just then and he couldn't as much as even attempt to reassure her or apologize.

His vision became spotty, and though he could no longer tell, Mia was reading the signs of overheating, something she didn't think an RK800 would ever be brought to experience, given the top market technology implemented on him. But there he was, rapid blinking, head flinching to the side, synthetic skin glitching out in random spots across his face and, she imagined, across his body too.

There was no hesitation within Mia when it came to quickly ripping the winter hat off his head and throwing it away. It was cold in the hallway. That cold had been their sole worry when packing for this trip. Never could she have predicted she'd need to unzip Connor's jacket and look around for the nearest window to open to let more cold in to make sure his condition stabilizes a little from the very edge he threaded now to a shutdown sequence.

The sight of his LED convinced her to esste no time in backing him up to the wall and using all her strength to get him into sitting down and thus use one less background activity to clog up his processing unit.

Only once his flinching stopped did she return to verbal reassurance. "I'm alright," Mia knelt next to him and picked up his left hand, fixing two of his fingers to her left wrist, right over her pulse.

It was the desire to actually take in this evidence that Mia provided which finally disabled Connor's combat protocol. The transition, should he dare attempt comparison as a way of describing it, was like ears kept underwater suddenly emerged to the surface; he was the ears and the air were the emotions the combat protocol kept muted in the background.

"I'm sorry," Connor's voice trembled.

"You did what had to be done," she raised her left hand to brush through his hair. His processes were slowly returning to normal and Connor hardly found it difficult to realize that Mia assumed he was sorry for what he had done. "They were horrible people. And you knew they were a threat. You were programmed to be capable of carrying out eventual combat missions," she said, and he couldn't help but sigh out a breath he didn't really need. She's wording out every reason she thought about, Connor noted to himself, discovering this to be yet another proof that he had not scared her only then, with the gun, but throughout this whole thing.

It occured to him then — was he really any better than a deviant if he was so violent?

"You have nothing to apologize for, you hear me?" Mia continued, some desperation making it through in her voice. She knew guilt too well to wish it on the person she loved most, and as long as she believed it with all her heart, there was no lie in anythint she told him just then. "You've done nothing wrong." Love certainly redefines the limits to belief and faith, she thought to herself, seeking in his eyes some sign that he was following her.

"I scared you," Connor worded out a little clearer now, managing however to say something that confused Mia enough to let her expression show it too. Taking full advantage of her momentary stun, he continued, "I don't regret what I have done, Mia. I didn't back when I disobeyed my programming the first time. It didn't even cross my mind when I made my way out of the CyberLife Tower to get back to you, and if I had to make a choice, I know I would do what I did today again and change nothing, because it kept you safe. That's the problem. I don't feel anything about killing these people, I am only scared that you see me different noe. That you'll be afraid of me as of any deviant out there and I can't even blame you for it. Someone alive wouldn't just kill and feel nothing at all after all, right?"

Deviant. Afraid. Mia's brows furrowed down as she struggled to assimilate everything he told her just then, unbeknownst that Connor was watching her expression and read just about enough into the lack of immediate answer to want to stand up immediately, even at the cost of moving his hand away from her and from her calming pulse.

"Connor," Mia called after him, much slower however in raising from her knees. "I could never be afraid of you," she admitted with the tone of a plea to the one thing that had scared her too — the new limits of love.

"Maybe you should be," he answered far colder than he had meant to. There was much on his mind yet to be processed and lifted off the load slowing down his unit's efficiency, much that he couldn't even bring up in what little had told Mia. But in order to begin making sense to her, he had to make sense to himself, and he only knew how to do that while cooling off in silence, going through everything that happened and discovering exactly what had paralyzed him.

Finding some solitude in dragging all bodies back to the cantina and covering them up, gave him plenty of hours to play back through his recorded memories and identify that the it was fear that froze him at the end. Not necessarily a fear of being similar to a deviant and thus scaring Mia, but rather one that he had experienced many times before and dismissed — a fear of losing her.

Without her, he was nothing but a faulty prototype with too many failed missions to count. He was certain then, that by all means of definition, without her, he would die.

And something told him, after all those hours of looking back, Mia knew all about this fear and how rapidly and drastically it changes every parameter and limit.

He cursed the difficulty and complexity of human emotions and that, in order to figure out what he felt and experienced, he had had to push her away for the reminder of their journey on a now empty freighter, driving itself to docks. There was some irony to it though that once the dawn brightened by a single nuance the sky and the foggy horizon, they found themselves together on a boat, slowly approaching Greenland, in order to take full advantage of the distraction of a massive ship heading for the docks unnanounced and the natural occurance of fog hiding their presence, yet he couldn't bring himself to break the silence he very much disliked being there in the first place.

There was some space between them that felt like an ocean of its own, and though he had tried to look down at his gun and even concentrate on the only sound there, that of the engine keeping them moving straight, nothing managed to take his mind off the wall of quietness building up pressure between them. Though he knew he had to say something, anything at all, Connor had little luck in finding the right words.

Nothing in the English vocabulary felt sufficient to express his gratitude for her help, as well as his apologies for his recent instability. Nothing seemed worthy to hold the meaning of his vows to protect her, to speak out the acknowledgment that he will not ever be able to hesitate when her safety was on the line. He wanted her to know that he discovered he'd rather die than lose her, but no language was fitted for this sort of confession, so perhaps, he eventually thought, words are not the way to go.

The material of his winter jacket shifted first, alerting Mia of movement in time to see Connor tuck away the pistol he has been staring down at since they left the freighter. She hadn't a clue what he's been doing since they talked in that hallway, but she didn't want to ask. Sometimes, people needed time to think. Though she's gotten used to knowing everything that moves inside his processing unit, she'd be a hypocrite to acknowledge him as alive and not also become aware that as much as she would like to know everything, she had to give hid privacy and his right to only tell her as much as he trusts her with.

The waiting was killing her, which is why she greeted his movement with a hopeful raise of her eyebrows. Connor looked at her and from the sight of his eyes alone she could see he wanted to apologize again.

Right as she was about to break the silence herself and object out loud that she truly wasn't capable of being scared of him, much as she wouldn't be able to be angry with him either, Connor closed the space between them by pulling her into an embrace.

While he couldn't find the right words, he knew he had the right means of showing everything from gratitude to remorse, from 'I'm the luckiest android on this earth to have met you' to 'I often feel so flawed I think myself undeserving of your love'. Each feeling translated into a desperate clinging, a digging of his thumbs into the material of her jacket and a synchronization through closeness between her heart and synthetic imitation of it.

Only once her own arms wrapped around him did Connor know it was alright not to speak, that she understood all he did on that ship, he did thinking of protecting her. We'll be alright, he thought, watching from the embrace as snowflakes trapped themsleves in her hair, spots of white over auburn red. We'll be just fine. Just us. We have to be.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
Pretty much jinxed it last chapter when I said this one would be a breeze to write. Ended up re-writing and deleting and re-writing again, up to the point that I just hit a motivational slump and had to rely on playing the game again with a friend to refresh my inspiration to keep going on this story. Truth is, I knew I had to finish this chapter today, to commit to one final edit and just post this, because had I delayed it any longer, we'd be stuck here forever, with me second guessing every single thing I wrote.

Thank you so much for your patience waiting on this chapter, and please, get ready, next chapter will end in the first and final choice that you can make and will branch out into two endings for this book.

Oh, and here's a small edit I made while fighting the white hairs this chapter grew on me:

I went all out to make this as high fidelity as I could to the scene itself and I am kinda proud of it ngl. This whole chapter was a bit heavy on them coming to terms with the fact that their love truly knows no bounds and that means it will make them do some horrible things and they are no longer ashamed by it.