• • •

It all happened too fast. Everything, from the moment she saw him, the second she looked down the barrel of his gun, to the instant in which someone tackled him to the side and she saw the bullet getting fired her way, had happened too fast for Mia to have a single chance at a reaction.

Before she knew it, she was on the floor, sight of the ceiling blurred and a deaf pain blending her senses together in some slush she could barely understand.

He shot me, Mia's mind conjured back the conclusion, only for the shock to awaken a much better one instead, worded under the sign of inquiry — How am I still alive?

She knew Connor's code inside out and therefore could not shrug off the fact that it had no parameter in it which would allow him to miss his shot once he locks in the target.

The interruption, her memory chimed in with that fraction of a second before she had blacked out in contact with too much sudden pain. Someone disrupted him. Who?

With her curiosity hardly being kept in check by her half-asleep senses, Mia forced mobility back to her body and lifted her head from the ground to look back towards the doorless frame in the wall leading to the scaffolding kept deposit. Her head disapproved with this sudden movement and her body was quickly being washed by pulses of fresh ache in the fade of the numbness, but before she could let any of that bother her, Mia squinted ahead confused at how exactly she had managed to see double.

Pain, she justified to herself. I hit my head too. I'm probably delirious right now.

But despite that reasonable explanation her mind had given her, she couldn't help but stare as there were two identical RK800's stumbling backwards on the scaffolding, tackling each other first to the railing to the left, then the one on the right.

The thought that one of them had saved her had quickly turned into a reignited hope that one of them was actually her Connor, who still remembered who she was and what they have been through. That was hope that she otherwise had to quickly extinguish. This can't be real, she shook her head and closed her eyes to stop the vertigo that had made her feel the world spin without herself, a highly nauseating sensation that shouldn't be allowed to mix in with the growing pulses of agony she couldn't pinpoint yet to one single place on her body.

On the spot, she recalled entire regulation documents stating that no two models of the same series would be allowed to be activated at the same time during the testing period of the RK800 prototype. I have to be imagining this, her mind turned less appreciative of any belief that would point her towards any other conclusion.

Not managing to make any sense of her situation and not quite ready yet to look down at herself to identify where she had been shot, Mia opened her eyes again only to immediately study her surroundings and discover, through a squint the discarded gun the RK800 had used to. She found she would much rather prefer holding the gun herself, so though her body begged her for stillness, she gritted her teeth and raised first on her hands and knees. Finding her limps awfully uncooperative, Mia resorted to dropping back down and crawling forward to the gun dropped near the door.

She tried to ignore the grunts and dull noises of plastic hitting against plastic, sounds that were coming off muffled over a music her affected hearing had already diluted down to pulses of bass, but she couldn't quite help herself from looking up every once in a while in hopes that she'd start seeing normally again. No way would CyberLife activate another RK800 to take out both me and Connor, she tried to think of more reasonable ways to dismiss what she believed to be an illusion. If Connor remembered me when he got to a new body, he wouldn't have taken so many days in coming back.

Her hand wrapped around the gun, but Mia didn't stop her struggle there. She dragged herself to sitting, back leaning against the doorframe and once the freshest wave of pain allowed her to open her eyes again, she moved her head to the side and checked on her hallucinations.

One of the two RK800's was holding a gun and, forced by the other into pointing it to the ceiling much further above the level of the scaffolding installation still. Two shots were fired and a rain of glass shards fell on top of the pair while the gun had finally been knocked out of his grip.

The ear ringing those two gunshots caused her had spread into a head splitting headache within the second, turning redundant her attempt to arm herself, because the gun had already slipped her grip.

In an attempt to see where the gun had landed while the height of the headache still reverbed inside her skull, Mia threw by mistake a single glimpse that would turn into a panicked stare down at her white shirt turned bloody and the absolute carnage of her left shoulder. Was that white her collarbone? Obviously, that was no question to ask herself when her consciousness was hanging by a thin thread, because while the sight of her wounds immediately nullified her brain's efforts in dosaging how much pain she'd feel, the mere thought of seeing her own bone through a bullet hole twisted her stomach in a knot tight enough that she felt lightheaded and prone to throwing up.

Instead, her brain decided that would be the perfect time to turn off the lights for a while and abandon this scene turned into a nightmare of obscure darkness barely interrupted anymore by the nightclub neons below or the broken lamp still shining on the room's ground, illuminating the path she had crawled over the Red Ice crystal covered floor.

Connor could not bring himself pinning the trackint of Mia's vitals on the corner of his interface, not even as her passing out distracted him enough to allow the Forty-eight model to land a good hit on the side of his face, one sufficiently strong to temporarily throw off his synthetic skin into deactivating from the spot and exposing the white plastic beneath. He recovered too quickly back to the fight for him to even consider turnint off such an important background runnint command, one that ultimately help give him wn edge of motivation over his clone.

With his own handgun now out of the equation too, and with no statistical chance of winning a close combat encounter against an android of the same model that held the same programming and protocols as him, Connor knew he had to pivot to some sort of advantage that his clone could neither expect, nor employ in return: he made his second mistake on purpose.

The hit as punishment for him dropping his guard was immediate, knocking harsh knuckles over an equally harsh surface that was his cheek, and pushing his head all the way to the side while he was backed into the railing by this power imbalance he allowed to come between them.

When a second hit followed, taking full advantage of his hesitation and stagger, Connor knew his plan had worked and Forty-eight fell for what chess would have seen as a brilliant sacrifice — with chess having been his and Mia's favorite method of training his computing power in the early days, Connor had learnt  the weaknesses of a computer laid in its inability to choose a small loss in order to earn a bigger win. Hundreds of chess games played against Mia and the only two she had won were those where her blunders set up moves he that he could not predict thanks to first classifying her strategy as a mistake and thus dismissing it.

There was nothing quite like intentional errors that would throw off an android's processing unit, and Connor knew that for sure, because even his own LED flashed red when he chose and executed this plan without heeding to a single warning given to him through his interface.

As expected, after being given the upper hand for three consecutive hits, Forty-eight was taken off guard to find Connor's hand grappling onto his shirt, shock which opened a short window of reaction that had the clone be met with a hit into his nose and a knee into his stomach, effectively bending him over for all the momentum needed to complete the maneuver he had set himself out for. Cobnor stepped around his clone and gave it no time to react to being thrown over the railing until it was already an inevitable fact.

He took the win however with no reaction at all, not even as much as waiting to see if his clone had hit the ground, nor if it had injured any of the innocent bystanders in the club below. Connor's one and only priority once there was no fellow RK800 threatening their safety was to run to Mia and wake her up.

His first concern had been that she had already lost too much blood and there was not enough left oxygenated to keep her awake. As soon as he was kenlt down before her and his scanners were put to work, he assessed however that was fortunately not the case. They still had time. While his processing unit ran the background compiling of a route to the nearest accessible location that he could procure the necessary items to tend to her injury, Connor tried to find what else coulr have caused her sudden loss of consciousness. Narrowing down the options to either pain or panic, he finally lifted his hands up to her cheeks, cradling her face in his palms before calling her name.

"Mia."

She heard his voice beyond the unexpected and hardly explainable veil of darkness that had draped over her sight, but this wasn't her first rodeo with the cruel fabrications of her mind. "You're not real."

Her incoherent response was a bad sign of her state so though Connor would have liked to get a good look in her eyes before dropping his hands from her face, he couldn't allow himself to risk her life on the behalf of his Thirium pump acting up, as it had since he had managed to piece together CyberLife had activated another RK800 in his absence.

His sensors picked up movement to his right before he could work his way into getting Mia up from the ground though, and perhaps that was for the better, because a single glance confirmed to him that the danger was not yet completely averted: Forty-eight had not fallen off the scaffolding and had instead managed to hold on to some bars beneath and climb his way back up. His forearm was already flat against the platform.

He's not going to stop, Connor realized, recognizing all too well the determination the android displayed. It was the very same determination that he had embedded into his programming as well.

Knowing what he had to do — and do so fast —, Connor picked up Mia's right hand and pressed it up over her left shoulder, "Hold it here. I'll be right back and we'll get you someplace safe." He took the gun next to her after making sure her hand wouldn't just move off her wound when he let go, and did not waste any time into walking back towards his clone, stopping only when his foot stepped on his arm.

Forty-eight looked up at the gun pointed at his head, awfully unimpressed by the clear threat and far more interested in looking past the barrel and into his defective clone's eyes. "You know I'll come back," he informed him, tone unwavering.

"I'll be waiting," Connor maintained himself only as cold as the clone below him, pulling the triggered immediately after the half-threat, half-vow had rolled off his lips.

There was little time spared by him between looking down at the Thirium dripping from a the hole the bullet had burned cleanly through the middle of his clone's forehead and tucking the gun thay had caused the damage back. Connor's priorities laid elsewhere, not with the uneasy feeling that came with fighting the version of himself who had experienced none of the things he had with Mia. He must not have my memories, he told himself dismissively, pushing aside any branching questions in order to return to her and help her to her feet.

If her incoherent mumbling was anything to go by, Connor would say that Mia had faded in and out of consciousness at least seven times before they've made it out of the nightclub and back in the car. It was there, when he sat her down in her seat and strapped her seatbelt on that some of consciousness seemed to take root and actually stick around, because he finally caught a glimpse of her eyes, bloodshot, confused and teery, looking more green than ever, even under the faint light inside the car, joined only by a streetlight several feet from them.

"I remember your face," Mia smiled to him and he couldn't quite understand what she meant by that and why she'd sound so proud of something so bizarrely common, but he smiled right back at her anyway.

"Keep your hand pressing," he held his own over hers, guiding her to press a little stronger on the wound, to show some resistance agains the bleeding that fortunately was not too severe. His scanners, brought much closer to her now, also reassured him that there was no severe damage done to her clavicle either, so he could lean back with less guilt weighing him down.

The jolt of stinging pain that erupted from her actually pressing on the wound stringed Mia out of her dream-like state temporarily, enough so to realize that she had somehow gone from sitting on the dirty floor of the nightclub to being back in the passenger seat. Instinct was what had her look to her left once she heard the door shut and she was pretty sure this was heaven: being back in that car, with Connor driving, like nothing has ever happened to them.

"Mia?" Connor inquired, registering her body temperature dropping just as he started the car up again. He couldn't bring himself to appreciate being in a familiar environment, not when she was next to him, consciousness fading again. Is she paler?

With his worry building up to a system overload that stuck his LED working between flashes of yellow and red, Connor was certain he had broken several road rules to get them to their destination faster. Law after law, he had dismissed ever single warning his programming was forced to show on his interface, and he would have dismissed a thousand more had he not managed to park the car where it needed to be before that.

The closest location his processing unit identified as having all he needed to extract the bullet and stop the bleeding effectively was a currently closed veterinary clinic doubling as a pet shop and animal shelter. It was currently closed and he had security confirmation on site that there was no one human within as a security measure.

Having parked in the back of the small building in order to not draw the attention of anyone who might be out and about on the main road at this late hour, once Connor picked Mia up — her state compelled him to choose that over helping her walk on her own —, he had to walk with her through a less than pleasant area of humid trashcan, well overdue for an unloading.

He disambled the security system of the location and forced his way past the back entry door mechanically, with no regard to anything other than keeping track of her breaths, all that much closer to him now. Though he would have liked to cling to calmness, Connor knew better now than to fool himself on such things: his worry was turning into fear. After all, hadn't he already let her down? Delayed by a dream for five days? Getting there too late to stop his clone from pulling the trigger on her?

Had he some time to spare, he knew his processing unit would label his tasks so far as failures.

As soon as he brought them inside the dark building, the barking of several dogs and the rattle of metal cages greeted them to a noise sufficiently loud to have startled Mia awake and groaning. Connor looked down and caught a glimpse of his own hand holding onto her arm, now stained in her blood. His gaze lifted instantly, resuming his task at hand, because much as it disturbed him the prospect of being covered in the physical proof that she was suffering, he couldn't just stand around and contemplate things — he had to do something.

The shelter at the back of the building was no place to place Mia down and while it would have been efficient, he believed, to bring her with him to the infirmary to the left, Connor was rather certain treating her in a place where animals were being treated may be dehumanizing to some extent. A single glance thrown to the right presented him with an all too familiar undulating blue glow, one his memory linked back to the relaxed half of the night they spent in her childhood home. Her head was resting on him now too, although not quite as uncaring and relaxed as it had back then. Wishing only to bring her comfort, no matter how small, had made up his mind rather quicklt to go right first, into the pet store and locate, after startling the parrots to the right, the aquariums and fishtanks to the left.

It was in front of the calm swimming fish that he placed her down, back rested against the shelves filled with empty tanks for sale.

Connor aimed to be fast about returning to the infirmary and getting the supplies, but he couldn't move once he felt the strength Mia had placed in holding onto his hand. Her eyes were barely open, he noticed, but once her eyelashes fluttered a couple of times, she looked down at their hands.

"Don't leave," her lips parted to let out that beseech that threatened to be his undoing paradox. Androids, as AI and computers in general, were not constructed to understand or compute paradoxes, and should their systems be presented with such situations, instences or scenarios, they were prone to overheating.

Here was his very own paradox — he wanted to say, 'I will never leave your side again', but his lips moved and voiced, "I'll be right back," instead. And somehow, he believed, those two statements could coexist in the same plane, at the very same time.

Much as it pained him to have to pry his hand out of hers, Connor forced himself to do so. Once she's safe and her condition stable..., he ensured himself while hurrying past the cages of still barking dogs, towards the infirmary and its cabinets of supplies.

Faced with his tasks, he didn't manage to finish his thought making promises to himself, but truth was, he didn't know what he will do once he knew her safe and sound. Though he had thought about what he'll tell her once they see each other again, most of his plans had been rendered into a nothingness by the tragedy he was almost too late to prevent. His processing unit didn't dare compile for him what would have happened if he had failed his mission tonight.

The sight Mia found once she lifted her open eyes from staring at her empty hand was one that had reminded her of home. With just about enough imagination, the sight of the fish and their clear, illuminated water bubbling up small pockets of air was enough to send her back to her room, back when her best break from working on her projects was to sit up and walk to her fish, look at it go about its life at its own pace, undisturbed and unbothered.

She found it relaxing to observe the carelessness of such small creatures, the dedication and perseverance written in their habits. If anything, it reminded her that while her life may be in shambles at the moment, a breath of chaos was not a permanent state to find herself in, but a passageway. Life observed from the outside had a pattern to itself, and she too was capable of seeing it, if only she stepped back.

Mia missed the days when such thinking was sufficient to ease her mind, but for now, she was satisfied to merely finding comfort in the melancholy of reminiscing that simplicity of the past.

Connor had apparently not granted his attempt at bringing her comfort enough credit to begin with, because once he returned with all that he needed carried in his jacket that he took off, he was slightly taken off guard to to find Mia's vitals to have slightly stabilized in comparison to the fluctuating data he received from her in the club and in the car, while they drove there.

He didn't know what he say though, so he said nothing at all, quietly kneeling next to her and setting down his jacket to his side.

The sounds breaking the silence in her vicinity made Mia turn her head abruptly and immediately grow aware that an insistent dog barking tore the veracity of her image of home apart. She couldn't quite bring herself to care, not while seeing Connor there with her.

There was only so much adrenaline could do, and she was rather certain it drew the line at having her get herself to the car and drive to what looked like a pet shop she had never in her life been in before, all while hallucinating him. No, Mia gulped down her dry throat the denial. It is time to accept the possibility...

In fear that she'll either start crying or have the words stop in her throat and choke her out, Mia hurried to ask, regardless of how broken and faint her voice would come out. "Are you really here?"

Connor needed no scanners to tell him that she was sincere and actually seeking a honest reassurance from him, he had eyes and ears that knew Mia well enough to know that whatever she had been through while he was away had not been easy. "I'm here," he took her hand resting in her lap and gave it a light squeeze, accounting for the possibility that she may have required a more physical proof rather than just a soft-spoken confirmation.

The tears blurred her vision before she could stop them. She was so tired that she doubted she could have held back the sob that followed even if she tried. Those shivers, she has held them back behind a shield of hope, valiantly denying herself the relief of this outlet for sorrow, even as her belief decayed into despair.

Looking away was her attempt at holding her dignity while her shoulders shivered, movement growing her pain to match the mounting heaviness on her chest, and her hand held a little tighter onto his.

"I missed you," Mia muttered past her trembling lips and Connor felt, for the first time since the first memory he had ever recorded, how a rare programming protocol was on the verge of being initiated and the small pocket of Thirium dedicated to human behavior emulation was getting filled behind his eyes. He felt sad watching the fragility with which Mia presented herself to him, and his processing unit associated what he felt with the yet to be used function of crying.

Connor blocked the command and redistributed the Thirium out of those pockets, focusing instead to remaining the calm anchor Mia might need more in that moment than an unstable android dealing with a status of livelihood. Raising his free hand to her face, he brushed his thumb under her eye to wipe her tears as they formed.

"I'm not going anywhere," he reassured her, knowing it would be much more beneficial to her breathing patterns if she didn't cry, and believing some comfort to be the best way he could ease her in letting her cheeks dry. "But I need to take care of your shoulder first. I've downloaded all I need to know about wound cleaning, bullet removal, stitches and bandages, as well as human anatomy, so I believe I am as qualified as I am ever going to get, however, I must warn you that I could not find any local anesthetics and this... will not be a painless process."

His calm clashed in an odd contrast with her borderline breakdown over her dying hope's last breaths of madness finally being rewarded. There they were, her crying because she thought she'd never see him again, never hold his hand and feel some warmth trying to hold her too, and him telling her how he's going to take care of her. It was enugh to stun her into silence.

"I did bring you something to bite down on," he pulled over the rolled cloth he had procured from the infirmary section of the building. "The research I've consulted says there is a chance biting down on something while in extreme pain may help the brain focus away from the central unpleasant sensation and even release some chemicals that may alleviate the pain altogether. I read it has a lot to do with the human brain sharing in predatory instincts with animals that hunt prey which has a chance of fighting back." After his tone had faded off, Connor's lips flattened in a line and he tilted his head to the side ever so slightly, allowing his worry to return. Maybe his voice wasn't as calming as he thought he would be for her. "If you wish for silence, I can remain quiet—"

"No," Mia interrupted him, only then realizing that she had been watching speechless, eyebrows raised and lips slightly parted. "I've had my fill of silence. This is better." She took the rolled up cloth from him and though she wished to forget about the state she was in and that she was very much still bleeding, Mia couldn't help but hiss at the stinging pain her movements brought.

Much as it was a relief to know she found no difference in his brand new voice synthesiser, Connor couldn't linger on that while she was in pain. He reached his hands out, but hesitated with them hovering above her shoulders. "I'll...," he rummaged the best approach to what he was about to ask. "I'll need your permission to remove your shirt."

"How many times did I have to undress you exactly?" She retorted effortlessly, even with fatigue clinging to her own tender tone. "I know you keep count of everything."

She was right about his processing unit keeping count of everything and though he had a number at the ready to answer her rhetorical question, he shook his head instead. "This is different. I'm an android and you are human. Humans have customs of prudence that make being forced to remove clothes in front of others a highly uncomfortable situation."

Nice as it objectively was to have the confirmation that she had missed him, the warmth had doubled over once Connor realized he too had missed this. He missed the two of them talking, looking at each other, and even though this wasn't the most pleasant of ways to have their reunion, he was undeniably happy to be back by her side.

"I believe heavy bleeding cancels out that embarrassment you're talking about," Mia said, but after not even a full second, she sighed. "You have my permission, Connor."

"Thank you," he responded, instantly taking hold of her collar and undoing button after button with an efficiency that certainly startled Mia. He wasn't yanking on any of those buttons and she could barely even feel his grip on her shirt, but there he was anyway, in two blinks time, already tugging the material endings out from underneath the hem of her pants and already looking for the best approach to remove the sleeves, first from her right shoulder. Mia helped him out by lifting her back off of the surface she was leaning against and with only a bit of maneuvering around, aiding her in leaning her head down on his chest, Connor managed to remove her shirt altogether and end up easing her back against the shelves with his hand not being the one keeping the pressure over her wound.

"I'm sorry about the mess," she mumbled, looking down at the blood he was getting stained with.

"Don't be," Connor shook his head. If he were to admit that seeing the red of her blood on his hands upset him, he'd have to acknowledge and be fair to the fact that it wasn't because of the stain itself, but more so because of the only cause behind her bleeding on him would be that she was suffering and he couldn't prevent it all. To draw them both away from that topic, Connor nodded Mia to finally bite down on that cloth and once he was certain she was ready, he removed his hand and took hold of her arm instead to hold her still while he begun the meticulous process of first cleaning the place.

Though her discomfort was palpable and audible even with Mia clearly trying to keep it all toned down, until he reached the bullet removal part, she endured valiantly in Connor's opinion the whole thing. It was only once he pushed the tweezers inside the bullet hole that Mia's right hand flew up and clasped around his wrist to stop him. Connor locked the components making out his whole right arm in place and waited for her to spit out the rolled cloth from her mouth to hear her explanation, despite being able to read it on her face just fine. He kept a close track of her vitals and his processing unit had no trouble turning all that data into a pain meter approximation. Unfortunately, he was well aware the pain she was feeling had skyrocketed.

"Let's take a break," Mia requested breathlessly, mouth dry enough that Connor let his left hand fall from holding onto her arm and instead picking up the bottle of water he found in the infirmary. He opened it for her using only one hand and wordlessly offered to hold it while she drank.

"We're almost done," he infomed her once he lowered the bottle from her lips and set it aside.

"Please," she shook her head ever so slightly. "Just one moment to catch my breath. Tell me something, anything," she switched her approach next, realizing that she would much rather benefit from thinking of something else than sittin in silence with her pain and expecting it to dial down. "The other android," she chose the topic a second later. "How did they activate him? We have protocols in place against activating two prototypes of the RK series at the same time."

Connor busied his left hand with bringing up his won sterile cloths to keep cleaning any trail of blood making its way out of the bullet hole he kept the tweezers in completely motionless. "They did not break any protocols by activating a new RK800 to take my place." Well aware his statement only managed to raise he confusion, he continued without much of a break, "I was the one whose activation broke the protocol."

Catching him looking down at the serial number on his jacket prompted Mia to finally focus her sight on it too. "Forty-nine," she read out loud. "So they activated a new model before the memory transfer was completed?"

"I believe the memory transfer wasn't supposed to be completed to begin with," Connor told her then, his eyes trailing down her bare arm. "The transfer was blocked and I was stuck in the cloud database for five days. Only after I forced my way out of it did I reach a body. This body. Forty-eight was already active and tracking you when I woke up."

"You were conscious while inside the datastream?" Mia put aside her current pain in order for seriousness to take over. Sure, she was aware now of 'rA9' qualifying Connor to a status of livelihood, but she was still learning these new limitations and boundaries of his mind and soul.

"Barely," he met her eyes, knowing he wished to witness her reaction to what he was about to confess next. "I was dreaming for a while. Of you. Of us." His scanners alerted him of some irregularities in Mia's heartbeat patterns, so he did not let his words linger enough to demand a response from her. "Something inside the dream is what eventually made me aware of it all."

"Dreaming," Mia smiled ever so softly,looking away from him only to lean her head back and stare up at the fish swimming in their little tanks held up on the wall ahead of her. "That's very human of you, Connor."

"I wish I had woken up sooner," he admitted, well aware the regret too was a telltale sign of humanity, because his own pragmatism was adamant in reminding him he couldn't have controlled the moment of regaining consciousness inside a dream even if he wanted to.

Mia felt it on her tongue the desire to tell him that she too wished that he'd woken up sooner, but there was a certain degree of selfishness and weakness to it that made her bite back on the truth, gulp it down and finally look at his hand, and thus also her shoulder. The sight of the tweezers inside of her was blood churning and apparently, Connor must have been able to tell that somehow because his left hand hooked a finger under her chin and raised her gaze back to his.

"Can't we just leave the bullet in there?" She pleaded, not quite past the heap of sickness that the sight had elicited in her.

"Usually, that would have been for the better," he nodded. "However, for your particular case, the current bullet location poses a 84% chance of further complications if the foreign object in not immediately removed. I can.. understand that you are in pain, even if I am not capable of comprehension when it comes to this particular feeling, but this is truly the only way I can ensure you won't be needing any more medical attention in the future regarding this. I will try to be as quick as possible."

Though she had to close her eyes first in order to do so, Mia built up her courage and finally raised that rolled cloth up to her mouth to bite down on it in preparation to the pain she already got a taste of and almost fainted.

Once he was given her nod, Connor stayed true to his promise and proceeded with the bullet removal at maximum efficiency. What felt for her like an elongated torment spanning hours were actually just another two minutes before he had the bullet removed and dropped to the floor besides them.

Mia didn't open her eyes, nor stop her heaven breathing though, not until after he had cleaned up the wound one last time and started wrapping the bandage.

"Let me know if this is too tight," she heard him talk close to her ear just as the ringing dialed down. With the pain fading away just enough for her to hear her own heartbeat and dial it down with deep breaths, Mia found that Connor's hands lingering even just a second longer than necessary over her skin while he fixed her bandage were just the anchor she needed to go the distance in thinking at something other than how dreadfully unpleasant felt to be shot.

That's how she ended up removing that cloth between her teeth and, with her eyes blinking away some tears shed in the height of the pain and her voice yet to recover from a throat once again dried up, she spoke, "I followed your plan, you know?"

"Yes," Connor nodded, leaning closer to wrap the bandage properly in the back. "You laid low rather well if it took the new RK800 so long to find you."

"No, I mean," Mia shifted her position until she could turn around and look him in the eyes. "I followed your initial plan and know where Rory is." After giving some thought to her statement though, she shrugged and added, "Or where he's heading to, at least."

"You have a lead?" Connor had no time to supress his surprise, after all, he hadn't even given their initial plan a passing moment of consideration since he woke up in this new body. His one and only focus had been to return to Mia, mission that quickly changed to making sure she was safe. Finding Rory and putting an end to this madness had dropped out of his priority list, ending up to the very bottom of it until that very moment when he looked her in the eyes and watched her nod.

"You were right about where we should start looking," Mia continued explaining, unphased by his surprise. She wouldn't have given herself any more credit than he probably did and she was certainly still in shock over remembering everything she discovered at the club before bullets started flying and her night went to ruin.

"Do go on," Connor sat back on his heels, motioning for Mia to continue while his eyes remained wide, clue that he was giving this his whole attention, especially now that her vitals have stabilized and her wound had been properly bandaged. "I want to hear everything."

"Rory had marked some of his paintings at the studio and they led me to this nightclub, the Silver Spoon, that I knew already Lucien frequented," she explained, thus finally making Connor understand what she was doing there to begin with. "I was looking to confirm with camera footage my lead, but came across some deviants and accessed the memory of one of them instead."

"The androids in the room," Connor recalled vaguely the surroundings of the club as his focus had been elsewhere, but upon revisiting his recorded footage, he took note of the four androids in that room he found Mia into. "That was you?" He asked, noting now that none of the androids in the recording had gunshot wounds.

She nodded. "With the help of an EMP jammer."

"Clever."

Mia shrugged at his immediate praise, ready to dismiss it, had his hand not raised just then, holding out the edge of his cloth used for wound cleaning and tapping it ever so gently to her temple, where he finally took notice of a cut.

"Go on," Connor reminded her to continue her story and tell him about what she discovered as soon as she had instead fallen to a stunned silence.

"Right," Mia cleared her throat with a quick cough and looked down momentarily in order to properly gather her thoughts as well. "The deviants at the club had gotten involved in the production and distribution of Red Ice and, according to the discussion the deviant I got the memory data from had with Rory, they are using a particular freighter to get undetected through St. Lawrence Seaway and move the product to Greenland. He told Rory he too should be able to make the trip undetected and, once on foreign soil, he mentioned there would be some other means of transportation willing to smuggle him along with the drugs."

Connor's LED cycled yellow, because while this indeed was a huge leap of progress in their own investigation, his programming could not ignore how valuable the information they had gained was to the national efforts at stopping the spread of Red Ice. Conflicted by these two thoughts knocking against each other inside his processing unit, he shifted around and swept his jacket as well as all the blood stained utensils aside until he could sit down besides Mia. Then, he too leant his head back and stared up at the fish.

"The next shipment is in two days and it's leaving from Detroit," Mia sighed out the last crucial details. As much as she enjoyed staring at the fish, with Connor back besides her and her loneliness dispelled, she would be a fool not to allow herself the relief of admitting there was no better sight for her tired eyes than him. She had missed his freckles and she now knew better than to pass on an opportunity to memorize each and every single one of them again.

"You think Rory will be on that shipment?"

"He's probably already in Greenland by now," she admitted, a little displeased with the fact herself.

"Or halfway across the ocean," Connor offered an even more fatalistic view, however, he didn't quite see the picture in the way she did, fact that prompted Mia to nudge him with her right hand.

"Remember the supplies he asked me to bring him?" She proposed to him a different angle to asses the situation from. "They were an awful lot of supplies for an android whose biocomponent and Thirium supply lifespan should last somewhere around two hundred years in normal conditions."

Her clearly placed accent prompted Connor's eyebrows to furrow ever so slightly. Only a second after considering this angle, he turned towards her, "He was preparing for extreme cold weather."

Mia nodded, confirming to him that she had had the exact thought process in what little time she had to think before the other RK800 barged in. "The freighter takes around five to six days to get from Detroit to Greenland, which means, in the current season we are in, that Rory will have to endure a constant temperature ten degrees below the minimum his components are constructed to resist to. And since he didn't manage to escape you with all the supplies I brought him as they were not nearly done packing when things had escalated..."

"He might be in Greenland still," Connor followed her to the conclusion.

"We only need to get there," she let some of her sarcasm come through in her tone as that would certainly be no easy feat. However, after making it this far, it would almost seem ridiculous to not commit to the home stretch, crazy as it was to even consider using a smuggling route that drug dealers benefited from. She found some comfort in knowing that once they got what they needed out of such a trip, Connor would have had files upon files of actual proof to give to authorities and take down these cobwebs of human decadence.

"My components are not all that much better at resisting freezing temperatures than Rory's." Connor disagreed wholeheartedly with her relaxed approach to the next steps they ought to take. "And if you think I will let you go alone—"

"I kept your body," Mia interrupted him.

Confusion got the best of him, so he muttered out, "What?"

"I couldn't just leave you, well... the old you," she corrected herself promptly, "behind like that, so I stored the body in the car's trunk. We should have spare parts for everything the cold might affect within you during the trip, save for the voice synthesiser though." Some shame returned to her now, even while knowing without taking that component from him, she wouldn't have gained this lead to begin with. "I had to use it for the EMP," Mia confessed to him like she was telling him of some sin. "But we can keep you warm around the neck in some other way, I am sure."

It dawned on him then that Mia could not see what was to him frankly undeniable by then — her humanity was a blessing, not some curse or error.

Had it not been for the kindness of her heart, for her empathy and downright inability to differentiate him from a living being, they'd now be faced with the impossibility of procuring in only two days all the parts he'd need to make this trip. Being rather certain he will not be granted the benefit of a future body should his current one get destroyed again, Connor would go as far as saying that Mia had ensured his safety and functioning with nothing but her humanity's most innocent devotion. And all she saw, he could tell, was the flaw and the error to being human.

Some time ago, she'd scold him for judging her on her human behavior, but just then, there was another word he'd used to describe what he felt for the essence of what made Mia herself.

His lack of an immediate response had however made her look away from him before he was completely done with processing the natural end decision to his thoughts. By the time he was ready to speak again, Mia returned to staring up at the tanks filled with fish instead of looking at him.

"Or I don't know," she dismissed the entirety of the progress she had made on their shared mission.

"The memory transfer had registered no data losses," he informed her then and she must have felt that he was changing the subject, because her eyebrows furrowed down, confusion clashing with her smile.

"I'm glad, Connor." I know what would have become of me if I lost you, she thought. So I am glad I didn't.

Her humanity is beautiful, he thought through the silence as well. Maybe mine can be more than frightening too.

"I remember you kissing me right as I was about to shut down," he took a leap of faith with his next words and though his tone didn't reflect how nervous he was to be watching for her reaction, his LED flickered yellow and gave away how hard his processing unit was working to balance between emotions and rational thoughts.

Mia looked at him shocked as soon as she understood what he was saying. Her lips parted, but like she had changed her mind on the last seconds about what she should say, they closed without a single word.

"Do you regret it?" Connor inquired next, knowing he had to make sure before probing any further.

A choice, Mia recognized what she was facing, immediately seeking the false privacy of looking anywhere but at him for a second, to consider her cruelly simple and restricting options.

She could have lied just then and put an end to this whole mess about her highly unprofessional emotions that she should have never burdened Connor with to begin with. But did she want to? Did she want him to be met with more lies from her still? And all because she was scared out of her mind to accept she too was no different from the humans who sought their vices into plastic shells — she's loved the technology so much that she had wanted nothing more than to have technology love her back for once.

Telling him the truth meant facing the storm which was her inherent weakness. Perhaps she owed him this much. With a bittersweet taste on her tongue, Mia recalled her promise to him, before a bullet took him away from her. On the same metallic nuance of intervention, he was once again by her side, and she had the chance to stay true to her word.

"No," she responded and Connor couldn't deny the glint of joy he felt overtake his sensors. He held back though, in order to keep his tone leveled.

"When did you know?" He inquired softly.

Mia didn't need him to detail to understand what he wished to know. "I've known for a whole lot longer than I am ready to admit," she sighed out, lifting the heaviest stone off her heart. "I suppose it was hard not to fall in love with you. Your smile, your care and intelligence.  The openess and curiosity with which you approached everything. I've met humans who couldn't hope to have half the kindess and patience you displayed. And I've tried to deny it, to tone it down, to control myself, because it didn't seem fair to me to expect you to deal with such unprofessionalism, with emotions that don't exist in your programming. There's nothing quite like loss to teach you who you cannot live without."

"I do not understand love," Connor was unashamed to admit, however, before Mia could commit to a resigning smile, he continued. "Just like I do not understand what being alive really means either. I'm still unsure if I truly am worthy of being called alive. These concepts are bound to more than just definitions. It takes not textbooks and theory to understand them, but experiences. Though I cannot define my emotions, I know how to analyze the proof of what I felt and reach a conclusion. The proof so far is that the mere prospect of a possibility that you might love me helped my processing unit make sense of everything we've gone through. Another piece of evidence lays in the fact that your words have been significant enough to transpose themselves in the dream I had during stasis, a dream supposed to keep me there."

"What are you saying?" Her voice was quieter when she asked. Fear, Connor's scanners detected and he wished he could comfort her that the unknown past what he was going to commit to scared him as well.

"I have read that kisses are a human custom of showing affections towards significant others," he stayed on course with his broader trail of thought, watching Mia's eyes for any sign of that fear turning into anything else — repulsion, anger. She wasn't dumb by any means, he knew she'd understand what he was implying. "May I...," Connor urged his voice synthesiser into compliance, closing the alert about his inner temperature rising above expected value as his processing unit worked itself overtime, "get the chance to answer to your affections?"

Kiss him, Mia was stunned by the realization. He wants me to kiss him again. However, her shock was only going to grow at the words that made it past her parted lips, "Are you going to leave me again?"

"I will never leave your side again," he gave voice to the vow he's wanted to take before her since finding her in that club.

And after all, she was only human. She's never had it in her to deny him a single thing.

Connor watched motionless how Mia leant in, the space between them rapidly closing to the singular point of pressure between her lips and his. Noticing her eyes were closed prompted him to attempt shutting his own out of a willingness to learn what about this custom had humans associate it with a display of 'love'. As soon as his optical units were obstructed, and he could only focus on their connection, he understood.

There was an unspoken rawness stored in the sensation of flesh pressed warmly against synthetic skin, in concentrating his sensory intake only on that singular spot and surrounding himself with her. He discovered a pulse to the brush of their lips against each other once Mia initiated the motion, one he couldn't help but deactivate his synthetic skin for in certain spots in order to have less between himself and her to block out his perception of a moment that electrified him to his very core, pumping his Thirium faster into his pump, yet at the same time calming his LED to a breathing blue. Eagerness helped him imitate her movements and his sensors were set on fire by the sensation of it all.

He felt her right hand lay on the side of his face and Connor thought to himself then, This is love. There was only her in his senses, only her to be translated into zero's and one's, and never before had he felt lighter, more relieved and safe.

So immersed into the experience he had become that he did not realize the kiss had ended until her breath fanned against his slightly damp lips that he wished, more than ever to swipe his tongue over and collect whatever data he could on Mia's taste for himself. It was a strange desire that he unfortunately had to immediately push aside, because with his eyes opening, he had to wonder: had she stopped because it didn't feel as good to her?

His synthetic skin had long since covered his lips again, but Connor couldn't help but worry, especially now that he had felt how plush and soft human lips were supposed to feel, if she had been put off by his own stiff in comparison imitation.

Perfect, Mia thought to herself watching his eyes flutter open, brushing her thumb over his cheek.

His worries had been dispelled by her smile the same way the night gets banished by the coming of the sunrise. There was no need for his scanners to confirm it, he could tell she hadn't been disturbed by their differences at all and he swore then, his dream hadn't done justice to the experience of being loved by her.

With just a bit of patience, she showed to him just how little she cared for their differently built bodies too — leaning back in, Mia claimed a tight embrace, as tight as she could with only one arm capable of moving without pain. Though his arms had been useless bystanders until then, the return to a familiar territory put them into motion, quick to pull her in and allow his rising temperatures become of use.

Their plans for tomorrow could wait. This moment belonged to them and the fish that watched.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
A *big* chapter, but it's the one we've all been waiting for, for a while now 😭 not only the reunion, but also the big stepping stone into this new stage of their relationship. No more yearning and denial, we are now in the learning how to love each other best era.

Goodness, I edited this chapter sooo many times that I knew if I don't post it tonight, I might just end up hating it and never posting it, which simply wouldn't be fair to those few great lines I've got in here. "There's nothing quite like loss to teach you who you cannot live without" is one of those lines that sorta motivated me to just keep pushing to get this chapter posted. And Connor almost crying because Mia was suffering??? Please

This story has become so incredibly significant to me over the course of writing it, gosh..

Hope y'all enjoyed and that this was worth the bit of extra wait!! In terms of future update, I've got a small sim racing thingy going on this weekend, so though I will try to get an update ready for Sunday, I will make no promises ( I really wanna win the race ).