Chapter Text
Jude likes to think he’s doing good with what he can.
Running an android repair service out of his house wasn’t his first pick careerwise, but it pays the bills. And he does it well , too. Jude can be pretty confident that there isn’t any android mechanic around with as much skill in fixing joints as him, for the same reason he’s very confident that it’s far too risky for him to work for anyone other than himself. The experience that’s given him that skill is very uncommon. (Or at least Jude hopes it is, because he really wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.)
He isn’t overwhelmed with clients, but that’s a given considering how so many models keep getting newer versions faster and faster, it’s a lot easier to just buy the latest one when yours shows any sign of wear.
But there’s still a lot of people who’ll go to repairs first, whether they don’t have the money to buy a whole new droid outright or they’ve grown too attached to their current one to replace it. Jude likes that second kind of person a bit more, but whatever the reason he always prefers when someone chooses to save rather than scrap.
Even if he has to do the latter every once in a while - replacement parts have to come from somewhere. And Jude may be skilled, but there’s nothing he can do to fix a droid that doesn’t turn on.
—
A van pulls up to his place with a familiar rumble. Jude gets up from his desk, sets down a work-in-progress part, and stretches. The light discomfort in his shoulder doesn’t cease, but it doesn’t get worse, so Jude considers it to be a pretty good day. He makes his way downstairs, and greets the driver with a grin.
“How’s my favourite supplier?” “Loaded, today.” Camavinga smiles back, and then tilts his head at him. “Favourite? I thought I was your only supplier, bro. Have you been cheating on me?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “Yes, I have, with the only other supplier that’s got parts as good as yours for even lower prices.”
“What? How’s that even possible, I give you a discount -” Cama catches on to his teasing expression. “Ohh, I see how it is. You know what-” “You said something about being loaded, today?” Cama keeps frowning at him, but without much heat to it. “You’re lucky I like you.” His annoyance mostly evaporates when Jude goes to help him unload his latest shipment, though.
—
“Oh, I’ve got one more thing for you.” Cama looks excited, but almost a bit guilty, too. Ah, it must be an intact android for Jude to strip for parts himself. He knows that Jude doesn't exactly love to do that, too much sympathy for any machine he works on. Still, these were usually worth it.
“Is it good?”
“Oh yes, I’m lucky they called me. It’s going to be a source of very good parts, especially joints.”
Jude raises an eyebrow. “Really? How good are we talking?”
“Sporting quality. High calibre, too.”
Jude raises his other eyebrow. That was rare. The parts from sporting androids were about the hardest to come by, other than military-grade stuff. If they even were stripped, they’d always be recycled back at their factories.
Their parts went for untold amounts on the black market, (not that Jude would ever go to those lengths to get them, he had some morals) since they used such expensive materials and time intensive designs. It was what allowed them to apply and withstand a real amount of force while staying more flexible than almost any other type of droid.
As far as android parts go, they’re probably the closest thing to real human joints.
“Ok, let me see.”
Cama nods and drags out a box with a tarp over it. It almost looks like a coffin, but Jude ignores that thought. Whatever’s inside was never really alive anyway.
“Big, innit?”
“Yep, he’s still intact.”
Cama pulls off the sheet covering the android, revealing-
“Is that…?” Jude stares, disbelieving at the android’s face. Its expression is frozen in a look that's partly exhausted, partly protesting, half-lidded eyes staring back blankly.
It's a face that Jude recognises. From watching Spain’s qualifying matches in the Euros de Máquinas.
“Yes, it’s him.”
“But he’s- why is he in your shipment?”
Cama looks sympathetic, almost mournful. “They couldn’t fix the damage to his knee. And,” he hesitates, almost as if he could spare Jude from the news if he doesn’t say it, then sighs. “He doesn’t turn on anymore.”
“Fuck… seriously?” Jude hears the words, reacts to them on autopilot, but still doesn’t think they’ve fully clicked in his brain. “So they’re just.. selling him for scraps? They don’t even care about preserving him, after everything he’s done?”
Cama shakes his head. “Apparently there was some attempt to keep him exhibited in a museum, but he’s gotten some internal damage so they think his batteries could be unstable. It’d be too much of a fire risk.”
“Still, it seems so…” Jude searches for the right word, “ unfair of them.”
Cama shrugs, but his sympathetic frown remains. “They’ve got about a million other droids waiting in the wings, and this one had a very public mechanical failure. I know it sucks, but I think they just wanted to move on, bury him.”
“Then why bring him to me?”
“You need good quality parts, right?” Cama gestures at the damaged area. “Apart from here, he’s a gold mine. Especially for joints and structure.”
“Yeah, for sure.” Jude sighs with a somewhat pained expression. “It’s just, the thought of taking him apart…”
“Look, Jude, I know you’ve got a bleeding heart, even for machines, and that you liked to watch him play. But he’s circuit-dead. If you don’t take him, I’ll have to bring him to a droid disposal centre and he’ll be melted down. At least this way you’ll be able to keep his parts and use them to repair parts that need it.”
Jude doesn’t miss the look that Cama gives him when he says that, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. “You could even preserve more of him if you feel like it.”
Jude thinks for a moment. Then he nods and mentally braces himself before Cama answers his next question. “How much for him?”
Cama pauses, then cracks into a fond smile. “Only because you’re my favourite customer, he’s free.
“Seriously? He must have cost a ton, though.”
“No, they gave me a ton to get rid of him discretely, that’s literally my job, bro.” Cama laughs. “Besides… I feel like charging you for him would be too cruel.”
Jude almost argues with him on that, but ends up relenting once he realises he can’t come up with a solid rebuttal. “Thanks, mate.”
“You want help getting him in?”
Jude lifts the android out of the box and hoists him over his good shoulder. “Nah, I’ve got ‘im.” He only winces for a second, but Cama notices.
He doesn’t say anything, but he gives his bad shoulder another pointed look. Jude gives him a reassuring smile that’s only half forced, and says goodbye with a tone that leaves no room for argument.
Cama returns the gesture with another look, a bit kinder this time, if not a bit more tired too. It’s an expression that says he expected Jude to respond like that, and he’ll drop it for now, but he won’t forever.
Jude supposes that’s the best he’s going to get, and turns to go back upstairs, this time with a circuit-dead sporting droid in tow.
—
Jude sets the android down, and just takes him in. He still isn’t sure he’s processing thie sight in front of him. Just to check that this is real, and not the most fucked up prank Cama’s ever pulled, he finds the right spot, then presses down on an almost invisible panel on the droid's wrist. It pops up, then slides back.
He inhales when he sees the serial number and the text below it.
6 - G4V1R4
Made in La Masia, Designed in Los Palacios
Property of FC Barcelona
Number 6 - his position.
And G4V1R4... Jude didn’t know that Gavi was short for something.
Something in his chest aches a bit at the thought, did he develop the nickname himself? Or was it something his teammates or his design team came up with? Jude shakes those thoughts away, Gavi’s circuits are dead, he has no reason to get attached.
Besides, he’s an android, and a sporting one at that. He was never even close to sentient. Jude doubts they’d programmed much more into him than a basic personality archetype.
Especially with how little Barcelona seem to care about their droids outside of the pitch, judging by the way they’d get rid of their supposed golden boy like he wasn’t even good enough to scrap for parts. They really seemed like a better team than that.
Jude’s starting to get angry on Gavi’s behalf, and that’s when he knows he needs to get on with it and get the job done. It won’t do him any good to start getting attached now.
Jude opens up his shoulder, and although he’s surely seen this part in hundreds of droids before, this one takes his breath away.
It’s state of the art. He’s a bit surprised by the parts of it that look like refinements Jude’s thought of, has never been able to make with the quality of his materials. But he’s really shocked when he realises there’s a few aspects of this design that he’s never even thought of. Jude’s own almost seems to ache even more as he takes it in.
But once he’s finished marvelling at Gavi’s engineering, he notices something. It’s so subtle, he wouldn’t be able to pick it up if he weren’t so in tune with how android parts feel touching skin.
There’s a faint sort of hum coming from the metal. Jude brings his hand closer, and then, after a moment of hesitation, he touches it.
It feels warm. Almost as if-
“S’like you’re still on.” Jude breathes out quietly. Then he processes his own words and rips his hand away, eyes wide.
No, he must be imagining it, it’s impossible for an android to be circuit-dead but still have power. This wasn’t possible… unless Gavi wasn’t circuit-dead.
Unless he just looked like it.
That could be possible if there was a problem with the android’s central wire. If it was damaged in just the right way, cutting communication but not power… then an android could be turned on and would still be able to process things, but it would be paralysed. It would look like it was still off.
Jude stares at Gavi’s eyes again with new recognition. It was so unlikely, he was probably just imagining the humming in his shoulder, but… if there was a chance that he was still on, Jude had to do something about it.
“I need to test something, I’m just going to turn you off and on again, okay?” He receives no reply, of course, because this whole thing was probably just a foolish exercise in denial.
Jude checks underneath the right side of the android’s jaw, and finds his kill switch. He flicks it off, then touches Gavi’s shoulder.
Nothing. The metal still feels a bit warm at first, but cools within a few seconds. Any sort of hum, no matter how subtle, is gone. Jude flicks the switch again, an action which should turn Gavi back on. No movement, his eyes stay as unfocused and gone as before.
But his shoulder is humming.
That’s enough for Jude to get to work, bringing him up onto the operating table of his workshop, shutting the panel over his shoulder and opening up his back so he can focus on finding the disconnected circuit. Finally, after examining up and down his spinal column, there it is.
He warns Gavi, and then turns him off again so he can operate. He may be paralysed anyway, but if he’s on he’s still processing the world around him. Jude doesn’t know if Gavi been designed with the capacity to feel pain, but he’s a sporting android, so it’s possible.
The operation is a shorter affair than Jude thought it would be. It’s so strange though, it’s quite a clean cut of a part of his central wire, managing to avoid severing the section which would kill the android outright. Almost as if it was… intentional.
But that’s something to think about later. Right now he needs to focus entirely on this repair so he doesn’t accidentally finish the job himself.
After about an hour, he’s done. Now all that’s left is to turn Gavi on again. Jude’s shoulder twitches with excess energy, his heart in his throat as he brings his hand to the kill switch.
He flicks it back on.
At first, there’s nothing. Jude feels his heart sink, then speed up, he must have made a mistake somewhere, he has to go back and fix it. He moves to flip the kill switch back to off again-
Gavi blinks.
Jude freezes.
He blinks again, and the light is coming back to his eyes, his expression shifting into one of shock, then relief. Then his eyes glance over to meet Jude’s own, and Jude suddenly finds himself able to breathe again. He’d barely even realised he’d stopped.
Gavi blinks a third time, (since when is Jude keeping track?) then flexes his fingers. He slowly lifts up his hand, closing it around Jude’s wrist so he can pull him away from his kill switch, underneath his jaw.
His expression has morphed into something unreadable, but a thousand times more intense than what it was frozen as before.
“You can still turn on.” Jude speaks it with a bit more force now, but that breathless disbelief is still there.
“Yeah, and I’m staying that way.” Gavi’s voice crackles slightly at the start, but it’s clear, Andalusian accent coming through. Jude’s heard he was given it as a nod to the town he was designed in.
Then, faster than he can blink, Gavi knocks their foreheads together. Jude cries out in surprise, as Gavi lets go of his wrist and moves to get off the table and run out the door.
He succeeds at that first part, but the moment his feet hit the ground his knee buckles, making the android swear fiercely.
He still tries to drag himself forwards with his arms and his other knee, but this time Jude’s too fast for him, bolting over to the door to lock it.
Then he moves back to Gavi himself, and crouches down in front of him, holding one hand up in a show of surrender and extending the other towards him.
Gavi freezes and stares at him. Almost like a wild animal who’s just been rescued, and now is desperate to escape from him as fast as he can, to return to its life of freedom.
“Mate, slow down. What are you trying to do?”
Gavi makes a face like Jude’s just asked him the dumbest question known to man. “Get back to Barça, duh.” Jude bristles at that, and not just because of Gavi’s attitude. He can’t trust that team anymore.
“That’s what you really want?” He knows what answer he’ll receive. Gavi was made in La Masia, anything else would be unthinkable.
“Of course I’ll go back to Barça, where else?” Jude has to admit he doesn’t know, and he really wants to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But they wanted Gavi to be scrapped.
He doesn’t know why, it sounds impossible, Barcelona’s always been the team that’s treated their androids the best, the closest to human.
And he knows internal battery repairs are risky, but they’re still possible, and so are knee repairs. But somehow, Barcelona didn’t care about Gavi enough to attempt them.
“You can’t go back to them, your battery is still damaged. And you could still hear me and Cama talking, right? They were fine with getting rid of you.”
Gavi looks so frustrated and angry that Jude is almost knocked back by it, he’s never seen an android this expressive before
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I need to go , get out of my way.”
“You can’t go anywhere with your knee damaged like that.”
Gavi groans in frustration, then almost seems to shut down a bit at that, turning his gaze away from Jude. Looking at his expression, Jude almost winces in sympathy. He looks like he’d be on the verge of crying if he had tear ducts.
“Look… I can fix it.” Jude isn’t sure what’s possessed him to make that offer, but he sure isn’t going to take it back.
Gavi huffs, then goes quiet. “The national team’s mechanics couldn’t. And Barça’s.”
“Well, I’m an expert in android joint repairs.”
Gavi looks at him again, more consideringly now. He tilts his head, examining Jude.
“Really? How come you weren’t called in, then? You’re based here in Spain, after all. Even if your accent seems a bit.. British , almost.”
Jude hesitates, caught off guard. “I um, prefer to keep my business more private.”
“Why though? You’re good. If my internal clock is right, it took you like an hour, at most, to fix my central wire. That’s fast . And your specialty is one that’s very sought after in sporting android mechanics.”
“I- I guess I’ve just never gotten the opportunity to work with a team.”
Gavi frowns, not buying it. “More like you’ve never gone after the opportunity. I know they’ve been trying to hire more specialists, Barça’s been open about that.”
It’s a frustratingly good point. Jude had seen some of their postings and he had really wanted to go for them, it was practically his dream job.
But he had to bring himself back to reality. He couldn’t work with any other mechanics, the risk that someone would find out his secret was way too high.
Speaking of, Jude realises Gavi’s gaze has changed, slightly. There’s a glint to it, almost like-
“Stop scanning me.” Jude snaps. He doesn’t like to give androids orders, he really hates it actually, but he can’t let Gavi find out what he’s hiding. He pulls back his hand, and Gavi raises his eyebrows in surprise.
But his eyes don’t change.
That’s- that shouldn't be happening. Maybe his audio processing was also damaged?
“ Stop scanning me.” Jude repeats the order, with more force, more panic. Gavi stops scanning him a few seconds later, not instantaneously as he should with an order, and looks almost guilty about it. As if he’s empathising with Jude’s situation.
And then it clicks.“You don’t listen to orders, do you? You’re sentient.”
Gavi nods, still staring into Jude’s eyes. “And your shoulder is made of android parts. You’re a cyborg.”
For a second, neither of them dare to speak.
Then Jude replies. “Yeah. Looks like we’re both illegal as fuck, then.”
Gavi almost smiles. “Hm. Looks like it.”