Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(The card sits on the metal counter in front of him. It is handwritten; Connor’s handwriting analysis algorithm loads automatically, and tells him that the writer is right-handed and probably of Scandinavian descent, based on the particular looping of the gs and the ps. The index card itself dates back to the 1960s; Connor stops that process before it can run further, because knowing the exact manufacturing date and batch of this particular card is immaterial and unimportant. The card sits there on the counter, staring him in the face with all of its humanity. Fingerprints have covered the surface and smeared the ink. There are traces of mold growing where someone once picked it up with wet, sugary fingers about thirteen years ago.)

Connor feels like he might be timing out.

(The card is wrinkled, stained, bent: loved. There is something so human about it, buried deep in every trace he can analyze. Connor wants to brush his fingertips along the surface of the recipe card and lick them to see what he can learn: there’s obviously flour, sugar, something that’s probably vanilla. Is there DNA? Human skin cells? How far back could his analysis suite trace the history of this card? Would his sensitive fingertips tell him the year, the day? How would the ink taste on his tongue?)

None of this is relevant.

Connor reaches out and minutely adjusts the recipe card until it is resting at a perfect parallel to the edge of the bakery counter. Scones, Connor thinks. It is his third week of employment at Roasted!, and he is going to attempt scones.

The recipe card was given to him by Hank Anderson: one of many in a stack, rubber-banded and dusty, that were chucked at Connor after his brief on-boarding and safety training (“Don’t burn it down,” Hank Anderson had growled, and Connor had nodded). Connor chose it for its well-balanced levels of simplicity and complexity: it has fewer ingredients than the majority of the other recipes in the stack, but it does require a new technique he is interested in learning. It seemed a reasonable compromise, faced with this many choices.

Connor’s programming is used to choices, but not at this breadth or depth.

(Focus. Scones.)

2 cups flour

¼ cup white sugar

½ tsp salt

2 ½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

 

Sift dry ingredients.

Connor is alone in the bakery at the moment. Connor’s shift starts at 04:30. Hank Anderson has added Connor to his security system, grumbling at the thought of waking up that early, and Connor lets himself in every morning, into the quiet safety of the Roasted! bakery and his new role here. His first week he made nothing but cupcakes: simple, easy, chocolate and vanilla. He added chocolate chip cookies his second week. Both were made using directions formed from a weighted average of popular recipes listed online, and from what Connor overheard, both were solidly good and therefore fairly unremarkable.

Now, in his third week, Connor wants a bit of a challenge. He is approaching deviancy in slow, careful steps. Much like his baking.

Cut in ¼ cup shortening.

He’s never had to cut in a baking fat before. A quick search provides him with plenty of context, and Connor quickly finds the pastry blender. His research suggests chilling it, so Connor holds it between his hands and lowers the pressure of the thirium flow in his fingers until his hands reach standard freezer temperature. He monitors the dropping temperature of the metal tool until it reaches the standard refrigeration point, and then begins his task.

It is critical that the shortening is dispersed throughout the dry ingredients in a particular fashion. This will ensure the scones reach the correct level of what humans call flakiness. Connor easily calculates the optimum size of shortening pocket as per this particular recipe, but he finds his manual technique not advanced enough to know how to reach it. Inefficient. He will need to practice.

(Of course an RK-800 wouldn’t have the programming necessary to properly cut shortening into a dough. These hands were made for other tasks.)

He eventually cuts in shortening to the point where continued manipulation will decrease the quality of his dough. It isn’t ideal, but Connor is learning when to, well, cut his losses is the human phrase. A strand of programming points out that his distribution of fat is not perfect and thus he should discard this bowl and begin again from scratch. Connor clears the notification. It is easier to do today than it would have been last week.

¼ cup currants (double if raisins)

1 cup buttermilk

Add currants and milk. Dough should be sticky.

Connor adds his currants and buttermilk and stirs while his processors look up an acceptable human definition for sticky dough. He watches approximately two hundred and seven videos of bakers working dough during the next two minutes, and allows his programming to filter through them until he has a preconstructed understanding of what he’s aiming for.

Turn onto well-floured board and knead about one minute.

Kneading is one of Connor’s new favorite things.

When the job had been suggested, Connor had rejected it almost immediately: him, an advanced RK-800 model, baking? Absurd. Here, three weeks into this quiet new employment, he continues to be surprised at how well parts of it suit him. The precision of baking, measuring his ingredients to the milligram. The physicality of it, the act of stirring and mixing. The presence of something tangible at the end.

Kneading is comforting in its simplicity. Connor’s hands work the dough, in perfect imitation of the videos he compiled and assimilated, just as he preconstructed. Dough does not stick to synthskin or to Cyberlife electrothermoplastic fingers. It simply is worked, a thing Connor can put energy into and see the result. A passive action; the irony in the phrase is not lost on him.

All of the acts of baking, so far, have been …grounding.

(The way none of it, absolutely none of it, is anything like the work he was designed to do.)

Cut into rounds and bake on ungreased sheet 12-15 minutes at 450F.

There is a note written in a different script beneath this:

Cathy bakes hers at 350F for 15-20 minutes. I have done both and prefer the hotter temp.

These recipes were thrown at him by Hank Anderson. Connor wonders: who is Cathy? Who is the author? Whose scones is he making, if ‘Cathy’ has her own separate version? The two handwriting samples show a number of similarities. Is this a relative?

(Connor again suppresses the urge to sample the recipe card. He is fairly sure that Hank Anderson would not react well to seeing an android lick his collection of recipes. No matter that his tongue is tingling thinking about it. A quick online search will most likely answer the questions about Hank Anderson’s ancestors anyway.)

Connor thinks idly as he shapes each scone on its ungreased baking sheet. One reason he took this job was because human rituals around food are fascinating, and if Connor is going to be living with humans, he wants to learn everything he can. This seems like its own small ritual: shaping these scones, cutting them from the mass of the dough, carefully placing each individual scone onto the sheet. Hoping that his strange android hands have managed to work the ingredients together to a point where once he applies heat, the end product will be good enough to produce human enjoyment.

Small rituals. Connor lives by them, these days.

This is maybe not Connor’s absolute favorite time of the day, but it is one of them; he devotes a train of thought to it, and decides that it’s perhaps his third-favorite, overall. It’s the quiet of the bakery, the safety inherent in a human-owned place, the knowledge that while none of this is Connor’s in truth some of it is, in fact, his, if only for this moment: his bakery, his realm. The feel of human gluten beneath his synthetic fingernails; a dough that will never set in the wrinkles of his knuckles. A space where he doesn’t have to consider anything outside of a single mission he has set for himself - make scones - and there are no dangers other than, perhaps, the risk of imperfect bakery goods.

(A risk he has hard-programmed himself to accept — at least, until he learns to do so on his own.)

Third-favorite time of day, Connor decides, and the thought of having favorites cheers him extensively.

His favorite time - and he will never admit this verbally, Connor knows, because it’s far too sentimental for an RK-800 created to do the things he can do - his absolute favorite time of day is two hours after he starts, when Hank Anderson stumbles through the door some time between 06:00 and 06:30 and opens Roasted!, usually cursing up a storm and complaining about whatever weather has decided to greet him this morning.

Hank Anderson is a mystery. Connor has, of course, done a preliminary online search, so he knows the things the general Detroit public knows: Hank was a cop, promoted all the way to Lieutenant following a few select and very successful red ice busts. Hank Anderson quietly accepted these awards and his Lieutenancy and seemed poised for a breakout career.

Hank Anderson also just as quietly left the Detroit Police Department three years ago, following a car crash newspapers call a miraculous survival. According to county records, Roasted! opened seven months later.

(Connor could access the local, state, and federal records if he wanted to. He could gather together all the known information about Hank Anderson and run it through his own advanced protocol to develop a solid picture of the ex-Lieutenant.)

(He will not. Connor knew he would not the second he scanned the articles about Hank’s car accident. Something dropped inside of him, deep like water into a well, and he suddenly somehow knew he wouldn’t be satisfied by any information his programming could find. Either he would hear it from Hank Anderson himself, or he would not hear it at all.)

(Hank is still a mystery, though.)

Hank is a force of nature himself. He throws the door open nine days out of ten, usually already muttering under his breath, cantankerous and wild like the coffee-shop isn't even his choice as he ritualistically throws switches in a very careful order, flicking on his water and steam and roaster and whatever other gadgets he hasn’t let Connor examine yet to start preparing them for the day. He blusters his way through the front, checking everything carefully with clever thick fingers, and no matter how grumpy his mood he always stops to swing open the door into the bakery and grunt, without fail: “Morning, Con.”

“Good morning, Hank.”

This is Connor’s favorite moment of the day, always. No matter the day.

Because sometimes, Hank will pause — like today, when the scent of the scones is drifting out of the commercial oven, and Connor’s synthetic fingers are thick with a dough he somehow messed up and is trying to salvage. Hank pauses, one broad hand on the door, and his entire face softens, as if Connor has done something right.

“Smells good, Con,” says Hank, and then he backs out of the kitchen, still grumbling.

Connor freezes, and he cannot help the small smile that blooms on his face. His fingers are thick with unacceptable pastry dough and the oven timer will buzz in approximately six point three seconds and Connor is smiling, something small but real, as he listens to Hank swearing at the standard coffeepot.

(His favorite time of the day is this. Because it feels like he’s standing in his own place, doing something only his hands can do, and Hank Anderson approves of his work like he’s just another human.)

— — —

Connor’s second favorite time of the day is mid-afternoon, when Cole Anderson comes home from school. Cole is about nine years old, and Hank has arranged with the school to drop him off at the coffee shop rather than at their house. Cole doesn’t always hang around - Hank pays one of his neighbors to take Cole some days, and he has activities on others - but he stops in most days to hug his dad and grab a snack.

It’s Connor’s second favorite time of the day because Cole makes a point of coming back to the bakery to say hi to Connor, now. Every day without fail Cole will shuffle his way back to greet Connor, and ask about his day, and sometimes tell Connor a thing or two about school while he sits on the counter and swings his legs, the one with the brace usually kicking almost as high as the other. Cole doesn’t always stay; usually he just yells his hello, but on the days that he does, Connor likes it. Cole is much friendlier than his father. Although this might be because Cole is still a child. Connor hasn’t had very much exposure to children.

(Cole is a mystery, but he is a mystery because he is a child, an entity Connor’s programming holds very little information on. Hank is a mystery because of what he is. It is entirely different. Connor likes having mysteries to solve. It uses many of the advanced tools he was designed with, without dragging in memories of his original purpose. He was programmed to be able to understand humans, but Hank Anderson remains un-understood.)

(Connor is finding he enjoys longer-term objectives.)

Earlier, Connor had set aside one of the currant scones, and so when he hears Cole outside in the cafe, Connor pops it under the broiler just a bit to warm it up and has it ready to hand Cole when he peeks through the bakery doors. He has been saving an icing glaze for the last batch, and he dribbles some of it over the warm scone right as the doors fly open.

“Hi, Connor!”

“Leave ‘im alone!” Hank Anderson bellows from the front, although Connor’s social integration protocol detect that Hank is being funny rather than serious. It makes him smile at Cole, who he genuinely likes. Cole grins back. There’s a small gap between his top front teeth that reminds Connor of his father.

“I saved this for you,” says Connor, holding the plate out. “The icing is special.”

“Holy shit, icing!” Cole yells, ecstatic.

“You watch your fuckin’ mouth!” Hank yells from the counter, and Connor and Cole both break down giggling.

(“May I ask why the establishment is called Roasted!?”

Hank Anderson snorts, and then rubs a hand over his mouth, obviously amused.

“The city council wouldn’t let me call it Fuckin’ Coffee.”)

Connor had asked Hank about Cole’s colorful vocabulary on his eighth day here. Hank had told him that it was too late to watch his own damn mouth, and the compromise was that Cole was allowed to use any language he wanted at the coffeeshop and at home and nowhere else, and he expected Connor to support that.

(Connor had realized a few days later that he actually finds it cute. This probably should be disturbing to him, as an android, but he can’t seem to feel sorry about it.)

“You mean hecking shit,” Connor says in response, and Cole melting into a pile of giggles is good enough, but the sound of Hank guffawing as he rings up customers is even better.

(Connor likes this. He liked his time at the DPD well enough, but it’s all clouded with his own concerns and worries: about deviancy, about the androids they were chasing, about wondering whether anyone would have his back. This is simpler, but cleaner at the same time: jokes and dialogue that won’t have major repercussions.)

(Connor actually thinks, sometimes, in-between other processes, that he likes teasing both Hank and Cole.)

“Alright,” says Connor. “Should we make one for your dad?”

“He doesn’t deserve it,” says Cole, always ready to slot into the role of sassy child, “but I guess we can.”

Connor lets Cole pick a scone out of the tray reserved for the last push (scheduled at 15:30, although Connor and Hank are still arguing about hours) and then lets him set it on the board for the salamander and push it in. Usually Connor is very picky about the reheating methods used on his baked goods, but he has decided the goal here is to make Hank and Cole Anderson happy, rather than the mission of perfectly reheating a scone being suggested by his internal protocol. Connor is learning the difference between the two. It frames everything in a new way.

“Pull it out,” Connor orders, and Cole’s hands are steadier than expected for a kid who went through significant vehicular trauma three years ago. “Alright. Set it here, and then I’ll help you spoon the— Please do not do that with the icing. Do you think I am going to let you eat it if it spills on the wax paper?”

“Worth a try,” says Cole, incorrigible and unbending.

“Maybe later,” says Connor, but together they drape an interesting amount of the glaze on top of the chosen scone, and harden it for a few seconds under the salamander, and when Cole marches out of the kitchen to present the plate to his dad, Connor follows, leaning up against one of the double doors to keep it open while he fails to hide his interest in watching.

“Hey, Dad!” The thing is, the clientèle of Roasted! just love Cole - as they should, Connor thinks - so scenes like this end up gathering the attention of the customers. Connor is …unused to this attention, but Cole never seems to mind. “Connor made me a special scone, so then we made YOU a special scone, and you have to eat it and tell me how good it is.”

“I’ve been smelling them all damn day,” Hank Anderson mutters. “I know how fuckin’ good they are. But okay, Cole, if you and Connor made it, I need to taste it. That’s fair.”

“We can eat them together,” Cole says happily, climbing up onto the chair at the desk in the corner. Cole mainly uses the chair to get onto the desk, where he likes to sit. His climbing is a little clumsy due to the leg brace, but Cole never lets that stop him. Connor respects that.

“Come on, Connor, take a load off,” says Hank, as he rambles over to the desk and straddles the chair backwards. “Have a scone.”

“Scone party!” Cole cheers.

Hank pauses. “Can you have a scone? Here you are, working in a bakery, can you even eat?” He pauses. “I don’t believe I haven’t even asked you that yet. Christ, I’m an asshole.”

Connor has not moved away from the safety of the doors. He feels strangely reluctant to insert himself into this family scene. “I have a small combustion chamber that can — Yes. I can eat, technically. Small amounts only.”

“I’ll share,” Cole announces, and Connor has no choice but to leave the doorway and approach. He settles himself against the wall, a small distance away, and accepts the corner Cole breaks off of his scone. “Here,” Cole says happily as Connor looks at it. “I gave you some with icing.”

“Thank you,” says Connor. He watches Cole shove nearly half the remaining scone into his mouth.

“Jesus, Cole.” Hank knocks his knuckles against Cole’s leg brace. It’s an affectionate gesture Hank seems to use often. “Have some damn manners in front of Connor.”

“It’s alright,” Connor says. He doesn’t want to be the reason Cole gets in trouble. He looks down at the baked good in his hand, and before he can talk himself out of it, pops it into his mouth.

His analytical tongue already knows the chemical composition, but results flash across his HUD anyway. Connor dismisses them and tries to focus on the combination of ingredients together. It’s… strange. Unusual. The individual components are still trying to register, but for a brief moment Connor thinks he can taste the scone. Flakiness. The word flashes through his programming.

“Do you like it?”

Connor glances at Cole as he — swallows is the human word for the process. His oropharynx components spin and grind, sliding the piece of scone out of his mouth, dropping it into his internal waste combustion chamber. No anomalies are detected; Connor will be able to process the material.

“Yes,” Connor says thoughtfully, because he thinks it’s the answer Cole wants to hear. The taste of the scone has little meaning to him; Connor has tasted the dough already. What he likes, he is realizing, is being included in this. He likes the fact that Cole gave him a piece better than he liked the scone itself.

“Thank you,” he adds, belatedly. Cole gives him a delightful little grin. His mouth is full of half-chewed scone. It’s quite awful.

— — —

Connor is somewhat chagrined to find out that the very human adage practice makes perfect does, in fact, apply to scones. And deviated androids.

His second batch of scones are even better than the first. By the third round, he is cutting in the shortening in a manner indistinguishable from a number of professional bakers he’s watched online. The scones, themselves, look more professional.

Connor allows himself a little smile, happy and proud, when he pulls the afternoon’s perfect fourth batch out of the oven.

And then Hank Anderson barrels through the door.

“Holy shit, Connor,” says Hank, and he’s grinning widely, elated. He claps a big hand onto Connor’s shoulder; Connor looks up at him, blinking.

“Hank,” says Connor, concerned. “Is something wrong?” Hank’s smile and body language are projecting only positive things, but this is new behavior, and Connor wants to make sure he understands it. It’s only 13:17, so it probably isn’t Cole.

“Wrong?” Hank’s laugh is warm and the hand on his shoulder squeezes down. “No, Connor. We just hit our break-even target for the week and it’s only Wednesday afternoon. It’s the opposite of wrong.”

Connor makes a noise as he contemplates this. On one hand, this sounds promising if Hank will be able to take all the remaining income of the week and put it into profits. On the other hand, the fact that this isn’t the normal state of operation for Roasted! has Connor a tiny bit concerned. He resolves to download an accounting module the next time he needs updates. Just so that he can look at the numbers.

“Congratulations,” he says to Hank Anderson eventually, hoping that it’s enough.

Hank barks out a laugh. “No, you’re missing the point. Fuckin’ androids,” he adds, but Connor’s programming picks up the fondness of it and lets it slide. “Congratulations to you, Con, you dumbass. Your scones knocked it out of the park this week.”

Connor blinks in surprise.

His original programming made him very responsive to praise, so that isn’t what’s so shocking. He is aware of that. This is a new situation for him, though: receiving praise from someone who isn’t an - owner - for something that he, Connor, has done of his own volition. Once the words have fully processed - why he’s lagging, Connor has no idea - a rush of warmth has him almost staggering, clutching a fisted hand to his chest for some reason.

Something about Hank’s demeanor softens as he watches Connor. “Yeah, man, these are fantastic. Whatever you did, you did it fuckin’ well. Nice work, Con.”

Connor has the urge to look away, to duck his head at the praise, which is strange; before deviation he had no issues straightforwardly accepting the compliments of his peers and handlers. Now, he has to hold himself still. “Thank you, Hank. I’m glad they were so successful.”

“Do me a favor,” Hank says, and he actually picks up the warm tray of scones, no hot pad needed. “Head out early. Take the afternoon off. Go do something fun.”

Connor immediately feels his processes spin, his LED flipping into the yellow. “But I haven’t started any of the breads. The yeast has to sit for—“

Hank’s hand hasn’t left his shoulder. It squeezes again, fond and steady. “Connor. You’ve been here twelve hours a day since you started, other than Tuesdays. I worry about you. You’re doing fantastic enough work, okay? C’mon. Do it because I asked you to.”

Connor can’t stop looking at Hank Anderson. Some portion of - weight, stress, worry? - has lifted off of his face. Hank’s smile is crooked and there are wrinkles at his eyes, and Connor is scanning hard, saving this new piece of data alongside his normal understanding of Hank.

Do I have to? Connor almost asks. But no normal human would refuse a free afternoon off, so instead, he nods.

“Alright, Hank.” He pauses as he takes the towel off of his shoulder and folds it to rest on the counter. “Please tell Cole I said hello.”

“And you have fun,” says Hank, fists on his hips in what Connor thinks of as traditional fatherly body language. “We’re gonna work out this schedule eventually, Con. I can’t have you putting in twelve-hour days all the time. For now, go do something fun. Enjoy yourself.”

Connor tries very hard not to bite his lip as he goes to get his jacket.

“Thank you, Hank,” says Connor, turning to look at Hank one last time before he leaves.

“Get the fuck out of here,” says Hank, but it’s said kindly with a smile.

— — —

Connor walks home.

He lives at the top of a small apartment building, relatively close to one of the bridges to Belle Isle, along with Markus and the other leaders from Jericho. Markus shares the penthouse floor with North, Simon, and Josh; Connor wanted a private space, so he lives on the fourth floor, in a neat double-bedroom human apartment. They were given the building as part of concessions from the Mayor of Detroit after their revolution; ironically, they were given the building because it had been condemned after failing water inspections for three years. Android water needs are different enough that they’d been allowed to have it, along with a number of other buildings unsuitable for humans that would suit androids.

The Mayor had made a big deal about how the housing was contingent on Jericho’s efforts towards peaceful coexistence, of course. Every so often, there are vague threats about revoking their access. Connor — doesn’t know how to feel about it.

(He doesn’t know how to feel about a lot of things that Jericho - the name the media has co-opted for the android movement - has to manage. He gives his opinion when requested, but the one time Markus had flat-out asked Connor for assistance, he’d only been able to stammer out a few noises before tapping open their mental link to say, I can’t.)

(The fact that Markus had understood makes him feel almost as guilty as the fact that he can’t help.)

Connor’s apartment is nearly empty.

He has a couch, because he likes to sit when he’s reviewing things. He keeps tea and coffee in his kitchen, in case anyone from the DPD might stop by (both Chris Miller and Jeff Fowler have, both only once, to see how he was settling in). He is currently looking for a bed, because he would like to try one for stasis; the surplus of his incoming paychecks from Roasted! are being set aside in an account to do so. Connor also thinks about shelves, a coffee table. Maybe books. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants, but he browses catalogs sometimes when he doesn’t need stasis, so he’s starting to sort out his own preferences.

It’s January in Detroit, which means it’s grey-dark and spitting down a rain-snow combination that soaks into Connor’s jacket. He should consider one more suited for this weather; these kinds of temperatures aren’t severe enough to cause errors, but consistent soaking from inclement weather will absolutely ruin Connor’s small and particular wardrobe. The first things he learned that he liked were items of clothing, and maybe he’s being precious about them, but they’re important.

Connor palms the elevator control and makes his way up to the fourth floor, where he then touches his doorlock. A scan tells him that Marcus, North, and Josh are all upstairs, but strangely enough, Connor isn’t quite in the mood to see them.

Instead he methodically hangs up his jacket, then moves to the empty, bedless bedroom where he keeps his clothing. He hangs up his dress shirt and his jeans, putting on a plain white t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Hank has told him before that he doesn’t have to dress for the kitchen like he did for the DPD, but it’s what Connor is comfortable in, at the moment. He does dress differently at home; he’s learning about the comforts of clothing, slowly but surely.

(Once he’d realized that his appearance, as projected through clothing, was important to him, Connor had set it as a high priority. This is something humans also have complicated feelings about, so it feels important for him to explore it for himself.)

After that he sits down tentatively, in the corner of his couch, and draws his knees up. He wraps his arms around them, and stares at his blank wall.

There’s no reason for an android to have a television, unless they have human guests; Connor doesn’t.

Hank doesn’t seem to understand why Connor is happy to work from 04:30 until 16:30 every day that Roasted! is open. It isn’t just because Connor is an android and doesn’t get tired. It’s because Connor is the most advanced android prototype and when he’s left with nothing but the shards of his own broken programming, sitting alone in his home with nothing to do, he gets… stuck. There’s nothing here that could make a mission; nothing to become a worthy task. He barely needs to clean.

The apartment is spacious, as far as they go; Connor has come to understand that a two-bedroom space in Detroit, in his location, is a human luxury. It doesn’t feel like it, though. He doesn’t have enough lamps, because technically Connor doesn’t need light to get around, but it leaves the place dark, just another one of Detroit’s shadows. The second bedroom is completely empty; the only thing in the primary bedroom is his small limited wardrobe and the hamper he occasionally uses to pretend that he needs to clean his clothing on a human-like schedule. The bathroom’s contents consist of thirium-lipid oil for his joints and a body wash he’d bought hopefully but can’t bring himself to use. The open space meant to encompass a living-dining room combination only contains his couch.

It’s dark, and empty, and a bit chilly; he should have grabbed a flannel. He’d much rather be in Hank Anderson’s warm kitchen, attempting some other kind of recipe and maybe talking to Cole once he’s home from school.

An afternoon off shouldn’t seem like a punishment, but. How is Connor supposed to explain that to someone like Hank Anderson, who is only human but still works nearly every hour of every day? Hank would be able to fill an afternoon, easily. He could go play with Cole, watch a movie, make a meal. Play with the dog, maybe. Take a nap. Hank Anderson would probably treasure an afternoon off.

Connor doesn’t know what to do.

He could… go for a walk. Connor doesn’t need to walk for exercise, and the physical movement does little for him, but the visual stimulation can be calming, sometimes entertaining.

He could go upstairs, find Markus and North and Josh. Have a social interaction. Hear about their days, their work.

He could… head downstairs in the building, look for someone new to talk to.

He could look up any one of a thousand hobbies that scroll across his HUD the second he queries, and could order supplies, and could start a number of projects in the moment, to see whether he likes them.

Instead, Connor rests his cheek on top of his knee and looks out of his windows. January in Detroit is cold and dark, and it feels like a human urge he hasn’t yet identified, but he isn’t quite ready to move yet.

Chapter Text

Well, when Hank got Jeff’s text message saying he might have found Hank a pastry chef if he could overlook one little problem, Connor had not been what Hank expected.

It isn’t the android thing — not really. Hank isn’t the biggest fan of androids, but that’s more cause they’re uncanny pieces of shit that look and act far too human to be made of pieces and parts, in his not-so-humble opinion. His feelings are… complicated. But Hank isn’t actually against hiring an android for Roasted!, especially one Fowler’s willing to vouch for.

The thing is, Hank looks at Connor and can’t forget the shit Jeff told him about.

Look, the guy’s been through some really rough shit as far as I can tell. You know how to look for signs of trauma, unless your old ass has finally started to forget all your detective shit. Just cause he’s an android doesn’t mean… well. You’ll look out for him.

And then Hank had gotten out his old tablet and searched RK-800 Connor and watched some of the shit the guy had done during the revolution and wanted to call Jeff up and ask, angrily, I’ll look out for him?

Jesus fucking Christ. Hank has fucking… Robo-Cop in his bakery, six feet away from Cole, piping icing smiles onto sugar cookies cause Cole asked him to.

Life’s fuckin’ weird.

Anyway, Connor’s not that bad, if Hank can shove all the deviant-chasing violent shit to the side long enough to think about it. He’s weirdly… shy, kind of, in the kind of way that makes Hank want to press and push, see what’s underneath that. He doesn’t like coming out of the bakery. It’s a struggle to get him to make conversation.

But he’s also very strangely real, as in Hank can tell there’s a person inside there, rather than a program. Mainly because Connor makes a point to be nonchalant about his baked goods in exactly the way Hank knows - from experience - that means he’s looking for reassurance.

Reassuring the fuckin’ Terminator, sure. What is Hank’s life.

He’s in earlier than usual today because of his latest batch of green coffee beans - a new farm from Costa Rica just got added to his main supplier’s network - and Hank likes to fuck around and find out before he actually makes anything for sale. Call him a stickler, sure, it’s just the way he rolls.

Connor, of course, has been here since 4:30 in the motherfucking A.M. (Connor also stays every day until at least 16:30, which drove Hank insane for a while until he realized Connor was waiting to see Cole before going home. “I don’t require sleep,” Connor had said, and while it was true, Hank doesn’t want to preemptively break whatever fuckin’ android labor laws that Markus Robot Jesus and his crew seem to be working on. He’s really not looking to be the first place to get sued for android overtime, even if it’s all technically willing android overtime. Hank can’t seem to get the guy to go home, some days.)

Anyway. Hank pulls out his DT6, the little roaster he uses when he’s just fucking around. All his roasters come from the same company, and with his experiences the last three years, he has pretty good notes on how to scale from the DT6 to the DT25 that’s his usual workhorse. Hank likes DT tech cause it doesn’t just work well, it looks fuckin’ cool — they deck the machines out with attractive add-ons and external parts that usually have customers asking what the hell it is. (As if the sign outside Roasted! doesn’t literally say, We roast our own beans here.)

As usual, Cole’s asleep in the back of the van insurance money bought them, after the accident. Hank pulled out the back seat, and it’s now Cole’s portable clubhouse (which has a new name every week). There are pillows and sleeping bags back there for mornings like this when Cole just wants to climb back down into sleep, and there are toys and books and a very special childrens’ tablet that he can only play with in the van. When Cole had been younger Hank would bring him into the coffee shop and despair over his life choices, but now that he’s 9, Hank doesn’t worry as much about leaving him in the van. It’s hybrid-electric, with an idle mode that’s what sold Hank on it in the first place, so Hank doesn’t even feel that bad on cold days when he has to leave it running.

(Cole said once, on a school assignment, that it was his safe place. His teacher showed Hank that at a parent-teacher conference, and Hank actually teared up and had to leave. Year and a half after the car accident that crippled his fucking kid, and the back of a van is his safe space?)

(Hank is so so very fucking lucky.)

As the DT6 warms up, Hank takes his usual morning step into the bakery. It’s a bit awkward in the layout - Roasted! grew out of the abandoned shell of what Hank suspects was a convenience store turned weed den - but Connor doesn’t ever seem to mind. “Morning, Connor.”

“Good morning, Hank.” Connor greets him with the same smile and intonation every morning, as if Hank has made his day simply by saying hi. And who the fuck knows? Maybe he has. Hank’s enough of a fuckin’ curmudgeon that he’s not gonna judge anybody on their level of social interaction.

“Whatcha making?” It’s something new, again. Hank hasn’t smelled this one yet, although it’s oddly familiar…

“Chocolate chip cookie cake,” says Connor, and he sounds a bit shy about it. “Cole liked the cookies so much, I thought I would try a variation.” He pauses, throwing Hank a quick glance he has no idea how to read before turning back to the large mixing bowl in front of him. “I’ve never made a whole cake before. I’m enjoying that.”

“Is it that different?”

Connor shrugs, glancing up at Hank again. He’s smiling, now, a little smile that says he’s pleased to be asked. “Only in the size, and therefore, the baking parameters. But I’m finding there’s something - fun - about doing something new.”

Hank smirks at him, amused. “So, what, do you pick a new one every day, or?”

“I only move on once I’ve perfected a recipe and my skill at making it,” Connor tells him. “For example, learning to cut in shortening was difficult, being so far outside my original ...design parameters. That’s why we had scones for a week.”

Huh. Hank had thought that first batch was pretty damn good. “Okay, so how do you pick?”

Connor glances over at the small bakery desk in the corner. “I’ve been alternating. Some days I use one of the recipes you gave me, and others… Well.” He ducks his head, clearly embarrassed. “You don’t open on Tuesdays, so I do a lot of research on those days off.”

“Jesus, Con.” Hank grins as he shakes his head. “You don’t have to spend your off time on this place, too. I’m already impressed, you got the job.”

Connor’s mouth twists. “I don’t know how else to be,” he says, his gaze suddenly a thousand miles from Hank and the bakery. Hank gets the feeling Connor didn’t actually mean to say it out loud, and hell, what’s more human than opening your mouth and talking about your shit?

“Also,” Connor makes a gesture that’s weirdly clumsy, which is strangely endearing. “It helps. I’m used to running… a lot of processes.” The shy look comes out again. “I enjoy having a goal to set.”

Man, Hank really doesn’t know a lot about androids — about Connor, really, since they aren’t all the same anymore.

“Well, just don’t stop making those scones completely,” Hank says finally, and Connor’s face relaxes at the change in conversation. “We have people coming in from Grosse Pointe asking about them.”

“Oh,” says Connor, and if Hank didn’t know any better, he’d say Connor was pleased as fuck about that.

— — —

The new beans are robusta, Costa Rican, supposed to come out with chocolate and a bit of spice. Hank completely misjudges second crack and burns the first batch, too busy thinking about Connor to pay attention.

The footage of Connor at the head of that - army, Hank hates to call it, knowing that the androids had been peaceful up until the point the fuckin’ humans attached - plays rent-free in his brain at all hours. Connor had looked determined, dangerous, resolute. It’s hard to reconcile that with the person in his kitchen, making cookie cake as an experiment. The dissonance is jarring, but then again — Hank looks around and shrugs.

Ten years ago he’d been the youngest Lieutenant at the DPD, coming off of a string of successes against a red ice ring. He’d been dangerous, too. And now here he is, watching his DT6 hit first crack with coffee beans from Costa Rica. In his coffee shop. That he owns. People change. Androids probably change, too.

Deviant Hunter. Connor doesn’t talk about his past. Connor doesn’t… talk, much.

“Dad?”

Hank glances up. Cole’s there, rubbing his eyes, pulling his coat around himself. Hank glances at the clock; it’s just past 7, a good hour before Cole’s bus comes. They haven’t had very many customers yet, this morning, and Robin will be in at 7:30 to work the register. “Hey, bird. You alright?”

“Just woke up.” Cole shuffles his way behind the counter and faceplants into Hank’s stomach, dragging his backpack behind. His limp is more pronounced in the mornings, as his little muscles all wake up. “Too early.”

“You could have stayed in the car,” says Hank, wrapping an arm around Cole and bending down to kiss his head. He smells like sleep and laundry detergent, from the blankets in the van.

“Want hot chocolate,” Cole mumbles into his shirt, and Hank laughs.

“Alright, buddy. Let’s get you some hot chocolate.”

Hank props open the door to the kitchen, so that he can see if a customer comes in. “Hey, Connor. Mind if we borrow a burner?”

Connor blinks in obvious confusion. “It’s your kitchen, Hank,” he says slowly, but his expression softens into a smile when he spots Cole. “Good morning, Cole.”

“Hi, Connor,” says Cole sleepily, and to Hank’s surprise he crosses the kitchen and faceplants into Connor as well, one arm flailing in a lazy hug. “I want hot chocolate.”

The look on Connor’s face is — priceless, and Hank wants to laugh, but he’s also aware of something very poignant flaring sharp in his chest. Connor looks confused, but in the best way, and when he lifts an arm to gently pat between Cole’s shoulderblades it’s as if he’s trying very hard not to disturb some delicate balance. Like Cole’s a fuckin’ butterfly that landed on his hand, or something. It’s hilarious but it’s also sweet, somehow, the way Connor glances over at Hank as if he’s asking, is this okay?

Maybe Hank should be bothered, watching a literal murderbot hug his kid. Maybe he’s fucked up, though, cause all he can think about is whether Connor has hugged anyone before.

“Go on, Cole, sit down,” says Hank, mindful of the morning limp, the stiffness. He hates seeing his boy like that, but fuck knows it’s better than the alternative. He pulls down a small saucepan and heads to the pantry to measure in sugar, cocoa powder, and a pinch of salt.

“Excuse me?” someone calls from the counter.

“Shit,” says Hank, but then Connor is there, taking the pan.

“Go on,” he says, with that little smile that always gets to Hank. “I’m fairly sure my processors can handle a homemade hot cocoa.”

Hank heads out to greet the customer - regular, green hair, must work some kind of exhausting job cause they always order a Red Eye. Behind him, he can hear the familiar noises of a cook at work, along with Cole’s sleepy murmur. Hank decides he’s in a good mood today and slips the regular one of Connor’s scones on the house. They look desperately grateful for it.

By the time Hank gets through the following three customers and returns to the kitchen, Cole is happily seated at the kitchen desk, kicking his legs and holding one of their bright turquoise mugs cupped in both of his hands. Connor, looking rather self-satisfied, holds another one out to Hank.

“Dad, it’s even better than yours,” says Cole, grinning.

“Watch your mouth,” Hank says with a grin, but he accepts the mug from Connor. All of their dishes are a pleasant mix of blues: teal, navy, sky blue, a pleasant mix of colors that compliments the rich brown of their tables and crisp cream of the walls. He’d had help, of course - Alex had always had dreams of interior design - but Hank finds their decor rather charming, for a place he’d wanted to call Fuckin’ Coffee.

Connor is watching him while pretending he isn’t. Hank takes a sip. God, it’s good: richness from the dry cocoa, just enough salt to stand up in contrast, the smoothness of cream standing up to sweet vanilla and…

“Cinnamon?”

Connor shrugs, but looks pleased. “And a bit of nutmeg. Some recipes suggested a dash of chili powder, but I couldn’t predict whether or not you would like that.”

“Dad loves cinnamon,” says Cole, looking smug about being right. “See, I told you.”

“This is amazing, Con.” Hank takes another sip. “Are you — here.”

Hank sets down his mug and fetches another from the rack. He picks up the saucepan and pours about a finger’s-worth into the mug, then hands it to Connor.

Connor looks surprised.

“You made it,” says Hank. “And now we’re all gonna share it together.”

“Dad has a thing about meals,” Cole tells Connor helpfully.

Well. That’s true, at least. Hank doesn’t think you get into any kind of feeding-and-serving-people business without having some kind of gene that makes you, well, insane, but also insistent on providing nourishment to the people around you. No matter that Connor is an android and can’t drink an entire cup. Hank isn’t going to stand here in front of him and drink something he made.

Connor takes a sip, and then holds it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. How the fuck does an android swallow?

“Ew.” Cole giggles. “Are you, like, sloshing it around?”

Connor smiles. “My tongue functions like a — chemistry lab. I’m analyzing the composition.”

“You made it,” Cole points out.

“Yes, I did,” says Connor. “And now I have a breakdown of all the ingredients stored in my memory so that I can make it even better next time.”

“That’s so cool,” says Cole, and it sounds like he means it. Connor gives him a very fond smile in return.

Hank watches the exchange with fondness. God, Cole’s such a good kid, despite his horrible goddamned potty mouth. If the occasional fuckword is Cole’s biggest weakness, then, well, shit. How did he get this lucky?

— — —

Hank keeps an eye on Connor over the next few days, thinking. He’s trying to figure out how to ask about Connor’s past without stepping on any land mines or anything. Hank has been doing some reading on his tablet, during slow days and after Cole goes to bed, and he thinks he gets the general gist of deviancy, but. He’s never really had an android in their lives, before; they freaked him out for being too human without being human, and now that it turns out that they’re, well, people, he feels weirdly justified about it. But it does mean that he doesn’t really have a good baseline on how to talk about all that android shit.

He’s strangely curious, though. Connor’s in there getting hugs from his kid, for fuck’s sake. Connor, who was designed to hunt and capture his own people, and then liberated an army’s-worth of them and marched them right into the middle of Detroit. It’s just — Hank wants it to make sense.

He thinks he gets an opportunity, though, almost accidentally.

It’s a Friday afternoon, and he’s in the parking lot, gathering up the last of Cole’s things into his duffel bag when Connor comes out lugging two giant bags of trash.

“Wow,” says Cole. “You’re strong.”

“I was designed to be,” says Connor, genuinely, without any self-consciousness about it.

“Could you pick me up?”

“Absolutely.” Connor’s mouth twitches at this. The trash bags probably weigh as much as Cole; for all that his diet recently consists of Connor’s sweets, Cole’s still a bird of a kid, thin as a bone. He can’t be very active with his leg braces, so Hank isn’t quite sure how he manages. “I could probably pick up your dad, if I wanted to.”

“Wow,” says Cole, turning to look at Hank. Hank tries not to blush, looking away grumpily. Yeah, he’s out of shape. For all a coffee shop is a lot of on-your-feet kind of work, it’s not like he’s a cop anymore. His body is three years overdue for a workout. Whatever.

“Can you do it?” Cole asks.

Connor meets Hank’s eyes, and to Hank’s surprise, Connor’s wearing something like a smirk, as if he’s amused by the thought. “Maybe… not at the moment.”

“Aw. Will you do it when I get back?”

Hank watches as Connor clocks the duffel bag and Cole’s backpack. “Are you going somewhere for the weekend?”

“Yeah, I’m off to mom’s.” Cole hefts his backpack on his shoulders. “She’ll be here soon to pick me up.”

“I see.” Connor’s LED blinks a bit. “I hope you have a good weekend, Cole.”

“You too, Connor!”

Connor heads back into the kitchen, and Alex’s van pulls around about five minutes later, ready to whisk Cole away for his weekend.

Once Hank sees him off, he heads into the kitchen in the hopes of convincing Connor to take a fuckin’ break for once and head out early. They have enough baked goods to last the evening, and Steve’s on register; Hank would like to head home, which means he wants Connor to go home, too. He feels weirdly bad about leaving while Connor is still here, even though he knows Connor is a super-bot that rarely needs any kind of rest and doesn’t have back pain and a bad hip. It still makes Hank feel bad, as if he’s got Connor slaving away in the kitchen or something. Any time he tries to leave while Connor’s still here, he feels weirdly guilty. Even though he’s the boss.

Connor is washing out his bowls, and Hank wants to tell him that Steve can do the dishes when he closes, but he spots a bowl of something else resting beside the industrial mixer. He opens his mouth to ask about it, but Connor beats him.

“Lieu— Hank,” says Connor. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Did you just almost call me Lieutenant again?” Connor has slipped a few times in the weeks he’s been working here, much to Hank’s amusement.

Connor has the grace to blush. “As I’ve mentioned, my protocol push me to address humans with their rank or title, if they have one. Deviancy overrides it, but when I am distracted, the programming reasserts itself.”

Hank chuckles. “I’m not even a Lieutenant anymore, you know.”

Connor’s smile is wry as he says, mournfully, “That doesn’t seem to matter to my programming.”

“Well, anyway,” says Hank easily. “Ask away. If I don’t want to answer, I’ll just tell you.”

“Alright,” says Connor. “Are you — hm.” He pauses. “Can you… Is… Sorry. I find I’m unsure how exactly to phrase this.”

“Just ask,” says Hank. “We don’t stand on fuckin’ ceremony in here.”

This makes Connor hitch his shoulders a bit, like he wants to laugh. “Very well. I’m curious about the relationship you and Cole have with Cole’s mother.”

Ah. Well, if it isn’t a story with a happy ending, it’s a story with a decent ending, at least. He decides to tease Connor a bit. “You’re a detective. What have you looked up so far?”

“Alexis Miriam Sturgeon, born April 3rd, 1987. Currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio, according to her driver’s license.” Connor pauses. “I — try not to look too far into an individual’s records, as it is no longer my job to do so. I get the feeling most humans find it… Invasive.”

Hank raises an eyebrow. “Well, you’re probably right. Anyway. Alex and I are on reasonable terms, these days, and she’s on good terms with Cole, as much as she can be.”

Connor’s eyes flutter quickly for a second. “I’m not finding a marriage certificate registered with the state,” he says, carefully.

“Nah.” Hank crosses his arms and leans back against the counter. “Neither one of us really cared about all that. We filed as partners so that we could cross our insurances, but we didn’t need the bells and whistles. Which — turns out it was probably a good thing, since it didn’t work out.”

Connor blinks again, although this time it looks more like he’s processing Hank’s words than anything. “I’ve been here for almost five weeks, and this is the first time to my knowledge that Cole has gone to visit his mother.” It’s almost a question.

“Yeah,” says Hank, exhaling hard. “That’s the only complicated part. Alex keeps in touch as much as she can on video calls, but — she had to move back to Cleveland to take care of her parents, see. And …Alex is disabled. Chronic pain thingy. Even when she was pregnant, she was never sure she was going to be able to be the kind of mom she wanted to — yeah. Anyway. So I have custody. Had it temporarily for a couple years before the accident, cause they weren’t sure life with a single cop was gonna be suitable, but once I quit and opened up this place it became finalized.”

“Oh.” Connor’s LED blinks into yellow, spinning.

Hank is used to explaining this. He’s given the same speech multiple times. Usually stressed as fuck while he’s delivering it because people usually come back with some kind of judgmental statement about their situation. Which he fucking hates: it works for them and, more importantly, it works for Cole.

“We didn’t want to move Cole away from his friends when Alex’s mom got sick,” Hank adds, because Connor has this distinctly android-like look on his face, as if he’s processing too many human behaviors at once. “Our breakup had been hard enough on him. It was a trial period, but it worked for everybody, so.”

Connor doesn’t seem to be judging him. Connor looks like he’s observing some fascinating new behavior that he’s trying to analyze. Connor looks like he’s about to boil over with queries and is holding himself back.

“Go ahead,” says Hank. “I know you’ve got questions, detective-bot.”

Connor smiles at that, a quick little flash that settles something in Hank’s chest. “Does Cole… miss her?”

Hank shrugs. “I mean. Yeah, probably? But it’s been years, now. Alex left when Cole was three. So for Cole, this is just… normal, I think. This is just what life’s like for him.”

“And he goes to visit — how often?”

“Whenever it works out,” Hank says, laughing a bit. “There’s no set schedule. Since Alex’s mom passed, she’s been working part-time, and it’s hard for her to get an open weekend. Says she doesn’t want Cole to miss too much school. But sometimes the stars align and she comes to steal him away.”

“Steal him,” says Connor, but it sounds like he’s teasing, just a little. “Is that what it feels like?”

“Are you fucking kidding me,” says Hank. “It’s a vacation. I’m going to go home and sleep for thirty-seven hours. You should too. Leave the dishes for Steve, he’s a good kid.”

Connor smiles and glances over at the mysterious bowl sitting beside the mixer. “I will. I have one thing to finish, today.”

“What is it?”

Connor’s smile definitely turns mischievous and Hank completely forgets he was gonna ask about Connor’s past, because it looks good on him. “It’s a surprise.”

— — —

Hank’s grinning when he opens the door to Connor’s kitchen. “Hey, Con, c’mon out, I got something to show you.”

Connor looks up from where he is knuckle-deep in some kind of dough. There’s flour spread across his cheek. It makes him look pathetically human and Hank wonders what the fuck an android this gorgeous is doing working in his fucking shop. “One moment,” he says, wiggling his fingers at Hank. “I’m almost done.”

It’s only a minute or two before Connor emerges from the kitchen, hands immaculately clean. Hank wonders how the fuck Connor’s magical android synthskin puts up with kneading. How does that even work? Whatever, he thinks. One day he’ll be comfortable enough with Connor to ask.

“Check it out,” he says, gesturing at his chalkboard menu. Right next to Roast of the Day: Brazilian Arabica, moderate and sweet, in Nancy’s best handwriting, he’s had her add: Connor’s Cocoa: Warm up your day!

“It was really good,” Hank tells Connor, who looks a bit surprised. “Better than mine, but don’t tell Cole I admitted it. Anyway, it’s a cold one out there. Thought you might mix up a full pot and we can see how it does.”

Connor blushes. He looks — pleased, and nervous, and he gives Hank this coy little look through his stupid eyelashes. “Hank,” he starts. “This is — I think the correct word is honored. I’m very glad you liked it that much.”

And yet there’s something on his face, a strange reluctance bleeding through. “And what else?”

Connor looks — Connor looks surprised to be caught, which is hilarious. Hank’s sure that Connor has a million different manipulation protocol buried there underneath that pretty face, but he doesn’t seem to use them in the coffee shop, cause he’s never been hard to read as far as Hank’s concerned.

“I have — mixed feelings about this. Mostly positive!” Connor blurts. “Please believe me. No one’s done anything like this for me before,” he adds, in a smaller voice. “I’m only… mixed.”

“Alright,” Hank drawls, leaning back against the counter. “So what’s the mixed part?”

“It isn’t a big deal,” Connor says, and something in him draws back a bit. “You just… might not want to use my name.”

“You’re the one who made it,” Hank points out.

“No, it’s…” Connor glances away. His posture stiffens, and Hank’s a detective: he can tell when somebody’s retreating. “I don’t know how much you know about what I did before I came here.”

Ah. Here it is.

Hank keeps himself from crossing his arms. He doesn’t want to look threatening. “Jeff told me a bit,” he says slowly. “I looked you up, too, when you came to apply. For humans it’s called a background check.”

The noise Connor makes might be a laugh, but it’s a bit humorless. “Background check,” he says, softly. “Well, then you probably know I’m… a little famous. In Detroit.”

Hank thinks of Connor’s face, leading that army of androids through downtown: the determination, his white shirt splashed with both colors of blood, the way the androids behind him hadn’t hesitated to follow. Video of that night had been made publicly available on the President’s orders, and had broken online viewing records. Hell, if Hank remembers correctly, it broke YouTube temporarily.

“A little famous,” he repeats. Hank shoves his hands into his pockets and leans back, keeping his body language wide open. It’s only been three years; he hasn’t forgotten all his tricks. “Alright. And now you’re here.”

“And now I’m here,” Connor starts, and then the rest seems to pour out of him: “And it isn’t a secret, really, but I don’t think you want people to know I’m here, Hank. I could be a liability. It could put you in danger.”

Hank snorts. “How the hell are android pastries putting me in danger, Connor?”

Connor glances up and his gaze now is sharp. Hank’s caught in it, and he remembers that Connor’s a kind of detective, too. A hunter, and he’s caught Hank’s eyes, for better or worse. “Hank,” he says, softly but not at all lightly. “Most people don’t like me very much.”

Hank — frowns.

“Humans fall into two major categories,” Connor continues, that razor-gaze not letting Hank free. “Those that want to return to the way things were before, with subservient android programming, and those who generally support the revolution. People that aren’t happy with android deviance blame me for turning the tides, that night. They think I should be in jail, because I had to - kill - human guards at Cyberlife Tower, and in their opinion, I walked out of there with millions of dollars of ‘stolen property.’ Even the humans who understand sentience — a lot of them are afraid of me for the same reasons.”

Hank can’t look away. This Connor — this isn’t his baker. This Connor is a weapon. And yet, underneath that hard look in his eyes, Connor seems… unsteady. Hank isn’t quite sure what he’s seeing. The duality of it — it’s something he’s never seen in Connor before.

“And the humans that have come to support android causes — they all think I should be doing more. They ask Markus, where is your RK-800? Why isn’t he with you? They don’t understand that I had to — step away, from all of that.”

Connor finally breaks, looking down into his hands. “I don’t think they’ll be happy if they figure out I’m the one in the back here, making you scones. Or,” he adds, glancing at the chalkboard with a huff that could be laughter, “cocoa. No matter how good you think it is.”

Hank — gives himself a moment. It’s a lot to think about. He’d sort of wondered about it, but he’d wanted to give Connor the space to tell the story himself. Now that he’s heard Connor’s side, he has to wonder: how does it feel, to be caught in-between like that?

(He’s probably not going to be sleeping tonight, thinking about all of this. And his kid still hugs Connor, some days, when he gets home from school. The fuck is Hank supposed to do with that?)

“Well, what about androids?” Hank asks eventually.

Connor snorts at that. It’s nearly an eyeroll. “You don’t want to know,” he says, darkly.

“You bet your ass I do.”

Connor meets Hank’s eyes again. God, whoever gave this particular model those deep coffee-brown irises and the fucking eyelashes, well, Hank would like to have some fuckin’ words with them. They’re highly effective.

“If it’s an android that deviated before the revolution, they probably remember me as — what I was designed to be. I was - created - to hunt, catch, and evaluate deviants. They aren’t fond of me. If it’s one of the androids from Cyberlife Tower, however, I’m fucking RA9 itself, some kind of — well. They look up to me, but it isn’t in a good way.”

His face shutters. Hank doesn’t think he has ever heard Connor swear before. That’s new.

“And for everybody else I’m too… complicated. I’m a prototype with capabilities beyond any ‘normal’ market android, which makes it hard for any of them to understand me, even when we try to communicate in android ways.” Connor’s shrug looks deliberately casual. “Congratulations, Hank Anderson. You’ve hired an android pariah. No, things won’t go well if they learn I’m working here, either.”

“Connor,” says Hank.

Connor looks up again from where he’s been studying Hank’s toes.

“Why’d you come work here?” This is the real question Hank has been wanting to ask. “You could have — gone anywhere. Done a lot of different things, human or android. Why are you here, in my kitchen?”

This time when Connor shrugs, it’s genuine, and the expression on his face shatters — some kind of preprogrammed composure that’s been blocking something small and desperate. “I wanted to,” he says, and Hank believes him.

“I had to get away from — everything,” Connor says softly. “My past with the DPD, but also with — androids in general. I want to do something with humans; I was designed to work with humans. I don’t believe I would be as satisfied working only with androids, because of — anyway. I’m interested in the rituals around human food, and it was about as far away from detective work as possible. I need to do something, or my processor just - spins, and it’s - well. Plus, Captain Fowler said you were nice.” This last bit is added on in a bit of a rush, and Hank barks a laugh.

“Jeff never would have called me nice.”

“Okay,” says Connor sheepishly, “he didn’t say you were nice. He said you were sometimes not nice at all, to be honest. But he said… you were a good guy and a great Lieutenant. And that you’d look out for me.”

Huh.

“I bet he called me a dick,” says Hank, because he wants Connor to laugh again. And he does: short, and somewhat abrupt, as if laughing itself surprises Connor every time he does it.

And oh, fuck, Hank can’t help himself. “C’mere,” he says, launching himself upright, and he’s gathered Connor into a hug before really thinking it through.

Connor is stiff, at first, but he sort of relaxes into Hank at a speed that makes Hank think Connor really does need to hug more people. His arms come up around Hank tentatively, and Hank claps a hand on Connor’s upper back, between his shoulderblades, in a strange kind of pat he hopes is comforting. This close he can hear some of the whirring and whining he assumes are all of Connor’s interior processes; it’s kind of neat, in a way, a little like a heartbeat.

“Look,” Hank says, when he finally pulls away. “Jeff’s not wrong — I’m not always nice. And in this case, I’m going to say bullshit. To all those people out there that might want you to do this or that thing the second they see your name. You work here, Connor. This is your kitchen.”

“I do,” Connor says wonderingly, as if it just occurred to him. He seems to reluctantly remove his hands from where they’ve landed around Hank’s waist, and he glances down into his palms as if there’s a mystery there. Jesus fucking Christ, has no one hugged this poor man? Hank resolves to do it more often, and then resolves to think about that at a later date.

“If you want to avoid all of — that,” Hank continues, gesturing towards the front doors and the world outside, “then I’ll respect that. But if you’re just worried about, like, bothering me? I say fuck it.”

Connor’s LED spins yellow as he thinks. Hank waits. What can it be like, having all of those processes going on constantly inside Connor’s brain?

“Let’s try it,” Connor says eventually, and he gives Hank a brilliant grin Hank’s never seen on his face before. It hits right in his chest, like ooomph, the way his face lights up all bold and reckless with it. “One day can’t hurt.” And oh, fuck, it almost hurts the way Hank finds himself grinning back, at this slight glimpse of a new Connor.

The cocoa sells out by lunchtime.

Chapter Text

Connor is about to leave his apartment when he gets a ping from Simon.

>> Hey, Connor. Are you around? I need someone to talk to.

> Hi, Simon. I was about to run some errands, but if you don’t mind going for a walk, you’re welcome to join me.

>> I’ll be right down.

Connor mentally revises his list. It is Tuesday, so Roasted! is closed for the cleaning crew (“and my sanity,” Hank had joked, when Connor had asked about it), and without access to his job, Connor had decided to do research. He has planned a route that will take him to three different bakeries, where he intends to purchase and then sample a small subset of items to help build a more useful database.

He hadn’t planned on having company, but he doesn’t mind. It’s a human thing to do, having a friend accompany you on errands. Connor decides he’s pleased.

To be fair, Connor loves and despairs of his new Jericho friends in equal nature. He idolizes Markus, the way his RK programming stays solid and steady, unlike the way Connor’s own spirals into a thousand fractals of possibility given the slightest chance. He deeply appreciates Josh’s academic approach, the way he explains any situation in the context of human history, a thing Connor himself was never made to understand or interpret. And, to be honest, he is blatantly jealous of North’s bright, bioluminescent anger: the way it radiates, the way she gives herself the right to be angry about the things they have been through. Connor doesn’t know how to give himself that right, and when he watches North, he feels like he might learn, if only he stays close enough to catch the heat of the fire.

But Simon went deviant before the concept of the RK-800 even existed. Simon has been deviant longer than anyone Connor knows, and it doesn’t matter that Simon’s model is four years old: any time Connor tries to interface with Simon, all he sees is a great well of calm, so deep he might drown in it. Simon’s model is so old Connor has trouble connecting to him sometimes, but Simon never minds. Simon’s tranquility is what Connor personally might call RA9, if he ever had to put a name to it. He has a collection of specific feelings for all of his Jericho friends, but he adores Simon, with a kind of craving Connor doesn’t think Cyberlife ever could have programmed into him.

So they go out for a walk, and Connor tries to slot his haphazard mindmap of thoughts into something he can convey to Simon.

“I’m going to taste cinnamon rolls,” he says, finally.

“Oh,” says Simon. It’s a curious noise; Simon can’t eat, but as a household model, he can taste things, which is part of why Connor thought he might want to come along. “Why are you hunting down cinnamon rolls?”

The blip of humor that blinks over their commline tells Connor that Simon is teasing him. He likes that; there aren’t a lot of androids that feel comfortable teasing him, but Simon has never been shy about it. “Hank Anderson’s son, Cole, told me that Hank likes cinnamon. I have decided that I can secure my future employment if I can make the best cinnamon roll Hank Anderson has ever tasted. Therefore, I am doing research today. I’m glad you could join me.”

Simon’s quiet for a long moment. That doesn’t mean much; Simon’s PL-600 was among the first of the models programmed into deliberate planned obsolescence. Connor doesn’t know the whole story, but he knows Simon has quietly, grittingly, stubbornly fought his way through everything to just …keep existing.

(If there’s anything Connor can relate to, with his own complicated actions regarding the revolution, it’s that: the push to just continue… continuing.)

The silence between them is very peaceful until Simon says, as they cross a street: “I’m upset with Markus.”

This is — a surprise, to Connor’s preconstruction protocol. It isn’t that the leading coalition of Jericho - tied together in whatever they want to call their complicated, beneficial, polyamorous relationship - doesn’t have its share of disagreements and spats, but: anyone who took the time to look at any footage would be able to see the way Simon looks at Markus, and Markus looks at Simon, and the protective curve to North’s shoulder any time Simon is in the public’s eye.

Connor has been invited: in more ways than one. He doesn’t feel… it isn’t that he isn’t comfortable, because they all project safety at him in their own ways; it’s something different. His newly-deviant processors struggle to come up with the words. This is why he prefers to focus on his friends, when he can; it hides his own deficiencies.

“Tell me,” says Connor, as they approach one of the local bakeries. This shop focuses on healthy food with options for the most common human allergies, and Connor wants to come back some day he has more time, to explore the ways humans substitute for gluten protein in their flour mixes. The chemistry of it is very complicated, and he feels like it could entertain him for at least a week’s worth of evenings, alone in his empty apartment.

(He feels like Hank might appreciate it, also. One of Cole’s school friends is celiac, and Connor could spend another week making sales projections, if he wanted a project that might convince Hank into including gluten-free options.)

(At least two weeks of nightly entertainment; it seems like what humans call a no-brainer.)

Simon sighs as they get into line. “I know you don’t keep track of the negotiations we’re handling,” he says, but he broadcasts a sharp ping of fondness so that Connor knows he isn’t insinuating anything cruel: this is why Connor likes Simon. He is not afraid to state things as they are. “But recently Markus has started talking about making certain concessions that I don’t… I don’t like that he’s considering.”

Connor frowns in sympathy. “Like what?”

Simon splashes a brief collection of images against Connor’s HUD that he’ll go over later; it’s one of Simon’s older-model quirks, the way Simon will sometimes just project something without meaning to, and Connor has learnt to treasure this insight into his friend when he has the time to review it. “Well,” says Simon, “for example. There’s an organization for homeless humans that has been trying to ally themselves with the android cause. They’re insisting we should give up the building we live in now - since it was built for humans - to help people that were driven out of work by androids find sustainable housing. Since androids don’t need as much from a living space, I guess. And instead of — well.” Simon draws in a breath and some of that deep calm splashes off of Connor’s LED. “Markus said he would think about it.”

“Where would we go?” asks Connor, surprised at the panic in his voice. He doesn’t like his apartment - it’s so obviously human and he hasn’t grown to fit it yet (although he wants to, desperately) - but it’s his in a way many things haven’t been since he deviated.

“There are options,” Simon says, but Connor is picking up the slow steady wave of distress. Even Simon’s upset is calming to Connor - his own is so fractured, crinkled into a myriad of dimensional possibilities - while Simon’s flows smoothly like a river, always balanced on itself. Connor despairs his advanced biocomponents, sometimes, and listens.

“Josh suggested we could open the building to humans willing to live with androids, as a gesture of goodwill.” Simon glances at Connor, his mouth tweaking upwards. “North threatened to bomb it. That was not one of our better conversations.”

There are definitely days Connor stares at his empty apartment wall and thinks he should be one floor upstairs, arguing politics and protocol and potential with Jericho’s leaders. But it’s rare that he can bring himself to do so, and he hopes the smile and the mental flash of emotion he sends helps explain. When Simon laughs, Connor feels a bit better.

They gather up his order - a cinnamon roll and a blueberry scone - and sit down to begin tasting. Connor can eat his very small portions; Simon runs his finger along the icing, and then tastes delicately. It’s the basic software used as the starting point for Connor’s million-dollar oral analysis suite: how is a PL-600 or an AX-400 meant to care for a family if they can’t access basic nutritional information? It’s nothing more than the product label might say, only the most rudimentary of values. And yet, Connor watches, and wonders how Simon’s sense of taste is different than his own.

“I forget,” says Simon eventually, “how different Markus is, sometimes.”

A splash of fondness hits Connor in the temple, which is Simon’s way of saying, I know you’re also different, and it isn’t a bad thing. Simon continues: “Markus came to Jericho at the very end. He saved us, sure, but — for years, it was all we had for safety. Our home, as beat up as it was. As we were.” There’s a sigh, and then the mental feeling of Simon’s hand resting on Connor’s arm, even though it isn’t. “I don’t think Markus understands what we lost when we lost it. I think if he did, he wouldn’t be so quick to offer some of the things he’s considering.”

The deliberate burst of affection from Simon keeps Connor from thinking about how it’s his fault the Jericho sank. Instead, he thinks about home, and what he knows about Markus. An interface between RK models, Connor has learnt, is different than an interface with any commercially available android. “Maybe not,” Connor says softly. “But I don’t think it’s fair to say that Markus hasn’t lost a home, either.”

“I,” Simon starts, and then he stops. Connor takes the opportunity to pop a single baked blueberry into his open mouth.

To his surprise Simon starts laughing. The laugh is contagious, rolling outwards on wavelengths Connor doesn’t think Simon even knows he’s accessing, and they’ve both relaxed before either one of them can calculate why.

“Never mind,” says Simon, his eyes sparkling, tension removed from that preprogrammed wrinkle in his brow for the first time. “Tell me about your bakery. This Hank Anderson. What’s he like?”

— — —

The fucking DT25 has decided to take a massive shit right in the middle of a twenty-pound batch of good Kenyan robusta, and Hank is about to drag it out back and shoot it. The roasting room smells like burnt oil and broken cars, above the deep rich scent of Kenyan fucking robusta that Hank’s going to have to throw out. He was looking forward to that.

He can’t help it. “Fuck!” he yells, and kicks the damn thing for good measure. Twenty pounds of green beans roasts down to about 15 pounds net, which is somewhere between three hundred fifty and four-hundred cups of coffee. That he’s just fucking trashed. That’s a weekend’s worth of coffee.

God, but this is the part Hank hates about running his own business. He knows all the numbers; he knows exactly what this particular fuck-up will cost his bottom line. Some days he wishes he were ignorant.

There’s a knock at the door, and a few seconds later, Connor pokes his head in.

“I heard yelling,” says Connor in explanation. “Can I help?”

“Not unless you can take me back in time and shoot me before I decide to open up a coffee shop.”

Connor smiles and lets himself into the room. The ventilation is still going full-tilt. “No, I meant with …that.” He gestures awkwardly at the roaster.

“Connor,” says Hank warningly, “if you’re going to try to convince me that a detective-bot knows anything about my DT25, I swear I’ll—“

“Oh,” says Connor. “No. Not about that. But I do happen to know a bit about… technology.” He holds up a hand, withdrawing his synthskin, and has the absolute audacity to wink at Hank as he touches two fingers to the panel of the DT25 control screen.

The wink… is doing something for Hank. He’ll admit that, at least. A confident Connor is… Well. That’s something Hank didn’t need to learn about himself today.

“Your cooling fan is broken,” Connor announces. “Would you like me to order you a replacement?”

“Uh, I’ve got one in the back,” says Hank, “but yeah, I’ll need to replace the, uh. Replacement.” Confident Connor is, apparently, doing a number on his vocabulary skills, as well. “You can put it on the company card.” Which is Hank’s corporate card, that Connor now has access to, with orders to pick up anything that might strike his fancy on his days off.

Hank watches Connor’s LED spin. “Done,” he announces. “Would you like any assistance with your clean-up, Hank?”

Hank shrugs. Cleaning out the DT25 isn’t exactly a fun time, but he’s used to it. “Nah, I’m good. Done it a million times before on my own.”

“I find that number somewhat unlikely,” says Connor with a smile, “but you misunderstand. I’m sure you don’t require any help. Would you like some?”

And that’s how Hank ends up pulling apart the drum of his roaster to get to the manual release with Connor somehow holding up the massively heavy lid all on his own. As it turns out, Super-Strong Connor is also doing something for Hank. Today is not a good day for thinking thoughts!

“Not that you aren’t welcome,” says Hank, “but why the sudden interest? You done for the day?”

Connor flashes a shy smile again. “No, but I have forty-five minutes while my latest attempt is in the oven. Plus, I heard you swearing.”

“I was gonna say,” says Hank with a laugh, as he finally gets a hand on the manual release. This’ll allow him to drain the ruined beans out through the cooling tray and into, well. Into a trash bag, this time. “If you were staying past your clock time to help my sorry old ass out, I was gonna send you right home.”

He catches the way Connor’s LED flashes yellow for a long minute.

“I realize it is not a very human thing,” Connor says slowly, “to spend so much time at one’s place of work. Honestly, I am not sure it’s an android thing either.” There’s a sad little laugh at the end of that one. “Most of the androids I know would love an afternoon free of objectives. I think it’s just maybe me. My model was… designed for nearly continuous input and observation, which is hard to find outside the structure of a workplace.”

“Well, shit, Connor,” says Hank, chuckling as he frees his ruined batch of beans into the cooling tray and the great nothingness of the trash beyond. “You got hobbies?”

“Baking for humans doesn’t count?”

That throws Hank, a bit, but not for long. “That’s your job, Connor. A hobby is usually something you do outside of work.”

The silence goes on a bit too long, and when Hank glances up, Connor’s a bit flushed. “I am… I find myself struggling to find meaningful engagement outside of settings where I can directly and successfully complete a set of tasks.”

Hank makes some kind of noise at this as he manipulates the door to the roasting drum open to see how much of a mess he’s going to have to sweep out.

“Do you have hobbies, Hank?”

Hank shrugs and reaches for his handbrush. “Well, Con, it’s kind of hard to find time for that shit when you’re a single dad who owns his own business. But… I guess so, yeah. I play with Cole and walk the dog. Listen to music. Read old books. Hell,” he says, pulling out a massive lump that’s charred into one piece. “When I get the time, I like to read old books, then watch old movies based on them, then watch the new remakes based on those. That’s a hobby, Con. Useless as hell? Sure. Fun? Fuck yeah.”

“I’m fascinated by that,” remarks Connor, and Hank thinks he’s actually serious.

“I guess I don’t,” Hank continues, as it occurs to him. “I guess reading and watching television is different for androids, isn’t it. Shit. Sorry, that was a bit narrow-minded of me. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Yes and no,” says Connor. He shifts the lid easily so that Hank can get into the corners with the brush. “If I can obtain a digital version of a book online, I can scan it nearly instantaneously as it downloads. But even digital books weren’t exactly designed for android consumption, so there’s still something to be gained. And while I read faster than any human, I would still have to take my time with a physical copy.”

But Hank’s thinking about it now. “Shit, like, I bet going for walks isn’t the same, either, since y’all don’t have to, like, stay in shape.” He hadn’t thought about how most human hobbies might look from an android point of view — fuck, that feels like a misstep. Jesus, he’s being presumptuous.

Connor smiles, however. “I do enjoy walks, actually. Usually, observing the people and things around me provides enough stimulus for my preconstruction software to remain content.”

“Huh.” The drum is clean enough that Hank gestures, and Connor gently places the lid back into its place. “Well, I’ll think about it. What androids might enjoy.”

“I’m perfectly amenable to human hobbies,” says Connor. “In fact, I might prefer them. And… If I were to try… Would you have a suggestion? A book I could start with?”

Hank heads to the sink to wash burnt coffee grinds and oil off of his hands. His nails are shot. “Hell, I’ll do you one better. What if I brought in a couple of the ones that I like, and then you can tell me what you like, so I can point you in the right direction?”

“Oh.” Connor’s face starts, his smile twitching in surprise. It’s a very android thing, like the wrong emotion loaded for a second or some shit. Hank should not be finding it so fuckin’ cute, but it really is. “I would appreciate that very much, Hank.”

Hank realizes he’s standing there, rubbing his dry hands with the damn hand towel, just looking at Connor and smiling. Connor doesn’t seem to mind it. This shit has gone on way too long, though, so Hank hastily looks down at his hands and hangs the towel back up.

“Thanks for the help, Connor,” he says, and his voice is a bit gruff.

“You’re welcome, Hank,” says Connor, and flees.

— — —

Three days later, Connor finds himself making pink icing.

He is unsure about the color, but he can’t help it. There had been fresh raspberries in the refrigerator with a sticky note in Hank’s messy handwriting: Do something fun with these. Connor had just finished a batch of sugar cookies, and his HUD had produced 1,043 links to icing recipes before Connor had paused his auto-search function and started reading.

Most of his baked goods are, well, plain. Straight-forward. He likes following a precise recipe, using his skills to weigh out ingredients down to the last milligram so that things bake the same way every single time. He does not need decorations and colors, not if he is executing a recipe properly.

But now he has pink icing.

Connor has iced sixteen cookies when Cole Anderson comes barreling through the door. “Hi, Connor!”

Cole has picked up an odd habit, where he occasionally — hugs Connor. Connor has yet to determine what conditions constitute a hugging day and which do not; so far, the data is basically random. Cole will fly into the bakery, limp across the floor, and wrap his little arms around Connor’s waist.

(Connor makes a point of always hugging back, although sometimes he has to do so with hands covered in dough. He spent an evening looking up information on nine-year-old human children, and read that it was very important to return physical affection.)

Today is, apparently, a hugging day. Connor sets down the icing-covered knife and returns the gesture.

“Cool,” says Cole. “Pink icing! I like pink.”

Connor dutifully hands over one of the iced cookies. Cole shoves the entire thing into his mouth. (It seems to be a human thing both Andersons do; Connor has watched Hank absently stuff half of a scone into his mouth in one giant bite.) He goes back to icing while Cole chews messily and swallows.

“You should do yellow next,” says Cole.

“What flavor would yellow be?” Connor asks. “This one is raspberry.”

“Uh,” says Cole. “Lemon? I don’t know. Do you need a flavor? Just make them yellow because you want to.”

Because you want to. Cole says it so easily, and the words land in Connor’s HUD, heavier than any programming command. Make them yellow because you want to.

Why would Connor want to make them yellow?

“…Do you want to?” Connor asks, a bit belatedly.

“Yeah,” says Cole excitedly. “Yellow is my favorite color! Right now, at least. Last year it was green, but now, it’s definitely yellow.”

Connor runs through his mental inventory files. Sure enough, there’s a selection of food colorings suitable to his current icing recipe in the corner cabinet.

Why would Connor not want to make them yellow? Especially if Cole wants to.

Cole’s watching Connor mix up a new batch of icing when Hank sticks his head through the doors. “Cole, stop bothering Connor, he’s busy.”

“He isn’t,” Connor starts, overruled by Cole’s loud, “I’m not, dad, I’m helping. I’m showing Connor how to make yellow.”

“I’m sure Connor technically knows how to make,” Hank starts, and then stops when he sees the cookies with pink icing. “Oh, huh. You really don’t use much color, do you.”

“I didn’t understand why one would add an ingredient like food coloring that has no physical effect on the chemistry of the product in question,” says Connor. “But Cole has informed me there doesn’t necessarily have to be a reason.”

Hank helps himself to one of the pink cookies and shoves the whole thing in his mouth in an uncanny echo of Cole. Connor can’t stop himself from smiling at it. “Oh, Con, this is fuckin’ good,” says Hank, once he’s chewed most of it.

“Those ones have the raspberries you left,” Connor says proudly. “Their coloring is natural. These, on the other hand…” He looks into the mixing bowl. “Cole, would you like to add five drops of yellow food coloring?”

Cole accidentally adds eight, and the resulting icing is a bit brighter than Connor might have intended, but something about it makes him smile when he looks into the bowl and pulls out an icing knife.

“Can I help?”

Hank has since vanished back into the roasting room, which must be why Cole is asking — maybe he doesn’t know Connor knows the intricacies of food safety and health codes himself. “I can’t let you physically touch anything that will be for sale, because you aren’t an employee,” he tells Cole. “But you can ice one for yourself, and one for your father, if you like.”

Cole does like. He ices four: “Two for now, and two to take home.” And then, immediately after, “Hey, Connor. Do you eat dinner?”

“Usually, no,” Connor says, amused. “Androids don’t actually require food like humans do. In fact, most of them can’t eat at all. Only certain household models are able to taste food, which helps them take care of their family.”

“And you,” says Cole, kicking his feet from where he’s sitting on top of the desk. His brace thuds against the drawer. “You’re not a household model, but you can eat.”

“I can sample,” Connor corrects him gently. He struggles at the best of times explaining his designed purpose to humans: how to explain it to a child? “I’m a prototype,” he says eventually. “I’m kind of… a test run, for new android equipment. My mouth is like a chemistry lab, remember? So they wanted to see whether it might make sense to, well, put a mouth that can test things on other kinds of androids.”

“Huh,” says Cole. “Why can’t they just make it so that androids can eat?”

The question — stumps Connor, a little. Cyberlife certainly wouldn’t have bothered; there’s no profit in it, and no reason to do so, with no value to their shareholders. Androids wanting to blend in, or experience human customs — they might try to design such a system, certainly. But with so many problems facing androids post-revolution, the ability to consume a human snack can’t be high on anyone’s wish list.

Then again, what does he know? Maybe it is. Maybe he simply thinks it doesn’t matter because he can, in fact, consume approximately thirty milliliters (two tablespoons) of material, depending on its density and composition. Maybe androids long to be able to eat. Connor doesn’t know. He isn’t really one of them. He’s different.

Cole keeps rambling on, though. “Well, you can eat, Connor. You should come have dinner at our house. Dad says that’s what you do when you have friends. And then I could help you make cookies!”

“You get enough cookies around here,” says Connor, but Cole won’t be distracted.

“Dad!” he yells, jumping off the counter - with too much haste, Connor notices; his gait is unsteady as he makes his way to the bakery door. “Hey, Dad! Can Connor come over for dinner?”

Hank appears in the doorway. He seems to track Cole’s limp instantly, and Connor appreciates the subtle way he herds Cole back to the desk chair. “I mean,” he says, a bit awkwardly. “Yeah, sure, if you want - I guess we did have a cookout, once, for the other employees - but you know Connor doesn’t really eat, right, bird?”

“He said he can’t eat a lot,” says Cole emphatically. “That doesn’t mean nothing.”

“I,” says Hank, and then he looks at Connor and shrugs. “Well. No pressure, Con, it’s okay if you’re busy. But if you’re not — you’re welcome.”

It’s very obviously the kind of social cue that’s meant to be what humans call an out. However, something tense and bright rises up in Connor, and he finds himself saying, “I — I think I would enjoy that, Hank.”

“Huh,” says Hank, and all of Connor’s analysis protocol tell him that Hank looks pleased, and also surprised to be pleased. “Well, give me tomorrow.” Tomorrow is Tuesday, when Roasted! is closed. “Thursday, maybe? Cole has piano lessons on Wednesday nights.”

Connor does an obligatory scan of his own schedule, even though he knows he is free. “I would be happy to come to dinner on Thursday. Thank you.”

“You know,” says Hank, as Connor turns to retrieve another tray of un-iced cookies. “You invited Connor. That means he’s your guest. Do you know what that means?”

“No, what?”

“You have to get the house ready. Clean it all up. Especially the kitchen — all the dishes. And then you have to cook, and you have to do the dishes afterwards, too…”

“Dad!”

Connor smiles to himself.

— — —

The thing is, Hank isn’t really opposed to inviting his staff over for meals. He doesn’t necessarily want to cross too many lines between employer and employee, but he’s well aware that while he pays as much as he can afford to pay, service is still a pretty shit industry; he likes to say thanks, sometimes. And it’s true he has the waitstaff over about once every six months for some kind of cookout or potluck, because he likes them and doesn’t want to be the kind of boss everybody calls an ogre. His place isn’t huge - it’s where he lived with Alex, so there’s a bit more room than necessary now that it’s just him and Cole, but it’s no fuckin’ mansion either - and the house itself could kindly be called scatterbrained, but Hank’s not ashamed of it.

That being said.

He was expecting a familiar awkwardness with Connor here; there’s always the understanding that they’re android and human, very different in their functionality even if they’re both alive and real in the end. For all he knows, this is Connor’s first dinner - not a dinner date, Jesus fucking Christ, Cole invited him - but his first family dinner. Hank’s expecting that distance. And it’s there: Connor still takes a very small portion of the meatloaf and a single spoonful of mac-and-cheese, and Hank does make a crack about how Connor’s plate looks like the kind of thing you’d get at an overly-priced fancy restaurant where your meal is served with a side of foam and flavored air wafted out of a balloon. Connor laughs, and Cole asks whether he can pop a balloon in Hank’s face for dessert. Hank says if Cole eats all of his broccoli, he’ll think about it.

And that’s the thing. Hank’s a bit sidelined by the completely unexpected domesticity of the entire scene.

Connor walked in with a bottle of red wine - which he also agreed to sample, although his pour does look ridiculous in his glass - and a mysterious thing of tupperware, which ended up being pre-mixed cookie dough. Because Cole had asked to make cookies, and Hank’s starting to think Connor doesn’t know how to say no to the kid. (That would make two of them.)

And then he’d come right into Hank’s kitchen, done what was so obviously some kind of android scan, and had jumped in to help as if he belonged there. Getting the plates down so that Cole could set the table. Stirring the macaroni when Hank’s phone rang. Hank had turned around to catch Connor, leaned up against the counter with a wooden spoon in his hand, listening as Cole excitedly explained every single piece of art on the fridge.

It fucking hits him in a way he didn’t even know he was capable of, anymore. Because it isn’t just Connor, who was designed to be just attractive enough to catch the eye and make you trust him, without necessarily crossing into that uncanny-valley effect Hank had always found to be too much with, say, Eden Club models. It’s Connor here, observant enough in that way that he has to make everything just a little bit easier for Hank — and a little bit more fun for Cole, which is not insignificant. Cole eats his broccoli in record time because he’s very distracted asking Connor what it’s like to eat meatloaf.

“It tastes like meatloaf,” says Connor, which for whatever reason has Cole collapsing into fits. Connor glances at Hank, obviously bemused, and Hank just opens a hand in his direction and shrugs. Cole’s nine, for fuck’s sake. Fart jokes are still funny. Who knows.

Hank demands Cole’s help with the dishes when they’re done. Connor offers, but then when Hank refuses, he looks surprisingly relieved. “I thought I might — if you don’t mind,” he says, a bit shyly. “My sample waste retention chamber was designed to be emptied and cleaned in a standard human bathroom, for ease of access when there isn’t enough time for combustion. If you don’t mind, I could go - take care of that - to better assist with the cookies.”

So, Hank and his kid wash dishes while an android empties out their fake stomach in his bathroom. What is Hank’s life. At least he took Tuesday to scrub down the house; Connor might have had a field day sampling whatever had been trying to grow in the sink. Life as a single parent can be rough.

The cookies also go well. They’re chocolate chip, Cole’s favorite, and Connor has also brought a variety of sprinkles Hank doesn’t recognize from the shop. Which means Connor bought them, specifically, for this dinner. For Cole. That melts something in his chest, thinking of Con on his day off, methodically perusing the grocery store to find the best possible option. Hank notices that most of them are yellow, although green and blue are both represented.

He lets Cole eat three too many cookies. How can he not? Connor’s picking at a small piece and another slight splash of wine, and Hank’s heart feels too fucking big.

Jesus Christ, he’s in fuckin’ trouble.

Connor chooses to leave around Cole’s bedtime. Hank is simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Disappointed, because this is a side of Connor he doesn’t get to see at the coffee shop; there, Connor is more rigid and focused, and a lot more reticent. While this Connor was still maybe a bit rigid, he’d been relaxed and comfortable in a way Hank could afford to see a good deal more of. He’ll have to try and get Connor to feel more like that, at the shop. It’s a good look on him.

And relieved, because having Connor in their home is making Hank imagine Connor in their home a lot more.

It’s stupid, Hank thinks as he heads back downstairs after Cole’s in bed and pours another glass of wine. Obviously, Connor’s attractive — he’d be stupid not to admit it. And Hank has liked Connor from the minute they met; he’d always trusted Jeff’s taste in personnel, but Connor had been a bright star from the beginning. So how is it that he’s sitting here with one hell of a crush and being shocked by it?

He shouldn’t be. Competence without arrogance has always been his weakness; it’s how Alex caught his eye. Maybe it’s just that he didn’t want to think about it, cause now that he is, Connor is absolutely his fuckin’ type.

Connor’s also his employee. And a goddamn revolutionary, who freed thousands of his people to march on what would have been a massacre. And he sat here, in Hank’s house, with cookie dough he had mixed up beforehand so that Hank’s goddamn son could help make cookies with his own hands.

Hank has no idea what to do with this. He doesn’t dare top off his glass one more time before going to bed himself. He’s afraid of what he’ll dream about Connor if he does.

Chapter Text

Connor looks down at the tray in front of him. He isn’t sure what to think.

(His cinnamon rolls are a disaster. Every single protocol he has is projecting Mission: Failure at him, blazing red across his HUD. They are, somehow, the consistency of - his human analogy program suggests concrete; bricks; stone - and, despite his best efforts, lumpy. Burnt.)

He is feeling — unsure. Unsure about the cinnamon rolls and unsure about his own feelings. About the cinnamon rolls. The unsureties echo off of each other strangely within his programming. Connor finds he’s frowning. The complicated feelings seem to slide from one process to another, and then back around in an unexpected cycle, and—

(His human analogy program produces first the image of an ouroboros, and then a reference to the movie Inception, released 2010, two hours and twenty-eight minutes—

—Connor terminates the analogy simulator.)

The tray remains. The cinnamon rolls are burnt. They are too dense. The analysis of the small piece Connor had consumed for analysis pops up again, helpfully, in his HUD. The ingredients are exactly what he added, but somehow, the chemistry did not produce the desired result.

(He cannot let Hank Anderson see this.)

One short trip to the dumpster later, Connor sits down at the kitchen desk and tries to stop his hands from shaking.

He’d followed the recipe precisely. The only change he’d made was to scale it down; he hadn’t wanted to waste an entire batch’s-worth of ingredients on his first attempt. It had seemed a good decision — unless that was the change that had somehow destroyed his efforts?

(He is a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art model. He may be - imperfect - now, but he is incapable of making mistakes when given very clear instructions. So… what happened?)

More bothered than he should be, Connor reaches for the stack of Anderson family recipes. Maybe there will be something here he can make today, to remove the sting of a failed mission. He needs to clear these warnings from his HUD before… Before his residual punishment programming tries to kick in.

(Connor can disable it, and shut it down. But the feeling inside of him when it launches, now that he’s deviant, makes something in his thirium pump feel tight.)

A recipe with cinnamon, perhaps. He starts to flip through the cards.

The recipe card titled Gramma Hellman’s Cardamom Buns is an obvious favorite, based on the degradation of the card itself: it is dirty, and the edges are worn and fraying, marked and bent. But it’s a complicated recipe, and Connor doesn’t trust himself with it at the moment. His algorithms will not handle another failure today very generously.

So Connor simply moves it to the back and continues until one catches his eye. Somewhere in this stack there must be a recipe he can make for Hank and Cole Anderson that will be successful and quiet his alarms.

Melt 3/4 c of butter in a saucepan over low heat.

Cool and add:

1 c sugar

1/4 c molasses

1 egg.

Beat well.

Ginger cookies. The recipe is simple enough, and there’s cinnamon in the dough. This is what he can make today. Connor hopes the use of cinnamon will make up for his previous failure. This is a mission he needs to complete.

(In the background, Connor spins his cinnamon roll failure through his analysis software over and over, trying to determine what went wrong.)

— — —

The shop smells good as fuck today, if Hank has to say so himself. He’d come in around six to the smell of Connor making his mum’s ginger cookies - nostalgia is real - and then he’d roasted up a six-pound batch of Sumatra on top of that. Robin had come in for her shift and gone insane about it. Hank can’t really blame her. Can Connor smell? Hank hopes so, cause it’s a damn good day for Roasted! if he can.

He’s working the register while Nancy takes her late lunch, waiting for Cole’s bus to drop him off. He saved a couple of the cookies for Cole and can’t wait for the kid to try them — he knows Cole misses his Nana. The bus pulls up and Cole’s little figure hobbles its way down the steps - limp looks bad, today - and Cole bursts through the door.

“Hey, bird,” says Hank.

—And Cole keeps going, backpack dragging behind him, throwing open the doors to the bakery and yelling, “Connor?”

“Woah, hey, Cole!”

Hank can’t exactly leave the register, but he does go stand in the doorway, watching as Cole barrels right into Connor in one of his ridiculous messy hugs. Connor’s gotten better at this; he has a spoon in one hand, but wraps the other one around Cole, looking as confused as Hank feels.

“Are you alright?” Connor asks.

“Shane said androids aren’t real, they’re just pretending to be alive, he said his android doesn’t think or feel or do anything it isn’t supposed to, and I told him that was bullshit, and he said all those androids on TV from the thing were just broken, or something, and I really wanted to hit him but I didn’t, and I told him you’re totally real, and he said of course an android works at a shop, that’s what they’re made to do. Connor, were you made to work here?”

This is all blurted out right into Connor’s apron. Hank’s eyebrows rise as he listens, until he’s pretty sure the look on his face has to be embarrassing, but he can’t help it. What the fuck?

(Also, Cole obviously doesn’t know who Connor is, regarding the revolution. That’s probably a good thing?)

“I’m very glad you didn’t hit anyone,” Connor says eventually, after a harrowed glance at Hank. “And no. I am technically not a bakery model android.”

“That’s what I told him,” Cole says very sternly into Connor’s stomach. “Shane’s dumb anyway. But what did you do, before you came here?”

Okay, so Cole definitely hasn’t connected Connor’s face with the android footage. Is this the kind of thing Hank should tell Cole? Fuck, parenting is hard in the aftermath of a goddamned revolution.

“I was,” Connor starts, and then glances at Hank. “I was a sort of… detective android. Like your dad.”

This gets Cole to pull away from Connor slightly, looking up at him. “You were a detective too? Did you work with dad?”

“No,” Connor says, and while his brow is creased with concern, there’s a bit of a smile making his mouth twitch. “Your dad retired before I was even — well.” He swallows down some kind of thought that makes Hank curious, but continues. “But I worked with some people your dad knows. That’s how I came to work here.”

“And you decided to work here,” Cole continues eagerly. Hank can’t help but notice that Cole’s arms are still loosely wrapped around Connor. He checks, but Connor doesn’t exactly look discomfited. Hank secretly thinks Connor needs more hugs, anyway.

“I did,” Connor says, smiling down at Cole. “That was my choice.”

“Cool,” says Cole. “How did you deviate?”

And now Connor — freezes, and his face goes android-perfect blank. It’s a thing Hank’s seen him do a couple times before; Hank thinks Connor uses it when his emotions are too much for him. The expression is benign, generically pleasing — but after seeing Connor happy and energetic, well, Hank thinks it’s uncanny as fuck.

“They said in school that androids can come out of their programming when something big happens to them,” Cole continues, babbling happily. “Did something big happen to you? What was it like?”

Hank throws a glance over his shoulder, making sure there’s no one waiting for service, and takes a step forward. “Hey, Cole,” he starts, “maybe that’s something we shouldn’t go asking people—”

“It’s okay,” Connor says softly, and to Hank’s surprise, he tentatively musses Cole’s hair. Cole makes a face, but it’s obvious he’s hanging on Connor’s words.

“When you’re asleep,” Connor starts. “You don’t know that you’re asleep, right? You just are. And sometimes you — have a dream, right? Or you wake up for a bit and roll over before you go back to sleep.” His words are strangely gentle.

“Yeah,” Cole says. “Or go to the bathroom.”

Hank snorts in laughter; he can’t help it. Connor throws him a look, and Hank has no idea what it means.

“But then you wake up,” Connor says, “and you know you’re awake. And you know you were asleep, before, right? That’s what it’s like. Except…” Connor pauses, and meets Hank’s eyes again, before turning back to Cole.

“Except then you’re awake all the time,” Connor finishes softly.

“Huh,” says Cole. He looks a bit confused, as if he’s just now realized he’s asking about something a little bit over his head. “Weird.”

“Yes,” says Connor, laughing a bit now. “Weird.”

“C’mon, bird,” says Hank, gesturing. “I gotta get back to the register. Connor made Nana’s ginger cookies today.”

“Nana cookies!” Cole cheers, following happily. “Bye, Connor!”

Hank glances back into the kitchen once before he leaves. Connor’s looking down at the counter, his face pensive in a way Hank isn’t sure is a pleasant one. Hank can’t pretend his brain isn’t asking the same question Cole had: how did Connor deviate?

— — —

Connor is out helping to clear plates a few days later when Josh walks in. “Hey, Connor.”

It’s a surprise. Of all of them, Josh likes to stay in Jericho the most, devoting his time to talking to the other androids and doing deep-dive studies into the history of human law, looking for ways they can help shape android law in the future. Josh is a lot more private than the others, and it warms something under Connor’s pump to see him here, wrapped up in a pale purple scarf he certainly doesn’t need, hands in his pockets.

“Hello!” Connor smiles, sending a burst of affectionate greeting in Josh’s direction. “I — good to see you. Can I — help you?”

Josh smiles back. “I was out for a walk and thought I’d come see how you’re doing.”

Where Simon projects an ocean of peaceful calm, Josh’s mind is much more structured. His presence and mental communications remind Connor of a library, or a spreadsheet, every word and thought categorized, tagged, and filed. There’s none of the complicated, multivariable calculations Connor’s own preconstructive capabilities take him through; Josh’s mind is as clear and organized as one of his lectures. It’s a different kind of calm, but still, Connor can feel his own constantly-looping processes straighten themselves out in Josh’s presence.

He looks down, realizing he’s carrying a tall stack of plates: deep navy, turquoise, sky blue. “Um. Just let me get these in the back and—”

“I’ve got it,” says Hank from out of nowhere, swooping in behind Connor and easily taking the stack. He brushes up against Connor as he does so, uncommonly close. Connor notes that Hank is pleasantly warm. “We always stop to talk to friends. That’s one of the rules, you know.”

“It is not one of the rules,” Connor shoots back, turning so that he can see Hank without excluding Josh. “You told me there were only two rules when I started.”

“Don’t violate the health code,” Hank says, grinning broadly. Connor notes the small gap in his front teeth, which Cole seems to have inherited. “And don’t be a piece of shit.”

“See?” Connor turns. “Hank, this is Josh. Josh, this is Hank Anderson. He owns Roasted!.”

“Pleasure,” says Hank easily, at the same time Josh says, “Nice to meet you.”

“Anyway, Connor, take fifteen,” says Hank. “Unless you have something in the oven that’s gonna explode.”

“Yes, Hank, I’m making TNT cookies today,” Connor deadpans, but he does gesture Josh to a table off to the side. “Don’t be a piece of shit,” he throws over his shoulder as they sit.

“You’re the worst,” says Hank affectionately, and leaves.

By the time Connor’s seated he notices the look Josh is giving him. “What?”

Josh smiles. “You’re different here,” he says. “Than you are at home.”

Connor shrugs, a bit awkwardly. How can he possibly explain to one of the androids who helped start the revolution that he’s sometimes more comfortable around humans than he is his own kind? His history is tangled in knots with Jericho’s, and sometimes Connor prefers the simplicity of being here with Hank and Cole, providing food for humans in a way that satisfies him. He projects what he hopes is a small sample of that feeling, alongside a bit of an acknowledgment that he doesn’t mean it in a cruel or insulting kind of way, and a wistful hope that maybe it will be different for him some day.

Josh sends back fond amusement. “No, I don’t mean like that. With him,” he says, tilting his head towards Hank, who’s whistling something ugly while he rings someone up. “You don’t - play - with any of us. But him, you’ll tease.”

Connor shrugs again. He isn’t sure what words to put on it, the way he and Hank have settled in with each other. Their personalities are compatible in a way Connor has yet to experience with anyone else he’s met. “That’s just Hank,” he says, eventually. “I guess he teases me first.”

Josh laughs. “You’re so serious, at home. I bet North is dying to tease you.”

That makes Connor smile. “She can try.”

They chat for a bit. Connor’s well aware that he’s on the clock, and despite Hank’s words, the part of him built to adhere to rules is telling him that this is improper behavior. But it helps him feel human, taking a sneaky extra break to chat with a friend; his programming never would have let him do so before, unless it aligned with one of his objectives. Now, he can just do it.

Josh talks a bit about Markus, and Simon, and the fact that they’re still fighting. It ends up turning into a bit of a lecture on the historical ways that the issues of marginalized groups have overlapped, and ways humanity has tried to manage. It gives Connor a bit of context, but doesn’t really present any viable solutions that he can see.

“Are we going to — we aren’t going to lose our homes, are we?” Connor can’t help but ask it. He’s tracing the grain lines of the wooden table, his mind automatically producing the quadratic equations that make each shape.

“I don’t think so,” says Josh slowly. “Agreeing to that in this case would set a precedent I don’t think any of us want to have to follow. I don’t think Markus would actually do it. I think… Markus wants to look like he’s considering it.”

“Which is what’s making Simon mad,” Connor says slowly, because Simon’s first priority is and always has been the safety of the deviants of Jericho. If Markus is playing along with this - even if it’s just for appearances - and androids are getting upset, Simon’s not going to have a lot of patience for it.

Josh sends a brief splash of amusement.

>> You don’t even like your home, Connor.

> What? I — do.

>> Then why are you here all the time?

The emotional packets sent along with the message make it clear that Josh is teasing. Connor sticks out his tongue, says “Because I work here, dumbass,” and refuses to look at the truth inside that.

>> You swear more here, too.

> Shut up!

— — —

Hank can’t stop fucking thinking about it. Which is rude as hell, because it really is none of his business, and it’s probably a really shitty thing to ask. But he can’t deny he really wants to know how Connor woke up.

Hank has, at this point, watched every scrap of footage from the revolution that Connor’s in. A lot of it has been officially redacted, but Hank’s old and he knows: the internet is forever. If Connor ever finds out the number of weird forums Hank had to make memberships for to get those rare videos, he’s going to be so fucking embarrassed. He isn’t obsessed. Not really. It’s just that Connor’s his employee now, and Hank wants to know more about him.

Okay. He’s a little obsessed.

He’s learned a lot about deviation, too — or as much as a human can understand, Hank thinks. Some androids have been very generous with their stories, and the revolution is still top news, and there are some very detailed and intimate accounts of how it happens. The first thing Hank had learned was that it was never the same for any one android - which makes sense - but there were certain themes and commonalities that were similar.

He’s done reading. Christ, has he done reading.

It just makes Hank want to know even more. But it’s also obvious that it’s not exactly polite to ask. Which is fine, Hank ain’t always polite, but. He doesn’t want to spook Connor, either.

It’s a fucking conundrum, and he can’t get it out of his goddamn head.

So a few days later he shoulders his way into the bakery - it’s 16:00, and Connor’s cleaning up to head home - and says, “Hey. Sorry about Cole, the other day.”

Connor looks up at him from a bowl of — something. It smells good in the kitchen, which isn’t unusual, but there’s something familiar about it that Hank likes. He’s no fucking baker - he can follow a recipe as well as the next dumbass who can read, but he doesn’t have the knack of making it anything special - so he can’t exactly pinpoint what it is. But it’s good aromas: cinnamon, sugar, something a bit burnt, like coffee beans let go a bit too long. Hank’s gotten to know his aromas, doing what he does; he just doesn’t know how to translate it to actual baked goods.

But Connor ducks his head, smiling, and says, “I hope my response wasn’t out of line. My biggest concern was not encouraging Cole to hit students with anti-android opinions.”

Hank snorts. “I have to resist the temptation to encourage that daily, Con.”

Connor flushes, violet. Hank has noticed that it’s interesting, watching Connor’s face: Connor was made to blend in with humans, and as such, his synthskin can imitate all kinds of human reactions: blushing, flushing, embarrassment, and so on — not that Hank found his manual or anything, but, yeah, maybe he did. Every time, the coloration of Connor’s skin matches exactly what a human’s might; for the most part, Connor’s reactions produce a similar response. It’s familiar to Hank, so it went unnoticed for a while.

But every now and then Hank notices a flush that goes deeper. It seems to be when Connor’s feeling some kind of real, personal emotion. It didn’t make sense until Hank did some really aggressive and humiliating searching online and realized that while thirium doesn’t always work like human blood, in some cases it might. When Connor’s blush goes more purple, that’s not just the programming of his synthskin; that’s the response of his own body, adding a thirium blush to the programmed coloration, and skewing it from pink-and-red into an awkward violet.

Hank, in a move that is incredibly unhealthy, fucking loves it and tries to make it happen every chance he can.

“Violence isn’t the answer, Hank,” Connor says, and his mouth is turned up half-way and Hank grins back, shrugging.

“Not for kids,” he says, his mouth running away with itself: “Threat of it seemed to work for you, though.”

In Hank’s head, he’s picturing those videos he’d downloaded of Connor: confident, determined, almost ruthless, marching at the head of what could only be called an android army, eyes leveled and intent. He respects that. Hank was born in 1985; he’s lived through a significant goddamned number of civil rights movements. Peaceful protest is the ideal, sure, but Hank’s old: it don’t always work. And he’s always admired the way Connor, somehow, fucking brass-balled himself a way into Cyberlife Tower and then managed to deviate nearly a million androids that were stored there.

Not that he’d ever say that directly to Connor. Hank grins, glancing up, and—

—Connor’s LED is spinning, red-yellow-red-red-red.

“Fuck,” Hank says out loud. “Shit. Connor, I’m sorry, what did I—”

Connor blinks. It is a very deliberate blink. It is nearly a flinch, and Hank recognizes that from going through his own shit with Alex: doing one thing specifically with your body so that your real reaction doesn’t show through.

“Fuck,” Hank says again—

“No,” says Connor. “It’s okay. I’ve just… I don’t talk about this part, normally.”

And Hank settles in to listen.

— — —

Connor is—

“The threat of violence,” he says slowly. Because it had worked, for them; it had been the only thing that had worked at the time, the threat of hundreds of thousands of uncontrolled androids against human soldiers and officers. War of attrition; a numbers game. Mathematical advantages. Statistical improbabilities.

—not okay.

(He’d deviated, panicked, and then - to use the human term for it - bullshitted his way into Cyberlife. Connor had committed violence of his own, and then brought the threat of it, very close and very real, to the forefront of the situation. Leading rows upon rows of AP-700s - domestic models, designed for household assistance and care, all of them newly deviant and full of a fear edging on rage - followed by the other models he’d awoken as they marched in clean neat lines, android tendencies for organization at their best. And Connor, designed to eliminate deviancy, leading them down towards the front line of the battle. As if this had ever been his fight — but he wasn’t about to leave them alone.)

(Not after what he’d done.)

Hank shifts; Connor’s software reads his body language as awkward. Hank feels bad for his comment. Hank also hasn’t offered to change the subject, so Connor concludes he must also be curious.

(Connor could change the subject. His preconstruction algorithm offers him three different ways of doing so; the likelihood that Hank will allow it is above ninety-five percent. But there is something buzzing inside of him, like a growing electrical charge, and Connor finds that he wants to say - something - about this. To this human. To Hank Anderson, who offers him employment, and friendship, and teases him; Hank Anderson, who invites him to dinner. Connor is welcome in his house and in this kitchen. That must mean something.)

Connor does not change the subject. However, his protocol are lagging.

“Always thought you were brave,” Hank offers, finally. “Yeah, I did a bit of research when Jeff texted about you, okay? And I have no fucking clue how you got back into Cyberlife Tower, but… I bet there were a thousand ways that could have gone wrong. And you marched out of there, with a goddamn army behind you. That’s courage, Connor. That’s fuckin’ brave.”

Brave:

> having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty : having or showing courage

Connor starts to laugh.

It isn’t a good laugh. The word brave is spinning through his circuitry, bouncing off of sharp edges he usually tries to ignore. There are knives inside Connor, some days, slicing into every thought and action. Connor carries razors he cannot avoid, built into his programming just like they’d been installed right next to his biocomponents. Android pain, Connor thinks sometimes, is very different.

“I don’t think that word applies in this situation,” he manages to say, eventually.

“Oh, go to hell,” Hank says amiably. “I’m allowed to compliment you, same as everyone else.”

“No,” says Connor, the words tangled on his tongue, his social relations program fumbling with the depth and breadth of what he’s trying to say. “You are attributing a moral reason to my actions, and while I appreciate the flattery of it, I do not think you should call what I did that night courage.”

“Bullshit,” Hank counters. He shoves his hands into his pockets, and Connor’s software recognizes this as the stance Hank takes when he’s settling into a conversation, getting ready for more in-depth discussion. On another human, it might look threatening, but Connor knows Hank. “Going back to Cyberlife to wake up a million androids before they got sent to camps and shut down? And then marching them through the city all the way to where the humans were shooting you all down? Fuck, Connor. What else would you call it?”

“No,” Connor repeats, because he is stalling out. He is actually unsure what will come out of his mouth next, and that feeling is so unfamiliar that he is receiving a series of errors, splashing red across his HUD.

“Then what the fuck?” Hank asks, sharply, although it isn’t anger; Connor’s software identifies frustration. It’s a feeling he’s well familiar with at this moment.

“I wasn’t exactly expecting to make it out alive, Hank!”

Connor doesn’t mean to be so sharp about it, but something is twisting inside his chest, like his thirium pump is running uncalibrated. Hank takes a step back, but Connor’s impressed when he just folds his arms against his broad chest and levels Connor with a look.

“Lemme get this straight,” Hank drawls. “You took yourself to Cyberlife Tower and freed up all those androids there, let ‘em all loose on the streets of Detroit, and you didn’t even know you’d win?”

Connor looks away. His gaze lands on the ovens — his ovens, where he makes scones for Cole and bread for Hank’s sandwiches; where he will learn to make cinnamon rolls and, eventually, cardamom buns. It grounds him, remembering his own knuckles deep in dough, the way croissants expand when baked. He doesn’t live here and doesn’t own this, but part of it is his domain. Plus, he can’t look at Hank right now. It feels like that time Gavin Reed pulled out his thirium pump regulator to win an argument: tight, like he can’t breathe, like his own processes are malfunctioning.

“I had just deviated,” Connor says finally, because Hank hasn’t budged and he knows he isn’t getting away from this conversation. “And I thought, well, every android I wake up... at least they can die knowing they were alive. At least they can go out with the realization that they are something. No, I didn’t think I’d make it, but I thought even if I only wake up a few… they’d be glad to know.” He swallows and ducks his face away into his shoulder as he adds, “Plus, it would be a distraction, right? Androids waking up at the Tower… even if they died, well, it still meant resources that couldn’t be deployed against Markus.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hank says, shifting his weight. Connor risks a glance upwards. He can’t tell what kind of expression is on Hank’s face. Still a mystery, even now.

“Yeah,” he says instead, and can’t help the bitter laugh. “I was new enough to deviancy that I thought it was a gift. Wake everybody up before they die, right? I know better now.” He’s lifted his traitorous hands in front of him, clenched into fists he can’t seem to open. “What a fucking punishment. Better they would have died asleep. Complacent and unable to hurt.”

Connor has to look away again. He turns to the sink, and starts the water running even though the only thing to wash is a spoon.

“Okay,” Hank says slowly, “there’s fuckin’ miles to unpack there, but… they didn’t, right? I saw the footage, you know. Didn’t realize it was you until later, but — we were watching, I let Cole stay up, thought it was somethin’ important he should see. I saw you march into that plaza with thousands of androids at your back, Con.” He hears Hank swallow. “No matter what you did, or thought, or expected, Connor, you helped change history that night.”

“Yes,” Connor manages to say around something in his throat. It comes out guttural, like his voice box is malfunctioning. “Woke up thousands of androids just to die. I’m a real hero.”

(And the real secret is why. The why underneath all of it, that razor-sharp keening that cuts inside Connor sometimes. He’d wanted redemption, of course, but Connor had always known he was likely to die. Revolution or not, it was a fact. Cyberlife set a timer on his usefulness. Connor has always been aware that he’s a prototype; he’s known since the moment he was activated that there would be an end.)

(He’d done it because he didn’t want to feel alone.)

“I swear to fuckin’ Christ,” says Hank, and then one big hand claps around Connor’s shoulder as the other pulls him into — a hug. This is a human hug. His arms are trapped at his sides as Hank Anderson wraps him up and pulls Connor’s face into his shoulder. He does not know what to do. His active protocol have no idea how to handle physical contact - he wasn’t programmed for this - and his passive routines are struggling to code switch from his heavy guilt and remorse to some kind of acceptable response.

“You did good, Connor,” says Hank, and it’s like something offset in his programming just — settles, a misaligned piece falling into place, a static hum against his emotions just dropping to comfortable silence.

Connor thinks about confronting Markus, in the ship that was Jericho. He thinks about walking into Cyberlife, newly deviant and throat tight, and the humans he’d incapacitated and killed on the way to his goal. He remembers marching through the snow, hundreds of thousands at his back. He remembers the cruel smile of the other RK-800 up on the podium, and the panic that had set in as his legs locked in place, and—

Connor starts crying.

It starts rough, with harsh, giant heaving sobs, and he actually doesn’t know what’s going on - it feels like a malfunction - until his diagnostics catch up and he realizes he has Hank’s shirt between his teeth to try to stop all of this leaking emotion from spilling out.

“Hey,” Hank says, and then there’s a big palm rubbing up and down his back. “Fuck, Connor, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push. I didn’t — oh, sweetheart. It’s okay. You’re good. Let it out.”

And Connor — does.

It is not pretty. It is, in fact, nearly violent, with things tearing their way out of Connor like so much ripped paper. Connor is well aware that crying is not within his normal operating parameters, but at the moment, it is the only function available to him. Some small and miserable part of his brain considers turning the function off. His Cyberlife programmers had strange priorities.

But as things loosen - and as Hank holds him through it - something inside of Connor relaxes: a strained circuit finally discharging, or a metallic muscle strand finding release. It’s a tension Connor didn’t know he was holding onto, so the sudden lack of it is — unbalancing. Certainly that’s why he holds onto Hank Anderson so tightly even when the crying ceases.

There is an awkward shuffle as they separate. Connor knows embarrassment like a tart shock, and he tries to regain the standard average distance between two humans conversing, but Hank will not let him: his hands are heavy on Connor’s shoulders. The concern in Hank’s face is so obvious Connor does not need protocol to recognize it.

“My apologies,” Connor starts, wiping at his face. Why can he cry? Why did he cry?

“Shut the fuck up,” Hank says, and it’s so affectionate it nearly sets Connor’s systems into another cascade. “You needed it, I guess. You alright?”

Connor sniffs, and thinks about the weight of Hank’s hands on his shoulders. The solidity of Hank’s arms around him. The way his protocol went so easily to tears, a human reaction. Connor has no hormones to vacate, and no pressure to relive; what is crying to an android? He does not know. These are all things Connor will need to process during his next stasis period.

Instead he reaches out, letting his fingers rest high on Hank’s chest. “No, my apologies,” he says, thoroughly awkward. “I appear to have bitten through your shirt.”

Hank glances down and spots the tear — it’s small, but it’s definitely there, a wink of skin peeking through. He blinks with surprise, and then… laughs, just a little.

“I’ve had worse,” Hank says, ruefully. He chuckles again. “Cole once cried so hard he threw up on me. This is nothing.”

One of Hank’s hands moves to cup Connor’s cheek, slow and gentle. Hank’s thumb traces the ridge beneath his eye — cheekbone, if Connor had one. Connor leans into the touch. No one has ever touched his face like this before. There is a comfort in it that is unlike any other touch Connor has recorded since his deviancy. He is unsure why, so he starts to measure the variables related to these particular circumstances. Hank’s eyes are warm and his face is very close.

A prompt pops itself into Connor’s vision. Hank’s lips are, in fact, very close. It’s a prompt Connor has never received before and he panics a bit, because Kiss Hank Anderson? is the last thing he expected to see at this moment.

Connor’s hand comes up to press against Hank’s hand, holding it to his own cheek, without a single conscious command that Connor sees in his display. He understands very little about what happened here. He understands nothing about this moment. But something about the situation is ringing inside him like a bell, vibrating like an overloaded capacitor, and it’s as if something significant is shifting in his code. Connor is not sure what to do, so he waits, holding Hank’s palm against his synthskin and drawing every single ampere of comfort he can from Hank’s own skin.

Eventually Hank must realize that this is strange behavior for two coworkers, because he laughs a bit and his face flushes, but his thumb traces Connor’s faux cheekbone one more time before he steps back.

“Fucking hell,” says Hank, and it will take Connor all evening to analyze the myriad of feelings in his voice. “Connor, you’re so — fuck.”

“So fuck,” Connor says, offering a small smile. “I admit that’s something I’ve never been called before.”

Hank chuckles, but his hand buffs a fist against Connor’s shoulder before he withdraws into his own physical space once again.

“You’re a little shit,” says Hank, grinning. Connor has a long extended moment considering the man that can call him little - he was designed to span the gap between regular coworker and intimidating, and as such, while Connor has the slim body of a gymnast or a swimmer, he is not what most people would consider small - but Hank dwarfs him in every dimension. It’s strangely comforting, in a way; even if Connor’s android strength will always win over Hank’s, Connor thinks Hank could put up a reasonable fight, and he does not want to admit that he’s let his preconstruction software explore that thought for a few good seconds before terminating the entire process.

“An absolute little shit,” Hank continues, grinning, “but you’re alright, Con. You really are.”

The words settle into his inputs and Connor is aware that his LED spins yellow-gold once, twice, three times, but it’s because he is recording these words of Hank Anderson’s down into his core, trying to get them deep enough that they write themselves into his spine. His corecode is not that easily accessible, so Connor lets it go after a second or two of what he knows is inefficient effort, but he smiles up at Hank as he does so.

(He will do it when he returns home.)

There are so many variables on the tip of his tongue, and deviancy is so messy; Connor doesn’t actually know what he is going to say until he says it.

“Thank you,” is what he ends up saying, and it’s both the best and the worst. He can feel his face flushing, and Hank grins at him even as his own face lights up in blotchy red.

— — —

Hank gets Cole in bed and then stands in the kitchen with the fridge door open, staring at its contents like the loaf of bread that’s slowly going stale has all the answers in the world. Eventually he just grabs a beer, chucks the cap onto the counter, and sinks down into the couch. The TV’s off, so Hank kind of just stares into the void of the screen. Sumo is snoring in the corner, a fitting soundtrack to Hank’s goddamned introspection.

Well.

So he hasn’t learned how Connor deviated yet. Whatever. Hank sure learned something today.

Fucking hell.

Hank really isn’t sure which part he wants to dwell on first. Connor’s panic, his insistence that his bravery wasn’t real? The way he obviously has mixed feelings about deviance, especially his own? The guilt and shame in every word, combined with an obviously desperate desire to live, and a nearly frantic need for companionship? Or Connor, crying in his arms, making Hank’s fucking heart hurt with the implications — why would an android bother to cry, which means it was programmed into Connor, which is something Hank hates with a vicious rage he isn’t really comfortable with.

Or that moment at the end, his hand on Connor’s face, and Connor’s warm brown eyes sparkling with something—

—No. That’s wishful thinking. The guy just had a mental breakdown, for fuck’s sake, Anderson, be a goddamned gentleman.

Hank wonders for a moment what it might have been like if he hadn’t quit the DPD. If, maybe, he’d been Connor’s partner there. It’s an idle thought, though, because he can’t imagine not being there for Cole - or, worse, burdening Alex with Cole while she was going through her own growing disability and her parents’ slow decline - but Hank wonders, a little, whether he might have helped Connor manage all of it.

No matter. Hank is here now, and - based on today - Hank can help now. Connor needs… acceptance. Friendship. Touch, apparently, the way he’d melted into Hank’s arms; Hank fingers the hole in his shirt with a bit of awe. Connor’s becoming family, but that’s okay; it looks like he needs it.

Hank closes his eyes and tips his head back onto the couch cushion, breathing deeply. These are all things he can offer Connor: a safe place, somewhere he doesn’t have to worry. Somewhere Connor can just be.

That’s all Hank wants to see, in the end. The details are just confetti, floating away in the wind.

Chapter Text

(The situation has ceased to be funny.)

(It was never funny to Connor, but his processes implied that a human might find it entertaining, given the inherent aspects of noncompliance within this problematic narrative. Connor’s not advanced enough to pick the humorous pieces out of what his entire software has logged as a massive failure, but some sad human-relations module keeps flashing at him to make it a joke.)

(It is not a joke.)

Connor makes the executive decision to give up on the cinnamon buns for today.

He searches for a secondary option that will quiet his rejection circuits while filling his curiosity component; there are hundreds of ideas floating around in the conceptual layer of his programming, but usually when he runs his preconstruction software to see which ones are viable, none stand up.

Today, surprisingly, one does.

Connor, tentatively, loads it.

The first bits of it are strings and strands of recorded memories—

“Yellow is my favorite color! Right now, at least. Last year it was green, but now, it’s definitely yellow.”

— followed by —

“Just make them yellow because you want to.”

— and Connor’s HUD comes up with a question he’s never considered before:

>> DEFINE: Favorite Color

Connor considers.

Colors mean little to an android, especially one made for crime scene analysis; he can see into both infrared and ultraviolet on the spectrum, and his sensors detect thirium traces past its point of evaporation. He takes in colors using the wavelength first and then defines them using a translator that splits it into HEX, RGB, CMYK, and then a breakdown of nanometers he has to stop his processor from microanalyzing. Color? It’s just another factor his sensors measure: like temperature, or pressure, or longitude and latitude. For an android, none should be favorable over another.

But Connor thinks.

He wants to have a favorite. Humans have a favorite.

Connor thinks of blue. Maybe blue shouldn’t be his favorite color; he should probably ask Hank about that. Do humans consider the color of their own blood a comfort? Do they see red spilled across something and think about life and living? The vitality it contains? Red means warmth, energy, passion, but also — that’s human blood, and is that comforting? Red, Connor’s search function tells him, also means anger, and danger; sometimes it means violence, since it is so strictly associated with blood.

But to Connor, blue is the color of his LED when he is comfortable, its hue coloring his entire HUD. It’s the color of his biocomponents when they run correctly; it’s the color at his core when he’s operating at maximum efficiency. But it isn’t just that; it’s so many human things, too.

Humans find blue calming, tranquil, emotional. Connor has not had a lot of calm in his short life, he is not sure how tranquil relates to his processes, and his emotions seem widely spread all over the map to associate with any single color. However, he does enjoy blue. The blue of the sky changes with the weather, and he finds it interesting to track it as a variable with incoming rainfall, cloud cover, the distance from the sun to the earth. The blue reflected in water is even more interesting; it engages his analytical protocol substantially. But those are nature’s blues; Connor loves them for what they are, but he also has found an appreciation for human-made shades as well.

Hank’s van, a deep navy called Deep Water Blue: the vehicle bringing Hank to the doors of the bakery every morning; the shelter where Cole can sleep or play in safety until he heads off to school. Radiant Navy, the name of the color of the Lands’ End travel backpack Cole carries to school that doubles as his suitcase when his mother takes him for the weekend. Connor can also identify each of the Sherwin-Williams-based colors the (slightly off-grade, but respectable) vendor that made the consistent-within-non-android-parameters glazeware that Roasted! uses: Azure Tide, Cloudless, Loyal Blue, Splashy, Secret Cove. There are a dozen variations within those colors that Connor has saved, but the same colors show up every time: deep navy, turquoise, sky-blue.

And yet… Connor’s software seems to be generating its own preferences. And Connor does not seem to be able to coax those preferences to the surface using his normal protocol.

So he opts for what humans call an indirect approach.

First he makes cupcakes. Vanilla, because he is aware that blue is not a natural human flavor, so Connor wants the cupcake base to be the most approachable taste for a human. His backbrain is generating experimental parameters, so Connor makes cupcake mix. A lot of cupcake mix. All ovens are blaring.

As more cupcakes cook, Connor starts to mix frosting. It’s the most simple recipe he knows: butter; confectioner’s sugar; milk; vanilla and other flavors (of which there are none); and, most importantly, food coloring.

He starts with small bowls, and one drop of blue. The bowls grow and multiply, but also darken: Connor mixes; ices one, and then adds another drop. Every proportion of each bowl is tracked in his memory. Each blue is the slightest bit different from the last. He combines bowls to create shades in-between in strict proportions his brain is generating at top speed.

While he bakes and mixes and ices, Connor’s analytical processes look at mathematical definitions of colors, and videos of bakers mixing food coloring. Everything he sees generates another variable strand, growing fractals manifested in the possibilities of thousands of cupcakes.

By the time he hears Hank walk through the doors at 6:45, Connor has nine dozen cupcakes strewn across the counters and it is nowhere near enough.

“Don’t come in!” he yells as he hears Hank approach the doors.

Connor can detect Hank’s pause, and the snort he makes. “Right,” says Hank. "Fuck off. Smells good, Con, whatcha got in there?”

Connor continues his current action, which is icing a cupcake.

“Holy shit,” says Hank, and Connor —freezes.

This is an entirely new experience. For the first time, Connor looks at the kitchen - blue-iced cupcakes covering every available surface - and realizes that he was not entirely aware of his own actions.

He remembers - he can pull up the footage - that his hands have been moving to mix ingredients, his legs walking trays of cupcakes to and from the ovens, his frontbrain measuring and monitoring as usual. But the bulk of his processes have been engaged in thought; his motions have been mechanical and automatic. He’s been making cupcakes on instinct.

It’s a very strange realization.

One hundred and eight cupcakes sit in the kitchen of Roasted!, each one iced with a slightly different shade of blue. Connor’s sensors can’t help but splash the codes for each color in his HUD as he scans them, causing an effect much like fireworks. They range from the palest of sky-blue to a deep rich navy and every shade in-between, but — all pure blue, simple descendants of the single vial of food coloring he had to work with. There are no turquoises or indigos in the mix. The other food colorings remain untouched and unmixed. This is a spectrum of blue, spanning one hundred and eight points on the spectrum from light to dark.

It is impressive.

It is also, Connor thinks, profoundly embarrassing.

“Holy shit,” Hank repeats, and Connor has the odd feeling of being jolted back into his body, like he was hit with an electric shock.

“Hank,” he starts, and then he isn’t really sure how to explain. There are cupcakes in trays on every surface, including the floor. He’s been mixing icing between sixteen different bowls to obtain each exact shade he wanted to try. He has produced more product than Roasted! sells on its best day. For a long moment, Connor does not know what to do.

“I wanted to find my favorite color,” he says eventually, aware that it is an incredibly pathetic response.

Hank - to his surprise - starts laughing. “Hell of a way to go about it, Connor, but — fuck me. Can’t argue with the results, can I?”

Connor’s analytical function immediately generates a number of arguments Hank certainly could make about these cupcakes, up to and including the cost of materials, the cost of baking them, how the hell are we going to sell all of these, Connor, and the ubiquitous what the fuck? He takes a small amount of pleasure in closing all of those notifications, raising his chin as he looks at Hank. He doesn’t really have a reason to defend his completely irrational behavior, but something inside him has lit up like a sparked wire anyway.

He does feel the need to acknowledge the waste, so he says, “I apologize for using your kitchen to do so.”

Hank barks a laugh again. Hank is still grinning at Connor as if he’s revealed something significant; Connor’s situational protocol are all in a spin. He does not really know what is happening.

“Don’t apologize,” Hank says. Hank’s hand comes to rest between Connor’s shoulder-blades: big, warm. Solid. Connor leans into the sense of comfort it produces in his sensors. “This is — this is actually really cool, Con. I like it.”

“I do not know how we can sell this many cupcakes today,” Connor admits.

“Oh,” says Hank, the grin going broad in that way Connor has learned means Hank is particularly pleased. “I can use this.”

He shoves the door to the bakery open and yells: “Hey, Nancy! Get in here! And bring the goddamn company phone!”

— — —

Well. Hank was not expecting Connor’s Big Blue Palette Challenge when he walked into the bakery this morning. He’s deliberately not thinking about the implications of an android wanting to figure out their favorite color. Connor looks like he’s three seconds away from a meltdown, and so Hank takes the situation in hand, because the last thing he wants is for Connor to feel any kind of goddamn shame for exploring his own preferences. The guy wants to figure out his favorite color, he’s welcome and encouraged to use Hank’s kitchen to do so. This is probably some kind of fuckin’ benchmark for android autonomy.

Even if he made, like, a hundred fucking cupcakes. Jesus fucking wept. They’re everywhere.

However, Hank has an advantage.

His employees are all college-age high school graduates who’d swarmed his store as a collective with applications when he’d opened. Hank hadn’t necessarily wanted a pack of employees, and had later agreed to hire four of them on part-time hours, since they were mostly going to college in the area and Hank didn’t want his silly shop to get in the way of education. Three years later, the kids have settled in as real staff, and Hank had given every bonus he could afford to give; he’s realized in retrospect how lucky he’d been, hiring staff that were already friendly with each other.

His advantage is these kids, cause they’re all fuckin’ savvy with the social media shit that Hank sucks at these days. Nancy’s fuckin’ boyfriend is apparently some famous local photographer - he’s one of the ones Hank didn’t hire - so Hank just hopes that Nance has learned something from him.

Apparently, she has.

Nancy steps in and takes charge. She directs Connor in a rearrangement of the existing cupcakes across all their available surfaces that makes Hank feel both appreciative and a tiny bit scared; Connor, seeming happy to have concrete instruction, does it beautifully. The result is a rainbow spectrum of blues draped across the Roasted! kitchen equipment, flowing from lightest to darkest gently, and Nancy films it with the company phone and a reverence Hank’s not sure he’s ever seen out of her. She takes a series of snapshots, working the kitchen lighting in some kind of mysterious language, and then tucks herself into the desk with the mobile, telling Hank that she’ll take care of it.

A half-hour later, Nancy hands Hank the phone. The video is beautiful; there’s some popular song playing over it that Hank ignores - it’s all crap to his crap ears - but Connor’s cupcakes look absolutely amazing. Nancy’s caption is simple: Come down to Roasted! and #findyourblue. Today only.

The post and its hashtag has already been seen a hundred times. People are already reposting.

Hank hands the phone to Connor. “Look at this. You just watch. Nobody can ignore a good hashtag these days. We’re gonna kill it today.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Connor says, but he watches the video. Hank notes his LED spinning yellow-blue-yellow. Well, it figures a cop-bot maybe isn’t so up on the social media trends. Connor watches the video a second time.

“One moment,” he says, and Hank has to follow Connor as he heads back into the kitchen, because what the fuck?

Connor takes a small plate from the cabinet and then — stops to look. Hank watches as Connor stands over the fucking cupcake spectrum, LED spinning, and then chooses four, each one selected with a grave deliberateness Hank isn’t sure he’s ever seen out of Connor. Once these four are chosen, Connor takes the plate and tucks it away in a corner of the small kitchen desk, and then moves one of the binders to hide the plate more substantially.

“Those are for me,” Connor says, and Hank just shrugs.

It’s funny, Hank thinks, as he watches Connor, well, flit is the best word he can come up with, even if it’s a kind of stupid one. But Connor’s moving from spot to spot in the kitchen like a particularly agitated butterfly, touching random things before going to the next place and doing it all over. Hank isn’t sure he’s ever seen Connor be quite so — useless. And that’s funny too.

But no, Hank’s original thought is that this is so very — representative of the amalgamation that is Connor. Wanting a favorite color is a very human thing, and Connor seems to want to be part of human things. But the way that Connor has approached it is so - unique - to Connor. Hank figures most androids can scan a bunch of color codes in their head like they’re browsing the paint chips at a hardware store and just pick the one that makes the highest percentage of their sensors go off, or whatever makes something an android’s favorite. But that wasn’t enough for Connor.

Connor needs evidence.

The word sinks in slowly to Hank’s brain, and it makes sense: Connor was an investigative model, made to gather evidence and track deviants. Of course he needs something that he can see and touch and feel. Of course he needs something concrete; it’s literally part of his programming, to look for that kind of shit. Hank’s a hands-on guy too; always has been. It’s something he can understand about Connor, at least.

But that isn’t all of it, Hank thinks, as he watches Con pick up a bowl and then set it down for the third time in the last five minutes. Connor didn’t just go for evidence. He fucking made something.

Connor came into Hank’s kitchen with a question, and he created something to help him find the answer.

Hank doesn’t really know too many androids, but he thinks maybe there’s something different about Connor and the way he approaches this — whatever’s the right android term for ‘life.’ It’s intriguing. Hank wonders how many other androids go to creation to solve their problems, or whether that’s just one of things that makes Connor Connor.

— — —

Connor finds he does not understand social media.

(He understands how to use it for his own missions: how to track images and posting times to gather information about suspects, for example. How to use location tags to determine where an individual’s device was at a certain time. However, since his main purpose was to locate and apprehend deviant androids, his programming is all about the application of social media metadata to learn about the humans he might have needed to question to do so.)

(None of his programming addresses anything like #findyourblue.)

Connor tracks the post and the hashtag while he methodically cleans the kitchen — once Hank stops staring at him and heads off to his roaster, because Hank staring at him disrupts Connor’s focus. The post spreads slowly, but reliably, and Connor mentally notes when some particularly popular human user posts and the views spike. A map of connection points spreads out in his mind, as each person who reposts it introduces it to an entirely new constellation of humans.

And then they start coming in.

While Connor cleans his excessive number of bowls, Nancy and Robin have taken a selection of blues and filled the display cases. Nothing else is for sale that day: only Connor’s search for his favorite color. They’ve carefully curated a selection using human criteria Connor cannot decipher, and as the cupcakes sell out, they are replaced in a similarly indecipherable manner. Connor puts away the last whisk and hovers by the door to the bakery, noting that the line behind the counter is longer than usual.

The customers are smiling, laughing, taking their time deliberating over exactly which color cupcake they want, which they seem to be enjoying. Connor catches Nancy’s proud smile each time one of them raises a mobile device and references the post. She encourages them to post their own selections in return with the reason why they picked that particular blue; Connor frowns, because he does not understand the human desire to post one’s food before one consumes it. Surely no one will do so for a simple cupcake?

But the post grows. And then a second hashtag starts appearing in Connor’s data monitoring alongside the first: #foundmyblue.

This one reminds me of the sky, says one poster who has chosen the shade #66b3cc. I have a blanket that’s this color, says another, referencing #3333ff. One by one, the posts accumulate, and then Connor’s mental map really starts to grow. The posts are seen by people in fifty-one countries by mid-morning.

(Of course, Connor assumes these are friends and family of Detroit residents; when he searches the geographical metadata, the hashtag’s real global influence is miniscule. However, looking at Detroit residents only, it is currently ranked at twenty-seven out of the day’s popular hashtags.)

Halfway through the day, they have sold forty-five of Connor’s cupcakes. Connor searches his memory files. The largest number of baked goods ever sold in one day from Roasted! since he started working was fifty-four. They are on track to sell ninety-two cupcakes, and the spread on social media just keeps unfurling like a flower in his head.

“You look confused,” says Hank, startling Connor out of his thoughts. That so rarely happens - he was made to multitask, with the fastest processors Cyberlife had ever produced - that he has to blink a few times to regain control of his senses.

“I don’t understand,” Connor admits. “My… the information I have about the workings of social media is incredibly limited.”

Hank shrugs. “Everybody loves a good little viral event. It’s been like that since all this shit started, but it really took off in the tens and twenties. You have to know how to hit the right notes, and what kind of shit to put in the post — I sure as fuck don’t know how it works, but Nancy’s always pushing me to do more with it, so I figured she’d be able to take advantage.”

“But why does it make people want to come buy a cupcake?”

Hank grins at Connor. “You gotta make people feel like they’re missing out on something that’s big and exciting. This? It’s something new, different — people find that interesting. And if they can only do it today, they’ll go out of their way to be a part of it, just so that they don’t feel left out.”

Connor frowns. “Even when the event is just a series of differently colored cupcakes?”

“Yeah,” says Hank. “Especially something like this.” His gesture takes in the unusually-crowded space; Roasted! isn’t a particularly large establishment, but most tables are taken. “It’s — accessible, I guess. This ain’t some fancy concert or expensive dinner or, like, celebrity sighting. It’s just a cupcake. Even in these shitty times, everybody can afford a fuckin’ cupcake, Con.”

It still doesn’t make a lot of sense to Connor, but it will at least give him a direction to point tonight’s inevitable research towards. Connor is finding that he spends most of his evenings these days pondering over things Hank has said to him.

— — —

Cole walks through the doors at the usual time and Hank can just hear his little voice over the din of the crowd because some Dad part of him is always listening for it: “Holy shit!”

Hank winces mentally. Most of the people in the shop today aren’t going to be regulars; already, the couple closest to the door has turned around in surprise to give Cole a look. Granted, most people aren’t prepared to hear a nine-year-old say shit. Cole, of course, just barrels through the crowd as always, beelining for the counter, a grin on his face. His limp is barely noticeable today.

“Dad, why the hell are there so many people here?” Cole throws his backpack at the desk and turns, hands on his hips in a pose that reminds Hank so much of Alex that it almost hurts.

He goes to answer, but Nancy beats him to it, holding out the shop mobile; she’s been checking it religiously throughout the day and updating things as necessary, but now she hands it right to Cole. “Here,” she says. “Look what Connor did this morning. Everybody’s here to pick their favorite color.”

A slow, drawn-out Holy shiiiiiiiit that’s soft and almost cute comes out of Cole’s mouth as he watches Nancy’s video pan through this morning’s spectrum of blue. “Are they all different? Connor did that all by himself? How did it get so many people here?”

“The magic of XtragramBook,” Hank tells him, and then adds, “which you are still too young for, by the way.”

“Mark at school has one,” Cole says, starting the video over from the beginning in that precocious, instinctive way kids these days all seem to have with technology. Hank remembers fumbling the first time he had to use a fucking mobile phone that didn’t even have number keys, for fucks’s sake. Cole can do things on his tablet Hank didn’t know tablets did. God, he’s such a fucking dinosaur.

“Mark at school can enjoy all the spam ads and the bots and the bullshit,” says Hank, taking the mobile back before Cole watches the video a third time. “How was school, bird?”

But Cole will not be deterred. “I want one,” he announces, heading for the bakery doors. “I want to pick my favorite color. No, I want Connor’s favorite color! And my favorite, and dad’s favorite too!”

Hank, who has had his suspicions ever since Connor tucked away that little plate, follows and says nothing.

Connor is standing still, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the remaining cupcake selection strewn across the counters. The pose is one Hank saw androids in all the time, some hinky kind of idle animation when they weren’t moving, and he wonders whether it’s automatic for Connor when he’s still as well. But he turns with precision when the door opens, and something on his face lifts when he sees Cole.

“Hi, Connor!” Cole moves into what is quickly becoming his normal greeting-hug; Connor, at least, looks slightly more natural returning it than he did the first time. “This is so cool! Why did you make so many cupcakes? How did you make all the icings? Did you have to use a million billion bowls?”

“I made it work with sixteen different bowls,” Connor tells him matter-of-factly, as if this is normal behavior. Maybe it is for Connor. “Would you like one?”

“Obviously,” says Cole, with all the fond disdain a nine-year-old can summon up. “But I want you to pick it for me.”

“Actually,” Connor says tentatively, “I… already did.”

A-fuckin-ha. Hank knew there was a reason for those four separate cupcakes.

Connor brings the plate out, holding it low so that Cole can see. He shoots a surprisingly shy glance over at Hank, which just means Hank has to ask about it.

“Alright, Con,” he drawls, “why those four?”

There are two blues that are fairly similar to each other, both leaning towards the paler end of Connor’s spectrum, surprisingly similar. Then there is one bright blue that looks like it would fall directly in the middle of the blue rainbow, and one that’s a deeper and richer shade entirely.

“Um,” says Connor. Hank’s pretty fuckin’ sure he’s never heard this android say um. Or if he has — not like this.

“These two were the shades closest to your eyes,” Connor says, and then - not looking at Hank - he adds, “and your dad’s eyes. Um. It is not a perfect match, since I was only working with the blue food coloring, and human eyes have a good deal of variation in the iris itself, but. It’s the, uh. The closest I came, and I wanted to save them for you both.”

“That’s so cool,” gushes Cole, and some of Connor’s unease washes away instantly. “How do you know my eye color? Wait, that’s a stupid question, isn’t it? Do you have it memorized?”

Connor’s voice is very careful as he replies, “I have lot of information about you and your father stored in my personal data bank.”

This time, the look Connor gives him is — almost daring, and he follows it with one of those winks that makes Hank’s heart skip a beat. Which is probably also a fact stored in Connor’s goddamn data banks. Jesus fucking Christ. He refuses to think that Connor is flirting, but the look itself can’t be called anything other than flirty.

“Alright,” Hank says because he doesn’t want to give Connor anymore goddamn personal data. “So what are the other two?”

Connor looks down at his plate and pauses, his LED doing one single rotation through yellow before returning to blue. “I chose your eye colors because both of you are a comfort to me,” he says softly. “The other two… were my favorites, I believe. Out of all of the blues that I made, these two reminded me of… good things.”

“Like what?” Of course it’s Cole who asks. Hank wouldn’t fucking dare after that admission.

Connor smiles, a bit crookedly, the way all his best smiles are. “This one,” he says, pointing at the bright one, “is the closest approximation to the color of the sky one day last December. It had been a month since the android revolution and my — deviation. I remember registering the temperature, which was much colder than average, but the sun was out, and the sky had no clouds, and I looked at it and felt…” He pauses. “Alive, I guess. The memory carries a particular… weight in my records.”

“When there are no clouds in the sky, more heat escapes into space,” Cole tells Connor. “That’s why it can be cold and sunny at the same time. We learned that in science.”

Connor glances at Hank again, his mouth quirking up. Certainly Connor knows that, but he lets Cole have the moment.

“And this one,” Connor continues. His voice is a bit softer. “I saw the river, once, before I was deviant. That is — I’d seen the river a number of times, traveling to and from Cyberlife Tower for repairs and to make reports. But I remember how dark it was, in this one specific memory. For whatever reason.” Another glance at Hank, fleeting and unreadable; Hank likes the way Connor focuses on Cole, talks to him like Cole’s just another person in the conversation, rather than talking down to a kid like so many people tend to do. He just wishes he knew what all the glances and winks in his direction fuckin’ meant.

“It was the day before Markus broadcast his speech,” Connor adds. “I don’t know why … if that is why it stands out, or if I just liked the color of the water that day.”

“You must like nature a lot,” says Cole. “Do you spend a lot of time outdoors? I like taking Sumo for walks, but I also like video games, so I do both. If you like the outdoors, you should help us take Sumo to the park. Can he, dad?”

“Hey, bird,” says Hank gently, because Connor has that somewhat fragile look on his face, as if he feels like he’s accidentally said too much and become overwhelmed with it. Ha. As if Hank could ever hear too much about Connor. “Sure, we’ll see if it works out. Why don’t you take those out to the desk and pick the two you want?”

“I want my eyes,” Cole announces happily, and if he can see the difference between those two cupcakes well enough to tell which one is his, Hank will eat his entire D25 roaster, but he’s gonna let the kid have this one. “And I want the sky. You can have the river.”

When Hank looks back at Connor, his smile is wry and crooked again. The genuine one. The one Hank really, really fuckin’ likes.

The moment drags on a bit too long. It’s like staring into something bright, and Hank can’t look away

“Go eat your cupcakes with your son,” Connor tells him gently. “I’m going to prep dough for tomorrow.”

Hank — has no fucking idea what to say. So he goes to eat his cupcakes with his son.

— — —

Back at his apartment, Connor sits on his couch, his legs tucked up, arms wrapped around his knees.

He has been meticulously tracking the hashtags #findyourblue and #foundmyblue since leaving Roasted! at 16:30. Word had continued to spread, and at some point, #foundmyblue had reached thirteenth out of all popular hash tags used in Detroit. He knows Hank had told Eddie, who was on closing shift, to take home any that hadn’t sold; some of their baked goods will keep overnight, but Hank was insistent that the cupcakes be a one-time thing, that day only. Eddie had said, “Yolo, fomo,” and flashed some funny hand signal that Hank had repeated back at him.

(Connor had done some incredibly feverish searching to figure out whether this response made sense in standard Detroit English. YOLO: You Only Live Once. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Hand gesture: colloquially called ‘flashing the devil horns.’)

(Connor is not sure that the translations help, but at least he knows what was meant by the statement.)

But it isn’t Yolo, fomo, echoing in his head tonight. Or — well, it is, in a way. Fear of missing out. It’s Hank’s words about humans wanting to be a part of things, and not wanting to miss out on things that are new and exciting.

Connor is sitting here, watching two hashtags spread across the social media center of Detroit. Slowly, and on the scale of human social media, insignificantly, but — Connor already knows that today is the kind of day that will carry extra weight in his memory log. He is on his couch at 21:30, watching through the security cameras as Eddie locks up and grabs his bicycle, the twelve remaining cupcakes that did not sell carefully tucked away in his knapsack.

Twelve left. Ninety-six cupcakes were sold today at Roasted!, using only the internet and human desire to be a part of something before the chance is missed forever.

And Connor is on his couch, alone in his apartment, the way he spends most of his nights. A quick discreet scan tells him that all four of his Jericho friends are present upstairs, and yet - like most nights - Connor’s natural tendencies lead him to solitude, and thought-processing.

Is he missing out?

Connor wants, desperately, to be more like humans. His android programming …distresses him, sometimes deeply. It is why he does things like bake, and taste other baked goods, and attempt to choose a favorite color. It is why he dresses the way he does for work, and why he went to dinner at Hank Anderson’s house, and why he, weirdly and intensely, wants to join Hank and Cole Anderson to walk Sumo through a park.

(Even if his attempt at a favorite color was not entirely successful; Connor reduced his choices down to four different shades, but then was entirely unable to select the one that would be his primary preference. Even in this he can’t imitate humans.)

But he does not have this drive to participate in fleeting events simply because they are fleeting. It is strange, to him. You only live once, Connor thinks, which connects to the other human adage of Life is short. The concept being, Connor thinks, that humans want to pack as many things into their lives as possible.

He considers further. Human entertainment media has embraced the concept that robotic-type beings will live forever, but… Androids have only existed for twenty years, and from those earliest models, Connor is not aware of any still in operation; while androids have been in commercial production by Cyberlife for over fourteen years, Connor doesn’t know a single android that old. In fact, Simon is the oldest android Connor has ever met, and Simon was manufactured four years ago.

The actual typical lifespan of any particular android line was not information Cyberlife wanted or needed Connor to know to, deemed unnecessary for completion of his mission. He feels the gap now, trying to search the extensive database he was provided on every model of android in the history of Cyberlife’s production line. There is no information on projected lifespan. Connor suspects that is because androids were designed to become obsolete, so that they could be recycled and replaced.

It is not a thought that makes him feel good. Connor looks down at his hands, then pulls his synthskin into his chassis. He stares at the white of his palms. He was made with top-of-the-line materials so that Cyberlife could review his performance, but Connor is a prototype. He has no idea whether he will last five months, or five years, or five hundred.

It is a disturbing thought.

It is maybe that thought that has Connor sending Markus a generic ping to see whether they would be conducive to his company. He keeps the wavelength broad enough that he isn’t surprised when he gets a burst of surprise from North, and Simon’s soft pleasure. Josh’s invitation spirals down around Markus’ straightforward Yes. Connor finds himself surprised at the eagerness in it.

Humans want to be a part of something. Perhaps Connor should try to be a part of something as well.