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WHO: Hank Anderson | Connor
WHAT: Hank discovers he has a new roommate
WHERE: The Noobie Chicken Coop
WHEN: Connor's arrival
WARNINGS: 🎜🎝 General warnings for Hank's possible suicidal ideation. Will come back and add anything else.

Hank's shift goes on per usual. Today's grind isn't any different from the usual. He's occupied at the intersection next to a school during a science fair type of event, constantly directing the flow of traffic and both entitled parents and sweet old ladies bearing baked goods for the kids braving the sidewalk. By the end of it he's gained three muffins, a large chocolate chip cookie, two cupcakes, and lost four points of sanity.

He fuels himself up with two cups of coffee for a round of ticketing in downtown. He's relatively sure that, at some point, he sees someone that looks just like him buying fruit from a stand. Besides the bizarreness of Hank Anderson buying fresh fruit very well it being a doppelganger, a double-take proves it a false alarm. Though he's so busy staring and trying to fathom what he wasn't actually seeing (he thinks?) that the man who's car he was about to ticket is able to run out of the store and jump into his vehicle and rush away before Hank can scan in his plate number.

Figures.

As he's back at the station clocking out he passes by detectives discussing their cases and is surprised by how much he misses it, considering his willingness to throw it away back home. He really wanted to help people, but he also didn't want to play the games associated with the job.

When he gets home he nearly falls over when he comes through the door. The entire room's changed. Two beds. More drawers. More closets. Still a shower, though, that's good.

He reaches up and pulls the tie out of his hair that keeps about half of it up at work, letting it fall loose and into its usual aesthetic of crimped sheepdog shaggy. He's just standing there, in his uniform, staring in a state of confusion at changes he just fuckin' doesn't understand. That whole "matrix bullshit" theory is gaining ground in his head again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He dedicated about a third of his processing power into trying to figure out how any of this is possible, but before he even reached "The Head", he decided it's not possible at all, ran a diagnostic, had it come up with nothing and concluded that he has no idea so all he can do is see what happens.

Nobody, not the AI who talked to him, not the worker at the dormitory he eventually reaches, is willing to answer questions, so 'see what happens' is the mindset that takes him through the dormitory, gets him a device that looks like a bulky sort of tablet, up four flights of stairs and to the room he's been assigned. His thumbprint opens the door, and...

"Hank?"

His LED was already solid yellow, but flashes with it now, cycling rapidly.

Hank's still looking around the room, wondering if the damn thing was trying to reproduce asexually at this point 'cause that makes about as much sense as any other damn thing here, when he startles at a recognizable voice. As far as he's concerned, the only recognizable voice that would ever matter to him.

"Connor!"

He rushes forward, grabbing up Connor in a hug and squeezing him close, squeezing him and pulling his head against his shoulder.

"Good, you're alright. I promise I didn't leave you. I didn't mean to, I fuckin' got kidnapped into this shit." He pulls back again, takes his face in his hands, and with all the guilt and reassurance in the world. "I didn't leave you. I would never have if given the choice."

He thinks it must have been a couple of months. Surely the same amount of time has passed here as back home, right?

The first time Hank hugged him - a couple of days ago, as far as he sees it - Connor had seen it coming. It felt right, and it turns out that although as a machine he would have been deeply confused, deviant Connor likes being hugged. It's one of the first things about deviant Connor that is totally unlike machine Connor - that he's able to concretely put a line under. Not the vague, indescribable things that are profound, sure, but that he can't put names on.

This time he doesn't see it coming, just Hank barrelling at him and pulling him in hard. He automatically raises his own arms to reciprocate, but apart from that he's rushing to catch up.

They only saw each other a day ago. Maybe it's been a traumatic experience. But it doesn't look it - if anything it looks like Hank just spent the day working, and isn't that a little strange? Not Hank working (OK, maybe Hank working if he's being brutally honest), but Hank seeming to have settled into something resembling a routine.

"I have to admit..." His LED's still yellow, reflecting off one of Hank's fingers. He decides to take Hank holding his face in stride as well. Hank's hands are surprisingly rough against his artificial skin. "I wasn't sure at first."

When Connor says 'at first', he means, for the first .1 of a second - that little space between where his processor is handling information and his mind is interpreting it.

"Then I realised telling me we're both going to Canada and then going by yourself without me, Sumo or your car would be a bit strange even for you."

"A bit strange even for me?" Hank repeats after him, in a sort of disbelief that still includes a relieved smile. "How dare you assume I'm fuckin' strange."

Then he winces, that expression of mild joy shifting into nose-wrinkled confusion. In a familiar tone, one that Connor encountered less time ago than Hank said it as of now, he says, "Wait, what are you doing here?"

No. No no no. There's no fucking reason for Connor to be here. He has no DNA. There's no cause for this. "You shouldn't be here." He lets his hands slide down to his neck, now worried, letting them linger there before they drop from there to hold to his shoulders.

"Did they give you the same shit about needing to cure some disease or something?" He squeezes those shoulders, too many thoughts going through his head at once. Hank is, for the moment, unfortunately sober but god he wishes he was drunk. The room suddenly being built to accommodate two people is now fucking blowing his mind.

He responds simply by raising an eyebrow. He dares pretty easily, actually--but Hank's face drops before he can say that. In fact, Hank soon looks downright worried - he's considered before that humans might be easier to understand if they had LEDs, but in this instant, he knows what it would be telling him.

Connor's long let go of Hank, but Hank's hands move from his face, to his neck - he finds himself noting without any rhyme or reason that they're big enough to encircle it comfortably.

"They're looking for DNA so that they can cure some kind of disease," he recounts. "Maybe if they brought people who have DNA they would have cured it by now."

But then he shrugs, moving Hank's hands on his shoulders. "I wondered if maybe there's something like DNA in my biocomponents and they picked that up. Now I'm here and they can't send me back just because they don't need me."

"This room?" He lets go to properly motion around, "was a single before I left. I came home from work and it was a fucking double. Somehow without cleaning my side of it."

Because the clothese he left out are still there. Some new ones to go with the older ones that were hung up. Shirts familiar to Connor, on hangers. A yellow and magenta thing on the floor with a rounded neru collar? Somehow a mix between futuristic cybernetic and Aloha shirt? That's new. The black slacks are new. The velcro strapped workboots are new.

Hank's been here for a little while, at least.

He walks away from Connor to set at his side of the room.

"Well... at least I know you're fine. You are okay, right? Nothing broken?"

Though Connor is decidedly more clean than any other wayward off the grid android he's seen, he's also Connor. So it's hard to gauge.

He looks properly around the room as soon as Hank steps away. Half of it is very much lived in - shirts, some he's seen before, some he hasn't at all. Some real work clothes he's never seen Hank in.

There's a suspicion forming in his head - one that shouldn't be possible. The impossible is already happening, though, and it seems like all bets are off.

"I'm fine." He nods and absently adjusts a shirt sleeve. "I wasn't damaged coming here."

He takes one more look around the room - a room that was apparently a single directly before he got here - and turns back to Hank.

"Hank, how long have you been here?"

Hank sits down on the bed heavily, peeling off the coat to his patrol uniform and dropping it to the side. The LEDs on it dim as he does.

"About a month and a half. Something like that." As apologetic as ever, but also curious... because how would Connor not know that? All the million questions he had, ranging from How is Sumo? to Are the androids making it? fade from his mind at Connor's own inquiry.

"This uh... This place is pretty strict about a lot of things. Especially time spent, apparently."

A year. He has to be here for a year.

Connor frowns, his suspicions - nonsense though they seemed to be - confirmed.

"Hank, you were gone a day," he tells him seriously, going down on one knee in front of him to look him full in the face. "I came out of standby this morning and you were gone. I spent the day looking for you, then I was just putting in the missing person's report when I ended up here."

Even making the call, he hadn't had high hopes of anything being done - not under the circumstances, or given that Hank wasn't someone at high risk during the evacuation or the revolution. But he'd been making it. And he never even got through.

"I wonder if time moves more slowly here than where we're from..." he wonders aloud, although neither of them can answer that question.

"A day."

But instead of being shocked or doubtful, the words are grim. Like he isn't surprised and he's not disappointed, just fucking tired of it. Hank puts his hand on his forehead, runs it over his hair, and ruffles the back of it in all of his irritation.

"There are people here from 2008. There are people here from 2017. There are people here that do magical summonings and are named after weather phenomena. Well, they say they can, except the Head thing doesn't let anyone be anything above a standard dead average unless you buy it here."

Wait.

"Do you have everything or was some of it disabled? Do a diagnostic now. See if some of it's been limited."

He's sure there are a ton of other questions related to what he just said that need to happen. He'll get to this first. He doesn't even want to fucking graze Gotham or X-Men yet.

Hank doesn't sound anywhere near as surprised about this as Connor might have expected at first, but it becomes clear soon enough - it's not uncommon. He's frowning, gaze fixed at a distant point as he takes all of this in and files it with what he knows, when...

"I did one," he says immediately. "I honestly thought I might be hallucinating, so I ran a full diagnostic on the way here - no issues."

But then yes, the questions have to start. Or rather, not questions but flat statements of the 'I'm sorry, did I hear that properly' sort.

"Magical summonings."

Like that.

"Connor, you gotta start jobs at shit level positions. I am a traffic cop. I've had motherfuckers try to turn their cars invisible with actual bullshit sparkly magic to get out of a parking ticket. Because that's real? I'm still not sure any of this is real."

In fact he's got pretty good reason to wonder about it, in his opinion. But everything is such a hammer of information, he's going to have to get through one nail at a time or it's all gonna fall loose.

"Multiple people mentioned Gotham as a real place. As in the city where Batman lives. People have come back from the fucking dead. There are honest to god superpowered comic book mutants. Except they've all been docked a little.

"So try a few things, and see if there's anything you can't do. I'll even not bitch at you for licking anything just... please not off the floor."

Connor's face actually twitches at the words 'traffic cop'. But that's not important.

"If we're both hallucinating or in a VR we're not aware of, at least we're together in this." Even if it is real, he'd rather they work together to figure it out than Hank being stuck here alone and Connor in Detroit with no idea what's happened to one another.

He's actually not sure what he would have done if he'd been in Detroit with Hank gone for two months.

"I'll check, and then you have to tell me about people coming back from the dead," he says just before quickly activating his mind palace, speeding up his processors to maximum - at which point time virtually freezes before him, allowing him to visualise the room from memory and examine it that way.

"I just scanned the room, got your heart rate and pre-constructed the best way to fall if I wanted to jump out of the window," he says patiently after a grand total of one second. If he was going to find any problems, he'd have found them during the diagnostic, but it doesn't hurt to try everything out. He takes out the phone he's just been given and interfaces with it, showing Hank the screen: he's scrolling down an intranet forum of some kind without touching anything but the back of the device. "If you've got anything liquid in the room, I can test a sample."

Edited 2019-08-12 19:34 (UTC)

"Okay, well. That's good to know if you fall out the window," he mutters idly, making a bit of a face. He stands up, undoing his work holster (which has a radio pocket and a currently empty scanner pocket on each side), unsnapping it from around his thighs and waist before heading over to the closet. Rather than pulling out some whiskey, he pulls out a bottle of something orange with a tin cap on it.

He gives that to Connor. "Try this."

In the meantime, he finds a the shitty tacky paperback he's been carrying with him everywhere. People must think it's his favorite book in the world if they don't know better (a few do) because it's with him in some capacity much of the time. During work he leaves it hidden in his room.

He holds that in his hand as he waits for Connor to take his sample.

"Yeah, apparently people don't have to stay dead. A guy came in fully repaired after his fuckin' throat was slit. You know. Save for a bloody shirt." And that was its own massive mess.

"I've gone through a couple of windows in just the last week, I can't rule it out."

The immediate one that comes to mind is Hank's, but there was the urban farm as well. Technically that might have been a roof - all the same thing with greenhouses, really.

He stands as well, idly eyeing the holster as Hank takes it off, then staring at the radioactive-looking orange, carbonated drink Hank presents him with.

"OK." And he lifts it to his mouth, taking in just enough for it to coat his tongue and...

He twists his face in a sudden grimace. He's done this several times since being activated and it was never quite like... It's like a chemical bomb just exploded in his face.

"It's..." A ridiculous, sweetened chemical bomb. "...mostly sugar. And sweeteners. Citric acid. At least thirty different artificial flavourings. Several... I think you get the point."

He twists his face again, scrubbing his tongue of all remnants of it.

"Yeah, I fuckin' noticed. Connor." Hank says, referring to that window of his. But he hadn't been conscious at the time. So he only noticed afterward.

"So you react that way to that but not the old blood." Hank observes, taking his bottle with a skeptical look, then drinking from it because he can't just let it go flat like that.

He settles down again, rolls up his sleeves, undoes his shirt a couple of buttons, and watches Connor. As much as he still has to explain, he looks at him with a long suffering, exhausted sort of expression. Like Connor is his last friend in the world (he probably is).

"It really is good to see you. I missed you. I really did."

"I thought you were genuinely ill," he points out. "If I realised you were just drunk I..."

He pauses and considers the matter. "I would have done the same thing."

So much for that.

"It was different this time," he says, eyeing the bottle with a sceptical look of his own as Hank drinks from it. "Like I was processing it in a different way than usual. Same chemical information, but there was... I guess I was tasting it."

That doesn't seem like limiting his systems, unless they mean to do it by making sure he never wants to use his forensics suite ever again. But still, now that he thinks about, it's...

"Can I have some more of it?" He holds out a hand for the bottle.

Hank sits back down, leaving Connor to momentarily stand awkwardly in the middle of the room - before he too sits, on the bed opposite Hank's. He doesn't look anymore like he's so stiff he'll shatter if touched, but his posture's still good - comes with being an android and never having to slump. He fiddles with the bedsheet between the fingers of both hands, automatically needing to do something to keep them occupied. He has to admit, it's a little odd seeing Hank like this - weary, but... What, a functional human being? Still stashing whiskey in his room, but apparently going to work before midday and managing. Is it good to see, or is it a sign of something more at work? He wants to believe it's good: that getting Hank out of Detroit and apparently out of everything familiar to him has somehow helped. But that also means that Connor is something familiar suddenly back in his life, and with that this whole thought process becomes too weirdly tangled to go on with, and Hank's looking at him.

"I can't keep from thinking it's only been a day," he says. "I'm not sure what would have happened if you'd been gone for two whole months."

Hank's been away from Detroit now for longer than he ever knew Connor, and in fact two-thirds of Connor's existence. He's not sure how that matters, but it's another thought that's jumped into his mind unbidden, and he's not sure how deviants (other deviants) deal with it.

Hank gets up off his bed and lumbers over to sit by Connor, handing him the drink that he's decided his foul-tasting. "I'm glad we don't have that to worry about. I'm a little pissed they decided to wrestle in a way to make me say for another couple of months." Because he wouldn't want to leave Connor behind. Not willingly.

Hank opens up the shitty little novel he has with him. To the first page of post-it notes.

"There was a terrorist incident my first fuckin' week here." His voice drops to something quiet, like he's worried they might be being watched. "A stage was blown up during a parade. Some people were injured. I've been looking for clues on my own. But the part that's bothering most is the message they've been putting out there. 'Wake-up.'"

Familiar sounding, huh?

"I know it's just a coincidence. But even if people hadn't been hurt I'd be looking just because of that. But the government in charge, they're trying real damn hard to cover up it's even happening. Not just letting the media stir up a shitstorm and scare everyone. They have these big unfriendly enforcer bots that come and uh... recommend people keep their mouth's shut."

Between the pages of a Noirish story about a detective falling in love with an alien woman and the persistent ex that wants her back are brightly colored clues, little notes in flashy paper only visible if you flip through the book. (Also, ultimately, the woman chooses her ex when he's exonerated of a suspicious crime and the detective is left humble and alone in the end. It's not a very happy story.)

"I wonder if this means I have to stay two months later than you," he wonders idly. That's ten months away, who knows what'll happen in that time? But now, in this moment, he doesn't think he likes the thought of it.

Taking the bottle from Hank, he takes another swig out of it as Hank sits down next to him - again, barely drinking any of it, just enough to taste it. Actually taste it. Mostly, it's just sweet. Artificial, cloying sweetness. (His forensics suite suddenly and very unhelpfully informs him that judging from Hank's saliva, he is perfectly sober in that moment, and Connor will very definitely not bring any part of this up.)

"Yeah, I definitely don't like it," he says, giving it back without any particular fanfare. Maybe he'll try something else later. Just to see.

He leans forwards keenly, watching Hank as his partner quietly explains the current situation. Another glance around the room tells him it doesn't look like they're being monitored, but something's making Hank be careful all the same.

What that is becomes clear after only a few moments. And it's very, depressingly familiar. The American government wasn't able to keep the deviant problem quiet, and in the end went a lot further in quietening all dissidence - but it looks like they've already had their TV Tower moment. Right now, the government may not know who to blame - maybe it's because they don't know that they're focusing their efforts on a cover-up instead.

"What kind of "bots"?" he asks. He'd like to think - and so he'll assume - that Hank wouldn't say bots if he meant androids like Connor.

"Yeah, and it makes me wonder if I tried to stay with you, if there would be some sort of fuckin' fine print to bind us here longer." But there is time to figure that out.

He resumes drinking the soda that Connor's decided that he hated with a light shrug. Well, it's fine by him. But so are his shirts, so Connor might have a point and Hank is, as per usual, brazenly ignoring it as harshly as Connor can ignore him when he doesn't want to do what Hank demands.

Except Hank has, as of yet, no reason to dump Connor in the shower. He absolutely would, though.

"Robots. Fuckin'... You'll know 'em when you see 'em. And I fuckin' don't think these things are gonna deviate. It's more like a uh... hive mind sorta deal? Nothing independent about it. They just do what the 'Head' wants. The officers at the actual station aren't so bad. I haven't ran into one fuckin' Gavin Reed there. More like a bunch of guys like Ben or Chris. But they got these big robots to be the bad guys.

"Remember the guy I mentioned getting his throat slit? He was still bloody when he showed up at that parade. They didnt' give him much warning when he left the intake office in one piece. They just threw a pamphlet and a coupon at him. Not even a clean fuckin' shirt. He was still fucked up in the head and the fuckin' robots tranqued him and dragged him in for questioning. Barely had a brain in his head at the time."

Hank ruffles his hair at one side, an agitated little motion, full of frustration he's been storing up because he's a dimwit about how to share it. He really wants to get a drink. But he's almost too worried that if he turns his back on Connor he'll turn out to be some sort of hallucination.

Edited 2019-08-13 15:55 (UTC)

"And they're the closest thing to androids anybody here's ever seen?" he says, trying not to sound like he's already resigning himself to anything, but. He just deviated and got to see Detroit start to change its stance on androids - and now this.

His LED's flashing yellow now, trying to sort all of this information into something he can make some sense out of. Just him suddenly processing information differently and being a deviant would have been enough to keep him occupied for a good long while by itself, but add that to the entire unbelievable situation with Dualis that he's not convinced he'll ever work out, and then this possible terrorist attack... It's a lot.

"This is... It's a lot to take in," he says quietly, brow furrowed. He's still fidgeting with the bedspread between his fingers, gaze distant.

"So we're in a place where time and space have no meaning, death is fixable, there's...some kind of martial law in place enforced by robots? And we're stuck here for a year." He looks Hank straight in the eye. "Do I have that right?"

Establish that first. Then the attack. He has the entire rest of his existence to work out his deviancy - even if that's what he wanted to prioritise.

Edited (wtf happened there) 2019-08-13 17:52 (UTC)

"No no I mean... there are a fuckload of cyborgs nearly to the point of being androids. There are actual androids. These are just what's made locally. Not anyone brought in from somewhere else," Hank reassures him.

He notices that Connor's still plucking at the bedsheet. And, awkardly, so awkwardly, put's his hand over Connor's to still it. Just leaves it for a heartbeat or two, then turns it to face palm up. His keys are pulled out from his pocket then (including those from Detroit on the ring), and he disentangles a very old, weathered, round dogtag that says 'Rocky' on it, with a long irrelevant phone number.

"All the currency is digital here. No coins. This'll have to do."

He puts that in Connor's hand.

"That work for ya?"

It's annoying as fuck but just from the words coming out of Connor's face, he knows the entire situation is overwhelming. From the worrying color of that red light, it's gotta be a bit much.

Some of the tension almost visibly leaves him at that. He hasn't seen any-- "Cyborgs?"--so it's good information to have. People here will know what he is. He's not taking a step backwards.

He glances down sharply at the touch to his hand, stilling his fingers against the bed. He blinks down at their hands - at first he assumes he's annoying Hank with the fidgeting and his other hand stops as well accordingly. But no, what Hank presses into his hand is...

"Rocky?" he asks, lifting the tag to examine it more closely. Then, tentatively, wondering if Hank realises what he just enabled, he flicks the tag up, spins it from fingertip to fingertip and catches it by the edges between two fingers.

"Rocky was a dog I had a long time ago. I put his tag on my keys after I had to put him down. He was a good dog. Just got old. Dogs do that." He worries about Sumo. He's actually pretty old for a dog.

He doesn't complain about the coin this time. Hank fidgets in his own ways, drumming his hands or pacing. He's got no place to judge Connor. He lets it happen because Connor needs it.

"Yeah, you can actually have mods added? Stuff you can pay for to make you better. The people that don't have their magic have been getting these magical tattoo things. Sort of a 'self-improvement enabled' thing. Pretty sure if I put enough money into it I could do some of the stuff you do."

And there was the stupid idea. The one he'd shamefully considered but also felt like such a waste. He puts it to the back of his mind again. No, don't think about that.

"But also I've had sorta this worry it's gonna be a pomegranate seed. You do somethin' like get a mod and you're stuck, some Persephone bullshit. I don't wanna take the risk."

Edited 2019-08-13 21:58 (UTC)

He downloaded a lot of information about dogs trying to look after Sumo while Hank was gone - and one thing he does know is that big dogs just don't live very long. In that moment, he finds himself thinking about Sumo as well. He fidgets with the tag for just a couple more seconds: he already knows it annoys Hank when he does it, so the gesture of Hank giving him a coin replacement doesn't pass him by. He settles for just rubbing it with his thumb, reading the letters and numbers on the face by touch alone.

"Stuff I do? Like making reports with my eyes closed?" he asks, teasing a little, but also genuinely curious about what Hank would get if he had the power to get...magical tattoo things.

A second later, he frowns.

"I think I found a limitation..." He pauses for a second, LED going yellow, then goes on, "I tried to look up Persephone and pomegranate seeds, but all I'm getting is pictures of cats with writing on them."

But is that his ability to search being limited, or is it just that he's just been put on a network where the only information is cat pictures?