#everything before ch. 61 doesn’t feel real. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

witchfall · 6 years ago

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the silver lining still remains: ch. 17

the silver lining

SUMMARY: Memories are points of light. Find the connections.

[A/N: This chapter can honestly probably be read as a standalone piece -- though you’d miss a lot of the references and shit. But that’s why I’m posting it like this instead of a link~]

A Connor x F!OC fanfic. Read on AO3. master post.

Ryker is owned by @popsicletheduck.

---

...61... ...62...

Emma watches the numbers tick up. Her fingers tap her palm, nervous, but she can’t remember why.

...64… ...65…

The elevator is in some silvery, novo art deco style popular among the rich set. She isn’t usually called to the gilded parts of Detroit; the penthouses and the towers stand empty and dark against the skyline. Those with privilege could take their time returning to the ghosts of their old life as the world changed fast, then slow, and they did not require the services of a ragtag team of rugged volunteers.

...69…

The air is dry.

...70.

Her stomach tugs.

Ding.

The doors open to a dark hallway.

“What in the…”

A SWAT officer neatly melds into the shadow, rifle pointed outward, finger on the communicator in his helmet like he is warning someone about her -- but he is frozen midstep, caught while trying to leave. Water from a shattered fish tank shimmers against the smooth wood floor. Unmistakable bullet holes mar the glass. The terrarium at the end of the hall -- stupidly unnecessary, as is the way of the rich -- is somehow untouched.

She has a nagging feeling she has been here before.

She has never been here before.

She feels pulled forward, anyway, down the dimly lit halls into the rest of the penthouse suite and its wide open floor plan, barren in the way that signifies a household living for appearances. She passes glass decorations shot to smithereens and a bedroom lit with soft purple ambiance. That room and a yellow, bloodstained shoe spark a realization: A child lives here. Or did.

In what was once a living room lies a dead man in plainclothes -- someone’s father, some part of her mind says. In the kitchen lies another man, but in an officer’s uniform. The rest of the SWAT team stands in almost reverent attendance near the door to the balcony, frozen in place.

She is following an invisible string to an unknown end. She could turn around, but she knows nothing is left behind her. Everything moves at the speed of dreaming, slow and viscous, until another gunshot hits the back wall, not far from where she had just been standing.

The sound fractures into a thousand pieces in her head. She’s heard it before. She cannot piece it together.

She steps through the door anyway, like the gun is an invitation, rather than a warning. A white hot pain sears her shoulder, but its not her shoulder, its…

She isn’t sure.

A blond man stares at her from across the balcony, dressed in black and white. A blue triangle twinkles on his chest. He holds a gun aloft, unapologetic despite the tears streaming down his face and the young girl curled into a statue of fear near the edge of the pool.

“Simon?”

“Who are you?” the android asks.

“Not Simon,” she realizes out loud, as if she should have known that.

---

Something wet and leafy clings to the back of Connor’s head. Drizzle sticks to his cheeks.

“Connor!”

He opens his eyes to a voice that isn’t familiar -- and yet, he knows he’s heard it somewhere, in some life beyond the grayness of this sky. He sits up. In an instant, he nearly understands the human sensation of vertigo; a sea of soybeans spreads for miles across the flatland. A curtain of rain marches closer and closer, and the green wavers and clacks beneath it.

A woman and man run to meet him as he rises to his feet.

“Please,” the woman says. Her hands grasp Connor’s shoulders with an intensity he hasn’t seen since his first real test mission. “Find her. She’s gone somehow. We don’t know what’s happening.”

“Shara Ibori,” Connor says, unable to believe it.

“I knew you’d find a way,” the man -- Ji-hun, clear as day -- says. He touches just beneath Connor’s elbow, intimate and comforting and asking. “We lost her somewhere.”

Connor is stunned before their vivacity.

“You aren’t memories,” he says. “What is this?”

“It’s an interface.” Ji-hun’s grip tightens. “We’ve hung on too long to help. But you...”

“He’s more advanced than I expected,” Shara says to Ji-hun, unsure.

“It’s not about that,” Ji-hun says. “If you look at his code--”

Shara shakes her head to silence him. Ji-hun turns to Connor.

“We aren’t supposed to be here.” He wipes his wet brow as if struggling under confession.

“We agreed,” Shara says as explanation. “We’re not letting our girl die.”

Ji-hun sighs. The rain creeps closer.

“I know.” Shara glares. “I know what we’re supposed to call her.”

Her eyes, dark as obsidian, shine with a curious guilt. The shameless kind. An understanding of wrongdoing, but a rejection that anything is wrong, actually, if you would please look at the evidence.

“Oh,” Connor says. “You’re deviants.”

---

The balcony is caught in a still life. Clouds of mist curl off the pool, kicked up by the helicopter hanging in the air. She pointedly ignores the dead body floating macabre in the water and holds her breath against the smell of the saltwater but she is still a part of the moment, painted in at last minute. Even if she doesn’t look or breathe, she knows.

“He never told you,” the Not-Simon says, disappointed.

“This...this was on the news.,” she says. “You--”

No, it's not my fault... I never wanted this... I loved them, you know...but I was nothing to them...just a slave to be ordered around…

That was not on the news.

“Daniel,” Emma realizes. “Connor thinks of you everyday.”

Thoughts spring forth like they’re her own, but they’re not her own, and the dissonance of the dual-memory sends her vision spinning. Daniel steps forward, arm out to stop her, but his face is still angry and she’s still too far away. Her vision stabilizes.

You're not going to die. We're just going to talk. Nothing will happen to you. You have my word.

"He tried to help you,” Emma says, realizing. “He didn't know."

"He did know,” Daniel says. “He knew what he was doing and he has to live with that. And so do you."

Daniel stares at her and she feels, strangely, like she is being tested. She’s at the beginning of a gauntlet. Something rattles in her stomach -- fear and loathing and want.

“Is he here?” she asks. Her voice feels thick in her throat.

He smiles mirthlessly. Splatters of blue blood bloom on his face. Bullet holes form dark craters in his chassis. "You’re here. Where he is supposed to be."

Air begins to lift her hair from her neck. Time skips forward to meet her.

“It’s time to face the truth,” Daniel says. “And you have a long way to go.”

The whole world tilts. Her feet skitter across the ground, useless, as the cement rises to meet her body and she slides toward the shining skyline of a Detroit she doesn’t know.

---

Perhaps this is just what happens when intelligence is left alone too long. It gets bored. It finds connections where it isn’t supposed to. It learns to seek, then to favor. Perhaps that’s all rA9 ever was -- a mistake borne out of time passing and memories forming and people, somewhere, caring enough to listen.

Perhaps the endless search for that actualizing flash of concern in another person’s eyes is what sets sentients apart.

“Okay, Connor,” Shara says, giving no quarter. Her hand tugs tightly on his, leading him toward a small house barely visible through the sheets of rain. “Where you’re going, you’re going to have to take it all with you. Everything that scares you.”

You don't love her. You don't know the half of it.

“She wouldn’t want me in here,” he yells over the storm.

Did it all start for show?

“Listen, honey,” Shara says. The tough slate quality of her gaze does not diminish. “You wouldn’t be here if she didn’t want you to knowsomething.”

What do you fucking live for?

“Our program is breaking down,” Ji-hun says. “It’s now or never.”

Doubt breathes hot down Connor’s neck. “Where do I start?”

Ji-hun clasps his shoulder. “The beginning, of course.”

Shara opens the door and the light blinds him.

---

An android sits across from her in a dark room with cinderblock walls. Red blood curls in a crescent across his forehead and down the front of his shirt, like it was paint no one wanted to scrub off. One arm is cracked open, revealing the blue stars of complex machinery within; the other has the tell-tale circle marks of cigarette burns. Her heart beats erratic and hollow in her ribs as he stares at her, unmoved.

“The evidence was not in Cyberlife’s favor,” the android explains with plodding exactness. “Abuse, hatred, misunderstanding. These actions are what led to our acts.”

This is the proving ground of a different Connor. A buzzy chill, a certainty that is not her own. More lies. More wondering.

How do they balance on the scales -- the mask that he wore with ease and his curious hope that maybe he could change the result this time?

“But those were not the answers the humans wanted, and so he searched on anyway, for something else.”

“They -- we thought you were just machines.” Emma’s fingers wrap together tightly beneath the table.

“Things change.” His dark eyes glaze over. “No one wants to see the world for what it is.”

All the secrets that run just beneath the crust of the earth. All the secrets that someone knows, so that someone’s agenda can persist. Her stomach twists.

She doesn’t want to think about Noah.

“You did kill someone,” she says, knowing without knowing and knowing because--

“I did,” he says, dead-eyed. “And I’d do it again.”

Her hand hovers near her mouth. She’s not qualified for this. She wants to crawl out of her skin just to stop staring at the dark, crusty stains on his shirt, at the thin chain keeping his fists from killing her, too. She glances to the mirror, knowing someone back there is watching her. She shoves the chair backward and stomps away from the android whose name Connor didn’t even know, if only to find some air.

She throws the door open. Hank blocks her path.

“Not yet,” he says. “You haven’t done your job.”

She turns back to face the bloody android, but then she’s not in the interrogation room at all.

---

Connor knows this room. It doesn’t look like this, the way he knows it.

The walls are brighter and there are no computers -- just two small beds and a wooden toy box kept between them. The white floor has no stains. White clothes sit in a careful pile on each bed, perfectly made. A single window brings in wan sunlight.

A small girl, between the beds, glares up at him.

He has never fully grasped the human notion of sentiment -- the tender sadness of reliving a memory. He has seen it. It is why Hank both keeps and hides his pictures of Cole. It is why Emma has a box of tchotchkes of no discernible use.

But his memory does not diminish. Recall is just another way to invite analysis into things he can’t change. And yet, he knows who this tiny Emma will become; the thought brings a pain akin to the first time he deviated, dulled through time.

He’s traveled so far and yet.

“Hello,” he says softly. “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” she says, in the way children poorly obfuscate lies. “Go away.”

He kneels down to her level, a common negotiation tactic. He makes eye contact. He does not wince, because he is a professional -- but he has to think about it. Surgery scars pulse against the thin cotton of her skin, red and angry as an LED. Her body shakes. She is the cost of human progress, and so is he, and he struggles to reconcile that with the girl in front of him.

“My name is Connor.”

“I don’t want you.”

His mouth twitches. “Who do you want?”

“I want--” Her voice stutters. Her face scrunches up. “I want…I want to see my friend.”

“I’m sorry, Emma.” He closes his eyes for a single moment. Will all the Emmas, of every age, hear this apology? “I’m afraid I do not know where he is.”

The glare returns. “That’s my secret name.”

A miscalculation.

“Why do you know that!” she shouts.

“I--”

She opens her mouth and screams.

“Now, wait--”

Her tiny fists pummel his arms, his knees, and her screaming doesn’t stop.

“I hate you!” she shouts between the wordless screams. Tears streak her tiny face. “No!”

“I’m your friend,” he says firmly between tiny punches. He does not try to restrain her. It wouldn’t work on an adult Emma. A child version, while smaller, would resist even harder. “And I love--”

“NO!”

She punches his chest over and over and over, desperate and afraid. Each punch is a reminder of what it feels like to be confronted with something you aren’t ready for. They don’t injure him. He still finds them unbearable.

“I know,” he says. “What you’re feeling is real. And it hurts so much.”

“I don’t know!” she sobs. Her punches, punctuating words, slow from exhaustion. She sniffles and gasps in air. “I hate you!”

“I left the door open,” he says quietly to her cries. “Where do you want to go?”

She freezes. Her eyes dart behind him and then back to his face and then to the door, calculating. And then, with the singular mischief of a child, she shoves him down and runs past. He listens for a dumbstruck moment to the pitter-patter of her bare feet against the dirty ground before he wordlessly follows down the grimy basement hall.

This is what love is, he has learned -- following and reminding and hoping. But he is glad when the light comes again, and he’s taken somewhere else.

---

Emma’s feet hit the pavement and she goes.

She narrowly avoids getting hit by a truck. She somehow makes a leap between rooftops like she was born to this life.

A pretty woman -- no, an AX400, no -- darts across the road, child in tow. A young man in a flapping jacket and askew hat stomps flowers into dirt as he goes. They all look back at her, goading and fearful and expectant. Chase us. Find your way. You seek a crime committed to prove you are righteous, but is it justice if you’re just doing what you’re told?

The wind of a moving train throws her hair behind her. Was it a choice?

Jump, Emma! The shouting sounds like Hank. You have to jump!

Connor thinks like an arrow, and maybe that is why he can keep going. When she jumps, she misses, and the falling twists her stomach up.

---

Memories are points of light. Find the connections.

Connor walks through flitting shadows: the surgeries that made his skin feel scratchy, the sanitized green brightness of her parents’ lab, the heavy quilt she hid underneath in the back of her father’s car. She leaves it all in a trail and he wishes to linger until there’s nothing new left to analyze, but there is no time.

Your mission is to--

Solve the tests, he thinks, for the first time in...over a year. Solve the tests. Stare at the blood in the perfect white test chamber and decipher the exact nature of how this came to be. Lab conditions are nothing like a real crime scene, but Cyberlife cannot afford to structure real breaches of justice over and over again to test their RK800 series, of course , and he is reminded coldly that he is the 51st, and he nearly detects something akin to exhaustion when the woman in the white coat tells him as much, but he discards it as something unnecessary. It digs in wrong, anyway. Instability is not an acceptable outcome.

Everyone wishes, don’t they? He projects.

He watches all the times Shara and Ji-hun thought she wasn't listening just behind the door. He sees the therapies, the fears, van after van after van, moving between houses until the act of moving is more a home than any single place. Understand more than you are supposed to. Grapple with meaning before anyone thought you capable as much. You are the consequence of someone else's choice, but no one will teach you what that means.

No one likes to be shown up, some Emma voice, ageless, says back. No one wants to remember exactly how much they can’t control.

She looks back at him, hair grown out but eyes still the same unreadable glass. Her body is lean and wiry with youth, untested.

I’m always watching from somewhere else. She said that to him once with alcohol-soaked veritas. They are the ones that watch as the door opens and the illusion breaks -- revealing parents and makers never knew everything, after all.

---

Another back alley, dripping and moonlit. A metal trash can slams into Emma’s back and she’s forced to the wet cement, body trembling from the blow. A blue-haired android stares back with narrowed eyes. A red-haired companion waits by a chain link fence.

“He thought it was weird that we remembered each other through memory wipes,” the blue-haired Traci explains. Rain slides down her glittering skin. Emma’s jeans stick to her legs and her shirt feels too warm.

“...isn’t it, a little bit?” Emma asks.

The Tracis’ hands clasp together. Emma presses her eyes shut and wonders at the strength of whatever error that allowed for the dreaming of a different life.

I didn't mean to kill him... I just wanted to stay alive...get back to the one I love.

These are the things Connor never allowed himself to know. The things he sought to see, regardless.

“Sweetheart,” the woman drawls, stepping forward with one heeled foot, gazing through her. “You can’t get away from the marks it leaves.”

The other heel rises, pointed toward her face.

---

Connor sees her through a haze of smoke. Her coughs rattle deep within her lungs. They’re at the end of an unfinished road, a subdivision that stopped growing, and they sit in the back of a pick-up truck facing a field of corn.

“You can arrest me now,” she says, with all the dramatic tension of a coughing 16-year-old baiting someone wiser to do something idiotic, and of course he shakes his head, even as she follows the failed cigarette drag with a quiet pop of a metal cap and the glug of liquid poured into a dirty cup.

“You like the feeling of testing your boundaries,” he says.

“Oh, because you’re perfect.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She eyes him suspiciously. Her cigarette glows red in the dark between her small fingers. She takes a shot of something amber colored and winces as if trying not to, and all he can do is watch like she’s smoke on twilight turning blue and he can’t miss it. He’s always been like this. Petting Sumo when he should have been studying Hank. Watching Hank when he should have been putting notes together. He tests the boundaries of his mission. The only thing you can ever own is your sense of how a thing should be done, be it a case or turning 16.

She flicks the cigarette away and slips from the back of the truck. “Maybe another time,” she says -- perhaps to him, perhaps to the cigarette.

He is not perfect, and it is a considered a deep flaw by the people that made him; she is not perfect, and he is enraptured by the concept of a life lived a little jagged.

---

Kamski stands in a snowbright room next to a pool the color of blood -- a vision that’s a bit too on the nose to be something Connor made up as a metaphor. Kamski must really be like that.

“Now isn’t that interesting,” Kamski says, crossing to her in a silk robe. “This isn’t your experience.”

“What did you do to Connor?” Emma snaps. He waves his hand, uninterested, as Chloe rises to her feet and Emma’s anger becomes a part of the memory, bleeding and hot. “You did this.” She’s unable to bear the mocking gleam in his eye. “You look at me and you say that you did this and that you knew.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he reminds her. “The creations can’t run from who they are.”

He has no idea exactly how good she is at running -- but Connor, she knows, has never been able to outrun himself. Her fists curl.

“Look,” Chloe says. “It’s all right.”

She points to the window which becomes a screen which becomes reality. The metal bruises of an ancient shipyard -- Jericho, the namesake, echoing with gun fire. Connor tearing down the ruddiness of his own code, betraying something he once believed in to follow the flitting hope of something he’d always wondered.

You're just a tool they use to do their dirty work. But you're more than that. We are all more than that.

Owning up to forgiveness in the green light of sanctuary. Stepping up to deserve it. Throwing himself on the pyre of expectation.

Betrayal leaves a hole, even if they had been using you. It can’t all be for nothing.

“He could have shot you,” Emma says to Chloe, shaken.

“He didn’t.” Chloe stands at eye level, searching. “Have you seen the way he looks at people?”

Emma looks out the window, screen now gone. The Detroit winter is familiar and uninviting and barren and bright, and she feels wholly ignored by it in a way that feels correct.

“He saw the intrinsic nature of the thing,” Kamski says. “The essential nature of living being enough on its own.”

She sees herself in the glass and winces at the blood on her face.

Life’s that way.

The tired and bloody gnashing of teeth.

Is it?

“I’m sorry,” Chloe says, “but it’s the only way.”

Her palms press into Emma’s shoulders until she falls backward into the red pool.

---

He begins to lose his footing against the muddy ground of some distant field as the memories move faster. His fingers touch the ends of her hair and then she’s gone again, and it reminds him of those crucial early months with Hank when absolutely nothing came easily.

He catches glimpses of a young girl not so young anymore, watching the mist rise off a neighborhood pond. Her fingers rip at the grass just between her splayed legs, droplets of late summer rain dampening her khaki shorts, and she considers taking her aunt up on the offer of staying in one place for years at a time.

Emma made the mistake of deploying this weapon too early against her mother; the fight cleared out the entire house in the way an exterminator chokes out vermin, and so Emma sits alone, the only way she feels comfortable anymore, watching the dusk and braiding grasses together like she can build a rope to elsewhere.

Three days later, her parents are killed.

The memories fracture and he gets the sense she’s not running so much now as hiding from him, ashamed, even though the recognition rings with the sincerity of the old church bells of Trinity Lutheran. She hides in small Michigan town after small Michigan town, fighting men at bars and fixing farm houses and watching people’s kids until she wears the loneliness of being known but not known like a cloak. He grasps for points of light, fingers spread wide, but sometimes he just sees himself, working late at the DPD until he can shed the mantle of deviant hunter. As of late he’s wondered if it’s possible to extract the reason you’re made from the components built to enable it.

By rA9, he just wants to find her.

He smells smoke in the distance, acrid and poisonous. Heat licks at his skin from flames he can’t yet see. He shouts her name as he bursts into the strange expanse of a dark theater, where curtains red as heat hang over a black stage. She’s not here, but he can see the smoke gathering upward toward the lights.

He careens around seats and scrambles to the stage. He doesn’t stop shouting until he finds Ryker behind the curtain, next to a backstage door shining with a strange light.

Ryker watches Connor stumble forward with a practiced, sad indifference. They raise a crutch, blocking Connor’s path.

“Let me through,” Connor snaps.

Ryker’s sea glass eyes flash with the properties of two Emmas: the self-flagellating hatred and the disastrous need she still can’t smother. They’d tried all damn year to get her to listen and she knows that; she didn’t deserve their love but she held on, anyway, because she doesn’t know how to live without it.

“She’d rather go down in flames than have anything else taken from her,” Ryker says, resigned.

Connor stares at them in horrified realization.

“She can’t!” he sputters. “She--Ryker! Let me through!”

Ryker’s face turns forbidding.

“What are you going to do?” The question is sharp. “Fix it?”

“I have to try. ”

“Don’t you think enough people have tried?” They shake their head, knowing more than Connor ever could. “She needs your help. But she has to fix it on her own.”

Before Connor can open his mouth, Ryker’s crutch whaps him in the side of the head, and he stumbles backward into the curtain as the door opens. The light blinds him. This time the falling feels permanent.

---

The cold in this place bites like teeth. A woman who is familiar in the vaguest of senses watches with the haughtiness of a still-falling god.

“My mom knew you,” Emma realizes, but that does not soften the woman’s slate gaze.

“Not me,” the woman says.

Connor crying out in a panic, Amanda! Not me, she says, though that is the correct name, and Emma considers that maybe she isn’t the only one with handlers in her head; perhaps Cyberlife stole that concept, too.

“I’m tired of your stupid tests,” Emma says. Rage rumbles down into her hands. She’s snowblind and useless, as always. “Where is he?”

“I’m not sure you’re ready yet.” Amanda’s voice is honeyed sweetness spread thin over a trembling anger. “He’s betrayed everything.”

Don't have any regrets. You did what you were designed to do.

“He betrayed you.” Emma steps forward, jabbing a finger toward Amanda. “You didn’t have a plan! You just wanted to control him so you wouldn’t be obsolete! You’re just as deviant as all the rest.”

The woman does not reel back, but her jaw tightens. “He will never be free of me.”

Anger bubbles up as hysterical laughter. It peals outward, eaten by the blizzard. “You don’t fuckin’ scare me.”

“But it’s not about you, is it?”

Emma’s bravado holds, even when the woman’s mouth curls into a glinty smile, but her breath freezes her throat on the way down.

“It’s about what he can handle,” the woman says. “And there is nothing he fears more than his own potential.”

He flies between rooftops, he shoots without looking, he tosses a dead body like it’s nothing but weight in a flimsy bag. He kisses like he’ll never be allowed the indiscretion again. He slides his hands up her back like he’ll lose the privilege in the next breath.

I don’t think you would have liked me.

Oh, sweetheart.

Have you seen what I’ve been willing to do?

“Now you see it, don’t you?” Amanda’s smile falters. Her eyebrows furrow. “What exactly it will take to risk it with an ex-deviant hunter?”

“Yep,” Emma says.

She tightens her shoulders and spins up a punch, right to the woman’s nose, but her limbs lock in place and the snow starts to glow, whiter and whiter and whiter and she screams against the brightness and then--

---

Emma awakens in a cloud of clover grass. Connor awakens to a vista he never thought he'd see again.

A computer’s soft clicking gives way to the real chirping of distant songbirds and springtime crickets, all singing within a soft golden light. The wind shifts the softly clothed willows weeping into the water. Wildflowers sprout around old trees with branches weighed down by old growth, webbing perfect white paths in swatches of pink and violet. Moss covers white stones that are collapsed along the pathways, some homage to a place that fell to ruin long ago.

On the central island, where all roads lead, roses spill out of a dirty trellis like a thousand drops of blood.

Emma hops across white stones to find a better view. Connor stands still, struggling to process the truth.

His eyes catch on a single fountain of blue light and the sparkling flutter of tulle petals across the surface of the moat, afraid of the realization. This place can only be complete if its true warden has arrived.

“My god,” Emma mutters, seeing Connor’s silhouette across the water.

He moves with sudden, body-seizing purpose toward the figure in a ratty old flannel, snow-stained jeans and work boots. Her hair is pulled up into a cloud. Her face brightens with exertion as she hops and hops and hops until she’s on the island proper, carefully stepping over vines of roses and moss and things long left to their own devices. His shoes smack metallic against the bridge.

She stares in wonder as he stops short of reaching her, fists clenched down at his sides so he doesn’t scare her off with the fury of his want.

“Wait,” she says. “This is your drawing, isn’t it?”

He blinks and scolds his eyes for forming tears.

“The garden?” she says.

“A bridge,” he says in realization.

“You’re in that--”

“Jacket,” he finishes for her, watching the gesture of her hand. A painting in motion. “I know.”

His well of patience has long dried up, so he closes the distance in two steps. He lays his hands against her cheeks just as she presses her palms against the flat lapel of his old android lambda. He freezes at the realness of her skin. The warmth of his body prompts her to speak.

“Is it you?” she asks.

“It’s me,” he says. “Are you--”

“I saw everything,” she says, words spilling out soggy and shaken. “I saw…”

“Everything,” he repeats, in question and statement.

“This place…”

The finicky nature of wetware sizzles on his tongue.

...bizarre organic connections…no one can explain...

Technology that followed rules written in old, old books, long ago by dead gods. Life had no good explanation.

“I think we made this,” he says.

He has never thought himself capable of making much of anything.

She has only ever dreamed of new worlds; her hands never moved to build one, knit up in time and money and all the excuses the world could ever offer.

They stare with great knowing and too many questions across their garden of variance.

She takes a step back. His hands follow, lingering against the front of her shirt, afraid to lose a dream.

“Is this how you see yourself?” she asks.

He looks down at his old uniform. “I...” I don’t know how to be any other way, he thinks, and yet. “...am learning, still, to see other things.”

The light in her eye twinkles out of step. He never wanted to show her those places. But when she opens her mouth, she answers an old prayer uttered in darkness.

“You’ve always looked like light,” she says quietly. “I wish you could see…”

He did see, he did see, he saw--

Her words choke off in a ripping, high-pitched sob.

“Oh, god, you’ve seen everything. You’ve seen--”

She closes her eyes against the wind rising in an angry bluff against her skin. He tries to step toward her but something else keeps him back -- some sense that she needs the space to find her way again.

“I killed him. I killed him and I wanted to do it, I…”

“Emma.”

“I’m dying,” she says. “That’s...that’s why it’s all been so…”

“No,” he says, as if words could hold back the world spinning on its axis -- but it had, once upon a time, when Markus had lifted his fist. “You’re safe here with me. In the…” He tries and fails to find the right word. “The science that made us possible.”

“Magic,” she whispers. He counts the stars across her cheeks again.

“Perhaps.”

“I did all that.”

“But so did I.” The words hit him in the chest like a 3 ton weight, but he steps forward and lets it sink in -- the weight of giving a shit. “I did, Emma. All the things you saw, and I didn’t do them for good reason.”

“I saw you,” she says. “I saw what you felt. I saw that...that even when you didn’t know, you...thought to ask the question, and--”

“You didn’t want to lose anything else,” he says, “so you fought back the only way you knew how. Pretending you had nothing to lose.”

She squeezes her eyes shut as tears run out. The wind picks up, ready to collect. He has never been very good at putting into words the faultlines of his thoughts. There is no time. Only the jump.

“You said once that loving me was like letting a part of your heart walk outside your body,” he says to her. “You remember?”

She nods, mouth grimacing against her grief and the storm curling inward toward them.

“But for me it is more like...you are my heart, everywhere you go.”

He is not sure if that makes sense, but when he touches her face again and she doesn’t flinch, he thinks it is the right track. He does feel it, the more he thinks about it -- that soft glow of truth stumbled upon in the course of investigation. She’s written into his code, now. Of course. And he’d let her settle there, if she wished.

“I don’t think deserving is part of the equation anymore,” he presses. “I think we just have to make a choice. To keep trying.”

The storm darkens.

“And I’ve made mine,” he says.

“Are you sure?” Her eyes finally open, afraid of something behind his shoulder -- obligation, duty, a mindless devotion to a concept of something.

“I’ve made it,” he repeats.

He lifts her hand up and presses his palm flat against hers before he peels back the skin of his hand to feel her warmth against his true self. She’s scarred from work and surgeries and time. He wants to taste the steel that made her.

The world around them begins to flatten and spin, starting far away but pressing closer and closer. She stares at him, caught between defiant and yearning, and she lingers in silence -- but then the first peal of thunder rolls and she jumps toward his chest, shaking.

The bridge is ending; they both know it. The storm rises to meet them, crashing like a cabinet of iron pans finally collapsing from the weight, and she digs her fingers into the front of his jacket until the fabric fills her fist.

“Hold on tight,” he says. “No matter what. Don't let go.”

He presses his forehead to hers, arms pulling her tight. She is silent against his plea, in his gathering of the pieces, until the storm roars like God and the world is little but a swirl of color. Their noses cross and suddenly one on her hands snakes around the back of his neck.

“I don’t let go of things,” she whispers against his mouth, “Even if it kills me, that won’t ever change.”

She presses her lips against his. She pushes in toward him and he pushes back, two particles entangled together across the universe. His fingers dig into her back.

“Don’t let me forget this,” she says, quiet and small.

They wait until the storm becomes them, and there’s nothing but color and light.

---

...brushing past, smiling tightly, holding aloft her coffee, holding herself together just long enough to find her post. They pass one another like motes in the wind and she knows --

---

She feels the sun again on her face, and the world seems so small beneath the hugeness of the blue sky. She doesn’t look back, but she knows who is finally there.

Listen, love. It’s okay.

We're only gone from here. But we aren’t gone from you.

Hank and Chase and Messi and Ryker and...she sees their eyes, even though they are far away, and she knows…

Here’s the real secret.

A whisper of a kiss on her temple.

When you truly love something...

When you set your heart free, Emmaline?

A love like that...it changes everything.

---

Connor flickers into consciousness.

“...Hank.”

“Connor! Connor, can you hear me?”

He nods, vague and tinny in some strange box...moving...

“Son, you’re gonna make it. Just hold on to me, okay? ...that’s right. Ah, don’t break my hand --”

“Emma...she’s dying, she…”

“She’s right there. They’re stabilizing her. See? Okay? Look at me.”

“I need to--”

“You don’t need to do shit except sit here with me. Alright? Your mission right now is staying alive, you got that?” The man lets out a shaky huff. Faith and disbelief realized, all at once. “Can you imagine what she’d say to you if you bled out in an ambulance?”

And Connor actually smiles a little at the concept, though it dies as soon as Hank’s sturdy hand brushes something on Connor’s forehead.

“...he tried to make me forget you,” Connor says, eyes welling so suddenly that he leans forward until his head connects with Hank’s chest and he shudders from relief more than anything else.

“I’ve got you. We’re gonna make it,” Hank rumbles, eyes wet and arms tight. “I’m here. We’re gonna make it just fine...”

#dbh fic #dbh connor #connor rk800 #dbh connor x oc #dbh connor x reader #connor x reader #connor x oc #detroit become human #the silver lining still remains #a garden in detroit #emma ibori #kathryn writes

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malmo777-blog · 8 years ago

Text

About Me

Haven’t done one of these since I was fourteen. It’s time.

1. What is your full name? Mallory Cook Fraser

2. What is your nickname? Malmo, but I try to get people to call me McFraser. No one does.

3. What is your zodiac sign? Libra. Fun fact- I’m attracted to Tauruses, always have been, apparently always will be.

4. What is your favorite book series? Obviously Harry Potter is dope as fuck but I read these Stephanie Perkins books and fell in love.

5. Do you believe in aliens or ghosts? No aliens, although something is out there that moves, it just isn’t gonna follow our earth definition of “life”. Ghosts- not typically. I believe in energy, and energy can possess things.

6. Who is your favorite author? I love Hemingway, Stephanie Perkins, and Sarah Dessen can be great if you’re in the mood. John Green is running out of steam at this point although he used to be on the list.

7. What is your favorite radio station? I love so many! Either 95.7 or 92.5 (both NH radio)

8. What is your favorite flavor of anything? Cherry

9. What word would you use often to describe something great or wonderful? Wicked or dooooooope.

10. What is your current favorite song? Today it was Cinderblock Garden. Lately, Undone (the sweater song)

11. What is your favorite word? Fuck.

12. What was the last song you listened to? Broadside- Coffee Talk

13. What TV show would you recommend for everybody to watch? Skins really is for everybody. Or HIMYM. Although Fairy Tail is my favorite, it’s not for everyone.

14. What is your favorite movie to watch when you’re feeling down? The Little Mermaid can always perk me up.

15. Do you play video games? Not much anymore. Used to play super nintendo. Good at racing games.

16. What is your biggest fear? Being financially unstable as an adult.

17. What is your best quality, in your opinion? I’m 100000% honest all the time. I say things exactly how I see them and never leave people guessing. I don’t like to play games and waste time.

18. What is your worst quality, in your opinion? On the flipside of that, I can’t keep my mouth shut. If something is bothering me, I wanna talk about it, even if it’s venting to another person. Which sometimes causes unwanted conflict. Not a huge deal, but I’m also super type B and I hate conflict.

19. Do you like cats or dogs better? Cats. Dogs are too in your face.

20. What is your favorite season? Springtime, spring-a-ling-a-ling time.

21. Are you in a relationship? I’m in lots of relationships, just none are romantic.

22. What is something you miss from your childhood? It was so inexpensive to be a kid.

23. Who is your best friend? Not sure if he knows it, but totally my bud Dillon. He is my mind. We don’t even have to talk to understand what’s going on.

24. What is your eye color? Blue

25. What is your hair color? Golden blonde.

26. Who is someone you love? My daddy.

27. Who is someone you trust? My best friend.

28. Who is someone you think about often? Alex Gaskarth

29. Are you currently excited about/for something? End of the semester! Woooo! And I just barely got sick the day after it closed, which is good. I get sick every year around this time, it just usually falls on midterms week, not right after. So I’m happy I missed it.

30. What is your biggest obsession? My book series.

31. What was your favorite TV show as a child? Roccos Modern Life

32. Who of the opposite gender can you tell anything to, if anyone? Obviously my best friend.

33. Are you superstitious? Only after one of my exes passed away. Since he did, things are freaky sometimes. But never scary. It’s always good energy.

34. Do you have any unusual phobias? Elevators. Potatoes. Mold.

35. Do you prefer to be in front of the camera or behind it? In front.

36. What is your favorite hobby? Writing!

37. What was the last book you read? This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen. Finished it two days ago.

38. What was the last movie you watched? Road Trip. I love raunchy comedies.

39. What musical instruments do you play, if any? Bass clarinet, clarinet, guitar, a lil piano, a lil sax, and vox.

40. What is your favorite animal? Loke ;)

41. What are your top 5 favorite Tumblr blogs that you follow? Oooo haven’t been on here enough to decide.

42. What superpower do you wish you had? Ability to call spirits and bond with them.

43. When and where do you feel most at peace? Lying in bed right before sleep, listening to tunes.

44. What makes you smile? Going to work.

45. What sports do you play, if any? Marching band.

46. What is your favorite drink? There’s this orange mango peach shit from market basket that’s phenomenal. Oh, alcoholic? Ahh, umm, Smirnoff ice?

47. When was the last time you wrote a hand-written letter or note to somebody? Christmas. Cards, you know.

48. Are you afraid of heights? Used to not be but now? Abso-fuckin-lutley.

49. What is your biggest pet peeve? Mixed silverware in the dishwasher.

50. Have you ever been to a concert? Try 12.

51. Are you vegan/vegetarian? I am vegan, but not super duper strict raw vegan or that shit. Just nothing where the ingredients state meat, eggs, or milk.

52. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? An actress or a pop star.

53. What fictional world would you like to live in? Fiore

54. What is something you worry about? Money, clearly.

55. Are you scared of the dark? No. I’ve been living in the woods long enough to be used to it.

56. Do you like to sing? FUCK YES

57. Have you ever skipped school? One time I said I was sick so I could stay home and write Harry Potter fan fiction.

58. What is your favorite place on the planet? Fells Point, Baltimore

59. Where would you like to live? Baltimore

60. Do you have any pets? Not anymore

61. Are you more of an early bird or a night owl? Early bird!

62. Do you like sunrises or sunsets better? Sunrises. The signal a new chance.

63. Do you know how to drive? Very well actually.

64. Do you prefer earbuds or headphones? Headphones!

65. Have you ever had braces? Nope.

66. What is your favorite genre of music? Pop punk, 2007-2008 era

67. Who is your hero? My daddy.

68. Do you read comic books? Only Deadpool

69. What makes you the most angry? When TOP fans come into my store aND FUCKING TEAR APART THE T SHIRT WALL AHH GO BACK TO HELL YOU ANGSTY LITTLE SHITS!

70. Do you prefer to read on an electronic device or with a real book? Real books. The creak of the pages, the smell. All part of the experience.

71. What is your favorite subject in school? History!

72. Do you have any siblings? Four older ones. Two and two, each gender.

73. What was the last thing you bought? A new air freshener for my car. Wait, no, groceries. Some of that juice I was talking about before.

74. How tall are you? Five foot nuthin’.

75. Can you cook? Apparently I can grill, I’ve been told. I think I make BOMB pasta.

76. What are three things that you love? 1. Blink 182 2. Chipotle 3. My dad

77. What are three things that you hate? 1. Pessimists 2. The word “hate” 3. Unneccessary negativity (kinda like this question)

78. Do you have more female friends or more male friends? A really good mix. My anime crew is all boys, my music friends are boys, my coworkers AKA besties are all girls, and my school friends are girls.

79. What is your sexual orientation? Straight.

80. Where do you currently live? Washington, NH

81. Who was the last person you texted? My girl Colby

82. When was the last time you cried? About twenty minutes ago, watching Fairy Tail

83. Who is your favorite YouTuber? I don’t watch a lot of youtubers but the one I enjoy the most is Shane.

84. Do you like to take selfies? No. But on occassion I will, just so I can do better personal branding.

85. What is your favorite app? I use wattpad more than anything.

86. What is your relationship with your parent(s) like? With my mom? Deceptive, negative, she always needs something for nothing. With my dad, amazing. He’s my best friend, sole provider, everything. If he wasn’t my dad he’d still be my bestie because we just get each other.

87. What is your favorite foreign accent? My phillipino friend Cam is phillipino, sounds mexican, and my mock accent is indian. Fuckin hilarious.

88. What is a place that you’ve never been to, but you want to visit? San Diego, west coast pop punk capital.

89. What is your favorite number? 7, but 77 in sports.

90. Can you juggle? No

91. Are you religious? I love all religion and the concept but do not identify with any one.

92. Do you find outer space of the deep ocean to be more interesting? Space fucks me up. Ocean for sure.

93. Do you consider yourself to be a daredevil? No. I may be a Gryffindor for the things I love but I am waaaaay too type b to take unneeded risk.

94. Are you allergic to anything? Nope. But caffine reacts really badly with my body.

95. Can you curl your tongue? Yup

96. Can you wiggle your ears? Nope

97. How often do you admit that you were wrong about something? Often

98. Do you prefer the forest or the beach? Beach. I can go to the forest any time; I’m bored of it.

99. What is your favorite piece of advice that anyone has ever given you? Just as a flower does not get to choose where it blooms, a child cannot choose their parents. It stuck with me, that my character doesn’t at all need to be attached to them. That I get to be my own person.

100. Are you a good liar? No fuckin way.

101. What is your Hogwarts House? Gryffindor!

102. Do you talk to yourself? All the time, only in the car.

103. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Extrovert. Being surrounded by people makes me feel less lonely.

104. Do you keep a journal/diary? I keep an everyday question journal.

105. Do you believe in second chances? Only after apologies. No sorry, no chance.

106. If you found a wallet full of money on the ground, what would you do? Depends on the money. Ten bucks? I’ll call that my payment for the hassle of turning it in. Lots? Nah. If I turn it in with that much, they’ll probs be grateful and gimmie some.

107. Do you believe that people are capable of change? Absolutely. Everyone changes all the time.

108. Are you ticklish? If I say yes you’ll know my weakness. If I say no I’m a liar.

109. Have you ever been on a plane? Yup. Like three times? Not sure.

110. Do you have any piercings? Belly button!

111. What fictional character do you wish was real? Wooderson

112. Do you have any tattoos? Not yet. A few more months.

113. What is the best decision that you’ve made in your life so far? Moving out and quitting Shaws. I followed my dreams all the way to Hot Topic.

114. Do you believe in karma? Not really. Coincidences are funny, but good people hardly ever get good karma, it’s usually only ever bad for bad people. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

115. Do you wear glasses or contacts? No.

116. Do you want children? Four!

117. Who is the smartest person you know? My best friend.

118. What is your most embarrassing memory? Tripping while hiking with my crush. My only recent moment.

119. Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? Twice!

120. What color are most of you clothes? Maroon or green. Can’t decide.

121. Do you like adventures? Love*

122. Have you ever been on TV? Nope

123. How old are you? Seventeen without a purpose or direction.

124. What is your favorite quote? “I just wanna fuck this burrito!” - Jack Barakat

125. Do you prefer sweet or savory foods? Totally depends on the mood.

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