SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

five ━ not alive, not dead

Her feet acted on their own and within moments she was knelt over an old and stained in layers mattress, hands shivering in a hover just centimeters above his face.

"Connor?" Her voice trembled in the night air, carried by wind into a lament waiting to happen.

Mia gave in to the heartbreak and let her hands actually touch his synthetic skin. Her thumbs rubbed into his cheeks, brushed back through his hair and she called his name again. "Wake up, Connor. Please."

She hadn't realized she was crying until she heard herself. It was as if her awareness of her senses had left her until that point of realization, because immediately after it, she felt a salty taste on her tongue from all the tears she had already shed since reaching him. There was also a damp feeling on her fingertips. She removed her right hand from his hair and stared in horror at the Thirium stain she now had on it.

The more rational side of her guessed he had sustained damage to his processing unit, while her emotional side, the human one which was burdened to take the reigns, cried out internally what would turn into a chant dancing around her thoughts — Who could ever do this?

"Connor," she dropped her hand defeated onto his chest, trailed it down an inch only to follow it with her gaze and work up the courage to see all his wounds. Who could ever do this? What she stared at was the product of a clear lack of humanity.

She's never been fully satisfied with her choices, with her decisions in life or with the certain trajectory she took at some points in her past, but she had never wished more than in that moment, when her hand held his and she tugged on him without a single reaction other than the heaviness of a clear absence, to turn back time and return to the safety of their lab at the tower, where nothing bad could have ever happened.

"I'm sorry," she whispered at last, her shoulders dropping. Mia tugged again, only this time she reached down and pulled Connor closer, hugged him to her chest. His head dropped heavily on her shoulder while she wrapped her arms around him. "I got you. Don't worry. I'm here." She squeezed one last time on his unmoving, destroyed body before pulling together all her strength for what was to come: she had to bring him home.

If running there had been challenging on her endurance, then the mere thought of walking home while carrying the lifeless carcass of Connor felt impossible. She couldn't remember if she begged for the help of the old man in whose junkyard she had lost a good chunk of her heart to pain alone, or if he had offered out of some confused pity to give her a lift since he was closing down the place and heading home himself. All she knew was that she sat in the back of that man's pick-up truck, with Connor's head still on her shoulder and by the time she started blinking again, she was sat on her lab chair in her half wrecked living room, with the silence of the house deafening her. Her ears were ringing then, when she realized she had Connor laid down on the outstretched surgical table, all cables connected to him. Her hands were shaking.

His memory had to be uploaded on the external drive manually since he couldn't be restarted — she tried everything, and the stains of Thirium going up to her elbows proved that —, an otherwise lengthy process which she had to sit through before finding out just how much had been lost due to the damage and the delay of getting him back.

There was a chance that they had lost everything. That the project was over. That he will not remember her. And that chance... It ruined Mia.

Somewhere in the house, a clock was trying to mock her that even with all the curtains pulled, the sun was still going to be rising over the horizon soon. Her ignorance of it won't shame the time into stopping on her sake.