SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-five ━ point of no return

"Anything interesting?" Connor whispered close to Mia's ear, over the continuing rant of the radio host.

Even with her volume down as low as it was, Mia was startled to flinching by suddenly having company on her secluded spot on the pew. The shock did not last all that long though given the nature of her company and just how little she had had to get used to seeing Connor wearing anything else other than the same neat costume he's had since she's first met him. There was not a single android identifier in sight and without them, he looked more human than ever. His LED was still somewhere beneath the knitted hat he wore, as he had refused her on removing it for him, but other than that, he wore nothing that could distinguish him from a human, which was perhaps exactly the intention of his model's designers.

Alas, to avoid having his slowly growing smile turn into a tease or any out loud observation of her staring for that matter, Mia pulled on the radio's wire and removed both earplugs at the same time. "Good news is that you are not a public suspect for the blackout," she sighed out a whisper only for the two of them to hear.

"And bad news?" Connor probed, not willing to take an early victory too soon.

After a short moment of consideration that Mia filled with turning the radio off and neatly wrapping the wire around it, she looked up at him, "Bad news is that I cannot pitch the idea of having the RK800 be hired into the Secret Services right now, because our test of your undercover mission protocols was unauthorized."

"And illegal," he agreed, however not entirely immune to her well hidden praise. Humans had many ways of showing the way words affected them, but most androids were restricted in their range of physically visible signs of emotion. For Connor, with his LED now covered, the most he could do to give away the fact that he appreciated having his work acknowledged by her without outright saying it was smile, which already rested comfortably on his face now despite the night he's had, one he was already looking forward to leaving behind. The less he thought about how he had broken the law, the better.

"I'd like to think what we are doing is a small price to pay for making a case to prosecute Elijah and reveal a drug smuggling route that spreads Red Ice across our borders," Mia shrugged, finally looking ahead. Connor followed her example, allowing himself to realize he's never actually been inside a church before. "It's unfortunate that we have to use the smuggling route ourselves, but..."

"There is no other way," he continued the statement for her, knowing by now too well the line they've used to justify agreeing on this plan to begin with. It was a truth, albeit an uncomfortable truth. There were no compiled scenarios that would have turned successful other than the one they were now executing of simply playing along the role of drug smugglers. Now, thanks to last night's incursion into the precinct, they had just about enough product to hopefully buy themselves a way onto the freighter leaving the docks in less than twenty-four hours.

Currently being ahead of the schedule had however made Connor more content with leaning into his curiosity for a moment and properly look around the church, first at the rows of seats, still empty so early in the morning. "Humans come here to... pray," he noted out loud, keeping his tone relatively quiet.

"Correct," Mia approved his statement.

"Did you pray?" Connor returned his gaze to her, momentarily stunned by his own audacity to have cared more about some old wooden benches than about the visual effect of sunlight coming through stained glass and dropping patches of bright color across Mia's skin and across her hair. Right under his carefully watching eyes, he witnessed one of those visible means by which humans expressed emotions physically: her flustering over his rather blunt questions resulted in a temperature rise on the mounds of her cheeks — she was blushing, ever so slightly.