"A process or a set of operations that occur in a specific order, one after the other - sequential." 'She also called it a funny word,' Connor thought to himself after his explanation had drawn silence over the officers before him, but omitted speak...
"I scared you," Connor worded out a little clearer now, managing however to say something that confused Mia enough to let her expression show it too. Taking full advantage of her momentary stun, he continued, "I don't regret what I have done, Mia. I didn't back when I disobeyed my programming the first time. It didn't even cross my mind when I made my way out of the CyberLife Tower to get back to you, and if I had to make a choice, I know I would do what I did today again and change nothing, because it kept you safe. That's the problem. I don't feel anything about killing these people, I am only scared that you see me different noe. That you'll be afraid of me as of any deviant out there and I can't even blame you for it. Someone alive wouldn't just kill and feel nothing at all after all, right?"
Deviant. Afraid. Mia's brows furrowed down as she struggled to assimilate everything he told her just then, unbeknownst that Connor was watching her expression and read just about enough into the lack of immediate answer to want to stand up immediately, even at the cost of moving his hand away from her and from her calming pulse.
"Connor," Mia called after him, much slower however in raising from her knees. "I could never be afraid of you," she admitted with the tone of a plea to the one thing that had scared her too — the new limits of love.
"Maybe you should be," he answered far colder than he had meant to. There was much on his mind yet to be processed and lifted off the load slowing down his unit's efficiency, much that he couldn't even bring up in what little had told Mia. But in order to begin making sense to her, he had to make sense to himself, and he only knew how to do that while cooling off in silence, going through everything that happened and discovering exactly what had paralyzed him.
Finding some solitude in dragging all bodies back to the cantina and covering them up, gave him plenty of hours to play back through his recorded memories and identify that the it was fear that froze him at the end. Not necessarily a fear of being similar to a deviant and thus scaring Mia, but rather one that he had experienced many times before and dismissed — a fear of losing her.
Without her, he was nothing but a faulty prototype with too many failed missions to count. He was certain then, that by all means of definition, without her, he would die.
And something told him, after all those hours of looking back, Mia knew all about this fear and how rapidly and drastically it changes every parameter and limit.
He cursed the difficulty and complexity of human emotions and that, in order to figure out what he felt and experienced, he had had to push her away for the reminder of their journey on a now empty freighter, driving itself to docks. There was some irony to it though that once the dawn brightened by a single nuance the sky and the foggy horizon, they found themselves together on a boat, slowly approaching Greenland, in order to take full advantage of the distraction of a massive ship heading for the docks unnanounced and the natural occurance of fog hiding their presence, yet he couldn't bring himself to break the silence he very much disliked being there in the first place.
There was some space between them that felt like an ocean of its own, and though he had tried to look down at his gun and even concentrate on the only sound there, that of the engine keeping them moving straight, nothing managed to take his mind off the wall of quietness building up pressure between them. Though he knew he had to say something, anything at all, Connor had little luck in finding the right words.
Nothing in the English vocabulary felt sufficient to express his gratitude for her help, as well as his apologies for his recent instability. Nothing seemed worthy to hold the meaning of his vows to protect her, to speak out the acknowledgment that he will not ever be able to hesitate when her safety was on the line. He wanted her to know that he discovered he'd rather die than lose her, but no language was fitted for this sort of confession, so perhaps, he eventually thought, words are not the way to go.
The material of his winter jacket shifted first, alerting Mia of movement in time to see Connor tuck away the pistol he has been staring down at since they left the freighter. She hadn't a clue what he's been doing since they talked in that hallway, but she didn't want to ask. Sometimes, people needed time to think. Though she's gotten used to knowing everything that moves inside his processing unit, she'd be a hypocrite to acknowledge him as alive and not also become aware that as much as she would like to know everything, she had to give hid privacy and his right to only tell her as much as he trusts her with.
The waiting was killing her, which is why she greeted his movement with a hopeful raise of her eyebrows. Connor looked at her and from the sight of his eyes alone she could see he wanted to apologize again.
Right as she was about to break the silence herself and object out loud that she truly wasn't capable of being scared of him, much as she wouldn't be able to be angry with him either, Connor closed the space between them by pulling her into an embrace.
While he couldn't find the right words, he knew he had the right means of showing everything from gratitude to remorse, from 'I'm the luckiest android on this earth to have met you' to 'I often feel so flawed I think myself undeserving of your love'. Each feeling translated into a desperate clinging, a digging of his thumbs into the material of her jacket and a synchronization through closeness between her heart and synthetic imitation of it.
Only once her own arms wrapped around him did Connor know it was alright not to speak, that she understood all he did on that ship, he did thinking of protecting her. We'll be alright, he thought, watching from the embrace as snowflakes trapped themsleves in her hair, spots of white over auburn red. We'll be just fine. Just us. We have to be.
• • •
AUTHOR'S NOTE | Pretty much jinxed it last chapter when I said this one would be a breeze to write. Ended up re-writing and deleting and re-writing again, up to the point that I just hit a motivational slump and had to rely on playing the game again with a friend to refresh my inspiration to keep going on this story. Truth is, I knew I had to finish this chapter today, to commit to one final edit and just post this, because had I delayed it any longer, we'd be stuck here forever, with me second guessing every single thing I wrote.
Thank you so much for your patience waiting on this chapter, and please, get ready, next chapter will end in the first and final choice that you can make and will branch out into two endings for this book.
Oh, and here's a small edit I made while fighting the white hairs this chapter grew on me:
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I went all out to make this as high fidelity as I could to the scene itself and I am kinda proud of it ngl. This whole chapter was a bit heavy on them coming to terms with the fact that their love truly knows no bounds and that means it will make them do some horrible things and they are no longer ashamed by it.
