The Partners (Connor x Reader)

Chapter 1: Ann Arbor

As the bus turned down yet another road, you tightened your grip on the bus pole to steady yourself. The few other people sitting on the bus swamp the cab with muddied silence. The seats and windows shake with every small bump in the ragged pavement, jostling the passengers back and forth. As the world slides by the window, there are small movements from amongst the passengers. Someone shifts in their seat, there's a little cough and a mild 'bless you'.

You closed your eyes, wishing to soak up the silence as much as you could before having to head into work. It had been two years since you had began working at Ann Arbor's police department, but yet you still found yourself struggling to adjust to your work environment at times. Despite waking up early throughout your high school years and your coffee-fueled 6 AM mornings in college, you still dreaded hearing your alarm clock go off each morning. If there was one thing to enjoy about your daily commute to work, it was the scenery of the city you lived in. Historical buildings, beautiful plants, blue skies- all rushing by in a colorful blur outside of the bus windows. It almost made up for the subpar public transportation.

Your eyes trailed to the back of the bus to the android compartment, where two androids were standing idly by, still as statues. Almost.

You couldn't help but feel uncomfortable around androids- and you had about a million reasons to back your feelings up. Perhaps the most prominent reasons was the fact that they were so life-like. Androids looked and spoke like humans. It was like witnessing slavery and segregation in the 21st century; androids that functioned as women, men, and children all being forced to work against their will, unable to use the same facilities of humans. Even on this bus you were unable to escape it, the glass divider between you and the androids being a reminder of what society had come to.

The androids' eyes showed signs of vacancy, their face, desolate of a single wrinkle that would indicate their feelings. You had thought all androids were like this: emotionless things- robots- that were built to serve humans. Make life easier. After becoming a detective, however, you had quickly learned that that wasn't always the case.

It was one of your earlier homicide cases. You had received a call about a murder in Ann Arbor, a husband, found dead while his wife was missing. You had initially expected to discover that the wife was involved with the murder. Maybe she killed her husband to run away with another man. Maybe she killed him because he was abusive. But when you finally tracked down the wife, she appeared to be just as surprised at the news as you. The wife had claimed to have left the husband awhile back as he left his job. They hadn't been living together for over a month.

That's when you learned of his android. Or, more so, the wife had asked about the fate of their AX400 android- which you hadn't even been aware of. Returning to the house a second time for more investigating was challenging as new tenants had moved into the house. All of the evidence was practically gone, but after some searching, you were able to find the android- who had yet to leave the house after all that time. She had been hiding underneath the staircase in the basement, sitting in the dark silence for weeks before being discovered. Her white suit was littered with dried blood, while her LED flashed an unnerving crimson red.

It was from that moment your "simple" homicide case became so much more. A tale of a man assaulting his own android. Physically abusing it. Sexually abusing it. His wife left because of his behavior, which drove the man to abuse his android even more. To make it fill the hole the wife had made in her departure. To become human- to become his new wife. The poor android couldn't take it anymore, she just snapped. And you were left there to clean up the mess. To send her to Cyberlife to be deactivated.

It was the first case you had solved that involved a deviant android, and it certainly was not your last. Throughout the next two years, you had solved three different homicides that were caused by deviant androids. This year in particular, the number of cases seemed to be occurring more frequently. Nothing compared to the nearby city of Detroit's staggering number of deviant cases, or so you heard, but it was still a significant amount of cases. Each deviant case made you more unsure than the last. Nearly every case you solved involved the androids being abused by a human before retaliating and defending themselves. The deviants were always so life like. They'd show fear, they'd cry- if it weren't for the color of their blood and the LEDs on their temples, you wouldn't be able to distinguish them from a real human.