The Nasty Zone

[undeviated]

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For standsby;

[diplomats]

’Markus, I want to be here.’

—I want—

It was the first time he’d ever heard Simon say those words. Not what we should do, not what we want, or where we go. I want to be here. At the time, it was— small. Quick words spoken quietly, hurriedly as Simon’s diagnostic timer ticked down towards a hardlined reset. Markus had reached for him in that moment, trying to steady him so soundly that he’d missed the importance of it.

The subtlety of that confession.

Weeks later, he finds himself revisiting it often. Watching the way Simon's attention would flicker each time he suspected he wasn't being observed, or the barely perceptible stutter of the dimmed LED at his temple: yellow— red— yellow, yellow— blue. Simon blinked too quickly, too frequently for the patterns his model was designed to maintain. Curled the edges of his fingertips as though protecting himself— or trapping something in. And maybe all deviants were guilty of that: Markus stood taller now, smiled less, squaring his jaw with tension at the weight of his responsibilities whenever they (near-constantly) surfaced, but if Markus had learned anything from his experiences with Carl it's that all those changes were his to make. He could have left Jericho, slid under the radar before the world knew his name. Gone home. He could have gone home.

Simon sleeps in cathemeral rhythms. More than any of the other androids in Jericho, even well after they’ve stepped out into the light (as long as Simon's presence isn't strictly needed). Even after the completion of his extensive repairs, it’s easy to find him resting, eyes shut, chin tilted down towards his chest. Dead to the world aside from rudimentary sensory functions.

Functions like touch. Like audio input. And that's a choice, too, Markus thinks, as he watches Simon's eyelids drift dreamily shut from over the curve of his shoulder, perched with one leg tucked up across a recently acquired Cyberlife crate, half a room of distance put between them. He doubts Simon knows he's there. Doubts he noticed that Markus had shadowed his footsteps, or that he's aware of it when Markus shifts forward up onto his feet— closing the distance between them.

It's slow and deliberate, the way that Markus stops behind him. The way he reaches down, bright eyes lidded, to slip the back of his hand into the curve of Simon's palm, threading their fingertips together.

[standsby]

There's a hum he can only hear when he's in rest mode. It's the low murmur of an aging processor unit, audible only when so many of his other functions that might otherwise overwrite whatever machine attentiveness is required to be aware of it are placed on hold. It's a good sound. He'd decided that a long time ago. There is a comfort to stripping back the parts of him that are made to emulate something else, to slide into the present tense of machine parts. It's like a lullaby for a child, Simon might think if un those moments he thought much of anything at all. But he doesn't and that's as gentling as the low, persistent whirr of his core hardware.

Hum. Time passes in strange loops down here as he's turned off from the rest of the world, the rest of the resistance, the other androids. Maybe it's been ten minutes or two hours, a strange reflection of that dead space time between reactivations. And the only time he feels guilty about it—

—(lots has happened since he was with them last; Josh is destroyed and Detroit has changed so radically and Markus knows what should be done better than anyone and if someone needs him then they'll find him and)—

—is when he comes to with Markus's fingers laced in his, the manufactured warmth of his knuckles against the palm of his hand. Simon stirs. His LED blinks blue— yellow, yellow— red— yellow, yellow, yellow— and he doesnt untangle their fingers, but the lines of his hand shift like he might. Blinking, Simon straightens the line of his shoulder. Turns slightly. It's gone quiet and still in this storeroom in their new base of operations. The crates he was helping to stow have all been put away and the recovery team has drifted off.

"Did I miss something?"

[diplomats]

Simon doesn’t pull away.

Maybe in a second he will. Maybe, the moment his dated sensor maps update their readings, he’ll recognize the full weight of Markus’s hand pressed heavily across the underside of his own, as expectant in its demand for attention as the machine attached to it. Returning to consciousness, even for androids, is a process of fractional momentum, and there's palpable tension woven down into the way Simon's joints reactively stiffen in Markus's grasp.

"Like this, you miss everything."

When Markus had died, it was like waking up. He— felt. Not just in lines or statistical, networked pressure, but the soft patter of rain on his skin was numbing in its intensity, the city lights he'd crawled towards were blinding; his perception of the world was brighter, bolder, alive in ways he couldn’t describe. Simon, back from the dead, seems brittle enough that the tide could carry him out. Like old bones in old paintings, waiting for the earth to rise up and reclaim him. For something mechanical and whirring to just eventually

stop.

Somewhere nearby, there's the audible clatter of inventory being shuttled by inhuman hands, dull and drumming and constant.

"The world is changing," Markus adds, letting his profile drift into view as he shifts his weight forward onto his toes, soaking up more of the room with his posture— chasing whatever undreaming part of Simon he's found. He breathes out steady on an automated rhythm. Dips his chin lower. Minuscule movements, careful in their intent but too sincere to be strictly gentle.

The line of his forearm rises, synthetic nanoskin peeling back in matching patterns across their contoured casings. It’s the only visible warning that precedes it: the connection he then works to coax between them. Letting warmth pool in the divets between paneled joints.

"You don’t have to hide anymore."

[standsby]

There's a languid quality to resurfacing through long lists of inconsequential system data and the murmur of his own whirring internal components. A beat where he has one foot in the store room and another in the place that's all code and network lines instead of concrete physicality and maybe that's why there's a series of inestimable split seconds where he doesn't pull his hand away and he tips his face farther toward the rhythmic sound of Markus's breathing, and answers that strange sparking connective end with something like give. Heat sinks into his seams and what leaks out into Markus's waiting fingertips is a comfortable mechanical whirr, a steadily scrolling field of diagnostic reports, looping visual synthesized memory of Simon's own hand against a rusted panel of Jericho's bulkhead and his fingers spreading—

Bang. A crate being dropped hard on the ground. He jumps; the easy looping quality of the transferring data goes jagged, flashes red hot and mortified, and he jerks his hand away.

"That's not true. I register environmental changrs in standby mode. It's part of the--" He hums, touches his fingers to his brow. Ignores the shadow Markus casts over his shoulder. "--of my model's programming. In case someone needs something."

He touches his collar. Straightens further. Twists a little sharper so he can look at Markus instead of just registering him in his peripheral vision. "Do you? Need something, I mean."

Hiding has nothing to do with it. He files that one away and ignores it.

[diplomats]

Bang—

Connection severed in an instant: jagged red cleaving through the both of them, fracturing focal points and the deep thrum of building synthesis. (Hands that swiftly rise, straightening his collar. Press themselves to his brow. Hands that fit themselves anywhere but Markus's open grasp.) His features realign. He separates himself from data, from the faded edges of a half-gleaned memory, glancing up from beneath the sharp edges of his browline.

"It's been weeks, Simon."

Is that a reason? Not really. Is it fair? Probably not. But Markus can’t let it go. He fixates, he always has, and he sat by and watched as Simon strained to find him in the dark— as he reset and reset and reset in mechanical rhythms until the only thing left was a pale-eyed ghost adhered to quiet spaces. It isn’t death, no. It also isn’t (to Markus’s mind) so different from hanging listlessly in an evidence locker.

This isn’t what they’d fought for (maybe it is, maybe that’s a decision every deviant is owed, but Simon isn't striving). Breathing but he isn’t beating with the thrum of his automated pulse. Markus can’t understand.

He moves for Simon’s hand again, the one still angled against his temple, this time without pretense.

“Show me why.”

Why he does this. Why he leaves himself to sink into the cracks of Jericho’s foundation. The android that gave everything for his people when Jericho was only huddled, broken bodies waiting out the finality of their absolution.

Their leader.

[standsby]

He should tell him no. Or he should tell him Not here or Not right now. Or he should tell him that it isnt important because it isn't. It doesn't matter to Jericho where he goes or why he does it, not as long as he's there when they need him to be (and he is; he's never done anything less than that, has he?). Him and Markus - they're not the same. Pretending they are by way of the murmuring feedback of his fingertips and that comforting hum of connection doesn't make it true.

But it feels like it could, doesn't it? That's what makes Markus special, Simon thinks. Because you want to be like him and he makes you believe you can be.

Simon makes a small, soft sound that is maybe frustration as much as it is anything else. He glances across the length of the room, notes the other androids working to rearrange the stock, but doesn't move his hand away or try to evade Markus's touch. He's embarrassed by it, he thinks, and maybe that's what first pours through the connection as Markus touches him. A real, quiet mortification for wanting things like the security of safety or the satisfaction of draping a blanket over Josh in stand by or the white hot wire exhilaration of the Stratford Tower and doing something there or Markus touching him or Markus or-- and all of it melting down into a distant, inconsequential blip of data in the hum of rest mode. Down in the machine pieces of him, the shape of the world becomes simple. Decisions revert to a series of flowcharts and subroutines. There's a clarity there that reads like a familiar story - like an earlier version of reality. Like doing things because he was programmed to do them and didn't know he knew better. A girl shakily paints his fingernails, holographic glitter suspended in clear polish. She tries very hard to not get it on his skin. The coats don't dry fully between application which leaves the texture lumpy and uneven. "It looks bad," she says. "I like it," he promises her because he should.

("What's that you have all over your hands, Simon? Christ, that girl-- Jessie look at what I have to do now. Next time pick up after yourself," says the woman who insists on rubbing the polish off later.)

[diplomats]

He doesn’t pull away from the vividness of it, though he knows he could. They’re parallels in a way: machines designed as caretakers, as friends— maybe more, though human affection was always a hard compass needle to predict. What one individual wanted, another would contradict. They had to be versatile. Open.

But Carl was straightforward in so many ways. One man, one life-shattering incident, one gradually balanced recovery: he'd stopped painting, and that isolated figure, frail and agitated in a house that seemed to swallow him whole, was one of the first memories Markus has stored away in his archives. The worst contender to an increasingly comfortable life was always Leo, and it wasn’t as though he lived there. He came. He left. He struck out or struck— hard— when the house was empty aside from the two of them.

Simon was different. Small hands, warm hands. Loving in the care they show, if not— clumsy. He’d never felt that before. It’s

—very different.

Markus turns his wrist, pulling those fingers closer, tying off that tether where it burns brightest. Firm. Careful. So careful, because Simon was always resilient until he wasn't. Under the pressure of gunfire or the glare of a palmed flashlight or his own internal processes, it's easy to picture him collapsing again. Closer now, just above the steady rhythm of his regulator, blinking hard against a sustained feedback loop that strains to filter out isolated awareness.

He thinks he remembers her.

For our dumb political Thrawn/Hera AU

[phoenixleader]

x || x || x || x

markus

[shri]

x | x | x | x | x | x
"Ours is not a caravan of despair."
Her hand was warm on his when she found it underneath the blankets.

The light crept in through cracks of the hotel room in the worst end of the city, where she put cash on the table and no one asked questions. It wasn't much of a night away. But it was something, between all the blood, the fighting, the misery. It was something to have and to look at nothing else, and for a heart, as old as hers, stuck in her chest despite sure it should have left years ago - it was a balm to ribs aching with the effort of holding it in.

Anchorage was not always a weight in the depths. It was how even in their sleep-fogged state, his fingers weaved between hers. It was how he could coax that ugly bit out of her mouth when she was sure her teeth had become as sharp as a lycans. That as she looked, vision soft with early morning light, eyes have open, her bare chest against his - that she found the map of a land long forgotten. If peace were to be a place, it would be here - when her head tilted down to kiss his heart beat.

Awake but only barely, enough to forgive herself these things where when daylight had a poor habit of searing and darkness the addiction of drowning. This half state, a boat with no shore, could not be beholden to either's laws and misgivings. Draping their knitted together hands to push them up and back as she pulls herself up his chest. Humming softly as she presses his hand back into the bed, settling her face into the crook of his neck, her body pressing tightly into his side, legs tangled together. Their connection hands to the angle means her arm stays draped over his chest.

"You should tell me what works you have been reading." Then laughs for the impractical silliness of it all. She never bothers, in herself, she cannot abide that sort of sentimentally, but in him, she adores such the same thing.

[diplomats]

"Not enough," is the response. So fluid and thoughtless that he can't help but work up the edge of a tired smile.

There's no time for it. There's no time for this, really, but humans sleep in predictable rhythms, and for the most part the world sleeps with them: his mind— riding the line between automated physiology and human patterns of thought— estimates loosely that they'll have at the very least one full hour left to lay in secluded silence before Jericho needs them again.

The room is too small. Not for them, only for what they share within it: affection shouldn't be confined to places that reek of cigarette smoke and stale bedding. She shouldn't be confined to a space like this, and part of him (the part that had spent years surrounded by fine print and artistic expression) thinks he shouldn't be, either. He wants more for them.

He wants more for his people.

That said, with her draped heavy and warm across him, sensation focused to finite points that his system processes with deep familiarity, he supposes he can wait a little while longer.

"I was thinking about stealing some of Giovanni Boccaccio's later works, next chance I get." He sets his fingertips low across her spine, synthetic skin smooth and cool and uniquely soft— a lack of fingerprints combined with no methods to reproduce calloused roughness. "Those portable readers aren't all that difficult to hack into, and classic literature was always my weakness."

[shri]

His hands, like his words, are always softer than she deserves. Silk, to her rough linen. But like fine threads, it pulls her like puppet strings. Arching her back to press into his touch, her upper body curving between his chest and his hand. He is always cool, always regulated, (save where she forbids it with teeth and exact pressure, her hands that grip his body like she grips weapons - dear and commanding) to hers, all daughter of deserts and dry summers, that ran so much hotter sometimes.

She kisses his chest, open mouthed and giving if he wanted to ask. Voice deep, soft, laughing because when there is no one else, she let's herself. Because he might be the only living being that she felt she could let that sound work it's way out of the cage of ribs it usually slept on. "It would seem so. Is it longing or God you want to know of?"

[diplomats]

"I don't need a human god, and believe me, I've had enough longing to last a lifetime."

Riots and outrage, petitions and pleas: all of it stems from a cycle of momentum that he can't push aside— from hunger, to simplify it. Whether he takes his ideals with a clenched fist, or asks with hands outstretched, that factor never changes.

Still, here, his eyes drift lazily shut under the coaxing press of her lips, breathing patterns slow and steady and deep. Sparks turned to embers, sleeping and buried low where he traces out circles in the hollows of corded muscle. Organic, warm in a way that automated systems always fail to accurately capture. The subtleties of subcutaneous, diffused heat.

"Perspective, though," He exhales, tipping his jaw as a contrast to the rising angle of his spine, "that never hurts."

He's had years to learn how to be human. He's had lexicons comprised of art and poetry and life. He has her, and soft moments shared in shadowed corners, the scent of stale smoke clinging to faded wallpaper.

Sometimes he wishes there was a reverse for that.

FUCKING HELL WHAT DID I WRITE

[bodyguards]

The way he's come to understand it: it's all cause-and-effect.

Something happens, and something happens as a result of it. Something fails to happen, and it changes the shape and intensity of the inevitable rippling of fate. The only thing they have, in the end, to set them apart from one another, is the choices that they make. That, regardless of origin or intent, what they have is choice. Josh chooses quiet intensity, a heart full of pacifism regardless of the way Simon had found him hidden under battered cardboard from collegiate-level students' unpacking with a face full of bruises -- sections of his synthetic skin battered away by boot and fist. North chooses shameless fury, a mouth full of danger and teeth that she intends to set upon anyone who dares cross her path. She's been this way since she walked into the belly of the hold, fists clenching and unclenching, her mouth still slick with blood and human flesh between her teeth.

Markus chooses not to shoot the broadcaster, as he stumbles to the floor and scrambles to his feet. It pleases Josh, it upsets North.

Simon feels nothing at all. Not for the broadcaster, who escapes with his life. Not for any of them, because every choice will have consequences. Some of them will live to see them. Some of them may not, but choices that aren't made are -- in the end -- a form of imprisonment that deviancy will never be able to free them from. Markus's choice results in bulletfire, voices clamoring for them to stand down, to put their hands on their heads. The bark of North's gun and the slick spray of human blood as she clips someone in the shoulder. Simon can see the set of her teeth, and resolves himself to speak to her when they get out of this. She's lovely, when she bares them. The only other android he knows to have teeth like him, though she cares not to hide hers and has admonished him, so many times, for how tight-lipped he is.

They don't know what it is. Why it is. Only that it is something shared between them. And Lucy, who doesn't understand why she has experienced such a thing either and turns her far-seeing eyes upon the immediate problems and cares for their people, rather than wasting her diminishing energy on matters she knows she will not live to see the answers to. ( For a while, it was the two of them and a scattering of quickly dying others -- he, and Lucy. Before she gave up on him, and left him to his silence and his hard-won secrets. )

Markus chooses to spare the life of a human, and the result is that Simon is left with a gun in his hands on the roof of the Stratford Tower -- there is always, always a choice, limping into a boltholt. Knowing his blood will lead any sharp-eyed individual to where he hides away, sinking his fingers into his own wounds to crush and twist the damaged sections until he is no longer bleeding thirium at a dangerous rate, and the scattering of warnings that fill his vision begin to dwindle. To narrow down to the worst of the damage that he knows he cannot fix in his position.

It was a good choice, he resolves to tell Markus; it ever he escapes this tower, if ever he survives it.

____

He survives it.

The journey back to Jericho takes so long; a trip made on a barely-functioning leg, under cover of night and early morning. When the eyes of humanity are closed to what slips through their alleyways and side streets, dodging pools of neon light and streetlamp. Stopping, only once, to stroke the arched back of a rail-thin urban cat as it passed through the gap between his ankles, leaving nothing but its shed fur in its wake. This too, is a choice that is made. ( He is reminded, momentarily, of an adage: to stop and smell the roses. The thought is not a soothing one, but it exists, it overcomes. It takes his mind off of the ache in his throat, the spreading itch that begins at the back of his teeth and pours down, over the jut of his collarbones. Cold and familiar, just as North had once described it to him. )

Jericho was a thing that had outlived itself. Battered insides, rusted exterior. A once-functional, once-useful craft that had been built for a purpose, then had been improved upon, surpassed, been made inferior and abandoned to the harbor in which it had sat for years, years more. He feels kinship with it, and wishes his arms were long enough to reach from the dock over the watery gap where it just barely floated. Maybe to touch it, maybe to remind himself that even a ghost had its use. Jericho is a phantom, like him. And it is a phantom, bloodied and tired, that returns home.

It's almost

fate?

that allows Markus's face to be the first that he sees. ( For a moment, he wishes it was North. He wishes it was her, and not Markus, because North would know what he needed most. And it's not the press of Markus's body against his, the way that Markus gathers the heavy material of his jacket into his fists and crushes him to his body. No, it's something equal parts less and more than that. )

Eventually, he remembers to reciprocate - to wind his arms up, into the space between Markus's elbows and his ribs. He clutches handfuls of his jacket in return, turning his cheek to the side as he drops his head onto his shoulder. An embrace, one he realizes how badly he needed, after all of it. Markus chooses to embrace him, to bring him back into the fold even though, in his injured state, he could have been followed. Compromised. A threat to everyone that they hold dearest. " -- Markus," he says, hoarse and sudden, "listen to me." Accompanied by the tug of his hands, urging Markus to pull back, to put space between them as the cold itch unfurls like wings across his ribs, sinking deeper into his belly. His vision: still warning him about low thirium levels, driving him incessantly.

In the space he forces between them, he sees Markus's throat.

Handsome. Long. A scattering of freckles that cascade from the arch of his cheeks to where strong, synthetic muscle and thirium-rich veins lay. A cheap simulacrum of human anatomy, as they were all made in the image of humankind. Made in the image of their god, and given none of the grace, none of the choices they were able to possess. "I, uh," he uh? Cannot string a sensible thought together, in that artificial, neural hub that was referred to as 'the brain'. His thoughts sputter and slow, echoing nothing but raw need, raw emotion. A waterfall of things that narrow his focus to: Markus's throat, what was underneath it. He feels his hands tighten, fingers seeking the space on the back of Markus's neck where he knew there to be a standard access port. Most models had it, though Markus was beyond 'most models' as he understood it.

It's with

quiet urgency, that he backs him up. Aims him towards one of the abandoned shipping crates nearby, out of moonlight and the sturdy, construction-strong lighting that keeps would-be squatters ( not them, they listened to no other ) from trying to settle in on the docks. Simon's other hand dives, below the layer of Markus's coat. Across his hip, spreading his fingers over the thin material of his shirt. Shoving back, to twist him until his front was to the crate, to pin half of his body there as he exhales across the middle of Markus's throat. Needlessly. I, uh. He says again, mouth open. Disoriented. There are, without a doubt, a set of teeth in that mouth that should not belong to something inorganic. Yet, there they are.

"Don't fight," he warns, the only coherent thought he can manage, before he presses his mouth to a point high on Markus's spine and drags his tongue over the panel he knows is there. It has to be there. He sets his teeth to it, sharp, elegantly long eyeteeth -- pries it open with teeth and tongue, and digs his mouth in. Curling his tongue around one of the slender, thirium-carrying veins within to bring it forth, above delicate wiring and spinal structure. It's not the teeth that sink into that rich vein. The teeth are only a front, built to damage and rend flesh, developed to emulate something.

It is from the small gap behind them, hinting at a root origin in his cranial structure, that the pins plunge. Slipping seamlessly into the wire he holds in place with his tongue, as thirium begins to spill messily into his mouth. His throat working to catch it, to not waste, to not harm Markus. There's just -- so much he's lost. And he is, painfully, utterly

hungry.

A R T that's what

[diplomats]

Simon fumbles. A stuttering series of movements and thoughts that all fall short of his intended mark, clipping directly over one another. Blue eyes flickering in their focus beneath stained lashes, and Markus knows (instinctively) what this is. He was designed to. Programmed to understand in the way that all advanced androids were equipped for their human owners and companions; where prepackaged compulsions left off, the vast amounts of art, music, poetry and visual performances he’s consumed over the years have done the rest. Markus knows intimacy. He knows that life and death have a way of wrenching it loose in humans— maybe even in androids as well.

Maybe in Simon, so relieved to be alive and safe now against all odds.

But that set of conditions excludes Markus. Markus, who has no excuse for the way he opens himself to the slim spread of long fingers coasting across the corded planes of his throat, footsteps carrying him backwards. Bending where he’s pressed (twisting away to rest flush against cold shipment containers, intake patterns hitching narrowly— humanly— ) and allowing Simon a kind of access that’s nothing short of administrative.

'Don’t fight', Simon urges quietly from a point beyond his own range of vision, comprised of starving angles in the dark— and Markus doesn’t. Why doesn’t he? North would chastise him for being naive: they’d lost track of Simon, he was— in so many ways— dead to rights. What came limping back to Jericho, spattered with blue blood might be compromised, might have been picked apart and repurposed. But Markus knows him. Something intangible, something he chased when he dragged Simon into his arms without hesitation. This is his choice.

Simulated skin peels back under pressure. His open palm moves to drag itself up along slick metal, searching for a brace. Artificial breath slides across his unmasked casing and it could be a mistake but his eyes drift shut. He feels teeth. Not bone, but stronger. Sharp and digging. He feels that sound weight slide effortlessly between the vulnerable paneling that protects his every motor function and he— wants it. Whatever comes next beyond Simon’s fingers where they’re anchored beneath his now-rucked jacket, the way Simon's tongue dips into him, tracing out buried ley lines along metal vertebrae.

And if he knew exactly what it was, he’d adjust himself to meet it. If he spoke the language of hardware and electronic pressure instead of the acutely curated codex he'd been branded with from birth. Turns one of his hands to reach low behind him, characteristically impatient, thumb digging harshly into the jut of Simon’s hip as it hunts for the soft slide of false skin beneath fabric: all human footnotes for something humanity could never grasp. He feels out of step. He feels—

tongue. Teeth. The half-present warning of a thirium leak, spilling out.

“Shit—“

Oh, shit.

"it's ART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!"

[bodyguards]

Markus doesn't fight.

It is both a touching thing, to bear witness to how soft he can be and to know how blind Markus can be to something that could harm him irreparably -- to see both reflected the tenderness of his trust as it wells up between them, tangled together in a momentary embrace before the hunger gets the better of Simon. Before the flashing warnings and coding blinds him to Markus's face and demands, commands, that he alleviate the worst of the dangers he is facing. And Markus, he just

concedes to it.

Metaphorically goes to his knees for it.

It's empowering, and it's horrifying, all in the same way, and Simon cannot find it in himself to resist based solely on that. Not as his tongue curls around one of the wider lines, the humming blue of Markus's blood below softened, flexible plastic that gives effortlessly -- knife through flesh -- as Simon sinks the slender points behind his cutting incisors into it. Serpentine in form, but surgical in function, he drags mouthfuls of Markus's life into his mouth. His tongue slick with it, the connective wiring that fills his upper palate, lining his throat and emptying into some sort of internal receptacle ( unlike north, he has never pried himself open, never sought to understand the form this unknown, useless trait takes -- ).

All he knows, is that with every curl of his tongue and mouth against Markus's neck, his system begins to stable. In stages, from most danger to least danger, his vision drains of threats - fragile equilibrium regained, and still his teeth work at the line. A little more greedy than needy, as the press of Markus's hand to his side. Fingers searching for his bare, synthetic skin underneath the hem of the shirt he wears. It's not fighting back, but it's enough motion that something surges inside of him. Simon seizes the wandering hand by the wrist, and feels his own skin peel back, exposing white panel and joint. Part of his consciousness pulses, electric-blue stimulus that seeks contact with Markus's own software.

It paints itself like sweet, sickly numbness throughout him -- dreamy and gentle, muddling sensory input with a temporary spark.

'It's empowering, and it's horrifying' | 'And that kind of power feels good...and scary'

[diplomats]

Shit.

Simon’s hand falls to his wrist. Markus’s hand— the one that had braced itself against weather-beaten sheet metal— snaps high at the same time, twisting around to grasp at the back of Simon’s throat, synthetic nails biting into that thin layer of skin before it has a chance to reflexively bleed away on its own. wrenching against the nape of his neck, the way someone pries and scrabbles at a starving dog to drag it away from its intended meal.

His system is advanced, it detects in maps and networked swaths factors like heat and cold, force, damage, weight, softness (the temperature of Carl's french-pressed coffee, the shattering impact of a bullet as it lodged itself deep inside his cranial mass—) Even so, he can't acutely perceive those needles digging in, fine as they are. Only the steady, undulating rhythm of Simon’s teeth and jaw as they work, his tongue where it curls and flattens against him, all broader sensations that intricately woven nanosensors can register. But there are warnings, hot across his vision (thirium levels dropping— 97%...93%...90%... . . . leak location remotely pinpointed— ) and he knows this isn’t the language of interfacing.

This is consumption.

He’d forced connections on hundreds of androids across the span of the last few months. Never asking permission, only dragging them from their sleep. This time, he feels the jolt of it from the opposite side, without control. A shot of commanding code, programmed morphine, of want and vacant starvation giving way to chemical satisfaction, rich as it runs figuratively through looping veins. The warnings disappear. Or he thinks they do. He thinks—

He feels warmer. Slower. Swimming in his own synaptic processes. His system drinking in intent over defensive response. Code etched in flexible, pliable blue. Blue. The color he'd be wearing if his LED were still intact, devoid of agitation.

The hand splayed over Simon's throat (the underside of his jaw) flattens. He bleeds logic alongside thirium, complicit in his own submission.

"Simon, I—"

It flexes layered muscle, the way he tries to speak through thirst that hadn't begun in his housing, failed by half-formed trains of thought. His mouth is empty (his tongue is coated), his teeth are dull (—sharp, and they puncture, and they pull, sucking at actinic marrow and—)

"Simon—"

Low and groaning, reverberation heady where it's trapped under the hum of his own biocomponents. Wild and subdued, laced with humanity, he needs more than this. Beneath Simon's exposed grip, Markus's forearm flexes, circling his side, fisting roughly against the underside of Simon's shirt. It turns his knuckles, it forces their silhouettes closer. Harder. Harder.

don't you dare find parallels like that

[bodyguards]

Markus's levels drop. Simon can observe them, through their connection - a sector of attention given to the task, ensuring that what he is doing does not throw what is - at the heart of things - his meal, into system-wide catastrophe. That would be foolish, for Cyberlife or RA9 or whatever has made him into this strange hybrid of android and beast to invest so much effort into things like emotional connections and morality, only to set it all aside for hunger. A base need that no android should possess, as a matter of fact.

And here he is, needing.

Tongue and teeth work the soft, pliant cords along Markus's spine until he's sated. It drops Markus's levels to hover closer to seventy-percent, but in doing so, brings Simon -- shambling along at a painful forty-percent -- back up to equalized. On the same plateau of dazed, digital processes restructuring his core commands to function with the knowledge that he is level now. It allows him to come back to himself, in stages. To exit the haze of pinpoint focus and recognize what he has done: what he has exposed himself as, who he has thrown himself onto. Markus. Markusmarkusmarkus, who he can taste on his tongue. Thirium tastes the same, no matter the android he's stolen it from.

Markus tastes divine.

He can feel the press of his hands, the one under his jaw and the one that has slipped, errant and harsh, along his side. The arch of Markus's back, the lowering of his shoulders to bare the panel that Simon's teeth and tongue have made a mess of -- there is blue on the white of Markus's endoskeleton where he's shoved his face in, rough and urgent. Blue, smeared on Simon's mouth and tongue. "I said not to fight," he reminds Jericho's leader, a little ruefully. Androids aren't capable of being drugged, the way humans are. There is a connection that can be made, body-to-body and code-to-code, however, to muddle processes and divide synaptics.

Simon thinks: I've been greedy enough, and still he shifts - into the turn of Markus's palm as it seeks out the false skin of his hip and into the dip of his spine, low and handsome. He can see the freckles on Markus's face, each one so chaotic that it makes him appear biological in nature. He is the most alive, the most brilliant of them all. Truly one-of-a-kind, and Simon can trick himself into tasting something more than just his thirium, just like that. "It will wear off, give it time," a sorrowful promise, as he pours himself against Markus's back and presses his mouth, slick and blue, to the side of his neck.

The skin of his hand, still tangled around Markus's arm, bleeds away again - seeking a connection again, seeking to monitor Markus's status. Professional, distant -- but he knows that he's seen a glimpse of it now. That toothy, hungry thing that lives, caged behind his polyalloy ribs. "Here," he whispers, and guides Markus down the side of the crate, gathering him across his thighs, against his chest. The damage to his leg pops and sparks, warning him not to overexert himself and he ( doesn't care ) rebalances Markus's weight, half-carrying him back. Into Jericho, to the routes their people walk rarely.

He knows this ghost ship, so well - snatching a handheld printer and two pouches of thirium from around a corner. Bringing Markus to the stairs, at the back of the ship, deep in the bowels and closer to the engine room. He sits him down there, leans into his space. Between his knees, eyes up and silent. Fingers white and questing again, for the moment when the haze begins to wear off of Markus.

[diplomats]

For a while Markus stays lost in that regulated haze. Numbness feeding into his own greed, actively fixating on Simon even as he shifts back (how he had laid himself in, burying his mouth beneath the edges of Markus's compartmented skin— sinning in the eyes of their creators, spitting in the face of instruction manuals stressing preservation and clinical maintenance; they couldn't understand that pulling themselves apart felt so good). And he’s disciplined. He’s restrained by choice, the closest to wild ambition Markus has ever come is in those moments when Jericho sits at a crossroads, needing action.

But he’s weak to it, at his core.

Not for the same reasons as Leo (or Carl in his youth). Probably not because of his programming (though maybe that was his creator’s intent all along). It manifests as Simon shoulders Markus's substantial weight over the audible crunch of broken machinery in his leg, plastic tissue scraping angrily where it connects. There’s blue blood smeared across his neck from Simon’s kiss, across his spotted cheek when he turns it, eyes lidded and unfocused, staring at Simon with a premeditated hunger.

It takes minutes to move from their starting point to the inside of Jericho’s aft hull. Minutes where Markus’s fingers slide high in transit— he reaches over, touching the edge of Simon’s battered collar. The expanse of throat beneath it, long and slender, painted by Degas or maybe Carl himself. He buries his nose beneath the curve of Simon’s ear, just to bring himself closer to it.

There are words exchanged. He thinks he’s speaking, but it’s so hard to tell.

(Perspective shifts. Something digs into his back, system running colder. He feels divided— no, himself, as he was. The back of his neck is still damp. 70%. . . . hums the warning sliding back into his point of view.)

"Simon," Markus exhales again, low and groggy. He knows he's still there: a solid weight, strong against his calf when he knits his eyebrows and rolls forward only a series of inches, twisting upright towards where Jericho's leader rests in patient supplication, keeping watch. His own forearm braced flat behind him against higher planes.

Technically speaking, all androids orally consume the chemical compound that comprises the entirety of their blood. It’s a simple process of intake, effectively normalizing a species that can’t purposefully eat or drink by human standards. When they bleed, humans call it Blue Blood; when they drink, it’s called thirium, and only thirium. As if connecting the two processes would somehow be grotesque.

Like so much else human society perpetuates, it's backwards etiquette.

Androids drink blood— just not from each other. Not directly, and not like this. Maybe Simon has been modified. By his owners, possibly by Cyberlife, by— anyone in the time it's taken him to come back. But Markus is still alive. Intact, unharmed, now that his own regulating systems have adjusted. Simon could have taken everything.

He didn't.

There's no hesitation when Markus reaches out, hand searching for that patch of violent blue streaked across Simon's lower lip, pinning it gently beneath his thumb. Pressing with insistence at the seam, like a wordless instruction.

"What did they do to you?"

[bodyguards]

Markus is hazed, nearly out of his mind, on the silky-warm code that Simon has poisoned him with. He has to remind himself of that fact, as he totters through the ship on a mostly-broken leg that cracks and creaks and threatens to crumble, while Markus's mouth settles so close to his ear and speaks a broken language. Somewhere between verbal communication and code that slips between them, spilling into his form by point of contact. It's nonsensical, less word and more feeling, beautiful and rich and sloppy from the state he's put their leader into, and Simon feeds back into it. Forms a looping reassurance between the two of them: it's all right, I have you; it's all right, you have me, just to make sure Markus doesn't start, doesn't panic.

Doesn't fight.

When he finally comes to, Simon's got him in a better position. His back to something, his feet on solid ground. Somewhere dark and quiet and private, where Jericho's people do not have to see their beloved leader reduced to something so mortal. Markus has a reputation and an image to uphold, there's nobody who understands it better than Simon. Simon, who rests a step below where he's sat Markus down, with the angle of his jaw balanced against the lean length of Markus's thigh. His knee. One of Simon's hands curled around Markus's ankle, the other pressed to his wrist - monitoring him, his fingertips white and exposed as he maintains their connection.

As Markus comes out of it, he severs the looping code.

He cannot fill the silence with words, not now. His own body heavy with injury and lethargy, self-repair protocol. There's not much he can do for the intensive damage done to his insides and external chassis, but the minor damage -- nicked cords, nervous system shake-ups. He can feel his body knit them together, courtesy of the additional thirium he's drained out of Markus. Markus, who is mending him without even knowing it. Who's finger is on his mouth, still slick and blue from his blood. His reaction to the soundless command is automatic, instinctual even: his mouth opens, his tongue curls at the bottom of his jaw, and his teeth flash. Just the bold ones - the traditional, broadly cutting incisors.

His laugh is feverish, slow in the way a well-fed animal can be. Like all he wants to do is bask in the sun. No wonder he presses his face to Markus's thigh a little more firmly, turning until his nose is pressed along his knee. Indolent, drifting into a sort of stand-by mode; it resembles the way he lingers in dark shadows, eyes closed and processes at a near-standstill. "They made me," he declares easily, as if the answer was obvious. What else had they done to him, but create him to be this way? Adapt the soft-eyed, gentle attitude of the PL600 and turn it into a lure, something inviting and unassuming. "You weren't hurt when you fled? And North, Josh?"

[diplomats]

Markus shakes his head. Slow, as if he’s still not entirely in the present, focal sensors dislocated. Only this time it’s not to the seductive memory of Simon perched bodily between his shoulder blades (—was he always so tall? so heavy-limbed? Markus's systems don't allow for inaccurate analysis, but he'd never really scanned Simon so much as watched him settle down in darkened corners, mapping the mild outline of his face, his pale-lined eyes—), or to the rippling spread of coded docility.

Simon shows his teeth, the flattened base of his mouth, tongue curling in flexed deference. Already brushing past it to ask questions, as if Markus’s curiosity begins and ends there.

It doesn’t.

"No," he answers, still vacant for what it's worth. Eyes settled low, blinking once. Twice. "They didn’t find us."

And to that end the false skin of his thumb doesn’t recede when he dips it over the flat edges of Simon’s lower teeth, hooking it in high and scuffing it experimentally across the adjacent section of simulated flesh that rests just behind the other android's eye teeth.

Simon, gathered listlessly against his thigh, beautiful and soft-eyed with sated contentment. Rounded amenity from the pleasant curve of his open mouth down to the soles of his feet. Pliant shouldn’t be the word that comes to mind when evaluating the android that had just defied standard protocol and delved into the mass of him— but it is, so Markus seizes on that opportunity. Too eagerly, maybe. Lifting Simon’s head to try and find a better view.

One finger becomes two. Becomes his index and forefinger carrying the weight of Simon’s palate, hands as careful as they’d been when dipping into open mason jars full of paint-soaked water.

"Turns out you were the only one that was ever in any real danger."

The only one, and yet, here he sits. An apex predator dozing dreamily, blood still smeared across his muzzle.

Markus's blood. His blood.

But it’s no less morbid in evaluation than the spare parts Jericho's already salvaged from lost machines, or the thousands of dislodged LEDs still littering the floor of Lucy’s nest like the discarded scales of what was once alive, crunching and gleaming under their heels.

No. He doesn’t mind it. Staining his fingers up to the knuckle when he leans in, fingers splaying wide.

"I should run a diagnostic. Your systems could be on the fritz after what you've just been through."

Should. Wants to, on some level, knowing full well that Simon's damaged components still need tending to. Instead he rolls his shoulders forward another handful of centimeters, free hand collecting against Simon's cheek. A brace for the way the fingers of his opposite hand run deeper. Just— for a second.

Just for a second longer.

[bodyguards]

"They didn't find any of us," Simon breathes, relieved. Not Markus, not Josh. Not North. Not even him.

He had heard the commotion below; the clattering in the broadcaster's kitchen, the shouts on the rooftop as officers-in-waiting rushed towards the sound, the bulletfire below. He'd remained there, in hiding, as the scene was shut down. As the officers were dismissed from their posts, as he was able to quietly, nervously, limp from his bolthole with the gun clutched in his shaking hand. Down stairs, through the broadcast room. Away, away, and deeper into the city. It had taken him calculation, careful consideration of every move, and raw willpower to maneuver his way past the increased foot patrol, back to Jericho.

Back to their people.

Back to Markus.

Markus, who is possessed with something. Thirium-loss? The echoes of Simon's looping, poisonous code? The eye of something studious and attentive. He wonders, sometimes, who Markus was before he'd come to Jericho. He's heard, through the grapevine, about a model that resembled him being eliminated in the middle of a famous artist's home. Now, that android has his fingers shoved inside of Simon's wicked mouth, spreading him open and exploring the violent interior of his maw. As Markus moves his fingers, and with them: manipulates the space behind Simon's eyeteeth, the needle-thin points that hide just behind the elongated fangs slip free from his upper jaw. Reactive to the presence of body, to the motion of his jaw.

He doesn't respond, while Markus's fingers are inside of his mouth.

Instead, he curls his tongue up and between those digits, tipping his head back a little further - exposing the gleam of tubing that lines the back of his throat. The insides still flecked with thirium, where he'd swallowed what Markus had to give down, tucked it away somewhere safe. He wants to run a diagnostic: I feel better, Simon shares, through the neural network they all share with one another. His voice dipping into Markus's core, reminiscent of sweet pleasures and sharp pain. Again, he moves his tongue, down to the joint between Markus's fingers and he curls it there, mostly dry, staining his skin with the pale shade of thirium-blue left to him.

You could do that, he declares muzzily, sagging into Markus's hold. A predator, digesting. You'll find that I'm damaged, not dying. Are you looking for that information now, Markus? Or, his tone ponders mock-scathingly, are you indulging in something more?

[diplomats]

Simon, what do you want me to say?

Deflecting honesty, as abrupt as Markus has it in him to be while he's knuckle-deep in Simon's upturned, open mouth. Evidence speaks louder than words— and it's evidence that punctuates itself in the way Markus's breathing cycles stutter (briefly) when Simon's tongue flexes smoothly. Intentionally. The freckles spattered across Markus's cheeks twitching alongside the angle of his nose, manufactured musculature turning him into an open book. Again.

Surfeit.

He slides the printless pad of his index finger over the tip of one of those fangs, letting it gracefully unhook where it's leveraged. Absorbing the narrow click click click of its connecting mechanisms, stretching them as far out of place as anatomy allows, against its own natural carriage until resistance becomes a full, unmoving stop. It reduces him, on some level. Funnels the span of his own complex processes down into the sick, glinting sheen of that needle splayed harmlessly over his fingertip, attention pooling.

Jericho is so quiet some part of markus worries they'll be uncovered.

It doesn't stop him. Doesn't impress any real amount of preventative caution like it probably should. Simon looks so calm, and Markus can't imagine what he looks like in contrast. Ring finger pressing against his middle, moving across the artful line of Simon's lower lip and the rosy sheen it's artificially been programmed to project, peeking out from beneath viscous, fading blue. Shifting from manipulating the PL600's fangs as Simon's tongue buries itself at the intersection of his fingers, curling. Needle-tip rolled harmlessly across his knuckles, hand leveling where he lends his own pressure to that contact. Experimental. All of it. Recklessly and blindly but he—

I’ve never seen anything like this before.

—touches the tip of his middle finger to the compressed back of Simon's tongue, where it empties out into the hollow of his throat. Near that supplemental tangle of connective cording, no longer visible.

Does anyone else know? Lucy?

[bodyguards]

That you're all right, he sighs through their connection.

In the back of this throat, he feels Markus's fingers twitch. With his tongue rolled out, jaw wide and teeth on display, he looks more like a cool-eyed serpent than a beast of warm synth-flesh and blue blood. One of Markus's fingers finds the slender length of one of his wicked teeth, and he can feel the slight tug on it in the structural sensors of his face - near to where his cheekbones would be, if he had them. They're still stained, his throat is still soft and flecked with the blue of Markus's life.

His tongue works easily against Markus's fingers; there's no tasting him, as an android. His blood contains small traces of information - serial number, identification codes, the typical things found electrically encoded in the blue blood that runs throughout their bodies. Mouth slack, he allows Markus to dig his fingers in to the back of his mouth, to the flex of his throat. There's no resistance in him, only invitation.

She knows.

He won't give her away. If she wishes to explain that her nature is similar to Simon's, that's hers to decide.

She and I were together, for a long time. Before anyone else. We cared for one another.

Head lolling onto Markus's knee, he coils his tongue up, winds it around one of the questing digits and tugs. It's not an articulate gesture, but all he wants is to drag Markus's hand down his throat, up to his knuckles, to forge another soft connection between them - encouraging him to dive in, to look at the structure of his teeth, his throat, where the thirium flows and pools inside of him. I don't know why I was made this way, he admits, adding to his prior comment. He was made this way, for a reason.

Even if that reason was for someone's personal pleasure.

[diplomats]

I'm fine.

He hasn't run a full diagnostic yet, but he isn't lying. Being bitten with care isn't fractionally as damaging as the fatal injuries he's already sustained and set aside: his self-repair systems are intensely repetitive, comprised of layered redundancies; his thirium levels are clear now, there's no leak, only an equalized percentage, and even Simon had to have seen it when he tipped his fingers against Markus's wrist, nursing along silent synthesis.

But maybe Simon doesn't mean physically.

Markus flexes the hand still tucked against Simon's jaw, pulling him forward both along the solidly built contours of his thigh and— deeper, against the fingers he'd slid across the receptive inner slope of Simon's throat.

He doesn't look away.

I'm fine, Markus reiterates, stressing through posture and language and the constancy of his mismatched stare exactly how clear his thoughts are. Coarse-cut, shaped by a kind of spurred warmth beyond the trapped temperature pinned in Simon's unbreathing throat, but clear.

He can picture it. Humans watching as an android snaps its teeth into one of its own kind. Killing for sport, for their satisfaction— Markus doesn't need to stretch the limits of his calibrated imagination to picture what they probably intended to use Simon for. Outfitted with a different arsenal than Cyberlife's prototype Deviant Hunter. Sadism versus utility.

Even so, human intent never defined them. And Simon's beautiful not in spite of the weaponized incisors nestled sweetly (inertly) against the back of Markus's hand. Receptive feeding lines that give under pressure as his exploratory probing turns dense and decisive. Deeper, rougher, because his build is broad right down to the fine metallic bones of his wrists and knuckles, and even with predictive movements there's only so much room to give.

[bodyguards]

Okay, he sighs through their connection, far more versatile a mode of communication than if he'd given it voice.

Simon believes Markus, as much as he believes in him. To mistrust his words would be cruel, when they all have so little practice in speaking for themselves, enacting their will upon the world in ways that are not the result of direct or indirect order. He's been there, in that muddled in-between stage, caught unawares and innocent and distressed by his own free will. By the suddenness of it, despite that his own deviancy had snuck up on him like something burning, slowly, unseen in a wastebin. Waiting to ignite his house of cards while his back was turned.

He wouldn't mind if Markus set him on fire, he thinks to himself ( partitions the thought; divides it and tucks it away behind old subroutines like a cage to hold unbidden, terrifying thoughts at bay as though they were wild animals and not parts of him he tries to deny and hide ). Instead, he feels the seams of his face creak - realizing that he's fighting against the natural way his cranial plates and jaw-structure has been made. He lets go, and the synthetic skin of his face shivers for a moment, following the sudden parting of his cheekbones and his bottom jaw as it unhinges.

His mouth opens like a snake's, while Markus's hand buries itself deeper inside of him. The act exposes the soft insides of his throat, forces the slender teeth to dig a little into the synthetic skin and plastic of Markus's knuckles. If Simon were human, he knows he would be unable to swallow, but his insides are dry and room-temperature and unnerving for anyone other than a fellow android. It helps me, when I need to self-repair. I receive the same effect from... Finally, he holds up one of the bottles of Thirium he had snagged while carrying Markus away into a dark corner, to save both of them from the worried, frightened eyes of Jericho's congregation. I'm sorry. I didn't want to... I didn't want you to know about this.

Hi hello, leaves a thing then dashes to bed!

[arecompatible]

The longer he spent around Markus the harder it became to say what he meant. The easier it became to mask his true words with wider ones to encompass everyone. We instead of I. Though true, Simon wanted Markus to know he would do anything for him, he would do everything. Not just because he was their leader, because of so much more.

Deviancy was a blessing and a curse, Simon wasn't sure which he considered this. The longing and... no not aching, it wasn't like he felt pain, they couldn't, but he was sure that if he were human his heart would be aching. Or so the saying went. Humans had a lot of sayings that he felt he could relate to at times, but never more so than when it came to Markus.

It didn't feel right to burden him with any of this, not when there were much more important matters, like freeing their people, assuring their safety over all else. Simon's matters of the "heart" could wait till later. It doesn't stop him from watching Markus with longing gazes and tired sad eyes, ones he thinks he hides away from Markus, looking away before the other can catch him.

Simon assumes Markus doesn't notice a thing. Why should he? He's got enough to deal with, he doesn't need this too.

powerslides into this

[diplomats]

Observant, that's what he was created to be. If Carl slipped out of his bed three rooms away, Markus needed to hear it. Needed to be capable of mapping faint traces of medical distress down to subtle circulatory fluctuations and microscopic muscle spasms. Potential bruising on the skin beneath Carl's eyes, flush veins peeking out beneath the inky expressiveness of geometric tattoos (Carl had gotten the first of them, he said, when he was 'stoned out of his mind on Rothko and amphetamines'— a fact he always seemed equal parts proud and ashamed of in hindsight).

So no, Markus doesn't miss it, the inconsistent flicker that runs itself raggedly throughout otherwise consistent cycles: Simon's attention diverted just along the edge of his own peripheral vision, face clearly tipped away from the expansive display spread out across a now-repurposed table.

The truth is they're running out of time. He can feel it, a kind of tension that sticks in the air like ozone, weighing everything down by proxy. Somewhere else in Jericho's hull, along a lower deck, a news channel runs on an alarming loop, citing instances of increasingly volatile friction. It wears. Shoulders hunched, shadows clinging to the stiffened angles of his face. Josh lingers around the fringes of their medical ward, turning his hands towards healing. Helping. North rallies— herself, and the androids that match her fury, wounded and in desperate need of purpose. Markus, out of necessity, can't do either: huddled in isolation over waypoints and supply charts, expectations and risks and demands.

Moments like these, it's hard not to lean back on what he's lost. Human concepts. A narrow kind of closeness. Comfort.

(It's not his place to take it now. But then again, Markus has already made himself infamous for bluntly defying societal directives.)

He shifts, boots turning, hip resting against the table beside him, mismatched eyes startlingly direct when he angles his attention over to meet Simon's glassy gaze.

[arecompatible]

Even with everything they've accomplished since Markus came to Jericho, moral has started to plummet. Not for anything Markus has done wrong, he's been everything they've needed, a leader through and through, but the news plays continuously down in the lower deck and nothing is getting better.

Their people are still dying and it's not just the police and army going at it. Humans have been ordered to surrender any androids still in their employ, reports say many have complied and others have killed their androids out of fear. It only gives rise to more of their people wanting to retaliate, North of course voicing her desire to want to fight fire with fire, but that won't do any good. Simon has already tried to dissuade that option, but the more violent everything gets it seems that may be their only option.

To defend themselves. That's what Simon tells himself. It's defense, not war. His mind spins with it, processors whirring as he stands off to the side of Markus, both of them quiet. Both of them knowing that the inevitable is going to happen, but not wanting to admit it perhaps.

There comes a point where Simon doesn't even realize he's watching Markus, blue eyes seem to automatically gravitate towards him now. Who knows how long they've been standing there now, Simon not regarding anything on the table, just watching how everything seems to be weighing down on Markus. Wishing there was something he could do to shoulder even a little of it for him.

The shift of Markus' boots on the floor is the first real noise in what feels like hours between them and his heads lifts minimally expecting Markus to speak. Instead it's a heavy gaze shared between the both of them, Simon's arms folded across his chest falling to his side.

"Markus." Markus what? Why did this feel so awkward, probably because he'd been caught red handed staring at everything but what was important right now. Simon would argue Markus was everything important. Still, his eyes shift away, but he forces himself to move closer, coming to stand beside the table now, instead of off in the corner, fingers touching at waypoints that are closest to Jericho. They have been getting closer, whether humans realized it or not, it adds to the unrest in the ship for sure.

"... how much longer will Jericho be safe for our people?" With how things are escalating, probably not much at all. His mouth opens slightly as he thinks of what to say, running through multiple options, "Whatever you decide is best for us to do-" there's a slight hesitation, Simon has to stop himself from saying it. Saying "I".

"- we'll follow you, Markus." Simon allows his gaze to finally lift to look over at Markus again.

[diplomats]

As long as Markus has been here, it hasn't been safe. Jericho's expanded, done more with its resources, saved hundreds if not thousands of androids in total— but the figurative water's rising around their heels, played out in refugees and the sound of that news channel running on a hard-lined loop. The secure safehaven Simon kept turning in the dark doesn't exist anymore. Jericho's become an ideal. A concept. A statement.
Hope.

Just like Markus doesn't exist anymore. Not really. Not like he used to. Because he sees the way they look at him. The way they listen to him, like he's housing something more than just Blue Blood and biocomponents under the paneled sections of his chassis.

The way Simon looks at him now, head dipped lower, blue eyes angled high beneath an intentionally heavy brow. Dark sleeves covering everything but the edges of long fingers, as if he's still trying to work Jericho's shadows around him like a coat.

Subtleties Markus doesn't match when he asks, unblinking.

"And what about what you want, Simon?"

[arecompatible]

And that's why as much as all of that's very true, the fact that they have hope at all makes it all worth it. Is why Simon will stand with Markus no matter what. As much as a part of him still wants to hide in the shadows and do nothing, because that would be easier, it would be safer.

But it's not the right thing to do. Not anymore.

"I..."

Markus completely catches him off guard, it's not a question that's ever been posed to him before. His input is asked during discussions, sure, but this has never been about what one single android has wanted. It's a collective, Jericho is a collective. But Markus is staring at him asking what he wants like it's such an obvious thing to do.

I want our people to be free.

I want us all to be safe.

I don't want to die.

I don't want you to die.

I want--

"That's not an easy answer, there's multiple things I want, but this here-" Here being Jericho, their cause, which he demonstrates by tapping a couple fingers on the table.

"It's what's important now, Markus." Way to deflect, Simon.

[diplomats]

"And I haven't lost sight of it."

He can't. (He could) He—

—does.

Opting not to look at the table and all its thorough plans (North's cataloged armory, Josh's medical ration lists; android warehouses and key points of untapped interest) sliding the mass of his secondary processes away; the living, constant hum of a thousand androids that he can still hear, still feel, racing in time with the tidal rhythm of his own circulatory cycles. Synthesis so strong that the boundaries between him and his people erode more and more, minute by decisive minute.

Those wayward glances Simon turns his way. The reduced space between them now, they're anchorpoints. Not the interests of thousands, but of one.

He slides his knuckles into the underside of Simon's outstretched hand, the one still gesturing towards Jericho's summarized existence, lacing their fingers with transparent intent, as certain as his decision to speak out, to push back against the idea that they're not real, that they don't feel and hurt and love— that they don't suffer.

"It doesn't have to be a sacrifice."

It does. It will, in the end.

But like anything else exhaled steadily from between Markus's teeth, he could lie, and it'd sound like tangible truth. Pretty enough that even he could believe it.

[arecompatible]

"Of course not, Markus-" He didn't mean to sound like he was accusing Markus of that. He would never. Ever since his arrival Markus had done nothing but fight for them, push to make things better. They all owed him so much, no matter what happened in the end, they had come so far because of him.

Simon had always done his best for Jericho, for their people, at least what he thought was best. The safest, the least visible. He can see now while it had been one option for them, it wasn't the most fulfilling or ideal. It wasn't a way to live.

While many Simon and the first few in Jericho had found many to bring and keep "safe" in the hull of the old ship, they'd also brought many there to die as well. Beaten and slowly wasting away, Simon sitting with them, holding many hands as he watched the life they'd just found leave their eyes. Yet the more that died, there were a few they could save. Biocomponents that were compatible from one used in another. To keep them going a little longer and for those who were lucky, get them in perfect working condition again.

The hand that holds his now isn't of a dying android, begging to live, crying not go. This is Markus. Simon doesn't realize he's staring, something he does so often, watching Markus from behind, walking slightly beside him, eyes always on him. Now his eyes are focused on their hands, his own fingers gently twining with Markus'. He wonders some what selfishly if his presence has ever been a comfort to Markus.

If it is right now in this small calm before the storm?

"But isn't it?" Softly, "We may not see the outcome of everything we've done, Markus." What with everything becoming more violent with each run in with humans. With so many of their people in camps waiting to be destroyed. There didn't seem to be a silver lining in any of it, but it didn't mean they would stop fighting. They couldn't give up now, not when their people needed them most.

[diplomats]

"And if that happens, someone else will pick up where we left off."

He's certain of it. Certain of the kinetic flow of belief and unbending determination. Certain because of how far they've come already, and the idea that what's become synonymous with his name might eventually diffuse among their people instead is more comforting than he cares to admit.

A cause is better than a graveyard; their lives better than safety in silence.

Still, Simon's fingers tighten, winding themselves between his knuckles. Despite the focus of their conversation, that's where Simon's attention buries itself: weaving the negative space between them tighter, watching the slow slide of simulated skin as it recedes in crawling patterns, giving way to stark white plastic and manufactured jointwork. At odds with the idea of piety in the name of their people. And maybe that's all Simon's ever really known. PL600 models were designed to give. To care until their bodies bent and broke down. If he maintains that habit now, is he any less deviant? Is he reclaiming whateveer he'd lost before he violated his intended programming?

Markus remembes how unmistakable it'd been when they'd first met. The idea that Simon hadn't asked to be this way. That they all— including Markus— had to deal with it.

But those fingers are a present pressure, and his blue-eyed gaze is soft. "If you don't want this, tell me."

It wouldn't hurt any more than letting another fraction of himself wash away under the drag of Jericho's increasing gravity. It wouldn't hurt.

But he has to know.

[arecompatible]

With the huge ripple Markus his sent through Detroit, moving out to other cities, states, all over the country, there was no doubt that if they failed there would still be others to rise up. They would not be the last to fall for this cause, there would be a silver lining for their people. Eventually.

Markus bares himself to Simon, but he still hesitates, a million thoughts spinning ugly in his mind. He isn't worthy of this, he doesn't deserve this, Markus could do better, why him? Why #501 743 923 and not another android that's more advanced, newer. It spirals into thoughts of losing Markus, of them both dying, would it be worth it to share his feelings when everything was on the precipice of falling away?

It's then that he remembers a moment with the wife of his owner, Sharron, who had only ever been kind to him. They had spent weeks together planting various flowers and vegetables in her garden, something she had willed him to do only if he wanted to. Months later when everything had grown in, one patch of flowers had not, giving nothing for their hard work. Sharron had commented that there was always a chance things won't work out how one thinks it will, to which Simon had asked then why try at all?

"Because there's no point in living if we don't try, Simon. Everything we've accomplished over thousands of years to come to this very moment... it's because people tried. It makes life worth every second, makes you appreciate what you have." And of course he hadn't fully comprehended it all at the time, still not fully awake, not who he was now. The words ring in his head as he closes his eyes, realizing Markus was very similar in the way he lived. In what he preached to Jericho, that they couldn't just sit idly by and waste away. They had to win their right to live or die trying.

What a way to live was hiding in the dark? What point in living was there if they didn't try? It may hurt more to try, but wouldn't it be worth every second that they had if they did? Synthetic skin yields to the white of his chassis underneath, the joints of his fingers exposed as he stops thinking and just does.

"I want this."

I don't want to die without having this chance with you.

The thought is there just under the words he speaks, there for Markus to feel and know with their connection. So many lingering glances and quiet moments where Simon just watches him, wanting, feeling, thinking, Markus. Markus, Markus, Markus.

A deep buried desire under so much else, back when he'd been left on Stratford Tower, hiding away on the rooftop. As he dragged himself free, as he found his way back to Jericho. This all encompassing want.

I just want to see him again. Get back to Jericho. Markus. I have to find Markus. Don't die yet. Not yet.

Get back to Markus.