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.