The Nasty Zone

[undeviated]

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[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.