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“The fuck you think you’re doing, prick?”
It had almost become an automated response in Connor’s programming to cringe when he heard Gavin Reed’s voice. Today was not an exception. He restrained the resulting prompt to physically cringe and instead finished stepping out of the doorway to the archive room.
Detective Reed had a single file box in his hands as he headed directly toward him, so Connor held the door from closing. Perhaps this would prompt the detective to just continue down into the evidence room and not prolong this exchange.
“I was logging evidence—“
“Yeah,” Reed interrupted, coming to a stop. “Last time you were left alone to ‘log evidence,’ you wrecked shit down there.”
Connor kept his expression flat, even as irritation sparked in his chest. “Are you referring to yourself as shit? Because I also remember how the last time concluded.”
He knew it was a mistake even as the words were leaving his mouth, but somehow that didn’t stop him. The flash of embarrassment at the memory that crossed Reed’s face was satisfying, but it was quickly eclipsed by red faced rage.
“You motherfu—“ Reed kicked the bottom of the door shut, since his hands were occupied with the box, or Connor was sure he would have either drawn his gun or otherwise gotten physical.
The door swung violently into the frame, and it trapped three of the fingers on Connor’s right hand. The three crunches were loud and simultaneous as plastic, metal, and wiring gave under the force of the solid door trying to close.
Warnings scrolled in red across Connor’s vision, and his LED flashed blue, yellow, red, yellow and stayed there. He barely overrode the instinctual demand to yank his hand free from the trap. The door hadn’t been able to latch closed due to the obstruction, and Connor reached over with his left hand to pull the door back open, releasing his damaged right hand. He hissed out a harsh exhale and cradled his hand as the pain finally hit.
All told, the initial crunch of his fingers had only initiated a damage response. Somehow, freeing his hand and removing the numbing pressure abruptly sent signals of pain shooting up from the damage.
“Shit…” Reed didn’t sound concerned, but he did sound surprised. “Looks like you actually feel that, asshole. Good. Maybe remember that next time you think about running your plastic mouth.”
Connor elected to ignore the detective this time, holding his hand to his chest and straightening up. Reed snorted and tugged the door open again, slipping into the archive room without another backward glance. As soon as he was gone, Connor gingerly uncurled his hand to visually inspect the damage.
The warnings scrolling at the edge of his vision told him what he needed to know, but the words seemed foggy at the moment. His synthetic skin had receded from his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers on his right hand, and it gave him a clear view of where the plastic casing on the appendages had been dented and cracked. The knuckles were slightly inverted where the structural metal had been forcibly bent in the wrong direction. Wires and delicate circuitry were pushing up through the cracks in the plastic. Several of the tiny veins supplying thirium to his fingers had been torn. The protective coating on the wires was intact, but they were still exposed. The fingers themselves were unresponsive when he tried to straighten them.
They…hurt.
He had listened to other deviants describe the sensation of pain: the sharp, prickling, debilitating presence of it. Cyberlife’s programming had never intended for androids to feel at all, much less to feel things like pain that could impede an android’s performance and behavior. So this was another result of deviancy’s mutation of their code. He had been fortunate enough to avoid pain so far, but he had known it would be inevitable, as a police officer. Still, he had expected his first experience with pain to be in the field, from an enemy…not from a fellow officer while inside the station.
The raw, splintering heat radiating from his hand demanded attention, and he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. The damage wasn’t even that severe, relatively speaking. His self healing program was already trying to close the severed thirium lines. In order for the program to be successful, he would have to manually straighten the fingers out: something that his mind backpedaled aggressively away from.
Doing so would cause more pain. He didn’t want to make the pain worse; it was already awful. Hank had a few phrases in his arsenal about things having to get worse before they got better, and Connor had never truly understood what that was supposed to mean. Apparently, sometimes it meant that you had to pull and twist your broken fingers back into alignment for them to start healing properly.
He needed to sit down.
It was an absurd demand, but his body demanded it anyway. Luckily, a plastic folding chair had been left beside one of the filing cabinets, and he nearly fell into it. His arm from his mangled fingers to his shoulder all locked up at the jostling, and he tapped into his database on human responses to pain. It came back with a lot of swearing, stomping, crying, and shaking the point of injury. None of that sounded appealing as an outlet, but he had to release some of the pressure building in his chest.
"Fuck.” It came out as a hiss, like steam escaping a kettle. “Fuck, fuck, fucking shit, dammit, fuck.”
The effect was minimal, but it was an effect. His stress levels, which had been lost in the pain induced fog of numbers, began to visibly tick downward. He rolled his shoulder to loosen it up, then his elbow, and then his wrist. The synthetic muscles circulated more thirium with the motion, and it helped to release some of the tension locking up the joints in the limb.
“Shhhhhhhhhhit.” He exhaled the T in a rush.
He sat up straighter and, without waiting for panic to sneak up on him again, he reached out and manually bent the three damaged fingers back into alignment. Plastic creaked and popped as the broken edges were forced back together, and the exposed wiring pushed up against the inside of the casing. The lost thirium from the broken lines was collecting at his fingertips, darkening like pale blue bruises.
He groaned as the aftershocks of the action forced him to double over in the chair. The wave of it passed after a moment, and he straightened with a wheeze.
Moving his index finger or his thumb sent a ripple effect of dull pain across his entire hand and into the damaged fingers. For at least the rest of the day, his right hand would be out of commission. He tried to reactivate the skin over the injury, but he only succeeded in activating it over the back of his hand and his thumb and index finger. Where the other three met the knuckles, the skin distorted and flickered, refusing to go forward.
He had been sitting here for too long.
Hank was expecting him to come back from evidence, and he didn’t want to be here when Reed came back up. But he couldn’t return to his desk like this, not without making Hank suspicious anyway. And it wasn’t a big deal…It wasn’t…but Hank would make it into one.
Connor paused long enough to make sure his LED had transitioned back to blue, and then he stood and exited the hallway, back into the main work area of the precinct.
Hank’s back was turned to him, plucking away casually at his keyboard. Connor lowered his hand to his side. Somehow that made the pressure increase as more thirium from the broken lines gathered at his fingertips, even if most of the lines had been closed by now, so he would just have to deal with it later.
He crossed back to where his desk was across from Hank, carefully keeping his left side facing Hank, blocking the view of his damaged hand with his body. Hank didn’t look up from his screen, and why would he? Connor wasn’t being conspicuous. He was just returning to his desk after taking evidence from their last case to the archives.
Now he was just sitting back down and was going to log back into his terminal…
He stopped his right hand from attempting the connection as he routinely would have. Instead, he tried to look casual as he rested his right hand in his lap under the desk and connected to the terminal instead with his left hand. Letting his hand rest on a surface instead of hanging loose relieved some of the pressure, and he tried to ignore the residual pulse of discomfort in his hand that was in time with the beating of his thirium pump.
Without moving his eyes from his computer screen, Hank spoke. “So you gonna tell me what happened to your hand, or do you want me to guess?”
Connor blinked and deliberately looked down at his fully functional left hand on the desk. “I don’t understand, Lieutenant. My hand is fine.”
“Not that one.” Hank sat back in his chair, folding his arms and glaring across the desk. He seemed to point with a raise of his eyebrows. “That one. The one you’re hiding.”
“I…don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Every day you interface with your terminal with your right hand. You went to evidence, were gone a long time, came back, and now you’re using your left. So what happened?” Hank pressed.
Connor kept a blank expression. “It sounds like you’ve gotten bored with the report that you’re working on, Lieutenant, and you’re trying to find a new case where there isn’t one.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re not as subtle as you think you are.” Hank tapped himself on the temple. “I am a detective. I will detect.”
Connor briefly debated continuing to deny the injury but decided against it. Steeling himself for Hank’s reaction, he slowly lifted his right hand from under the desk. He didn’t offer it for closer inspection, choosing instead to keep it a fair distance away, as though distance would make the damage less apparent.
By the way Hank’s expression twisted, that theory was quickly proven false.
“What. Happened.” Hank reached out, gesturing for Connor to turn his hand over for a closer look.
Resigned, Connor obeyed, and Hank carefully took hold of his wrist. As he turned Connor’s hand over and back, Connor confessed.
“I encountered Detective Reed as I was leaving the evidence room—“
“That asshole did this?” Hank seemed to be coiling, ready to spring up from his chair and go on the hunt.
“Yes, but I do not believe it was entirely intentional.”
“Don’t defend that piece of shit.” Hank did spring to his feet at that, accidently jostling Connor’s hand in his grasp.
Connor flinched, tugging his hand free and pulling it back toward himself protectively.
Hank stilled. “That looked like pain.”
“It is,” Connor spoke through his teeth. “And I don’t like it.”
Hank snorted at that. “Yeah, nobody likes it. Anything broken?”
“Nothing my self healing program won’t fix overnight.”
“Wasn’t my question, Connor, and you didn’t answer my first one either. What happened?” Hank remained standing, crossing his arms over his chest.
Connor sat back a bit in his chair. “Should we be having this questioning in the interrogation room?”
Hank frowned, glanced away, and then glared back at him. “Smart ass. My partner comes limping back from within our own office—“
“I wasn’t limping—“
“—and I want to know why. What did Reed do?”
“I was holding the door open, and he closed it…abruptly…on my hand.”
“Shit,” Hank cursed. “That little…And you don’t think he did that on purpose? C’mon, Connor.”
“I’m not defending Detective Reed. In fact I was going to mention the incident to Captain Fowler—“
“But not me? The fuck, Connor?”
“Lieutenant, the last thing that I want to do is cause another infraction on your record…Assaulting Detective Reed over my own injury would likely result in such an infraction.”
“But he can’t assault you either, kid.” Hank leaned forward, planting his hands on his desk.
“Which is why I will be speaking with Captain Fowler,” Connor replied evenly.
The door to the archive room corridor opened, but even as Connor willfully kept his eyes from drifting to it, Hank seemed to hear the door over the din of the precinct. He swiveled on his heel just as Detective Reed sauntered back into view.
“Reed, you piece of shit!”
The other detective had barely walked around the corner before Hank was swinging. His tightly curled fist smashed into Reed’s jaw. The force of it spun Reed ninety degrees and nearly across the floor to his own desk.
Everyone in the office seemed to pause, all turning to observe the scene.
“Fuck!” Reed sounded like he’d bitten his tongue. He spun back at Hank, his own fists clenching and rising from his sides. “What is your problem, asshole?!”
Connor started to stand up. Damaged hand or not, he would have to intervene…
“Hank! Gavin!” Fowler threw open his office door with a roar. “Get your asses in here, NOW.”
The two men snarled at each other and drug their feet, but they shuffled up into the Captain’s office. Fowler turned on the tinting feature on the glass walls of his office, and the glass darkened and became opaque.
Those left in the office slowly swiveled their heads from the Captain’s closed office door…to Connor.
It took a moment to name the hot itch creeping up his neck as their eyes all moved to stare at him. Their expressions weren’t judgmental or even particularly upset, just confused and wanting to know what had just happened. Hank didn’t tend to go off like that anymore unless specific buttons were pushed, and unfortunately, Connor knew that he himself was one of those buttons. It stood to reason that everyone else had picked up on it too, and he found that he really disliked their attention now.
Embarrassment, that’s what it was.
He stiffly sat back down in his chair, drilling his gaze into his terminal to avoid their eye contact. The bubble of inertia seemed to finally burst, and the other officers began to filter back to their business. Connor shoved his left hand onto his computer to interface with it, seeking out a distraction from the prickly humiliation buzzing under his skin.
After a few minutes, he couldn’t stand it anymore and rolled his neck to combat the feeling. It helped somewhat, and then Fowler’s door was opening.
Reed came out first, still fuming as he aggressively slammed the door shut after himself. Connor flinched at the sound and immediately chastised himself for doing so. Reed’s lip was bleeding and already swelling up badly on one side. No one went after him as he stalked out of the office. A deliberate beat of time passed before Hank left the office next.
By now, the embarrassment at the situation had simmered into an anger of his own, and Connor willed himself to stay in his seat and not anger his partner further.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Lieutenant,” he said in a carefully even tone.
Hank grabbed his coat off his chair. “Well, I did, and I already got an earful from Fowler. I don’t need it from you too.”
“I was going to handle it myself. It wasn’t your place to—“
“You’re my partner. Somebody fucks with you, then they fuck with me. I’m not apologizing for that.” Hank made a vague, aggravated gesture.
Connor watched him pull his coat on. “You were suspended.”
“Three days,” Hank said tersely. “And now my hand hurts too. So we match.”
He held up the hand that he’d used to punch Reed. Two of his knuckles were already bruising, and he was reflexively opening and closing his fist against the discomfort. Connor looked from Hank’s red and swelling hand to his own, where the artificial skin program was still flickering around his damaged knuckles.
“I’m going home. Suspension awaits,” Hank sighed.
Connor awkwardly stood up again. “I—“
Captain Fowler’s office door opened again, and the Captain leaned out. He glared at Hank’s retreating back as the Lieutenant turned and left the office. For a brief moment, Connor felt stranded again, but Fowler didn’t let that moment last long.
“Connor.” His voice had lost its bite, no longer a snarl but a quiet order. “Come in here.”
Connor looked after Hank, but the Lieutenant had disappeared out into the lobby. He drew himself up to his full height, fixing the front of his jacket and awkwardly straightening his tie with one hand. Then he made his way into the Captain’s office.
The precinct’s eyes followed him all the way in.