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[VIDEO]

[Hank's looking a little more haggard than usual when he makes this post. He's tired and fucking wore out from a long stretch of just being perpetually pissed and sad. And goddammit, he wants his hope back, but it's been sliding.]

[He's still fuckin' trying, though.]

[He positions the phone so it's showing an old-timeyish looking Detective's office. We're talking he went for the Sam Spade aesthetic. He plants himself in a desk seat.]

So, I know I just fuckin' talked about getting a promotion. But I had some things go wrong with my last case. [Some big things. People kept going missing, for one.] Connor got assaulted by a decorated officer. And while he's getting what's due uh... I don't know. I figured it'd be better if I got him out of there while he was recovering emotionally. And this fuckin' job would require less walking.

[Those are his excuses? Real reason number one? Connor can't understand all those extra languages at the moment. Real reason number two? Being in the middle of the police station when his year runs up doesn't sound like the best plan. And for some people? Seems like it's not taking a year.]

[He sure as shit would like to stop losing fucking friends. Thanks.]

[Hank turns himself in his chair.] This is my new private detective's office. So now I get to take pictures for paranoid fuckin' people looking for reasons for divorce. I'm really goddamn excited about that. [He smears his hand down his face, then scratches his beard.]

But uh. It was time I said good-bye to the job. [He'd always said this was his last chance to be a cop, and here it is. But damn if the heaviness of that loss isn't weighing on him too.]

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"I hate that I gotta ask you to keep doing this shit, but yeah. Let's talk to him. If he'll have it..." He'll need Connor there, at least his ability to sense stress. If anything he could tell when Morbius was trying to play Hank, he couldn't trick him into something by suddenly feigning cooperation. Connor's ability to sense stress would be invaluable.

Hank looks at the scissors just as Connor informs him of the bug. He's getting used to sudden images; they're not that different from his own intrusive thoughts. Just sudden ideas and scenarios that he knows aren't his, separate from his own hateful memories. He's suspected all rented buildings would be bugged for a while. His one hope is that the Head could be a busy man.

But the suddenness of the favor, and the fact that he came in here with a fucking stabbing impliment, makes the surveillance, for once, less of a priority. "Uh.... yeah. Depending. If you wanna cut my hair let's at least wait until after it gets warmer."

"Don't," Connor says, waving off Hank's words easily. "We're a team. If you need me, here I am."

Whatever Hank wants him to be.

But then Connor pauses, and grins a little uncertainly. "I never thought of that." He eyes Hank appraisingly. "You'd look good with it short."

Not that Connor doesn't think he looks good with it long as well.

"But that's not what I meant." He presents Hank with the scissors, holding them by the blade. He's hesitating as he goes on, "I want you to take this off for me."

He indicates his LED.

Hank looks surprised. He can't help it. Connor's been attached to the thing for so long that it's hard to imagine him without it. Hell, it's like a moodring to Hank. He can watch it and tell what's going on with him.

But maybe he finally needs his privacy? Maybe.

Either way, Hank reaches out to take the scissors.

"If you're sure."

And one last time he rubs his thumb over the glowing circle on his temple, smooth with Connor's skin in place.

"Just tell me how to do it."

He tilts his head into Hank's hand, but finally a flicker of distress crosses his face.

"I'm not sure," he says in a low voice. "I want to keep it, it's part of me. But it's an identifying mark, nothing about being an android."

He grimaces. "That helps a little."

He covers Hank's hand in his and brings the blades to just underneath where the LED is.

"You have to gouge it out. That's the only way."

He wants to make him stop and think about it a little more, or at least discuss it. But it does catch up with Hank that he's probably had to think about this a lot, that it's a change that they know they've had to make, and while it's not exactly the same as Hank having to quit his beloved job, it's also a necessity.

So he braces his scissors against the base of the LED, holds one hand against the side of Connor's face, and starts to pry. And god, if there's anything about the fucking sound and feel of an LED being pried off it's that it can make an android completely inhuman feeling while it's going on, no matter how human they appear after.

He can't help wincing until it's done, and once it is he puts both the scissors and the LED in his hand.

"I'll get you somethin' on Valentine's Day to make up for it, alright?"

Because it's still a loss. Good or bad.

He watches Hank's face as his partner lifts the blade to his head and braces his head into it. The scissors push into his head with a pressure that's unpleasant, though he can't call it painful. It's not sharp, or anything like the ghosts of sensation he's sensed from Hank's mind before.

It feels like a long several seconds before that pressure eases, and Hank presents him with the scissors, which he sets on the desk, and the LED, which he holds in his hand as he pulls his wallet out of his pocket.

In Detroit, someone's wallet would contain cards and various kinds of identifying information too. Here in Dualis, Connor's wallet has cash, loyalty cards for various shops and sports halls - and a little pocket which has held a tiny chip for the past couple of weeks. Now it holds his LED too.

"I wanted you to do it." he says, finding a smile as he pockets his wallet...then, as if magnetised, reaching up to touch his temple. It's not the scar in his chassis marring the other temple, just a smooth patch of skin. "I didn't want to be standing by myself in front of a mirror carving it off."

But the smile grows a little more genuine, as he adds, "But for Valentine's Day, sure - you can make it up to me."

He hasn't been sure if Hank was one of those people who dislike Valentine's Day for whatever reason. It's been playing in the back of his mind for a few days now and he was on the verge of outright asking - but now here's Hank, bringing it up himself.

He rubs that now realistic spot himself. "No scar or anything... Not that I expected it, but goddamn."

His hands drop into Connor's lap then, resting his forearms on his legs and looking up at him. "So you wanna go out to dinner or something? Do something nice? I mean, I've never been great at it but I'm lucky that I got someone that seems pretty fucking easily impressed."

So says Hank, who was overwhelmed by half of Connor's performances.

Valentine's Day is either heinous, sorta fun, or a non-entity depending on the year. Some years they've been exquisitely painful. Like the last couple, or the one after his divorce. Some years they're a tired work day in which drunk drivers have to be pried from their vehicles or surprise marital arguments require intervention or someone's caught fucking on an elevator. Some years they're strawberry filled heart-shaped pastries brought into work, covered in frosting. Some years they were sitting at the kitchen table the night before, with a box of children's valentines teaching him how to spell 'Maria' and 'Joseph' as Cole filled out each for his classmates and he helped tape cinnamon or watermelon lollipops to them.

It's just a day. But he doesn't mind treating it like a special one when the company is right and the situation obliges.

"It doesn't seem like it should be possible, does it?" At least not without the same kind of scarring on his chassis that his other temple has, or without some kind of interruption of his functions. But no, it really does seem to have mostly been on his head to let humans see to some degree what he was thinking.

But he has other, better ways to show Hank what he's thinking.

"I am not easily impressed," he retorts, putting on a very offended air. "Maybe you're just very impressive as a person."

Come to think, maybe Hank has reasons to not enjoy Valentine's Day. He's oblivious to any significance with regard to having a child on this particular day, but Hank was married at some point and Connor knows very little about it except the easily accessible. And cops have reasons to hate holidays as a general whole.

"But I'd like to go to dinner with you," he says softly, leaning down to lean his forehead on Hank's. "We can finally have that date we didn't get to have at the ball."

Not that he didn't enjoy the non-ball aspects of that evening a hell of a lot, but they missed out on a lot that night.

"I don't have a nice uniform anymore... Or a decent suit. I guess I'd have to look into something." Though he's mostly been investing in his mod. He doesn't have a lot set aside for good clothes. Maybe he can bargain shop.

He'll make it work.

"Let's do Jazz. We both seem to like that. And uh... I got a bunch of stuff we still gotta do. But let's work out a block in our schedule to talk to Mike, alright? I wanna try." And Hank is so distracted by his own stress levels in these personal matters that he probably can't be a good judge of Morbius's.

"You want to go to a couple stores together?" He doesn't word it as, 'do you want me to take you shopping', but that's basically what the question is. Connor thinks he's picked up a good eye for this stuff, mostly by picking the brains of every shop assistant and tailor he ever asks for help from. "You deserve something you feel good in."

Connor, without having mod updates or food to worry about, tends to save a lot, and the idea of giving that money to Hank pleases him. The idea that what's Connor's is also Hank's.

"How about a restaurant and a jazz bar after?" He was smiling, but it fades as he says, "I'll think about what to do with Morbius. We should start by talking to him, but we need to figure out what the Head did to this clone exactly to make it loyal to him. If he's still doing anything. Then we can move on to fixing it."

If it's even possible.

"I'll let you dress me up? How about that. We'll go to some stores, you can pick out some clothes, and I'll try to keep my mouth shut, alright?"

His look lightens a little over just talking about it. Much of his spare money had gone into this and into his current mod. He still has enough set aside for a decent Valentines. They need at least one damn good date before things got difficult. One wasn't too much to ask for.

"Honestly I'm thinkin' they still have enough metal in their brains to program them. So somehow we're gonna have to break their programming. But we need help with that and I keep asking for help with it and... Fuck it. I actually started enhancing this fucking mod just so I could try, too.

"Me." He scoffs. "I still barely can use a cell phone and now I'm getting loaded up with this."

He's getting better about using it, but he's not the best.

"I think I can do that," he says as if that wasn't the plan anyway. "I'm not sure about you being able to keep your mouth shut, though."

He leans forward and nudges them together, and Hank's breath on his face is perfect.

"Don't push yourself too hard," he says against Hank's mouth, knowing that will have no effect, then leans back legs swaying off the desk slowly. "I haven't seen Morbius specifically yet, but the clones I've been able to scan have cybernetics, metal skeletons, that kind of thing. There's enough that I bet the Head is doing something, I just don't know how much or what kind of influence he's putting on them.

"People don't want to risk themselves for one man who they think is gone already." It's understandable, but they don't have to like it.

"Do you need help with the mod? Anything I can try teaching you?"

"Oh you're gonna be like that." He teases, returning the soft kiss. But the more serious topic levels out his expression.

"Three options. Psychic. Magic. Technological. Fucking sucks, doesn't it? We gotta consider all the above as sources for how he controls people. Being that he's an AI I'm guessing that it's technological."

Hank sighs and sits back, his desk chair having just enough give to let him rock slightly.

"I don't know. All I know is I pick something up and it's like- it's like moving a hand or a foot. I decide I want it do a thing, it does it. But the other day I got mad and I when I was done the screen on my monitor was just fuckin' running static. I don't know for sure but I think I did that."

"There could be some element of plain old psychological brainwashing involved as well. Or at least, the reprogramming might manifest in such a way that it resembles brainwashing and it'll have to be broken in the same way."

Basically this is far more complicated than Connor or Hank have any experience of or knowledge about.

"Do you mind?" He reaches out his hand for Hank's. They could probably communicate without it at this point, but touching and actually interfacing with the mod is a much more direct way to find out if that was Hank's doing, and just how much power he has. It could be that the mod's given Hank abilities Connor's never come across before. And in an ironic sort of way, that's pretty exciting to think about.

"You know, there's a couple of people here that can't die. Maybe that was the intention, too. If he couldn't clone 'em, he has to do something else to control 'em."

Connor offers to take a look, so Hank gives him his hand.

It is much stronger than it was before. His reach is wider. His control is better. It picks up his feelings more thoroughly now, translates them into data as much as it translates data into words and feelings that Hank can understand. There's everything here from a slight discomfort from a too-tight belt to the background pondering on if Morbius could die, or what he should do to protect Arkady or Nick, to the fact that he very much likes the feel of Connor's hand in his.

It's all simple, yes, and at the moment his thoughts are subdued in whatever fashion they come in. But the transition is smoother, and when he feels, he radiates it.

"Maybe..." he murmurs. "If he wasn't planning to deal with them some other way."

There are a few other ways he can think of to deal with people who can't die, and that's supposing their immortality still works for them in the same way. They've established here many times that what works in one way in one world doesn't work that way here. Maybe the Head has his ways.

He distractedly strokes Hank's palm under his thumb as he analyses the signals from the implant, and they're strong now. It used to be fainter, vaguer, like some kind of odd interference was stopping him picking up the specifics. Now everything is clear and crisp, and with very little effort Connor can feel his own hand stroking Hank's palm as if it were his own palm too.

He wonders how much Hank can feel from him, too - if the background processes keeping his systems working, his sense of time running at the right rate, his temperature within a tenth of a degree of standard, if those are all tangible.

...If Hank can feel and understand the sensory data Connor's picking up from the environment around them. Ambient temperature, noises from outside that Hank himself can't hear, the little electrical frequencies of their phones and the bug Connor just pulled out of the vent in the bathroom, sitting harmlessly on the desk.

(He even for a second finds himself wondering if Hank could use Connor's processing power to think or react faster, in a crisis, say.)

There are so many possibilities to explore with something like this.

It comes to him not in numbers, but exacts. He hears the buzzing, sure. The small hum that would tell him where to find the bugs. But he feels the heat in the room, closer to him, further from them, on Connor's hands in precise areas of 'warmer than this thing" "cooler than this thing". No numbers. Just an exact sense of where that boundary of comparison lies.

He lacks any statistical control, his mind unable to settle on particular numbers, but if Connor were to use his mind palace, he'd be able to see it.

He knows that Connor is feeling himself back, and Hank grumbles a soft 'sorry' for not being in better control of that.

There are little unique things Hank feels, too. The ache of old bones, like a discomfort in his knees due to his tendency to sit oddly in chairs. A permenant crick in his back. Things that might not translate precisely to an android mind, but still come through that feedback loop.

While he's calm, though, he doesn't otherwise interfere with any of Connor's systems. The contented mood is settling.

"Holy shit." There's a sense of wonder creeping into his voice. He's never wanted Hank to be an android - Hank is Hank and anything else is irrelevant - but this, being able to interface on such a deep level he can feel Hank's very bones - strange and a little distorted, the data not quite complete - that Hank can feel Connor's android senses extending out from them... It's beyond anything he could have imagined.

Then he tries something else, something he doesn't really expect to work but - he activates his mind palace, ramps up his processing speed so that time seems to slow to a stop. He has full awareness of the room, a monochromatic graphical interface laid over it, sensors picking brighter trails of their footprints, an even brighter sense of the bug on the table between them. The vague notion of a task list dancing on the edge of his vision that even Connor rarely pays attention to anymore. Their bodies can't move fast enough to keep up with this, only Connor's mind, and maybe, just maybe--

Hank?

--maybe Hank can see this, one of the most advanced things his mind is capable of. Maybe the most personal thing Connor can show him.

What the fuck is what Hank wants to say. It is, however, not what he says as the world slows and crawls and his muffled "w" sound extends out for an eternity. In reality, it's just a surprised noise.

That's when he goes quiet and looks around. It's Connor's job to change focus, but yeah, when connected to him like this, he's suddenly very aware of the particulars of his surroundings.

It's his own sense of wonder kicking in, at the world devolving into Raw Data, separated into points of highlighted importance.

"Wow."

Oh that felt way too long to say. He needs to be quiet when he does this, because suddenly he's aware of his human limits at communicating.

It must be a little hard to get used to. The movements of the body, including the voice, are totally useless when he's using the mind palace - it's as natural to Connor as breathing, but for Hank it must be a strange thing. (Actually, Hank isn't breathing right now either)

He lets Hank look around, take control of Connor's focus to shift it where he wants. Though it might be strange if he focuses on himself. There's nothing visually different, not exactly. But there's a large amount of processing power dedicated to Hank that becomes especially clear in Connor's mind palace.

Impulses - to look at Hank, to touch him, to taste him, to hear his voice and hear his opinion on the things important to Connor. Awareness - a constant background awareness that Hank's there, close to him, and the comfort that brings him, the little occasional flickers of wanting more, wanting him closer. Emotion - Connor's feelings are cascades of programming that, with Hank, are in constant ebb and flow. In some moments it becomes so intense it takes up more space in his memory than it rightly should, little hitches in his system that Connor marvels at sometimes. He feels so strongly it affects the very core of his being.

If he looks at the tasklist still present there, the top item on it is just one word, with a series of collapsed subtasks: HANK

Connor's not sure how other androids experience love, or any other emotion. But his very nature means he understands very well what they mean for him.

Nothing like looking at yourself through someone else's eyes. He can see what he had for lunch, that his heart is currently steady instead of being tainted by an alcoholic arrhythmia, that he's managed to forget to do up one of his buttons.

That's what breaks it. That he tears himself away from the wash of wonderful emotion and saves Connor a look at his subtask folder because he fuckin' forgot to do up a shirt button. But he actually looks a little sheepish as he does it.

"That's uh... that's a lot. So you can do that whenever you want?"

He rubs the back of his neck, ducking his head so his hair hangs in his face and he collects himself. Having someone say they care is one thing. Have it hit him so fully and forcefully is another.

Hank breaks away and immediately fixes his shirt, something Connor hadn't been going to mention, and he feels a little embarrassed - and it looks like Hank does too. About the shirt, sure, but maybe about just how much of Connor's attention he takes up. A moment later, he seems to hide himself, shrinking away a little.

"Sorry if that was too much," he says, making himself smile comfortingly as he forces back his own feeling that he overstepped a boundary of some kind. "I didn't think it was... It was a lot."

He hadn't stopped to consider what Hank would see about how Connor saw Hank himself.

"I don't have to do it again, I just wanted to know if it was possible. My processors speed up so much that a human couldn't usually keep up. But you can." He leans forward, putting a hand on Hank's knee and trying to look at his face. "That's all I was trying to show you."

"No, it was alright. I just uh... Thank you for letting me see it."

He gives Connor an appreciative look. "It's amazing. It's more than any mod would be able to see, and I don't know. I've never had anyone look at me like that?"

In so much detail. Appreciating parts of him he'd never looked at. Prioritized his happiness with his own thorough folder.

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