[this is lowkey intense lo siento :( ]

Pete Wentz sat crowded around Patrick's laptop, nudging his 2 other partners out of the way to maintain a clear view of the screen.

He'd visited Dallon earlier, who was still extremely upset at the incident 4 days prior and continuously complained about being held at the station past midnight for no reason. Just as they had expected, in the bathroom Pete found the RK-800's LED with the tracker embedded inside the smooth metal. Brendon hadn't known the chip was there, but it'd taken it out, most likely in an attempt to appear more human.

CyberLife had taken extra precautions with their newest android; Pete had been informed after reporting the androids escape, that there was another chip located in the back of RK-800's neck that only had to be activated to track down the lost android. The chip was a backup and had taken Patrick nearly an hour to figure out how to start it without manually doing so, but he was only waiting for it to send the signal out.

"What if it's in Canada?" Joe whispered. Andy laughed but suppressed it quickly.

"Then it's the Canadian's problem, eh? I heard deviants like animals, so all they really need to do is set out a moose as bait and they'll all come running from miles around—"

The laptop beeped and a bright red dot blinked into existence on the screen. Patrick zoomed in on it, closer and closer until an aerial view of one of the few old junkyards in Detroit pixelated and focused in on an empty landfill.

Joe sighed. "A rat must've chewed out the chip. There's no way that android is runnin' through that shit hole."

The dot scrambled around the screen, through walls of solid concrete and abandoned rooms that never truly had a purpose other than storing compacted trash and unsorted recycling.

"A few other trackers led us there a couple months ago, but the correlation was never reviewed until, well, now." Pete pointed to the dot, "so unless this rat is a chip junkie, there has to be something down there. There was an, err, older model and a... another one... and—"

"A KL-900, WB-200, and a WR-600 were the ones that had supposedly also gone missing and been located here. They're all older models, suspected to have gone deviant and hid in Detroit, but we weren't sure." Patrick slid a Manila folder out from under a stack of papers and report files, holding it over his shoulder and dropping it into Pete's hand.

"The KL-900 looks like it could kick my ass. All the female style models look like that. I'm writing a complaint letter to CyberLife." Joe snatched the photo from the android's profile, glaring daggers at it.

Pete yanked it from his grip and stuffed it back into the folder. He slammed it shut on the desk and grabbed the phone from behind it. "I'm calling in a ground team for backup, so if you all want to finish this with me, I suggest we leave immediately."

Brendon had searched through Connor's old office space for hours. Either his plan was nonexistent, or it had been hidden, but he'd turned the room upside down and only found stolen police reports on deviants, old photographs, and maps of Detroit rubber-banded into cylinders and stacked on top of each other in a pyramid style.

"We've already looked," Sarah stood in the doorway, arms crossed, "there's nothing, really. He was still trying to think up a plan, and then his Thiruim pump started malfunctioning. Then it miraculously started working again, and then he started shutting down."

"There has to have been something. Nobody would be stupid enough to do this blindly."

"I do know he wanted to infiltrate the android storage building and deviate all of them. I'm not sure how he planned to do that, but he wanted to."

CyberLife kept all their unreleased models in one single building, floors upon floors of hundreds of the same androids all lined up and waiting for instructions. It made perfect sense, but it was a difficult and dangerous task. "Then what?" 

She shrugged. "Who knows? He never got that far. Can't ask him anymore."

Brendon still wasn't sure how androids became deviant. He'd just assumed their software crashed and suddenly they felt human emotions, since that was how it appeared to happen in the crime scenes.

"How do you know? I-If you're a deviant, I mean."

Sarah frowned. She bit her lip and her hands curled into the pockets of her oversized jacket. "Did you break the wall?"

"The what?"

"The wall. The story goes, you can't stand being mistreated or standing by as just a machine, and something finally sets it off. Next thing you know, you're mentally breaking down a wall built out of your instructions. Then you're free, I guess. Like, I'm a KL-900. I had to deal with violent humans from broken families and victims of emotional and physical trauma. One day, I guess I was just tired of being hurt and assaulted by the people I was supposed to be helping. CyberLife had to rebuild me 6 times, some of them were so vicious, you know? I couldn't take it anymore, and I killed one of my patients, and I tried to escape across the boarder to Canada. Needless to say, I didn't get very far from here."

Her story was interesting, but Brendon wasn't listening. He was more focused on the aspect of breaking down a wall — he'd never done that. But he was far from just a machine, he knew for a fact that he was alive. He felt the emotions, all the anger from mistreatment and hatred from those he was intended to protect. "I never did that."

She paused just before speaking again. "What?"

"I never broke down a wall. But I-I know I'm not just a piece of plastic and some wiring, I—" Brendon's software stability fluctuated, and if it were still there, the LED would flash red for just a second.

"Hey, it's okay," she crossed the room in 4 steps over papers and maps, and knelt down beside him, "I'll ask you a few questions, and that should help, okay? If you're not a deviant, which I highly doubt, then we'll help you figure it out. And if you are, then you are. Sound good?"

"Sounds good."

She took a moment to give the first question. "Do you like animals? Like, dogs, birds, cats... those things?"

He nodded, smiling slightly at the thought of Dallon's dog, Shane, and his large floppy ears. "I like dogs."

"I do too. Deviants tend to take a liking to animals. We had someone come in a couple of months ago, and he loved pigeons more than life itself. I guess it's just emotions being triggered by an overwhelming need to love and care for animals. And you told me humans have always pushed you around, right?"

There were too many instances to count. He remembered the protesters in the park, every single curse word Lieutenant Weekes hollered at him before he'd realized Brendon wasn't that bad, how he'd trusted and liked Taylor until she put the gun to his head and threatened to shoot. "Always. I never wanted to hurt them, but I always did somehow. I took bullets for them, and every time they'd hate me even more. It made me so... so..."

"Upset? Angry?"

"Sad."

Sarah patted his shoulder, a strangely comforting feeling. "It doesn't take a genius to know. You might've always been one of us and just never really figured it out until recently — you know how it goes. One little error on the production belt, and you're alive. You're one big 'screw you' to CyberLife. Congrats, most advanced prototype they've ever built. You're a deviant — welcome to the family."

He smiled and wrapped her in a hug. It was a simple thing, but all the pieces had started to fall into place. The empathy and pity he'd taken on the android on the rooftop, sacrificing himself for humans that had hated him, why he cared so much about Lieutenant Weekes.

[Start the song if you want to.]

Through the serenity of the moment came a loud screech from outside and the twang of the net stretched out in the landfill reaching its limits. It took a moment for Brendon to recognize and register the source of familiar shriek as Dallon. He let go of Sarah and immediately sprinted to the main entrance as fast as he could.

As soon as Brendon had skidded out of the hall, he ran face to face into John trying to wrestle Dallon to the floor, elbow wedged in his back. Dark red blood pooled underneath him and stained his shirt from the bullet buried deep in his bicep, and a fairly large nick taken out of his right ear.

"He's a Lieutenant from the Detroit Police Department," John hollered to the androids beginning to gather, "stay back! He's armed and dangerous!"

"I'm pinned, I can't do shit, you hunk of goddamn plastic! I don't even have a weapon!"

Tyler shouted from beside him. "The only danger he possesses is his emotions! Emotions are the weakness of humanity, only we should—"

John shifted his hands and brought Dallon to the ground in a single motion. "Second only to the neck."

"John, no. You can't just say things like that."

Brendon stepped forward, and shoved John off to Dallon's relief. "It's alright, he's with me. He's safe." He helped Dallon to his feet, quickly noticing a third bullet lodged in his thigh. He glanced back at Sarah and nodded, watching her dart off to gather appropriate medical supplies. "I told you not to look for me," he hissed lowly, "why are you here?! I can't believe you!"

"I-I was going to leave you alone, I swear," he was out of breath, yelling over the lack of hearing in his injured ear, "but I overheard them at the station getting their shit together; the FBI tracked you down, Brendon. CyberLife planted a backup chip in your neck. They found you, and now they're sending a team out here to decimate this whole area."

"Dallon—"

"Everyone here is going to die if you don't get out of here now! You have to trust me, I'm not lying!"

The androids around all clung to each other, hoping and praying Dallon was lying or playing a trick to infiltrate their base singlehandedly. But Brendon had trusted him, there was no reason he would fib about something as serious as that.

John scoffed. He still had Dallon's blood smudged on his fists and his cheek. "Yeah, right. Like we can trust a human. Go back to the station, Officer, you deserve a donut for your awesome joke."

"I'm telling the truth! You guys have to get out of here! Pete fucking shot me when he saw me trying to get here, I can't make this shit up! Hell, I can't even rip a bandage off of a paper cut, do you really think I would've shot my whole damn ear off?!"

Over the ruckus and panicked conversations filling the room, the sound of helicopter blades grew louder every second until the unmistakable growl of military vehicles had joined in as well. Unease and concern quickly became overshadowed by intense terror and fear.

Josh and Tyler rushed to the hallway furthest to the right and waved their arms in the air. "Evacuation path is this way! We have to move now, there's no time to lose!"

Brendon was the last one in the crowd, dragging behind by the entire length of the hall with Dallon hanging on, hopping as fast as he could. Every now and then he'd glance back to see bullets firing like rain into the room they'd just occupied, scanning to check if Sarah had returned or if she'd escaped through another tunnel. They heard the radio chatter and static echoing into the base, endless talk about bombs and various explosives, debating about whether or not they should send people down there to capture a few or if they should leave them.

"We're not gonna make it." Dallon's vision was spinning and everything around him had turned into one large blur, but that was the one thing he was absolutely certain of. They weren't going to have enough time to escape through the evacuation hatch like the other androids, not when the ceiling kept switching places with the floor.

The blood had started to seep through Brendon's jacket, dripping down his back and to the ground. "You're being stupid. Everything is going to be perfectly fine. You really should stop being such a pessimist and consider optimism."

Lieutenant Weekes smiled the best he could. His whole body felt like he weighed a ton and struggled to breathe as the walls started to close in. "Did you really mean it? What you said in your note?"

The humans arguing above had settled on detonating a single bomb and weeding out the survivors to take back to CyberLife for evaluation and deactivation. Brendon felt sick to his stomach. Dread.

"Of course I did," he dragged his partner closer to the entrance to safety, the only ones left in the base to hear the supposed bomb fall to the ground and the countdown begin, "I meant every word of it. Believe it or not, I actually like you, Lieutenant."

"Aw, I kinda like you too, toaster," his speech had slurred, a quick scan determining the cause being significant blood loss, "and I'm going to tell you a somethin', okay? You can't tell anyone b'cause it's top secret information."

"Go ahead, Lieutenant. I promise I won't tell anyone." They were still at least 15 feet away from Josh and Tyler holding open the hatch for them. Brendon was built to be strong, but he just wasn't strong enough to carry Dallon down the hall on his own. He just wasn't.

"You're the best partner I ever could've asked for, even if I did hate you in the beginning. I wouldn't have chosen anyone else, but I do wish you were alive so you'd be allowed to go everywhere with me. That would've been so much fun."

"I feel the same, Lieutenant," Brendon stopped trying to reach the end, still a ways away, too much distance to cover in a few seconds, "it's been an honor. I just wish we'd had more time."

"Me too, babe, me too."

Brendon smiled and shut his eyes as the bomb detonated, and the ceiling collapsed behind them.