A/N: Hey guys! Just so you know, there is violence ahead as well as some situations that could make people uncomfortable. Basically, I really earned my T rating this time. Please keep that in mind and stay safe.

It was the end of Hank's shift and as he closed the back door behind him, the stress seemed to sneak through the crack, clinging to his clothes, stubborn and unpleasant as cigarette smoke and booze. Usually, he'd exit out the front, sometimes with Connor if their shifts overlapped, but today he'd parked in the lot behind the precinct to avoid the hassle of finding a spot for his car in the front. It didn't seem likely, anyway, what with him showing up past noon, and a little walk in the cold had never bothered him.

Pulling his coat more tightly around him, Hank stepped into the alley, his breath visible in the form of curling wisps. He'd barely made it a yard before an old Ford model rolled in from the street. Now, few would describe Hank as the curious type, but an unidentified vehicle rolling up alongside a police precinct was a little too much to ignore, even for the lieutenant on his worse days. So he lingered, hands shoved into his pockets to keep his fingers from falling off, and then, in a particularly paranoid move, dialed his most recent contact. He waited a couple rings, knowing Connor had a habit of picking up on the second at the latest, then jammed Speaker as three men climbed out. Though their pockets were conveniently obscured by overly long t-shirts, Hank could have sworn they were carrying.

"Any way I can help you gentlemen?" See that? He could be civil. Fowler would be proud.

The first guy looked him over uncertainly, taking in the graying head of hair and bulky coat. "Are you Gavin Reed?"

Hank frowned. "That depends on who's asking."

"It's got to be him," the skinny kid that had climbed out of the passenger's seat interjected. There was a thin scar on his ear from what could have been a knife, a rawness under his nostrils from snorting red ice. His clothes hung loosely on his frame. "The guy that hired us on said this was when he got off his shift." He was nervous. Panicky.

The whole thing stunk to high heaven of bad news.

"Look, just answer the question, old man," and it was the driver taking charge again. Hank's gaze drifted to the third member of their posse, wondering what it was about his silence that bothered him. Something about the relaxed way he held himself, the hint of a smirk on his face, was setting his teeth on edge. "Are you or are you not Gavin Reed?"

After thinking it over, Hank decided it'd be better to find out what these punks wanted before setting them on Gavin. His instincts told him this wasn't a social visit, and guys looking for money or just to pick a fight should know better than to try ambushing a cop outside of the station. Gavin could be a real piece of work sometimes, but he was still one of theirs.

Hank deliberately relaxed his posture, hoping to keep their attention off his hands. "Yeah, fine," he shrugged, "it's me. What do you want?"

And the third guy, the quiet one, smiled with a mouth full of gold-capped teeth. "Doesn't matter."

In training, officers are required to endure ten seconds of having 50,000 volts pumped into them, so Hank knew what was happening when, after what felt like a solid punch to his chest, his legs fell out from under him, and with his arms twitching uselessly at his sides, collapsed bonelessly to the pavement.

He thought he'd screamed when the taser first hit, though that may not have been the case. Either way, by the time anyone came to check on the commotion, they were left with nothing to go on but tire tracks in the snow, an officer's cell, and a police-issued sidearm.

"Brought your phone to work today, plastic?"

Connor massaged the bridge of his nose, hoping beyond hope that if he closed his eyes and counted to ten, Gavin would realize he wasn't in the mood for games today and go back to doing his job. There were at least six active cases assigned to him so how he thought there was time for such juvenile bullying tactics escaped even Connor's advance social programming.

There was a jolt on the desk from a palm slamming down on it. Gavin demanding attention.

Sighing, Connor tried, "It was a gift from Lieutenant Anderson." Predictably, it was then snatched away from him, Gavin holding it high above his head as though Connor couldn't pluck it out of his grasp with ease if he wanted to. It was a game, really, and Connor was willing to play it to encourage non-hostile office relationships if so required, until the cellphone began to vibrate - Hank's name appeared on the Caller ID.

Gavin looked as though Christmas had come early. Connor stood, his arm outstretched. "I'd like that back now, please."

"Give it back to him, Reed," interjected Officer Miller from his desk. "You've had your kicks. Time to let this one go."

Though he obviously hated to be interrupted and was visibly annoyed by the request, Gavin still had enough respect for his superiors to toss it abruptly to Connor, snorting when he fumbled the device. "You're lucky everyone in this precinct seems to have some kind of soft spot for you, plastic cop." Connor was barely even listening at this point, having already assigned the interaction lower priority to the variety of unfamiliar voices coming from the speaker. He held the phone to his ear.

"Look, just answer the question, old man," streamed out, aggressive and demanding. "Are you or are you not Gavin Reed?"

Probability of Violence: ^75%

Hank had never been hit by lightning before. He'd seen articles online about a couple lucky people who survived it every now and then. It was always a miracle, always a blessing. Lying with his cheek pressed against a cold cement floor and his hands cuffed behind his back, Hank didn't feel quite so lucky.

More like a fool that had somehow managed to get run over by a truck while also sticking a fork in an electric socket.

Cold metal tapped against his temple, its weight and shape familiar enough to send chills racing down Hank's spine."You awake, Lieutenant?" He grunted, figuring the jig was up. The punk huffed a laugh, sounding relieved.

"It's about damn time."

It took real effort to pry his eyes open, to sit up and look around, try to get a feel for his surroundings after being electrocuted, knocked out, and carried around with about as much care as a sack of flour warranted. Several feet behind the kid pressing the gun to his temple was a WR400 model. Hank had never seen one outside of Eden Club before, though he'd heard they could be rented out. There was a blinking red light in the bottom corner of her right eye, "Are you… livestreaming me?" Hank stared at his captor in slackjawed disbelief. "You do realize your IP address can be traced, right?" On second look, it looked like the girl wasn't a deviant, at least.

Perhaps it was for the best, in this case. Hank would have opted out of waking up to these ugly mugs too if he'd had the choice.

"You'd like to think we were that stupid, wouldn't you?" The criminal scoffed, "Our resident plastic's got it handled." When he moved, his rolled sleeves lifted up to the elbow, revealing the brand of one of the gangs Hank recalled working days and nights trying to run off the streets back in the day. Did this mean their search for Gavin was a ruse? It hadn't sounded rehearsed. The other possibility was the other two numbskulls were out to collect Gavin while he was tied up in some uninspired warehouse torture chamber.

"You're routing the signal through an android to obscure the source. Not a bad idea." He didn't have to check his pants' pocket to know they'd tossed his cell, already. It wasn't waterproof, so hopefully someone at the precinct would find it before it got damaged by the snow. He'd rather not spend any of his monthly wages on purchasing a new one if he managed to get through this. Actually, was that sort of thing covered by workmen's comp? He'd have to ask Fowler- "And what do you plan on doing with that?"

While he'd been absorbed in his own thoughts, the former(?) red ice dealer had retrieved a handheld electric razor from his back pocket. "You don't look like you, Anderson. That's right. I know who you are. The cop who almost single-handedly took red ice off the streets. You probably don't remember, but you put me away seven years ago for possession. I was nineteen."

"Yeah, I remember you, Nick. Me and my team let you off with a slap on the wrist the first time we snagged you because you were young, and then you went and murdered one of your clients for trying to rip you off. If it's sympathy you're after, I'm afraid I'm all out."

"Thought so." A wicked grin curled his lips, his eyes glittering, Nick pressed the razor to his hairline, and Hank jerked, causing a trickle of blood to seep from his scalp and down the side of his face . "Try that again," Nick snarled, then aimed the gun in his free hand at the android, " and I'll put a pretty little bullet in its pretty little head."

She didn't blink. She wasn't alive. But she could be.

Hank grit his teeth, hating his own helplessness. There was no guarantee that anyone was coming to get him. The next time the razor touched his skin, he forced himself to remain rigidly still, his gaze glued to the WR400. She didn't look like any of the Traci's he'd seen at the club. Her auburn hair was cut in a perky bob, and one of her eyes was damaged, the artificial skin torn away to reveal the wiring underneath.

There. Did her LED just flicker?

By the time it was over, Hank was sitting in a pile of silver locks with cool air drying the sweat on the nape of his neck, glaring at Nick with the sole purpose of making him spontaneously combust. Ignoring him, Nick rose to his feet, dusted himself off, then strode over to the android. He took a pair of pliers and a knife out of his back pocket, "See, word on the street says you're harboring a deviant," slipped the knife's edge under her LED, and popped it off. Though she didn't resist, her brow visibly twitched. It wasn't much, but - "Bit hypocritical, don't you think?" - even something so small was monumental coming from an android.

He was momentarily distracted, however, when Nick began heating the circlet up with a lighter. "Same rules apply, Lieutenant," and he approached with the LED sitting between the plier's teeth. "If you move, I shoot the android." Hank bared his teeth in a wordless growl. As though he'd needed the reminder.

There was a good chance Connor was watching this. Hank wondered how he'd feel about him putting his life on the line for a machine. He hoped the kid wasn't too upset with him for, well, for everything. But for letting himself get caught, mainly.

Searing pain on his temple obliterated his thoughts, scattering them like dust in a hurricane. Bursts of white and red consumed his vision. He heard screams, only distantly aware that they belonged to him. Slowly, his thoughts rearranged themselves around the agony that was having the concentrated heat of the sun sitting on his flesh. He forced himself to breath through it, blinking spots out of his vision until Nick's self-satisfied grin swam into focus. "How does it feel to be internet famous?"

Tina discovered the live stream first. It was spreading through an email virus. Click on the link and it hijacked your address to pass the message on to everyone in your contacts. Something similar seemed to be happening to the androids as Connor got a warning notification from Jericho.

While they had it playing on one of the desktops, Gavin worked with Connor on finding anything they could use to identify the location. He did, in some way, feel responsible for this. If he'd just let the plastic answer the phone, maybe he would have been able to get to Hank in time. Plus, they'd been looking for him in the first place. Hank was in this mess because he'd covered for him.

Fowler had practically interrogated him, desperate to find a motive that could somehow lead them to finding Anderson, but Gavin was sure he didn't owe anyone money. Sure, he'd gotten into brawls before, received a few death threats in the mail, but nothing stood out. Worst of all, this wasn't personal. These guys were hired guns that didn't even know what he looked like. How else to explain them mistaking him for a guy that had nearly two decades on him? Unless…

Unless this wasn't actually about him.

This theory proved to be correct. The gangster-turned-kidnapper recognized Hank as the officer that had put him away for drug dealing and murder. If this was supposed to make Gavin feel better, though, it was doing a piss-poor job of it.

Connor had been hyperfocused from the beginning, communicating mainly in terse sentences. His LED was a solid yellow, his eyes unblinking. It was beyond unnerving. Then he captured an image of the android recording the footage of Hank lying shackled on the floor from the reflection in Nick's eyes. "She's a WR400 registered to Eden Club," he said abruptly. Gavin nearly jumped out of his skin. "I'm connecting with the ST300 at Eden Club now. I'm requesting access to their list of overdue rentals within a 20-minute radius of the precinct. Cross-referencing with this model." He closed his eyes, his pupils darting beneath his lids as though speedreading a novel. He bent over Gavin's desk, grabbed a notepad, and jotted out an address in what looked like typed font. "Can you find any discontinued warehouses close to this location?"

Could he - Which one of them was an actual detective here?

Still, it was a good lead. Better than anything else they had. After entering the information, he managed to find three that fit the parameters. After sending a picture of their findings to Fowler, Gavin pulled his jacket off the back of his chair and put it on. Shooting Connor a sly grin over his shoulder as he headed towards the exit, he said, "Come on, Robocop. We're gonna go save your partner."

"So, what's the plan with this guy, anyway?" The other two had come back from what Hank had deduced was probably the junkyard, judging by the damaged androids they'd carried back with them. Whether out of pragmatism or sadism, all of the androids were missing their lower limbs. It was possible that they'd simply found them that way, but Hank wasn't holding his breath. And as for the girl - he'd have to call her something other than that, eventually - though her LED was gone, every now and then Hank could have sworn he saw raw fear in her eyes. As much as it could potentially help him, this was a dangerous time to become a deviant. "This is fun and all but you-know-who wanted and paid for Reed."

It was the driver from before speaking. His clothes were covered in mud from the junkyard, and he was shoveling Chinese noodles into his mouth with a pair of chopsticks.

After snorting under his breath, Hank decided to chance baiting them, "So I guess you bozos are working for Voldemort, then?" A flash of anger crossed the driver's face, while the youngest, the kid that was sitting in the passenger seat, hunched in on himself minutely. Hank didn't really blame him for that. It was clear that while he'd known the group he was hanging with wasn't up to anything good, he hadn't exactly signed on for kidnapping and torturing a decorated officer.

Quietly, the kid muttered, "I thought we weren't supposed to hurt him."

"Thing's change," snapped Nick, making him flinch. "And as for getting the wrong guy…" Twirling his chopsticks through his fingers in a habit not dissimilar to Connor's fixation with his coin, he said with a note of finality, "The deposit for this little operation is more than enough to last."

The driver tossed his now empty carton over his shoulder. "Not divided by three, it's not."

"So, what? Are you saying we should let him go and try again? That'd be rather anticlimactic, don't you think?" While they spoke, literally arguing his fate, Hank remained silent. Not even his expression revealed much of anything. Had anyone bothered to look at the WR400, however, they would have seen her fingers twitch spasmodically, as though her palms were itching to curl into fists.

Nick glanced at Hank, drawling, "We don't want to disappoint our loyal viewers." Then he set his meal down and stood. "Line up the androids. It's time for us to bring an end to this."

The first android tried to fight them. He clawed at their faces, spitting out garbled threats until Nick put him down. And Hank didn't disappoint. He screamed for them for to stop, "Let them go! They've done nothing to you, Nick! It's me you're after," getting progressively quieter until the third, when he calmly offered to do the shooting, reasoning that they were all going to die anyway, and it was better he take the deviants out than a cold bastard like him. "Tell you what," Hank made his lips curl up, "I'll even do it with the handcuffs on."

"Yeah," Nick shook his head, "I'm not buying that for a second." He nodded towards the driver. "Check on him. He's up to something." Normally, the driver would have been the best choice for such a task, he was the biggest of the trio, and much younger than their captive. But Hank had been planning this moment. The instant the big guy got within range, Hank snatched his weapon, pressed it against the bottom of his jaw, and fired.

What happened next wasn't pretty. But Hank had to admit that he liked his odds a lot better.

"You used your own blood to slip out of the cuffs?" Nick looked at the body on the stone floor, lying in a mixed pool of his and Anderson's blood.

"It's harder than they make it look in the movies."

When the kid remained rooted to the spot, frozen in either fear or shock, Hank fired off a shot at his feet, startling him out of his stupor. "Get out of here," Hank demanded. "Consider this your warning. You only get one." While the kid sprinted for the door, Hank swung around to aim for Nick. "You already had yours. Put your hands up, Nick. You're under arrest."

For a moment, it seemed like he was getting out this alive. Sure, the girl hadn't deviated, but maybe that was for the best, and one of the androids from the junkyard had survived. His only regret was that he hadn't freed himself early enough to save the other two. Then the girl's brown eyes shimmered, tears flowing down her cheeks.

She buried her face in her hands at the worst time, her breath hitching on a sob.

And before Hank could react, Nick had gotten close enough to wrap an arm around her, yanking her in front of himself, and jammed a gun against her head. She screamed.

On the ground, the skinless android crawled towards them, her LED flashing yellow as she no doubt preconstructed a dozen reactions. Judging by the look on her face, none of them were favorable.

There wasn't a clear shot. "Be reasonable, Nick," Hank tried. "You know this is only going to hurt you in the long run. Put your gun away. The girl's got nothing to go with any of this." Addressing the trembling deviant, he gently asked, "What's your name, sweetheart?" She frantically shook her head. Hank frowned, thinking of her stress levels. They must have been through the roof. "Everything's going to be okay. You can trust me."

Nick looked briefly pained. "You barely showed this much compassion to me, Hank. It's just a machine!"

"Look at her, Nick! See how scared she is?! She's alive! They all are."

"Where was all this empathy when I was going to jail?!"

It was because of Hank's empathy that he'd been able to murder a man. It had weighed on Hank afterwards, the trial and seeing those who'd testified against the teen. "Everyone deserves a second chance, Nick." And staring at him now, Hank could see that boy again, as lost and scared as he'd looked the day they'd led him off to his cell. But Nick wasn't a boy. Not anymore. "They don't always deserve a third."

"Right." The girl cried out as the barrel of the gun pressed against her temper began to dig into her skin.." I see how it is." HIs expression hardening, Nick sneered, "But if I'm going down, I'm not going down alone."

Hank knew what was going to happen next. Or he thought he did.

He expected to hear a gunshot, to see the newly born life vanish from the girl's brown eyes, leaving them empty and dull. And he would have to arrest Nick, because killing an android still wasn't considered murder under Detroit law, or kill him in self-defense if he resisted, but that wasn't it.

"Detroit Police! Put your hands where we can see them!" Gavin's voice carried over a loudspeaker, startling Nick, which gave the girl enough time to slap the barrel of the gun away from her, elbow him in the face, then scoop up the legless android and dart for the exit. Clutching his broken nose, drug dealer attempted to aim for her back through streaming eyes, only to hear the decisive click of a pistol cocking.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Hank warned. "Especially since part of me still really wants to shoot you."

Connor came sprinting in soon after, followed by Gavin, who read Nick his rights as he slapped a pair of cuffs on him, and Hank finally let the stress of the day catch up with him. He sank onto the ground, cradling his head. The area around the LED fused to his skin pulsed like a heart, burned like it was made of fire. There was going to be a scar there, of that he was certain. Not to mention that the bloodied flesh on his mangled wrist looked more like an ill-fitting glove at this point.

"...ank?" He glanced up to meet Connor's worried gaze. Judging by the yellow band circling on his temple, it wasn't the first time he'd called for him.

Reaching out, Hank affectionately mussed his hair with his good hand. "Don't worry about me, Connor. I'll be okay."

Gavin, having returned, crossed his arms with a scowl. "Bullshit, Gramps. You're going to a hospital."

Swaying slightly, enough that Connor quickly lended his support by threading one of the lieutenant's arms over his shoulders, Hank huffed a dry laugh, looking rather pale and macabre thanks to the dried blood clinging to the side of his face and sitting in his newly cropped silver hair having grown dull and tacky.

"No argument here, Officer Reed. So long as you're driving."

A/N: Reviews are, of course, appreciated. Have a nice day!