A/N: Will be replying to guest/anon reviews here since I can't message you personally!

Selena92: Thanks so much! Would love to see your 'ending' to that chapter too! Honest question for you: what makes you say that deviants keep their immunity to physical pain? I could be forgetting something here, which is why I ask. Connor himself says androids don't feel pain, but the first time he says this, it's very early in the game when he wouldn't be deviant enough yet anyway, and the second time he says it, it's on the machine-Connor path. (Also worth considering is that both times he claims androids don't feel pain, it was at least somewhat to his benefit to say so.) Then, if you look at his reactions throughout the game: in 'Hostage,' Daniel shoots Connor in the shoulder as soon as he emerges onto the terrace, and Connor has ZERO reaction. None. But as the game goes on, he grunts and and makes some pretty revealing facial expressions when experiencing things that would cause a human pain. It's these things already in the game that gave me the idea to write a human experience of physical sensation into this in the first place! Thanks again for your comment & forgive the long response, haha.

Guest: Thank you, hope you enjoy what comes!

Chapter 2: Warmth

He had no choice but to accept what had steadily become his reality.

That he, too, could feel fear.

That he could feel pain—

BIOCOMPONENT MISSING

VI5AL VYSTEM DAMAGED

00:01:44 TIME REMAINING BEFORE SHUTDOWN

First it was heat in his chest and hand, a report that something was wrong, and then that report manifested into something palpable, something physical, something he couldn't explain and

-00:01:19 TIME REMAINING BEFORE SHUTDOWN

The heat sharpened until it expanded his own system's capacity for sensation. His mind spread open to a new reality. Warmth was comfortable at first, and then it was too much. Packed. Scalding. Radiating with enough pressure that he could feel the pulse of his own thirium against the pain.

No… no, only humans had nerve endings. That was a fact. He didn't have nerve endings. Only nodes that relayed a message of his state of health and safety so that he knew how to keep himself ali—no, not alive. Operational.

But that was – that was the precise function of human pain. And if this was anything like human pain, he needed to do something about it. Fast.

-00:01:01 TIME REMAINING BEFORE SHUTDOWN

So he did. With his free hand, he grasped the handle of the knife pinning him to the counter and pulled.

It had been holding all his weight. He collapsed to the floor. Without his regulator, he was weak – there was nothing to send thirium to his other biocomponents. His vision lapsed in and out and the world was red and splotchy in between.

-00:N0:43 TQME REEAINING NETORE JZUTDPWN

"Hank… Hank! I… I need help…"

It was the most force he had ever put into his voice in his entire short life, yet it came out quiet and strained.

Please… please hear me…

-400+0X:13 ?

No, no, call him Lieutenant Anderson. The eccentric old man probably wouldn't even recognize his first name as something that would come from Connor. Taking a breath, he tried to call out—

"Lieutenant Anderson…"

It was hardly loud enough for the androids in the room to hear, never mind Hank Anderson who was probably corridors away by now.

"Connor!"

Thank God, or rA9, or the "Jesus" that Hank was always…

"Hang on, son – hang on, hang on! We're gonna save you, okay? Hang on. Here, here…"

"Deviant…" He could hardly hear his own voice and wondered if Hank could.

The world blinked dark and then back again.

"There was a deviant…"

Connor tried to gesture to the biocomponent on the floor, tried to push the explanation out, but couldn't do either. His voice betrayed him, his eyelids shut, and everything else shut down.

"Connor! Oh fuck – your chest – what the fuck…"

He could still hear Hank's voice and he wanted nothing more than to respond to it – he wanted to respond, even more than he wanted his stupid mission.

"Connor… no…"

No…

He felt the human's hand first on his chest, then gently on his forehead. If Hank would just look around

"Oh shit!" Hank had seen the biocomponent; he could tell. All of Hank's warmth left him at once – and then, a few seconds later, returned. "Connor, you stay awake, you hear me? That's a fucking order!"

Hank shoved the biocomponent back into Connor's chest cavity, then turned it to set it in place. Immediately, he could see again. The two made eye contact for several seconds, both just present enough to wonder if it would work, if it was enough, and then—

"I'm okay," Connor realized aloud. "Thank you. You… saved me, Hank. Thank you."

Now, all at once, he fully understood the gratitude of the officer he had saved on the terrace. Hank gazed down at him, not quite smiling, but for Hank, it was something close.

"How the fuck did that happen, anyway?"

"I was interrogating the deviant," Connor said. "Our thirium regulators are like human hearts – we shut down without it. We're designed so that our chest cavities can open quickly and harmlessly in case of a malfunction, or in case quick replacement is needed, so I opened his, and took his biocomponent."

"Turned that right back around on you, didn't he? Cheeky prick."

"I wasn't trying to kill him," Connor said, even though Hank hadn't accused him of such – and even though it wouldn't necessary be a bad thing if he had been trying to kill the deviant. "I put it back. But he did want to kill me. I almost… I almost died."

Connor had died before. He uploaded his memory so that it could be replaced into a new, identical Connor. There were always details that got lost in the transfer. And there was one lone detail that never made it to the transfer to begin with:

The death itself.

He couldn't upload his memory after he was already dead. So even when he knew he had died, death remained as foreign to him as ever. He didn't know what it felt like, didn't know what it meant – but just now, had come so close.

"I was scared," he said, stopping in the broadcast room.

Glancing over at him, Hank slowed down. "It'd be strange if you weren't."

"And I felt it. I felt the knife…" He looked down at his hand. The unpleasant heat still lingered. Why? He was safe now. He had already run two self-checks to assess his state and he was fine now that the thirium pump was back in place. He wondered if human pain lingered too. "And you, Lieutenant Anderson."

"Ah, Jesus. Here we go."

"Humans are much warmer than I am. I don't know if I ever recognized that before. I know my system can register body heat, but I don't know that I've ever actually felt it."

Some of Hank's wariness dissipated. "Learned a lot today, did you, Connor?" The lieutenant looked over his shoulder at him. "Got news for ya – that's gonna be sore for a while. Come on. We can take care of it back at the station."

...

A/N: Alternate-alternate ending: Hank walks in while Connor's still got the knife through his hand and exclaims, "Jesus Christ!" Connor says "Not quite" and fucking dies.

Ahem. See you next time, in which Hank tries to help Connor tend to his injury while they wait for station android to come back with blue blood, and Connor struggles with how to handle these new instabilities in his software.