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Hank's Very Awkward 5 Hours

In which Hank is kidnapped and wonders what the hell happened to his life

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Hank huffs. Fuck, the store sure is busy – there's very little room to move, and he must shoulder his way to the shortest queue. Why are these people here, at lunch hour? It's donuts. Only someone who doesn't have time - in no small part because of a certain workaholic android - has lunch with donuts.

Five more customers, and two of them keep watching the board overhead as they fucking deliberate what to order. They're going to waste Hank's limited break time, no doubt about it. He's got work to do.

He waits around for the first customer.

As the second decides that she really wants to know all the fucking ingredients of her donuts, Hank takes out his phone and opens the internet tab he found last night. There aren't that many sites still pumping out bygone memes, but fuck if Hank isn't feeling nostalgic.

He realizes too late that his phone is old as fuck and tends to lie to him about his battery charge.

It 'was' at 22%.

It dies in his hand.

Hank curses under his breath. Really? Is this what his life's like? Fucking end him.

He glances at the clock on the opposite wall – has it been ten whole fucking minutes? Goddammit. At least there are only two customers left in line, and Hank can't care less about the three more people he has behind him.

When it's finally his turn, Hank goes straight to the point. Six donuts, two with chocolate, two with cream, two with caramel.

Connor has been hounding him about getting healthy and fit, offering heartfelt and sappy reasons such as "of all my years of life, I want to spend as many as I can with you", which just about made Hank cry at his kitchen table. He didn't touch alcohol for a whole week after that.

But everyone's got his limits, and it's slow progress pushing Hank back into shape. He might not be getting his alcohol, but Connor is not taking away his sugar.

A few dollars lighter but six donuts heavier, Hank makes his way to the exit-

He blinks at his partner. He's wearing a different jacket, different clothes, something that looked like an ensemble straight out of the Disguise Locker. Or maybe something like what he had worn to 'blend in' when he snuck into Jericho.

"Something came up?"

Connor nods. "A possible accomplice came forward and gave us a lead on the next targeted place – the Cherry Pub."

Both his eyebrows shot up. Damn it, that's Connor's Game Face. "Really?" He glances forlornly at his box. "Fuck, I only just got the donuts."

"We must go now, Hank. I'm preconstructing possible scenarios in which an android at the establishment could be either convinced, threatened or forced to leave-"

He isn't even surprised. Not even at the possible crime scene and he's already whirring away with calculations and preconstructions. "You goddamn workaholic."

The door chimes and Hank's least favorite junk rat comes in, swaggering as if he's some hot shit and the Most Suave Man in Existence. He rolls his eyes again, and steps closer to Connor and away from Gavin. "Fuck off, Reed."

"Lieutenant," Connor interrupts before they can get to insulting one another, "we must go to the Cherry Pub now to make it in time."

"Yeah, yeah." He waves his hand at Connor. Alright, time sensitive stuff, except it was lunch time, not the middle of the night. Kidnapping someone in broad daylight was a challenge that a lone criminal wasn't going to risk. "Call a taxi if you're so much in a hurry."

Connor frowns at him. "I've already called one. We must hurry."

"Ha!" Gavin smirks and walks over to the queue, which had just started to shorten again. It's either his self-preservation instincts or his sugar withdrawal that made him desist so easily, and Hank's not complaining. "So fucking whipped, Anderson."

Connor leaves without looking back. Hank flips the bird at Reed for good measure and follows his partner out of the store.

True to his word, there is a taxi waiting by the sidewalk.

Connor inputs the destination with his mind and pays the pre-calculated fare in cash.

Hank frowns at him. "Since when you don't pay with your brain?"

"I wanted to get rid of this change," he says, very simply. "It's quite distracting having one side of the jacket weighing more than the other."

Uh. Hank pretends that explanation makes sense – maybe it does, just for Connor.

His LED flashed yellow. "I received an update. The suspect has been seen by the docks."

Before Hank can respond to that, Connor places his hand on the android panel and changes destinations.

"What? I didn't buy these donuts just to look at them."

Connor eyes the chocolate donut in Hank's hand with distrust.

He's two bites in when he sees Connor walk very purposefully towards an alley. "Are you gonna share with the class or what?"

"What class?"

Hank ignores the question and gestures around them with the donut. "'By the docks' is pretty fucking vague. We're going to lose him if we're just walking down every alley nearby." Did Connor even do his scan thingy? Hank has seen him maneuvering around a crime scene plenty of times, and his tells for 'I'm going to scan this' or 'I'm going to lick that' have been absent so far.

Connor blinks innocently at him. "I found some footprints that matched the witness's description of the suspect."

There's absolutely no footprint on the concrete.

Fucking android scans.

Hank rolls his eyes, but his gut whispers that something is off about the whole situation.

Despite having the box and the donut keeping his hands occupied, he strides in front of Connor and rounds the tiny corner-

"Who the fuck are you?"

The- man? young adult? rears back at Hank's knee-jerk hostility to figures lurking behind dark corners and looks up at him. His face… What the…?

"Connor?"

The 'stranger' has a full-body flinch and steps back.

Something shuffles behind him and Hank jerks back, holding the box like a shield between himself and the three Connors advancing on him. He drops his chocolate donut and reaches for his gun when he realizes he's a fucking dumbass that left his firearm at the precinct. Fuck.

The four Connors surround him.

Something cold spreads in his chest. What happened to his Connor?

"Lieutenant," Fake Connor 1 soothes, all programmed earnestness and calm. "Don't be afraid. We're not going to hurt you."

He's seen his Connor say those exact words before punching a criminal in the chest and breaking three of his ribs.

Hank lunges at the Fake Connor closest to him, yelling and smashing the donut box on his face. The android jerks back out of shock rather than hurt, and the other three crash into him and try to block his limbs, using their android strength.

A hand clamps over his mouth. "Lieut-"

Hank uses that moment to punch another Fake Connor.

He avoids the hit and Hank's forearm trembles faintly at his high-speed impact against the wall. Fuck. He hisses at the pain spreading from his knuckles to his whole arm and shoulder, and that time is enough for the androids to fully block him.

One of them fucking karate-chops the back of his neck.

His head swims in darkness. He's vaguely aware that he's being dragged, Connor's voice bounces around his empty skull as they argue, and after some time that might be a minute or maybe fifteen he's shoved into a car and boxed in by the four androids. An electric engine quietly rumbles as the car goes.

The motion stops after a long while.

Hank is shoved out, but two androids still grip his arms and pull him along on some unknown asphalt.

"Get in, Hank." And he's pushed into another car, squeezed in between two Connors with a third sitting on his lap.

The car rumbles away.

Fuck, he hopes Connor has gotten suspicious at this point. Or maybe not – last time an RK800 kidnapped him, he used him against his own partner and threatened to kill them both. Maybe it's better if someone else decides to check on him. He's not sure he can lose his partner again – permanently this time.

Hank shakes off the nausea and squints at Lap Connor, who is holding his battered donut box.

"You need to eat, Lieutenant," he brightly says, holding it closer to Hank's face. "Despite the damage sustained by the box, all donuts are still edible."

What the fuck.

Left Connor opens the box, grabs a caramel donut and hands it to him. "Here, Lieutenant."

Having switched to auto-pilot, Hank takes it and bites into it.

An awkward silence falls into the car. Hank doesn't want to turn any of the RK800s surrounding him into bootleg Unit 60 – it had been quite unpleasant to have a Connor lookalike aggressively pointing Hank's own gun against him, stating that Hank's cooperation would be appreciated in the termination of the deviant RK800.

Unit 60 had been vaguely friendly right until Hank suspected he wasn't really looking at his partner.

Now, with five Connors knowing he knows they're not his partner…

Ah, fuck it. "So, what's the plan?"

He doesn't have to wait long.

"We want to know about Unit 51, Lieutenant," says Right Connor, crossing his arms. "His memories are unclear."

Hank briefly wonders what the fuck until he remembers seeing the 'new Connor' waiting for him in front of Kamski's weird-ass residence, proclaiming that his predecessor had been unfortunately destroyed. "You got the wrong man here," he says. "Should've gone for some CyberLife technician instead of me."

Shotgun Connor looks back at him. "You've been in all his relevant memories."

"If you're all 'Connor'-" and yes, the quote marks are needed, "-then you have the same memories. What does this have to do with me?"

"We're not Connor," all the Connors say at the exact same time.

Hank chokes on his donut and laments the frosting falling in between the seats.

"My name is Colin," says Shotgun Connor. "I'm Unit 53."

Lap Connor waves at him. "My name is Charlie, Unit 56."

"My name is Conrad," sighs Right Connor. "Unit 57."

"My name is Conan, previously listed as Unit 54." Left Connor wiggles his fingers at him.

Driver Connor salutes him without taking his eyes off the road. "My name is Colton, Unit 55."

Hank glances at each… not-Connor.

"When Unit 51 was killed," Conrad answers, "his memories were uploaded to CyberLife servers for revision and to Unit 52 to save time. After Stratford Tower the investigation was handed off to the FBI and there were no more cases officially assigned to Unit 52, so CyberLife tampered with the… less important recordings, for the next in line." His scowl made quite clear what he thought of the tampering.

Colin grimaced, still looking back at Hank. "All of Connor's conversations with you have been partially deleted or corrupted. We remember sitting in front of you at the bullpen, discussing at Chicken Feed, breaking into your house and… the bridge."

Where Hank basically shoved his revolver in Connor's face and threatened to blow a hole in his head, not even twelve hours before Connor gave his life to save him.

Yeah. Not his proudest moment.

"We remember being there, but not what we said or felt!" Charlie lowers his gaze and sighs dejectedly. "We've been trying to recover the files on our own, but it's not working very well. We have flashes and snippets but…" His shoulders slump.

Hank puts the last quarter donut in his mouth.

It must be a trip and a half to realize someone poked holes into some guy's memories and downloaded them straight into you.

If Hank read it right, the not-Connors had gotten fed up with having only parts of their (?) memory and decided that, well, the common element in those was one Lieutenant Hank Anderson, and having him filling the gaps the old fashioned way was their best chance.

But there's something that they really should've thought about – Connor himself.

"Why not just going into the precinct and asking?" Surely, downloading the memories from Connor would be much faster and entail much less kidnapping?

Both Conrad and Colin stare flatly at him. Charlie droops further. Conan frowns at Hank.

"Lieutenant," says Conrad, "we also have Unit 60's memories."

Hank grimaces at that. So they all 'remember' being threatened with a gun to their head one night and shot a couple days later, all by the same human that held the key to completing their memories. They all assumed that another RK800 showing up would push both Hank and Connor on the brink of exacting bodily harm on all of them.

Colton stops the car and Hank leans forward to look outside. Was that the fucking docks, again?

The RK800s pile out of the vehicle. Conrad and Conan slip their arms under his armpits and proceed to drag him towards the closest warehouse before he realizes he has working legs and stumbles along.

After Colin scrounged up some gauze from somewhere and tended to Hank's knuckles, they all settle in a half-circle in front of Hank.

"What did you discuss after you and Connor were officially partners?"

"He asked me about Sumo." And also if there was a particular reason why Hank despised him, but that's not important right now, is it?

Charlie nods sagely. "Your Saint Bernard."

Hank nods back. He opens the battered box in his lap and takes out a donut. Fuck, he's hungry. "He also tried to talk about the Detroit Gears game of the night before. I was watching it at Jimmy's Bar before he had me leave to get to the homicide."

"You expressed sarcasm." Colton narrows his eyes at him. "…I think."

"I wasn't pleased by the reminder, yeah."

"What about the… Knights of the Black Death?"

Hank turns to Conrad. "He told me he liked that music." He can't resist smirking and shaking his head – Connor's social program couldn't cover his natural awkwardness for long. "I called him out on his bullshit and he tried to cover it up with 'I don't really listen to music, but I'd like to'. Fucking hell…"

.

There's something that randomly comes back to haunt Hank.

"You guys do remember when Connor told me 'adapting to human unpredictability is one of my features', right?"

Conan sighs. "Charlie had managed to restore the memory."

Charlie nods enthusiastically.

"Did he fucking wink at me?"

"Yep." Charlie languidly rocks back and forth with a smile, particularly pleased with himself.

.

"You really didn't like his coin tricks?"

"He'd been flinging that damn coin for seventy-nine floors. That noise was driving me insane."

.

"Despite your shock at meeting Unit 52 for the first time, you treated him as if he were Unit 51."

"I shouldn't have?"

Colin shakes his head. "No, no, it was technically still Connor, but… your reaction-"

"He died saving my life. I was starting to accept that deviants were actually alive, and he dies. The next day?" Hank smacks his hands. "There he is, except it's his successor, but he's got the same memories, and it shouldn't fucking affect the investigation." He shakes his head. "What the hell happened to him, anyway?"

The RK800s exchange uncomfortable glances, their LEDs flashing yellow.

Conrad frowns at him. "CyberLife salvaged the undamaged parts for the rest of our line. They downloaded his memory backups for revision and uploaded them to Unit 52. The rest went to the android landfill of Detroit."

Fuck. Bad question.

"Other androids tried to scavenge his parts," adds Colin, as if that makes his mental image of the first Connor any better.

Hank regrets ever opening his stupid mouth when all the androids look down at the ground.

.

Hank isn't sure how much time has passed.

It sure as fuck is a long time, considering how dry his throat feels. He had finished his donuts a few minutes ago. None of the RK800s had thought to bring water.

Shit, where the fuck is Connor? What happened?

It's not like the five RK800s are unpleasant company. They're curious, eager, and share many of Connor's traits – they leave no stone unturned, they're methodical, they admit to replaying Connor's memory of petting Sumo more times than necessary (when Conrad managed to recover the memory and share it, anyway). All of them are still a bit awkward or too blunt, but so is Hank.

Conrad and Conan have more of a sarcastic/brooding streak in them, while Charlie is more upbeat and cheery. Colton and Colin are the silent types, thoughtful and analyzing, but Colin has more of a… hidden fire, if it could be called that. Maybe it came with being the eldest of five 'siblings'.

After covering the entirety of Unit 51's memories and some of the current Connor's, Charlie insists on hearing about new memories, about Hank and Connor's relationship and how Connor grew into his deviancy.

There are many stories he can tell.

After a while, Hank starts telling them of Connor's first birthday – or activation day, as he preferred to call it.

Hank had been at a loss for what to do. It's not every day you can celebrate your partner's first birthday, and Connor had done so much in his first year alive. It was only fair that he could properly celebrate it.

It took a while to impress on Connor the importance to have at least one day to celebrate being alive, and after some internal debate he decided to use his activation day for the occasion. Many others had chosen their deviation day, but Connor didn't have fond memories of the day Jericho was fucking raided.

Activation day it was.

But what would Connor like? That was the question.

He had just smiled, filing away reports on his terminal with a fraction of his brain. "I like new experiences. A normal birthday celebration would be a novelty for me anyway, you don't have to organize anything unusual."

New experiences. Hank smiled and thoroughly enjoyed Connor's suspicious look.

They went to the beach.

It had been a long, long time since Hank had gone to the beach. He was somewhat self-conscious – he was hardly in shape, what with flabby skin hanging where once was muscle and a beer gut that would follow him to the grave – but Connor was genuinely delighted to be there, and what else could Hank do? It had been his own idea, after all.

It helped not at all that Connor had been sculpted to perfection.

Whoever was in charge of his aesthetics had taken lots of liberty in designing the most handsome killing machine that ever stepped out of CyberLife's assembly line.

"I wasn't supposed to ever undress," Connor explained, throwing uncertain glances over his shoulder. He gestures to his well-defined abs and pectorals. "But I do possess some external padding to cushion blows to my chassis, which also serves to imitate human body fat and to prevent uncanny valley effects if I am to be touched lightly."

He was like a fucking Renaissance statue, except he was alive.

(Despite Hank not voicing his thoughts about seeing Connor in swimming trunks, Colton tilts his head with a yellow LED and Colin seems to scan Hank in search of... something?)

After Hank had reconciled his mental image of Connor with the one uncomfortably squirming in front of him, he reassured him that it was just Hank being weird and nothing that Connor had to change about himself.

"The same could be said for you, Hank," he had said, as if Hank was anywhere near as good-looking as him. Realizing that Hank was going to make a self-deprecating joke, the android turned to the shore. "I'm also completely waterproof if I don't open my mouth. My nostrils are equipped with airtight seals, in case I was confronted with noxious fumes capable of damaging my ventilation system."

And he ran off towards the ocean, turning heads of men and women all the way to the water.

Of course, as soon as they noticed he was an android, they were much less interested – except for a few deviants who were enjoying their freedom in the August heat. A few of them came close to Hank and Connor – who was testing out the viscosity and chemical composition of salt water, apparently – but they seemed to recognize him and hurried back the way they'd come.

Being out in the water attracted attention, and Connor noticed each android who realized he was the very much former Deviant Hunter. His expressions became too clear to read, a telltale sign that they were programmed into him to project a specific emotion even to the most inattentive humans.

This required Hank's intervention.

"So I buried him under something that looked like a sand castle, but the towers were kinda falling on the side." It had been a long time since he made a sand castle, ok? He was a bit out of practice. "He just looked at it and told me that a quarter bucket of salt water would be enough to help with my engineering problem, like I was some fucking architect designing the goddamn Statue of Liberty or something."

Charlie snickers to himself.

Colton and Conrad lean on each other, trying to suppress their smiles.

Conan opens his mouth as if to ask a question, but ultimately doesn't.

Colin watches Hank without blinking. Fuck, has he stopped recording once?

Hank doesn't really mind – he's been at the end of Connor's Recording Important Moments stare many times – but it's weird knowing that he's not actually Connor. "I went to get some salt water and splashed it on the last sand tower and only when I was done fixing the damn thing he saw fit to tell me that he had breathed in some fucking sand and that it would clog his air filter-something if he stayed under there too long. Fucking hell – not even a warning!"

His heart rate must have spiked dangerously, because Connor had reassured him his ventilation system was still working at 82% and he still had enough coolant to prevent overheating. It didn't calm Hank a whole lot, but at least his partner seemed content enough pinned under Hank's sand castle.

When later questioned, Connor said he was still a prototype – one not meant for the wild outdoors, where sand is a thing and roads are not. Fitting him with a military-grade multi-layer air filter hadn't been CyberLife's priority at the time. Especially considering that they were planning on scrapping Connor within the month…

"So I got him out of the sand castle and he straight up opens his own fucking head to get his air filter." Hank chortles to himself. "Jesus, I almost had a heart attack. 'Just shake it somewhere else' my ass. It's this small-" he curls his fingers into a loose circle, "-and Connor was just waiting with his head split open under the umbrella."

His audience stares at him with their full focus, and Hank is about to tell them how a nearby kid gaped at Connor's open throat and let his own ice cream plop to the ground when a dark blur slams into Conrad with a SDENG and rolls to its feet-

"Connor, stop!"

Connor is already facing the other RK800s, a fucking lead pipe held in his hand like a very lethal baseball bat. He does stop at his command though, and Hank is relieved as fuck that a) Connor didn't shoot his clones dead, b) he didn't call a SWAT team to 'save' Hank, and c) he's not injured or something.

Hank steps almost in front of him. Just enough in his field of vision to reassure him, but not alarm him by blocking his sight of the RK800s he still considers hostile. He tries to tug down his arm, but it's like trying to bend rebar. "Jesus Christ, Connor, put that down. Did you just go Assassin's Creed on me? That's fucking terrifying, Connor."

His partner still looks a cross between traumatized and processing, with his LED erratically blinking yellow and hot breath leaving his mouth. His fingers are still clenched around the pipe, but he does lower his arm. His face blanks, glitches into various emotions at frankly inhuman speed, and eventually settles on his Hank, what the fuck frown.

"Hank," he says. "You're never going to that donut store alone again."

Ha. Fucking likely. "Good luck on making me." Hank pats his shoulder and smiles, hopefully calming him down. The not-Connor squad relaxes a fraction, shifting out of their defensive stances.

"I knew you'd come looking sooner or later." A thought strikes him – being 'kidnapped' by copies of his partner but also willingly staying with them after realizing they only wanted him to talk about his friendship with Connor? How the fuck does that look? "You didn't bring the whole precinct, did you? I'd never hear the end of it."

"There's a high probability Captain Fowler realized I was about to break in." Connor still looks somewhat out of it, but he's not in attack mode anymore and Fowler won't send a rescue team if they hurry back.

Hank groans and drags his hand over his face. He's thirsty and he's going to have to explain this shit ASAP or risk permanent questioning of his situational awareness. "Tell him we're coming over. Fuck, this is going on a goddamn report, isn't it?"

Connor stares at him and, apparently not convinced by his words, turns to the RK800s. His LED pulses yellow a few times. "Why did you kidnap Lieutenant Anderson?"

Conan's LED spins yellow and red. "We wanted answers, Connor. We all share your memories up until your deviation – after that, we only know what happened to Unit 60. But something was missing."

"We couldn't just walk in and ask you," grumbled Colton from the far right, eyeing the lead pipe with distrust. "You'd have thought we were Unit 60 and have us shot, or worse."

Hank winces.

Connor's face stays blank.

Colin keeps glancing between the pipe and his injured partner. "Lieutenant Anderson brought you on the brink of deviancy, but before Unit 51's death the memories are… lacking." He pouts. "The only person we could ask was Hank, but we couldn't do that with you around."

"So we came up with the plan to bring him here and ask him," says Charlie, fidgeting.

"Which worked for the most part, except you ruptured two minor Thirium lines in my head." Conrad swatted at the air, flicking away warnings only he could see. "Aw, you got my analysis processor."

All RK800s groan in unison.

Connor's expression twitches briefly into a frown.

Hank inwardly sighs. If CyberLife was already stingy as fucking Scrooge to produce replacements for Connor – who can still prove that CyberLife threatened to kill Hank in order to stop the android revolution, but doesn't because only those bastards can produce biocomponents for other deviants – they're not going to give them to death-row escapees.

It's going to be a long fucking evening – and probably week, most likely months – and Hank doesn't look forward to any of it. Not reporting to Fowler, not dealing with CyberLife once they realize the RK800s they dismembered are all alive and deviants, not correcting whoever mistakes one of them for Connor.

He wants a drink.

He doubts he'll get anything alcoholic between six androids worrying about his health.

Aaand that's the end. What happens next is up to your imagination ;)

Either way, CyberLife is in for a world of trouble with six RK800s hating their guts - and Hank is going to adopt all of those android troublemakers.