Hello everyone I'm back from the dead after being silent for like 2.5 weeks XD basically its midterms week, friends are not as available to proof read soooo plz excussed the rushed writing and grammar issues. Still wanted to post and make this chapter meaningful so as some can tell, the chapter is 2x longer than usual :D but it may be stiffer than usual writing so heads up on that, i am really sleep deprived from midterms stress

Also, if u guys have time check out this link: /CgJwbzSmcvs

It is the trailer for Detroit: Evolution, a fan made film(if u like the Nines/Gavin ship) by Octopunk Media and they made an squeal after the large amount of pos feedback from fans and from David Cage(creator of Detroit Become Human) himself hearing about it :D i think bryan dechart heard about it as well and they liked it. They are doing a fan screening in NYC with the Detroit: Awakening cast n crew and go buy tickets! Its a 75 min film n the trailer looks amazing, please show it some loveeeeee

Shoutout the the guests who put down kudos and DetectiveBigg98, Wrirypadg, Loewenflamme! Hopefully didn't miss anyone! Also to MaydayMarbear for the heart kudos comment 3 i real appreciate all the support you guys give

Also, look forward to mini Q&A session at the endnote. I wanna find out more about u guys :D

After the talk with Connor, Hank sits down in the kitchen to take in everything once more. He's got a 16 year old orphan girl sitting on his couch right now, whom he barely knows and has to take care of her for the next couple of days. He'll have to order take out every single night unlike the past where he sometimes opted out dinner time for sleep much to Connor's dismay. Of course, he only skipped every once in a while. And this mostly happened when he was too exhausted to cook or order. Connor would plead with him to at least eat a fruit before going to bed and order takeout for them, only for him to pass out first and find microwaved food the next morning. I wonder what the kid likes to eat. He hoped she wasn't a picky eater and even if she was, he was not going to reorder for her. His wallet was already getting thin and he did not need it getting any thinner. Hank let out a groan before clasping his hands to his face, he is not getting paid enough to babysit.

Hank then went to grab this work tablet from his room that was linked to the DPD database and opened up the file that Tina and Connor filled out earlier on Alina. Most of the time with big cases you had limited access to digital paperwork at home, but this was a small and negligible compared to all the other android cases they had.

Alina Niu was her full name. Niu? How the hell do you pronounce that? He silently looked over to Alina on the couch and saw her happily scroll through the television channels. He didn't want to butcher the kid's last name, but he was in no mood to ask her about how to pronounce it. Besides, it was just a last name, not like Hank was ever going to use it to address her. Thank god her first name was something that he could pronounce.

He squinted through the bright screen and found that the information on her address was left out. Ethnicity was written down as Chinese American, not that this information helped much. She left out all the information on her parents. According to the notes left by Tina, the kid refused to say anything about her hometown either. He paused at the next note. Ah, Tina did confirm that according to Alina, she was born here though, just don't know which city. According to Alina herself, she was of US Citizenship. This meant that she either was born in the United States or her parents were. The kid also refused to say anything about extended family or friends other than just vague non-important statements. Just what the hell is she hiding? Did her family commit any crimes or anything?

He took another glance at the girl a couple feet away from him. She seemed so innocent and when he first saw her, she was easily frightened by the two. It wouldn't make sense if she came from a bad family background and also Sumo instantly attached himself to her. Sumo's known to be friendly, but the dog also was generally able to detect those it thought was a threat to the Anderson family. Hank let out another sigh and clicked the power button of the tablet to close the file. Whatever, in a week he's not going to have to deal with this kid. And if anything new comes up about the kid, he'll have to just write it into the notes.

Hank hears the shower stop and the bathroom door swing open, with Connor popping out in his pajamas. The boy had on a loose light blue sleeve button up with matching pants. There were little printed puppy imprints patterned all over the cotton material. Hank faintly recalled the warm memory of going to a thrift shop and the dog pajama set instantly catching the boy's eye when they went out shopping for Connor's clothes. While Hank went for a round around the shop, he left Connor alone with the pajama sete, who was feeling the material. By the time Hank came back to Connor's spot the second time, he found Connor still mesmerized by the texture and softly petting the fluffy cotton sleeve.

It was then that Hank realized he should probably let her shower too and find a change of clothes for Alinal. The girl had been wearing the same thing even after the snow melted on her and would most likely like something clean instead.

He goes to his closet and scrolls through possible options, but all of them are too big for Alina as far as he could tell. He then makes a beeline for his storage room to see if he still had any of his old shrunken clothes stashed away by any chance. He opens up the old rusty storage closet and it creaks open. Man, he hasn't opened up this storage for a while now. He mostly kept his old stuff here, including...some of Cole's old toys in the very back. He slowly runs his fingers through his hair, before sucking in a deep breath and searching through his old drawer for something small enough for Alina to wear.

"There we go!" Through his pile of old academy clothes, he finds one of his worn out navy blue DPD hoodies that he received as a gift that seems to be small enough that it wouldn't swallow up the teenage girl. According to the label, it was supposed to be Large size, but he could tell now it was now in the Medium to Small range for Men's. As for pants, he picks out some flowery summer shorts that don't fit him anymore, but it'll probably reach the kid's knees if anything. He then searches for an extra towel and the first one he finds is one of his beach towels from a past coworkers' outing. How many years have it been? He quickly shakes his head, that wasn't important. He takes a look at the towel design, it was so basic and ugly. In the middle was a cartoon sailboat and it had a simple navy blue background to depict the ocean. Why he even bought it in the past is something he doesn't understand, most likely it was on sale.

Hank goes back into the living room and hands the items over to her.

"Go take a nice shower. There are bottles of soap, shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom. There also should be a shower cap in the cabinet if you want to use that."

She simply blinks a couple of times, taking in the information he suppose and he quickly shoos in her into the bathroom. Alina ends up saying a 'Thank You' back before shutting the bathroom door and he hears her tinkering around with the mechanics of the showerhead.

"Left knob for cold water, right knob for hot!" He shouts through the shower door.

"Thanks!" She calls back again. A minute or two later, he hears the steady run of water coming from the bathroom so he assumes that she has figured out the gimmicks. He goes to the living room to sit on the single armchair couch in his living room when he sees Connor open the door to a flying drone.

The four winged black drone plops the pizza box into Connor's arms and says, "Thank you for ordering from Pizza Hut! We hope you enjoy your meal and order from us again!" It tips down a bit as if doing a bow, and then zips off into the air. Connor brings the pizza over to the table and already its wafting smells send his stomach growling, but he doesn't want to get up so he opts for asking Connor to pass him a slice.

The boy grimaces as he takes a slice of plain pizza out of the box and onto a plate, before handing it over to Hank. Knowing Connor, he probably was calculating the number of calories on that slice alone. But as far as Hank is concerned, he deserves to have pizza tonight for having to take care of an extra kid and plus he's taking in less calories this time because the slice doesn't have any toppings this time. He counts that as a win for being healthy.

Hank's on his third slice when he nearly chokes upon seeing Alina come out of the shower. Despite the sweater being much too small for him, it was still too big for Alina. The long sleeves were way too long that you couldn't even tell where her arms nor hands are. The sleeves just end up sagging down in a sad fashion. Overall, the sweater hangs down to her knees and it ends up looking more like a dress than a sweatshirt. As for the shorts? He can just barely see the tings of it when she's moving about and adjusting the sweatshirt. He ends up letting out a chuckle and Alina tilts her head to the side while frowning a bit.

"What?"

It was kinda cute how she was pouting with the oversized sweatshirt. When she tried to fold her arms she ended struggling a bit, almost failing because of the fact that she couldn't tuck her arms in with the extra material.

"It's fine, kid. Go pick up some pizza and eat as much as you want. You can sit on the couch or in the kitchen, whichever you find more comfortable."

She nodded back at his instructions and went for the pizza box, though Connor already had prepped up a slice and a cup of water for her at the table to eat. She took a seat next to Connor in the kitchen, gently taking the plate from Connor's hands.

While biting into his third slice again, he watched as she eagerly ate the pizza slice in a hurry. It was a funny contrast: the calm collected android sipping from a thirium cup and the girl next to him quickly devouring a pizza slice.

The oil was dripping down Alina's hand and if he could guess, maybe her arm too. She suddenly paused mid-way in eating her second slice when she looked up to his gaze.

"Uhhh," Her eyes flicked between her partially rolled up sleeves and him, "I'm sorry if I got oil on your sweater Mr. Anderson."

He quickly dismissed her doubts, "Kid, it's not that. And call me Hank. I can wash that all the time, I'm just surprised at how fast you eat that thing." He felt some chuckles escape from his lips. "You're gonna choke like that, drink some water. There's plenty of pizza left."

She wiped the residue tomato sauce from his mouth with a napkin that Connor had passed over, "Sorry, I just haven't eaten good food in a while."

Wait, what the hell? This? This is good food?

He quickly hunched over and eyed the young girl across from the living room.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, um, I mean in my col-," Then she quickly covered up her mouth wide-eyed and intentionally coughed before glancing over at Hank fearfully. "I mean, um, there was a certain, uhhhh. Limited set of food...choices? Where I used to live." She became rigid and tensed up, eyes flickering to the surrounding walls occasionally until she spoke up again.

"Well, I mean I would like to cook more often. But I just didn't want to spend more money." She quickly followed up, trying to give a definite answer to her earlier ambiguous response. "We're not homeless or extremely poor if that's what you're thinking. We..." She paused and spaced out for a bit. "We did what we could with what we had."

He decided to lay off on the questions with the...semi-gloomy atmosphere and they spent the rest of dinner in silence. He later gave her a tablet to play around and also had Connor open up an guest account for her to use on the family computer in case she got bored of the tablet. The two spent the next couple of hours after dinner talking about dogs, dog parks and also Detroit in general.

Hank overhears bits and pieces of their conversation while he's watching TV on the couch. Mostly, it's about landmarks around Detroit since it's the first time Alina has been to Detroit. Connor also talks about the fond memories he has at each location within Detroit and when the boy attempts to get Alina to open up about places she knows, she simply skirts away. Her eyes dart away from Connor and Hank watches as every time she literally caves in her body slightly inward almost into a fetus position but not quite. In the end, Connor stopped asking questions directed to the girl and just decided to talk about himself or Detroit to better bond with the girl.

Before he knows it, it's past midnight and Hank decides it's time for them to sleep. Luckily, the two are sitting by the computer on those tiny ass wooden chairs so he doesn't need them to move from the couch.

"Alright you know, enough with the chitter chatter, it's time to go to bed." He goes to his big couch and tosses the sofa cushions to the single armchair. Then heaves the metal frame of the mattress halfway out before unfolding the second half of the mattress that was previously hidden. Good thing he bought a sleeper sofa, he didn't have a proper extra room for the kid. The only other rooms he had were either used as storage for past items or the basement, neither or which was appropriate. After grabbing the extra blanket from his closet, he puts the pillows back onto the sofa.

"There should be an extra toothbrush and cup in the bathroom cabinet to brush your teeth, feel free to use those. I'm calling it a night." Yawning, he goes to his room and waves them goodbye without turning back before plopping onto his bed and falling asleep for the day.

Hank ended up waking up in the middle of the night. He goes out to the kitchen and looks around for a bottle of beer to lull himself to sleep when out of the corner of the eye he sees Alina is still up. It takes him a couple of moments for his sleepy head to register what was going on and to remember that he was taking care of an extra girl. She was propped up on the mattress couch thing and watching the TV silently with the subtitles on. He peeks at his clock and finds that it's 2am in the morning.

"Why the hell are you up kid?" It comes out more grunchy than he intended, but can you blame him and his manners in the middle of the night?

Alina's instantly jumps up in shock to see that he was awake and he was surprised that she didn't scream or anything.

He gestured towards the TV, "Why are you still up kid?"

To which she simply shrugged back and replied matter of factly, "I just couldn't sleep."

Hank turned his attention back to the fridge to look for a cold brew alcoholic drink and found that just a few inches away from it was some milk. He vaguely recalled that warm milk also had the ability to make you sleepy. It was just something he happened to come by while looking through the internet. He made a grab for the milk carton to look at the expiration date, December 24th. Thank god it wasn't expired, Connor must have bought a new one recently. He then took a black mug out of the cabinet and poured some of the milk into it.

Wait, no no no. NO. Nopeee. What was he doing? There was no way. He is not, ugh. Fine. It couldn't hurt to warm some milk up for the kid.

He yanked the microwave door open and popped in the cup for 30 second. What's gotten into me these days? I must be getting soft because of Connor. He's been feeling less grumpy, started greeting his coworkers some more and interacting with them to some degree.

When the microwave let out a buzz to indicate that the job was done, he huffed over to the couch with the warm drink, leaving his beer bottle behind.

"Here." He ended up roughly shoving the drink a bit into Alina's hands because of his unsteady hands in the midst of still being half asleep. She doesn't mind the ill-mannered way he handed her the milk though and simply gives an affectionate smile back.

He decides to take a seat next to her on the mattress couch and watches her enjoy the drink.

"Look kid, this gonna be a one time thing though. I ain't much of a caring type. You're most likely better off with Tina and the others in the next week or so." He floppily gestures to the surroundings. "I mean look at the state of my place. It's a mess. I don't know how to take care of myself, just ask Connor."

She gives a blank stare back and then giggles and grins, "I know that, it's perfectly fine." Alina then sets down the cup of milk onto the coffee table. "I've never really needed much parental supervision anyway. My dad was always away and the same with my mum, always making money all the time."

"What do your parents work as?" He watched as Alina's body instantly froze at the question. Too soon?

"Well...my father was a gambler. That was why he was gone like 80% of the time." She then crossed her legs in front of her and fiddled with her fingers. "It wasn't always that way, it was only because his small business became bankrupt that he started becoming addicted to the concept of money and then you know… gambling. He only comes back every couple of months. Mostly to steal any money from us to gamble some more. I made my mum divorce him."

Hank looked at her in shock. She was the one that talked her mother into divorce?!

"How old were you when your parents divorced?"

"12."

It was sort of unsettling how detached her responses were. She just presented all of that information in a flat tone as if it was normal for a kid. Now, he wasn't close with his family but he couldn't imagine having to be the one in the household that brings up the topic of divorce, especially at that young age.

She then took in a deep breath, seemingly bracing herself for whatever she wanted to continue next.

"I-I saw him, hitting her one night. She didn't want to hand over her jewelry for him to sell and gamble away. And THAT night, particularly," Her voice began shaking a bit, "He asked for their engagement ring because it had a diamond on it and it would sell for a lot more."

He felt his stomach drop at the mention of household abuse. It made his stomach lurch even more at the fact that the kid seemed to have slowly grown unfazed about that family past. The only way you could tell that she was affected by it was the small ways her emotions leaked, like the way her breath hitched when discussing it, the picking of skin around her fingers right now and the short as well as tight phrasing of everything.

He could tell she was a strong girl, it didn't look like she was looking back tears either, mostly just anger laced in between her words. But in a way it was reassuring to see that she could still feel something from the experience. Because as far as he knew, it was better to feel something than to be numb to the point that you felt nothing.

Wait, were those calluses on her hands? Labor? Fist fights?

"Alina," He called to her. "I need you to be honest with me. What's with the calluses on your hands? How did you get them?"

"Hm?" She took a quick look at her palms. "Oh they were prob from all those part times I did for my mum to help pay for rent. I did like all sorts of jobs to get some quickpay."

He hoped she wasn't talking about what he thought she might have ended the territory of and his shock must have showed because her expression quickly turned to slight alarm.

"OH, NO. Nonononono. Not that type!" She quickly reassured him. "I meant restaurant work and manual labor. Sometimes I did heavy lifting jobs like moving large bags of flour or something for the bakeries. Other times it was like getting bags of groceries from TaskRabbit. They vary from time to time, but NOT that area. I haven't even had my first kiss yet!"

He let out a huge sigh of relief. He didn't even know that he was holding in his breath for such a long time till just now. He looked up to see Alina's face flustered and cheeks silently tinted. He quickly thought about how this girl is going to be the hell of him as he rubbed the creases forming on his forehead. He was going to have so much information to put into the notes now.

"Well," He took a quick pause to realign his thoughts. "Wow. Um. Why don't we don't about something else then?" Man,this was not his department at ALL. He did not know how to go on with this awkward conversation. He quickly looked around his house for a topic to shift to and found the cup of milk cooling down on his coffee table.

"Why don't you finish that glass of milk of yours? It'll help you go to sleep." He suggested.

"I think...that's going to be hard to come by at this point." She chuckled back nervously.

"Ok. Well," He reached for the closest thing nearby, which was the TV remote. "Why don't we watch some basketball then? You good with that?"

She quietly nodded back, giving her approval.

"My favorite team is the Detroit Gears. You?"

"Hmm," She went into a thinking pose by putting her hand onto her chin. "I don't really have one because I don't usually watch basketball. The Nicks, I guess? That's the only one I really know? Oh, wait. I know the Rockets too. They had like Yao Ming in their team...once."

He noticed that she had been doing that a lot, like when someone slips up on something and they're trying to cover it up with some additional phrasing. Well, at least he could tell that she was telling the truth in these little moments. He was pretty sure Connor could tell too and was recording down all the times they happened.

They end up watching a recorded version of a past Detroit Gears game and about 30 minutes in, he notices Alina nodding off every once in a while before shooting up every time after nearly landing face first to the blanket. This head drooping would occur for a couple of times more, until about halfway into the recorded game he felt a thump on his shoulder. She had finally fallen asleep and was slumped up against him. He tried to leave, but Alina was nuzzled against his shoulder and her arms were wrapped around that same arm so he couldn't.

Another ten minutes later, he found her breathing slowing down and he assumed that she's going into deeper sleep and things were going well until he nearly gets a heart attack when he felt her head roll off his shoulder. He quickly sprung into action and his left hand caught her head before it hit his leg. He gently sets her head down on his lap and relief pours into him when he sees that she didn't wake up yet. Hank ends up resigning the idea of going back to bed for a while and simply moves his free arm out of the entangle and around Alina for a better position. The girl shuffles a bit at the movement so he resorts to patting her back gently to lull her back to sleep. He did that with Cole and Connor whenever they had nightmares and needed reassurance to fall back to sleep. It looks like it works well with Alina too because she settles down and it's just the quiet hum of the TV for a while.

While watching the rest of the game, Hank peeks over to Alina who is curled up next to him. She's so small, like a tiny squirrel nesting next to him enveloped by the big blanket and oversized clothing. He takes a closer look at her sleeping form and pats away the messy hair covering her face. It was so strange, her child-like statue yet the maturity that she expressed earlier. He continues patting her gently on the back some more and soon finds darkness taking him to the sleep world as well.

QUESTION TIME: Where are u guys tuning from? What are your favorite food? Favorite Ice Cream?

Mine is Boba/bubble tea and yes that is an actual ice cream flavor. Other than that i wanna say cookies and cream

Onto the story comments from me .~

Lolllll i hope you guys liked the fluff from this chapter and it was longer to make up for the hiatus, wanted to add some more stuff but like just dont have time. Have midterms, esssays, internship apps all due this week, so WISH ME LUCK IN NOT DYING. Hope you guys aren't dying from midterms or anything. *STARTS CHEERING* U GUYS GOT THISSS ALSO STAY HEALTHY N SAFE

Onto story notes:

Honestly, idk if police can technically bring home cases to study, but I made it in this case tht they can with some restriction, that way they can study cases while at home.

As for the food comment, its a reference to how college food is terrible and gets easily repetitive at times especially with a meal plan and college dorms usually only have like a dorm kitchen not personal kitchen

Also Hank's home in real life doesnt really have extra rooms so i kinda installed one for Connor and Alina XD if u were to look at replays at Hank's house. I also assumed a door went the basement as well

Also to my fellow asians or just people in gen where others had trouble with pronouncing their first or last name, here it isssssss. THE STRUGLGEEEE.

For now! Signing off! For while so I can cram stuff XD