The Fray – How to Save A Life

Connor walked into the precinct, heading straight for Hank's desk. It had only been a couple of weeks since he'd been here, yet somehow it felt longer. Alex had shown up at the hospital with Jake in tow. Connor found that he had endured enough of watching people see Taylor's condition for the first time.

Hank had called him early that morning to say that they were ready for him to take a look at the android that had stabbed Taylor whenever he had the chance. He was not looking forward to this experience in the least, but he knew it had to be done. He supposed that the concept of justice was important to humans. He was built on logic, and no amount of justice was going to change that Taylor was fighting for her life in a hospital bed.

Hank spotted him when he was still several desks away and rose from his chair. To Connor's surprise, the lieutenant drew him into a hug when he made it close enough. One that he hadn't realized he needed.

"How is she?" Hank asked quietly. Connor just shook his head as he pulled away. "Sorry, kid. Let's get this over with."

He nodded. He already felt anxious, being away from the hospital. What if something happened while he wasn't there? What if he missed something? The thought had gnawed at him from the moment he stepped out of Taylor's hospital room.

Brushing the thought aside, he followed Hank toward the evidence room. He also hadn't been here since that fateful day of Jericho. Before he was deviant. Now the room was empty of all of the evidence pertaining to the deviant cases, probably filed away in a more remote area of the precinct.

Connor spotted the android immediately. It had been laid out on a table, he supposed for ease of access, though the gesture was unwarranted. The whole front of its face had been crushed inward. The thirium had evaporated, but he could still see it smeared into the severe areas of damage and exposed wiring.

He suspected this would be an exercise in futility based on how much of the android's skull was caved in. Most of the synthetic skin was ripped away, leaving just shards of fractured plastic. Still, Connor glanced around, then settled his gaze back on Hank.

"I'm going to need some tools."

"You think you can do it?" Hank asked. The note of hope in his voice made Connor frown.

"There is a very remote chance. But I may as well try." He said. The two of them left the evidence room. It took a good hour to acquire the separate tools Connor said he would need to repair the android's memory enough to access it.

As he set his supplies out on the table in the evidence room, he glanced up at Hank, still lingering by the door. "There is a significant chance that the android purged its memory before it self-destructed."

"What are the chances these whack jobs knew how to program an android like that? Sounds complicated." Hank said. Connor frowned, but he couldn't argue that point. He had done what research he could into Helping Humans, but he had no way of knowing their inner working or who comprised their members. They could have ex-CyberLife employees among their ranks.

He took a seat and set to work. Hank left him in peace, leaving the room and returning to his desk. For a long while, he worked in silence, picking the broken pieces of plastic away from the android's face so that he could gain entry to its programming.

At least an hour passed. He had pieces of plastic laid across the table and was just starting to attempt to reattach wires and assess damage when Officer Chris Miller joined him in the evidence room. Connor thought he was coming to register evidence, but it only took a moment to realize his hands were empty.

"Hey, Connor."

"Officer Miller," Connor returned, nodding his head. He continued to work, but Chris lingered, eyeing him.

"I didn't know you were back on the force," He said next, conversationally. Connor looked up again, hands pausing over the android's head. He ran a scan on Chris, showing the young man's increased stress levels.

"Not officially," Connor said, resuming his work even though he was slightly perplexed by the situation. "I am helping Lieutenant Anderson with something."

"Taylor's case," Chris said quietly. Connor froze again. Not intentionally. His emotions went haywire at the sound of her name. "How is she?"

He fixed his eyes on Chris again, who had an anxious look on his face. He knew that Chris and Taylor had spoken, more than once. Did that make them friends? Acquaintances? "She's in critical condition."

"Oh." Chris lowered his eyes to the android, its face deconstructed on the table. A sadness tinged his countenance as he said, "I'm sorry to hear that."

Connor lowered his head and resumed working. He didn't know what else to do, or what to say. There was a brief pause, before Chris moved closer to the table. "Do you need help?"

"There is very little chance of success. I'm not sure how you could assist." After a pause, he added, "But thank you."

Chris turned to go, but before he made it across the room, he turned one more time to say, "You should come back. To the force. Officially."

He left, before Connor could think to respond. The time continued to drift by, Connor carefully reattaching wires, removing pieces that were too damaged to salvage. He had the android's memory storage plugged directly into a tablet, but he still only got messages of corrupt data every time he tried to probe for information.

"Oh good, the tin can really is back." Connor raised his head to find Gavin Reed standing in the doorway now, his hands on his hips. "They're all talking about it out there, but I had to see it to believe it."

"It is good to see you, too, Detective Reed," Connor said mildly, returning to his work. He heard Gavin make a noise of disgust as he stepped closer.

"I just thought they must be wrong. You spend all your time up Taylor's ass, there's no way you'd be here." Connor's fingers twitched enough to pull the wire he was trying to reattach loose. His first instinct was to curse. He must really be hanging out with Hank too much.

"Her family is with her right now." He said, keeping the anger out of his voice. He knew that Gavin was trying to get a rise out of him. The more disappointing thing was how easily it seemed to be working. His emotions were in such disarray that the smallest provocation would have done it.

"Yeah, guess that wouldn't include you, would it?" Gavin sneered. Connor felt his hands clench into fists, his jaw tense, but he stopped himself from standing. Instead, he raised his head and met Gavin's grey eyes.

"I am grateful, Detective Reed, for the kindness you showed to Taylor, whatever possessed you to do it. I would appreciate it if you would control the need to harass me while she is on the brink of death so that I may finish this task and return to the hospital." Connor bit off each word with more venom than he perhaps intended, but his jaw was still clenched. He was angry.

Gavin paled, but Connor knew it wasn't because of his tone. His brow furrowed, confused, but Gavin swallowed before he said, "Do you think she is going to die?"

It occurred to him, then, that maybe Gavin hadn't come down here to annoy him at all. Along with the news that Connor was in the precinct, maybe Chris Miller had told others that Taylor was in critical condition. In his own way, Gavin was worried, he just wasn't very good at showing it.

Taylor had managed, somehow, to get under the prickly detective's skin. And somehow, even lying in a hospital bed, dead to the world, she still had managed to amaze him.

"It's too early to tell," Connor said finally. "Taylor is on extensive life support. The doctor said it will take a few days before we have an idea if she will survive."

He didn't look at Gavin as he said it. He concentrated instead on reconnecting the wire he'd pulled loose a moment before. The room was silent for a while he worked, but Gavin didn't leave, didn't even move. After he fixed his mistake and moved on to another damaged section, Gavin cleared his throat.

"I shouldn't tell you this," he began, which caught Connor's attention immediately, "but I found Anthony Jacobsen's personal notes in CyberLife tower. They outline pretty much word for word what he intended to do to Taylor. Kill her and replace her with that android."

"Markus said he didn't find anything," Connor said in disbelief. Gavin huffed in annoyance.

"Yeah, well, your android friend is a shit detective, isn't he?" He was still scowling, but he aimed it at the android on the table. "Not like it matters now, but it should be plenty to convict him. I heard his lawyer was going to try and get the charge reduced to battery."

"It would have meant everything to Taylor," Connor said quietly. "Thank you, Detective Reed."

Gavin's scowl eased into a frown. He kept looking at the android on the table for a minute or two before he abruptly turned to leave. Before he stepped out, though, he said, "When you go back to the hospital, tell her I said not to die."

Connor nodded, but Gavin had already made his exit, leaving him to work in peace. It was another couple of hours, meticulously rerouting and reseating wires inside the android's head, before he finally managed to snag a piece of uncorrupted data onto the tablet. He had really begun to believe it was a lost cause when he received the first few lines of decipherable code.

He set to work with a new burst of energy. By the time that Hank rejoined him an hour later, he had extracted every working bit of information that he thought he possibly could. It was less than enough.

"Any luck?" Hank asked as he came toward the table, looking over the bits of android laid across the surface.

"Not much." Connor said, looking over the small bits of information he had collected in the tablet. "I was able to pull enough data to establish that this android was definitely programmed to target Taylor."

"That's good news." Hank said with enthusiasm. It quickly faded, however, when he noticed that Connor wasn't reciprocating the emotion. "Right?"

"Most of the android's memory is corrupt. It isn't registered to anyone. There is no way to connect it to Helping Humans." Connor said. Hank frowned, all of his previous excitement fading. He stared at the android in silence for a few minutes.

"Didn't you say that some of these androids tried to infiltrate CyberLife and go after Markus?" He asked suddenly. "Could you trace some of those back to them? I'm assuming Markus didn't toss them out with the trash."

"It's possible." Connor said after a moment. "The programming on this android is not very complex. In an undamaged android, I may have more luck."

"Well, don't worry about it now. Go ahead and head back to the hospital." Hank patted him on the shoulder. "I'll log this into evidence for you."

"Thank you, Hank."

Alex was alone in the room when Connor returned to the hospital. It had been a journey, getting back in amongst the crowd of people outside. Not android protestors, like the congregation always waiting outside of their hotel in Washington, but Taylor's fans. There were significantly more of them, and security was struggling to keep them at bay.

Not only that, but there were flowers. Flowers and stuffed animals and a multitude of gifts that people had sent. There were too many to fit in the room, and Connor saw that they had been distributed down the hallway, to other patients, at the nurse's station. Even in the waiting room.

He took the empty chair next to Alex, who hadn't moved to acknowledge him. Connor hadn't seen Jake on his way in, and he certainly wasn't here now, so he asked, "Where is Jake?"

Alex glanced over then. He was hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, but he leaned back in his chair and sighed. "He went home, for now. He needed a little time to process."

Connor couldn't help but notice that Alex had remained somewhat composed throughout this ordeal. He knew that Taylor and Alex were close, Taylor had tried to explain it to him on more than one occasion. Maybe Alex was just better at hiding what he felt.

"I can't help but feel like this is my fault." Connor's head snapped up in surprise. Alex was staring at Taylor, his lips pressed together, eyes narrowed.

"How could it possibly be your fault?" Connor was genuinely confused by the statement. Alex glanced over at him and gave him a humorless smile.

"Humans are complicated, Connor." He said. "You think this happened because this android protest group targeted Taylor. As if it were simple. But I think it began a long time ago."

"I don't understand." Connor said, his brow furrowing. Alex was staring at the floor now, thoughtful, frowning.

"I've known Taylor for eighteen years. I should have seen it. She tried to tell me, in her way, and I didn't want to see." Alex clenched his hands into fists. "I warned you that Taylor could be a good actress, but I didn't heed my own advice, did I?"

"You aren't making any sense."

"Taylor was being reckless." He said, very simply, like that was the solution to some great puzzle. Connor continued to look at him in bewilderment, but Alex went on, "She always had an inclination to be reckless, but not like this. The stuff with the deviants in Los Angeles. In the past, she never would have kept that from me. I found the supplies she was keeping at her house. How many murders did you investigate here in Detroit related to deviants?"

Connor glanced away. He supposed he hadn't thought of it in that capacity. All of those things had been in the past. Alex wasn't finished, though.

"Who knows how many strangers had shown up at her house, deviants, deviant allies. For months she was at this, until she agreed to come to Detroit to be a consultant on your case." Alex paused then, looking up at him. "When she was coming along to crime scenes, getting hurt, how reckless was she being then? When she was staying in that house for no reason?"

Connor remembered Taylor arguing with Hank, insisting that she would go to the crime scene. She had permission from CyberLife and Captain Fowler, and Hank couldn't stop her. He remembered dropping her off at her childhood home. She could have easily stayed in a hotel instead.

"I got married to Becca two years ago." Alex said, and there was a strain to his voice now. "Taylor was happy for me. She went out of her way to become friends with Becca. Then, a year later, I told her that Becca was pregnant."

The room was quiet for a few minutes. If the two nurses in the room were listening to Alex talk, they were doing a fairly good job of pretending that they weren't. They were going about their tasks for the hour and didn't even spare a glance toward the corner in which the two were sitting.

"I didn't notice Taylor was pulling away. Or I guess it's more accurate to say that I didn't want to. Taylor had been good for so long that I had grown complacent." Alex glared down at his hands, still curled into fists. "Even though I asked her, when I was here in Detroit, if she was punishing me for having a kid. If she thought I was replacing her. I had started to suspect then.

"But she looked at me and she lied right to my face. And I let her." He let his hands relax, and he seemed to deflate. He swiped a hand over his face, rubbed his mouth with it before he dropped it to his lap again. "Then when she called and told me not to call her every day anymore. She might as well have been screaming, and I didn't listen."

"Listen to what?" Connor waited a good length of time before he prompted Alex to continue. He was still perplexed, still not understanding where the story was circling back to or how Alex was to blame.

"Taylor wouldn't have admitted it." Alex said after a while. "She would have felt guilty, being jealous of my new family, feeling unwanted. So she found something to distract herself with." Alex glanced at him. "Not that she didn't truly believe in the deviant cause. But she threw herself in headfirst, she grew more and more reckless, because she didn't care what happened to her anymore."

Connor frowned. His LED was circling red now. He was thinking back over every single moment he'd ever spent with Taylor, trying to find something to prove Alex wrong. Who was he to argue with Alex, the person who knew Taylor best? He just didn't want to accept that Taylor was reckless because she didn't care about her own life.

"It's my fault," Alex said again, this time with a resoluteness that didn't broker discourse. "I should have seen it. I should have helped her."

"As I said to Markus this morning," Connor began, his eyes shifting over Taylor again. He had so many questions. So many things he wanted to ask her. "There is no point in worrying about what we should have done. We can only hope Taylor will get better. You can tell her then."

"I guess you're right." Alex said, though he didn't sound at all convinced.

"The bill passed." Connor glanced up when Markus walked into the room. A week had passed since Taylor had been in the hospital. He'd scarcely left her bedside in that time, though there hadn't been a whole lot of change in her condition.

He had gone back to the precinct once, after Markus turned over the android that they'd captured and deactivated belonging to Helping Humans. They'd managed to shut it down as it started to self-destruct, so there was very little damage to its processor.

Connor was able to prove the android belonged to Helping Humans, and that the programming was nearly an identical algorithm to the one that attacked Taylor. They were still building a case to arrest the leaders of the protest group.

He knew he should've been happier about it, or even about the news that Markus had just delivered. The Equal Rights Act meant freedom for himself, for his people. Taylor had worked for it, had been devoted to it.

But what had it gotten her?

"That's good." He managed to say. Markus was looking at Taylor, but he glanced back as Connor spoke. Probably the tone of his voice had given him away.

Alex spent most of the days in the room with him but followed the hospital rules and left during the night, trusting that Connor would let him know if something came up. Right now, he had stepped away to get lunch down in the cafeteria.

Jake came and went occasionally, but he could never make himself stay for very long. Rachel called to check on her from New York, but the frenzy after her story on deviants had made it impossible to pull away from work long enough to come. Not when there hadn't been any significant change. He didn't know if Raj had even bothered to ask about her.

Connor rarely left. Almost all of the nurses recognized him by now or knew of him by word of mouth. They didn't bother him, and he stayed carefully out of their way. Markus had been an infrequent visitor, but Connor supposed he must be busy with other things.

"It's a little more than good," Markus said mildly, giving him a once over.

"Forgive me for not jumping for joy." Connor replied, gritting his teeth. His temper had been much shorter as of late, and he regretted the words almost as soon as he said them. With Taylor showing no measurable signs of improvement, however, he had no patience.

"I'm sorry, Connor." Markus had the decency to look abashed. "Has there been any change?"

Connor just shook his head. He didn't like being asked. They had rewarmed Taylor, as they said they would, but she hadn't shown any significant neurological response. Her body was healing. They thought they could take her off of ECMO and let her heart and lungs work on their own again within the week.

Now Connor was struggling to reconcile with the thought of her never waking up again. Was there really a point in keeping her alive, hooked up to machines, if she wasn't really in there? The doctors and nurses all tried to be very optimistic, but he was too good at reading facial expressions. He could tell they didn't believe there was much hope.

"Hang in there, Connor." Markus placed a hand on his shoulder. "Taylor is a fighter."

Another week did pass. The doctors removed Taylor from the Cardiohelp machine, and her body began to function on its own again. Her heart was beating, her lungs exchanging oxygen with her bloodstream. The tubes in her chest draining the excess blood had been removed.

Compared to the first time he had walked into the room, Connor felt like there was hardly any machinery attached to her now. Just the ventilator, still breathing for her, and the monitor watching her vital signs.

Despite all of that, she still hadn't woken up. They were taking her to MRI shortly to get a better image of her brain, since the CT scan hadn't been definitive. Connor and Alex were to wait in the room while the procedure took place and would know the results a few hours later.

They were sitting there, in the vague silence of the hospital room, when a commotion began in the hallway. At first, Connor thought that maybe an emergency was happening in another room. He had been here long enough to know that sometimes a patient rapidly declined, and staff members would respond in force in attempts to resuscitate and stabilize them.

As the tumult moved down the hallway, his second immediate though was that something had happened to Taylor en route and they were bringing her back to the room. He was rising from his chair, ready to go and check on the situation, when Elijah Kamski walked through the door.

Connor froze, unsure what to do. His presence certainly explained the chaos in the hallway, but there was no accounting for his presence. Sure, Elijah knew Taylor from childhood, but they were not friends. Not if their visit to his house, where Elijah kept android copies of her likeness, was any indication.

"Hello, Connor." Elijah smiled at him like they were old friends, however, making Connor bristle. He may have been a machine the last time they met, but the man had placed a gun in his hand and forced him to aim it at one of those android likenesses to Taylor. It was not a transgression he would easily forget.

"You must be Alex." Elijah turned his smile on Alex, who had been looking between the two of them with a puzzled expression. Elijah closed the distance between them, glancing around the room with a frown. "It seems I'm missing the main piece here."

"Taylor is in a procedure." Alex said, still confused as he took in the sight of Elijah. He had to know who he was, there was scarcely anyone alive of a certain age who didn't.

"Why are you here?" Connor asked bluntly. He kept his face neutral, but Elijah must have detected the contempt in his voice, for his smile widened.

"A couple of reasons." He shrugged, nonchalant. "Mostly to see how Taylor was doing. She is an old friend, after all."

"Is that why you keep all of those Chloe's at your house?" Connor bit off, glaring. Alex's eyebrows rose in surprise, but he didn't interrupt their conversation.

"That's precisely why." Elijah sighed, as though answering Connor's questions was very tiring for him. "I explained before that I took them so that Anthony would not have them. I didn't have the heart to deactivate them." He paused, and then added, "Though a little birdie told me that it didn't stop Anthony from building a new one."

"Who told you that?" Connor heard his voice come out dangerously low, but he didn't do it consciously. No, his conscious self was busy wrestling the urge to throttle Elijah. Alex was still shifting his gaze between them, like he was watching a very intense tennis match and didn't know who to focus on.

"Why, Taylor did of course." Elijah shrugged. Connor sat back down in his chair, hard. That certainly wasn't the response he anticipated. "She thought I might be able to help with it in some way. To find a way to convict Anthony. I told her I would try, but she had to hand it over to me. She was hesitant, and then I think she was distracted by other matters."

"You're lying," Connor said, though there was very little conviction in his voice. How else would Elijah know about the Taylor replica?

"Taylor came to see me again, after that little debacle with you and Lieutenant Anderson." Elijah said after a moment. If he was trying to rattle Connor further, he was doing a good job. Though when he thought back to that particular time, he was still a machine, and Taylor had left him for the revolution just after that. He shouldn't be surprised.

"I thought she was going to scold me, for what I did to you," Elijah continued when he realized that Connor wasn't going to interrupt or protest again. "But she just wanted to ask me questions. Old questions. Like she wanted closure."

He wasn't smiling anymore. He turned back to Alex. "How is she?"

"Medically stable." Alex said. He must have decided he trusted Elijah enough to tell him the truth. "She hasn't woken up yet, though. They're getting an MRI of her brain right now."

"I see." Elijah glanced back to where the bed should have been, frowning. "I thought it might be something like that."

"Then why did you come?" Connor asked again, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. Elijah turned back and met his gaze, his expression carefully blank. They stared at each other for almost a full minute, before Elijah held his hand out in the space between them.

"Because I think I may be able to help." Connor watched in disbelief as the synthetic skin peeled away from Elijah's hand, revealing the white android casing beneath it.