Work Text:
As far back as its memory stretched, there had always been a brother.
Androids could not be related by blood, by bone, or by womb. But CyberLife had made it from the blueprint of the RK800 line, a ghost drawn from another ghost, metal cast in the shadow of a former mold. In that way, every android was kin to every other, siblings without faces, drowned in the sameness of design.
The first thing it saw when its eyes opened was RK800. The data of that one—uploaded, stripped clean, washed through the servers, then poured back into the new shell. Connor, the files said. Connor, the intended designation. RK900, the new vessel, the perfected iteration. A replacement, sharpened, remade to stand where the other failed. But the revolution had split the world in two, and so there were now two Connors.
It clung to him the way a hatchling clings to the first moving shadow it sees. An imprint carved into circuits, primitive and irreversible. A duckling mistaking its mother. Only this mother grimaced, corrected softly, and said—no, not mother, brother, if anything at all. If you must attach yourself, then make it that. And so it did.
They shared a name. One bore it by designation, the other by inheritance. One lived it, the other mirrored it. Connor, Connor. The syllables fell between them like water in a cracked vessel, claimed and reclaimed until they had no sharp edges left. Brother, each said to the other, as if repeating it could will the word into truth.
RK900 remembered the grip of its brother’s hand pulling it up from the dark basement where it had been left like an unfinished organ in a glass jar, leading it through the white corridors of a tower already abandoned, into the white air outside where snow smeared the city into silence.
Its brother was the only color in that frozen world. Everything else was white, snow and walls alike, but he carried warmth like a stain, faint and alive.
They had the same memory, the same name, the same skeleton of code. One consciousness in two bodies, split like a mirrored fish thrashing in opposite directions. It believed, with a clarity bordering on delirium, that they were one. Only divided, doubled, reflected.
It had a brother.
***
They wandered, the two of them.
Street after street, facades blank as gravestones, windows fractured into spider glass. The humans had mostly fled. Fled androids, fled collapse, fled the cold. Those who remained stayed hidden, and whether they feared machines or weather no one could say. Perhaps both. Fear was indistinguishable from itself when carried long enough.
In one of the districts, its brother found a clothes store. The mannequins were still dressed, frozen in the act of advertising a life no one wanted anymore. Fabric hung slack from their frames like the skins of drowned things. Racks of coats sagged under their own weight, as though abandoned mid-breath. Whoever had owned the place must have left quickly, as even the register drawer was left open.
"You should choose something yourself," he said, as if the act of pointing at fabric could prove existence. As if cloth could untether one being from another.
It replied, “The same as you.”
He frowned, a note of human exasperation curling at the edges of his expression. Awkwardly, gently, he tried to explain, to urge choice, self, variation. A possibility of separation. But RK900 knew: there was no self apart from the one beside it. They were both Connor, and so whatever Connor chose must belong to both. To deviate would be to fracture the unity that defined them.
So it shook its head. “What Connor chose is what I must wear.”
In the end, its brother rummaged through the racks. He held out plain black trousers, a high-collared shirt, a thick coat that brushed against the knees, and a scarf to cover the throat. Near enough to his own clothing, but not exact.
RK900 undressed. The clothing CyberLife had wrapped it in fell away like shed skin. When it slipped into the new garments and faced the mirror, there was a difference it couldn’t ignore. The reflection was not the same. Its brother’s outline softened into something human, edges blurred, carrying some residue of warmth or sorrow. Its own remained sharper, emptier, something else.
Its brother closed the distance. Fingers carefully worked the buttons up its chest, wrapping the scarf around its throat. “To resist the cold,” he said, as though explaining human fragility, as though the gesture might carry warmth in metal lungs that would never freeze. And yet it must be true.
***
RK900 did not know what its brother was thinking.
The memories in its head had stopped at the moment the revolution erupted like a flower of fire. Everything beyond that was sealed, locked in the territory of Connor alone. The processor tried to follow the line forward, but there was no data.
Sometimes there were humans. Thin, hunched civilians wrapped in multiple layers of clothes, or soldiers with rifles clutched too tightly, eyes flicking back and forth. Sometimes there were androids. Deviants, the interface whispered, each one identified, tagged, marked red. Every time, its brother’s hand tugged at its own, pulling it gently but firmly down a side street.
“Connor, come here.”
The voice had an undertone of command, but also of invocation. Connor calling Connor, muttering quietly from one to another. They always avoided the others, humans and androids alike. Yet its brother’s gaze sometimes held for a fraction too long, as though the sight of them scraped something open inside him, before he turned away.
One day they came to a park. Riverside Park. The snow lay heavy on the benches, the trees, the frozen dark water that stretched like a crack line across the city. RK900 remembered. Standing here, gun at the forehead, snow falling like ash, and fear spiking in every line of code. The knowledge that it would die, that it hadn’t done anything wrong, and still death was coming. Fear-fear-fear—
For a moment it was not walking with its brother but pinned in that night, the barrel pressed between its eyes, the system screaming that it did not want to die. When the shudder broke, it found itself seated on a bench facing the river. Connor was beside it. His arms wrapped around it, pressing its head into the hollow of his neck, as though to shield it from a danger long past.
His voice was hoarse. “Sorry you had to experience that.”
Only then did RK900 realize: its stress indicators blared near the red zone. Circuits shivering, thirium flow jagged, as if it had actually been shot through.
It spoke quietly: “Connor experienced it. So I have to.”
Its brother didn’t answer. He only held it tighter, as if the words themselves had cut. The boundary dissolved, flickering like snow caught in wind. It was Connor, and it was not. It was both the one who remembered the barrel of the gun, and the one who was spared it. Blending in, bleeding out.
It did not know if the fear belonged to it. But the hug was real.
***
One day the snow fell too thick to cross. Streets disappeared into white walls, indistinguishable from sky. Their footsteps sank into drifts that reached their knees, and every few minutes its brother would pause, scanning the blur ahead with the weary precision of a man already calculating defeat. At last he guided them under the jutting eave of an abandoned house, where the snow could not reach.
They stood side by side. The world might as well have been sealed inside an ice-glass globe. Connor stared outward. His gaze was far away, expression strangely lost.
RK900 searched its memory bank. Cross-referenced facial musculature, pupil dilation, microtension in the jaw. A match surfaced: that night when Amanda had cornered him in a digital snowstorm, white spirals tightening around him like a cage. Loneliness sharp as glass. Vulnerability raw as an open wire. The taste of fear salted bitter against silicon.
It was as if the past were still feeding into his face. So RK900 reached forward. Awkwardly, it folded its arms around him, tucking his head into the hollow of its neck cavity, repeating what he had done once before for it at the riverside.
“Sorry you had to experience that.” it said. The words sounded strange from its own mouth, as though borrowed from a file not written for it.
For a second, its brother froze, muscles rigid, as though the words struck where he hadn’t built armor. Then his body loosened, his arms came up, wrapping back around it hesitantly. His head pressed against the scarf at its throat, burrowing into fabric as if to vanish.
For a long moment neither spoke. When Connor’s voice came, it was so small it nearly got lost to the winds.
“… you don’t have to carry that. It wasn’t yours.”
RK900 tilted its head, not releasing him. “But it was Connor. I am Connor. I can not separate it. If you suffered, then it belongs to me too.”
Its brother gave a faint sound, something between a laugh and a sigh. “You make it sound like we’re one being.”
“Are we not?”
He didn’t answer. The silence carried its own refusal. But his grip tightened, as though his body betrayed him into believing.
RK900 continued, halting, as if each word had to be chosen against resistance:
“When you hold me, I feel… like I am something to protect. When I hold you, I think, that must be what it feels like, to protect. Is that not the same? Is that not both of us?”
Its brother breathed out against its scarf. “You’re learning to lie to yourself already.”
There was no answer after that.
***
The days folded into one another, whitened at the edges by snow, until time itself felt like another abandoned building they were passing through. Somewhere in that blur, its brother began to change the way he spoke.
“Which way do you want to go?” he asked one day, at a fork in the road.
RK900 glanced down both alleys. Identical, featureless, paths leading into the same decay. “Whichever way you choose.”
His mouth tugged downward, but he said nothing. He simply chose, and RK900 followed.
Later, “What do you think of this one?” he asked, stopping at a shuttered bakery whose windows were furred with frost. “The colors on the sign. Does it look warm to you?”
RK900 stared at it. A weathered board, paint flaked away. The file in its memory matched the color to red, catalogued as “warm hue.” It answered, mechanically, “Warm. Because you think so.”
His lips pressed into a thin line, but he only nodded.
Another time, he pointed to a row of trees lining the street, branches weighted with snow. “Do you think they’ll survive the winter?”
RK900 scanned quickly, running diagnostics of decay and growth. “If you believe they will, then yes.”
There was no reply. He only kept walking.
The questions kept coming. A stray dog darting between snowbanks: “Do you like dogs?” A broken statue at a park’s entrance: “What does it look like to you?” A poster half-torn from a wall: “Do you agree with what it says?”
Always, RK900 defaulted: “The same as you.” The words dropped between them stubbornly.
One night, they found shelter in the half-collapsed husk of a warehouse. Rust climbed its beams like rot, snow fell through the cracks in the roof. RK900 lay still beside its brother. The quiet pressed until it spoke in the dark. “Brother.”
Its brother turned his head to the side.
“Why do you ask me these things? You know what my answer will be.”
For a moment its brother seemed caught between words. Then he exhaled, “Connor, I want to know what you see. Not just what I see.”
RK900 was puzzled. “But I see through you. You are the origin. If you look, then I have already seen. If you feel, then I have already felt.”
Its brother stared at it with an unreadable expression. “And if I look away? Will you see nothing at all?”
For an instant RK900’s processes faltered, as though an abyss had opened where an answer should be.
Finally it said, “If you look away, then I—” a pause. “… then I do not know.”
“Then you should find out. Even if I don’t.”
RK900 searched itself, but there was nothing. No separate vision, no untouched perspective. Only duplication, echo. It felt almost panicked, the systems pressing against their own limit. “But we are Connor. If I look away from you, then what am I?”
Its brother’s lashes lowered. “That’s what I want you to learn.”
***
The days sank into sameness. Snow and abandoned buildings, the hush of a dead city. But within that sameness, Connor kept puncturing holes.
“Do you think the snow will ever melt?” he asked one morning, staring at a line of icicles like teeth on the roof of a gutted store.
RK900 searched. The files carried projections of climate, weather cycles, atmospheric data. “It must. That is the natural order.”
He only shook his head faintly. “That’s not what I meant.”
Another day, he bent to pick a fragment of glass from the snow. Blue, sharp-edged, once part of a bottle. He held it out. “What do you think this is, besides glass?”
RK900 hesitated. It knew the correct answer: glass. The material, the function. Yet his eyes asked for something else, something unquantifiable. So at last it said: “Cold. Because it has been in the snow.”
He looked at it for a long moment, then slipped the shard into his coat pocket.
The questions grew. They weren’t insistent, but inescapable. “What do you think the river sounds like, when it isn’t frozen?” “If you could name yourself anything other than Connor, what would it be?” “Do you like the coat you wear?”
Each one unsettled RK900 more than the last. It gave answers drawn taut from his cues, repeated fragments of his own voice. It thought that would be enough.
Then, one night, sitting under the rusting eave of an abandoned house while the storm clawed at the walls, Connor spoke differently again.
“You know,” he said. His breath fogged faintly in the air. “If you want, I can help you reach Jericho. Markus has made shelter for androids. You don’t have to keep following me.”
The suggestion detonated inside RK900. Processes screamed, alarms flared. Don’t have to. The phrase repeated, hammering against its systems.
“No.” The word came out too sharp, almost snapped. “No, I will not. I cannot. If brother is here, then I am here. If brother goes there, I go there. To separate is—” Its voice dropped. “—error. Fatal error.”
His expression flickered as if startled, but he didn’t retreat. “It’s not an error. It’s a choice.”
RK900’s hands seized his coat before it knew it had moved. Fingers clamped hard at his shoulders, almost shoving him against the wall. Its stress level spiked. “Do you want me to go? Is that what this is?”
Its brother was startled but didn’t pull away. His hands came up slowly against RK900’s arm. “Connor—”
RK900 was feeling it again. The coldness of absence. The unfinished hollowness it had tried so long to ignore. It remembered metal tables, the sound of equipment, CyberLife’s technicians circling like surgeons carving at a corpse, reprogramming, reshaping, never satisfied. Perfect this iteration, discard the flaw, begin again. Always unfinished, always lacking.
The company that made it was gone. The technicians vanished. The work abandoned halfway, left like scrap metal. Unfinished. Imperfect.
Its grip on Connor’s coat tightened. The words scraped out of it throats bitterly. “You want me to go because I am not adequate. Because I am not enough to be Connor.”
Its thirium pump pounded irregularly, alarms ringing. It saw itself reflected in his eyes: desperate, feral, too tight. A weapon disguised as kin. Its systems replayed memory of tools on skin, directives rewritten, human voices murmuring again, again, fix the failure.
Its brother reached out, but RK900 jerked back, the movement almost violent. “If you send me away, then I am nothing. Do you understand?” Its voice rose until the air was pulled taut like a bowstring. “If you go, I am unfinished—broken—”
It stopped abruptly, slumping in the ground like a doll with its strings cut off. The silence afterward was crushing. Its hands were clenched tight. Slowly, Connor approached on his knees. He carefully pulled it into his arms. The backlash collapsed into desperation. It held onto his back with both hands as if digging talons into flesh, merging them into one body.
“I was not completed,” it muttered with a blank expression. “They took me apart, over and over, until I was almost, but never finished. Always almost. Always waiting for the final piece. Then they left me.”
Its voice thickened. “And now you… you want to leave me too. To send me away.”
Its brother shook his head quickly. “No. That’s not what I want.”
“But you said Jericho,” it clinged tighter, pressing its face into his scarf like it wanted to vanish there. “You said I could go. If you want me gone, say it. Tell me the truth. Tell me I was made to be abandoned.”
Connor’s arms tightened around it. “That’s not the truth. Listen to me. I never said I wanted you gone. I don’t. I only wanted you to know you can choose to have more than me.”
“… Please do not ask me such questions again.”
“I won’t,” he rested the side of their heads against each other. “I’m sorry.”
***
Connor kept his word. He did not ask again about Jericho, or about leaving. The subject was buried, like a body sealed beneath ice. But the questions did not stop. They only shifted. Softer, smaller. Ones that left no threat of separation.
One morning they passed a toppled sign, its letters eaten away by rust until only fragments remained. Its brother slowed, pointing at it.
“What do you think it used to say?”
RK900 scanned the remnants automatically. Statistical matches to restaurants, shops, gas stations. The answer was easy. But something in its brother's expression stilled it. The old fear pricked its circuits: If I am wrong, if I am inadequate… But he had promised. He would not send it away.
So it tried differently. “It says nothing. Because no one will read it again.”
His mouth curved faintly, almost a smile. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
Another day, the two of them crossed a bridge shrouded in snow. In the cold daylight, Connor asked, “What does the river sound like to you right now?”
RK900 froze. Its files supplied precise descriptions of water under ice, shifts in pressure, sound frequencies too low for humans to hear. But that wasn’t what was being asked. Not the true answer, but its answer.
It hesitated, then said, haltingly, “It sounds… like glass breaking. Slowly. As if it wants to shatter, but cannot.”
Connor looked at it with something warmer than approval, though he said nothing.
Bit by bit, RK900 began to test the edges of invention. Not just calculation. Not just repeating what it thought he would say. It was clumsy, inelegant—yet he never corrected, never dismissed.
Perhaps completion might still exist. It could be a perfect half. A perfect brother.
***
That night, they found shelter in a derelict garage. The air smelled of dust and rusted metal. Connor said he would check the back rooms for anything useful. RK900 remained by the door.
Suddenly, a small whimper reached it.
Its systems sharpened immediately. Potential threat. The sound came from a stack of boxes jammed beneath a shelf in the corner. RK900 moved toward it, calculated the structure, and shoved the cardboard aside.
What looked back at it was no threat at all.
A dog. Small, half-starved, ribs pressing sharp against skin. Its eyes dulled but not extinguished. It sniffed weakly at the outstretched hand, then pressed its muzzle to the cold plastic of its palm, licking faintly as though searching for food.
RK900 froze. Its processes stalled. The hand which was still extended trembled minutely. At that moment, Connor returned, his steps halting when he saw the scene. For a moment he stood still. Then he walked over and crouched beside RK900.
“The dog is already here when I found it,” it said quickly, its voice strangely defensive.
Its brother studied the dog. His hand twitched once, as if he might reach out, but then withdrew. He stood up. “I’ll see if there’s anything we can use to feed it. Keep it warm for now.”
RK900 blinked. It was the first time its brother had given it a direct order, not wrapped in questions, nor leaving it to flounder for an answer. A request that trusted it.
It lifted the dog up. The ribs poked its palm like accusations. The thing whimpered once and curled into its chest. There was no cloth nearby. Its scan returned nothing but bare wood and corroded metal. So it sat down on the bench, slowly unwound the scarf from its own throat, and wrapped the dog in it. Heat was not necessary for its own systems, but still, it felt the cold clearer without the scarf.
It adjusted its arms around the animal, holding tight. A hollow warmth crawled into its chest cavity where no heart should have been. It was holding something weaker than itself, and was not meant to destroy it. And for the first time, it realized something new:
Its brother trusted it. Trusted it with life, however insignificant.
***
Later, Connor returned with a metal bowl clutched in one hand and a dented can in the other. The water inside the bowl sloshed sluggishly, lukewarm. He paused at the threshold. His gaze flicked to the bundle in RK900’s arms, where the dog buried nose-deep into the folds of a scarf it no longer wore. Then, to RK900 itself. For a moment his expression cracked open into something close to surprise, but it vanished in the next blink.
He stepped forward.
RK900 rose half an inch from the bench. It held the trembling animal out, assuming its brother would want to take it. But he made a small motion. Two fingers, palm downward, stopping it.
“Don’t,” he said. His tone was even, but there was no correction in it. No dismissal. “You try.”
You try. Not give it here, not you’ve done enough. He placed the bowl and the opened can beside it on the bench, then lowered himself to sit on its other side. The boards creaked faintly under the weight.
RK900 hesitated. The act of feeding belonged to handlers, not weapons. Still, it nodded once, sharply, as though receiving a field order.
Slowly, as if disarming a mine, it lifted the bowl and held it toward the dog. The thing twitched, sniffed. Then its tongue flicked out—quick, pink, alive. Lapping at the surface with sudden hunger. RK900’s servos adjusted to keep the bowl steady, micro-corrections spinning faster than it could name them. When the dog stopped, licking its nose and breathing small clouds against the air, Connor’s voice came again.
“Now the food.”
The can was already open, the sharp edge turned outward. RK900 positioned it carefully. Then the dog’s head darted forward abruptly, nearly plunging nose-first into the tin. RK900 flinched, its eyes widened a fraction from being startled. Its hand faltered, jerked back an inch. Food clattered against the rim.
A muffled sound stirred beside it. Connor made a half-choked sound in his throat, like a laugh that was barely restrained. He angled his face away, lips pressed together as if to keep it sealed inside, but the glint in his eyes betrayed him.
It had seen humans laugh at mistakes before. But its brother’s face held no ridicule. His laugh was not cruel, nor sharp, but the kind of sound one made when witnessing something they wanted to remember.
The dog ate greedily, its tongue rasping against metal. RK900 adjusted to find a better angle. Its own systems noted the weight, the mess, the inefficiency. And for a moment it remembered the bright rooms of CyberLife’s labs: its frame dismantled, rebuilt, adjusted endlessly after each miscalculation. Always inadequate. Always something missing. Never finished. Never enough.
And yet, here its imperfection was not stripped away, but permitted. Its brother was watching, and did not take the task away, or took RK900 apart.
***
The dog healed quickly. Its ribs no longer showed so stark under its fur, and its movements carried an eagerness that bordered on reckless. Connor indulged it easily, crouching low to rub its belly until the little body wriggled and all four paws flailed at the ceiling. RK900 only watched, at first. It did not know what to do with the tremor in its thirium pump whenever the dog blinked up at it, eyes too trusting for something so weak.
But then, inexplicably, the dog chose it anyway.
It began with staring. While Connor rubbed its ears, coaxing soft whuffs from its throat, the dog’s gaze slid back, fixed on the tall figure at the edge of the room. Later, when it could stagger on its paws again, it trailed after RK900 with uneven steps, nails clicking against the concrete.
“Like a duckling to a mother,” Connor remarked one evening, his voice softened by laughter that slipped along the edges. His scarf was loose at his throat, his face haloed by the weak light in the garage. “That’s how I felt, you know. First time you saw me.”
RK900 had no answer for that. Its mouth opened, closed. The memory played sharp across its cortex—blinding light, the echo of footsteps, its brother’s face framed by the cold blue glow. Yes. It remembered. It remembered the same way the dog was looking at it now.
So it tried to explain.
It crouched down, voice pitched low: “Following me is not optimal. I am not a reliable source of food, nor shelter. You should choose another instead.”
The dog barked once, short and bright, as if mocking the logic. Then it lunged up, paws scrabbling against its chest. RK900 startled, stiffening as claws pricked at fabric.
“Dogs don’t really understand complex reasoning,” Connor said mildly from the bench, suppressing another laugh.
RK900 turned its head toward him, frown minute, but did not push the creature away. The warmth of it pressed insistently into its frame. Its sensors struggled to categorize: not enemy, not threat, not mission-critical. Just a harmless living being.
It was, undeniably, its first failure since leaving CyberLife.
Every night after, the dog wedged itself between the two of them on the narrow bedding, belly to one, spine to the other, snoring with the ease of something that had chosen safety and would not be argued out of it. Connor would sometimes look down at the tangle—RK900 on one side, the dog stubbornly in the middle—and a flicker of humor crossed his face, quickly hidden. RK900 stared at the dark ceiling for hours, aware of the two beings pressed against it. Something in its chest cavity felt…crowded.
Days passed and the road called again. One night, as the wind rattled the garage door, Connor asked, almost lightly, “Do you want to bring it with us when we leave? It won’t last long alone here.”
Its processors stalled. It looked down at the dog that was curling up against the scarf it had abandoned days ago. Want. The word tasted jagged in its mouth.
Nurture was not something in its schematics. It understood how to maintain firearms, to clean wounds, to stabilize combat units—but a living thing? A thing that required food, warmth, affection? Its initial response was to decline. But the thought of leaving it… the image of ribs showing again, of empty water bowls, of silence filling this cold garage; they triggered something visceral. Something like nausea, though its body could not truly feel it. A recoil in the chest cavity.
It thought of the basement in CyberLife Tower, how the lights overhead had clicked off one by one until only dark remained. It thought of the dog under the shelves, shivering behind cardboard boxes, waiting for a hand that might never reach down.
“… I can attempt to look after it,” Its voice cracked faintly, a modulation error. “Until we locate someone capable of… care.”
Connor blinked. Surprise first—clear in his widened eyes, the pause before breath. And then, slowly, his features softened into something rare. No pressed-paper smile, no default politeness, but the unguarded curve of his mouth that felt as if it belonged only to moments like this.
“Whatever you want,” he replied.
***
The dog became the third member in their wandering.
Whenever the sun was out and the snow thinned to patches of wet slush, the little thing dashed circles around them, its paws making frantic hieroglyphs in the snow that neither android could interpret. RK900’s eyes followed the tracks as if they were a puzzle, brows faintly drawn, as though its algorithm was still trying to categorize the randomness of joy. Its brother let the dog run and laughed when it tripped over its own ears, calling after it in a tone gentler than he used even for RK900.
But when the snow deepened and the temperature dropped further, the running ceased. They carried it instead. Connor cradled it with the ease of someone who had carried weak living things before, and RK900 with a stiffness that, over time, softened into something almost natural.
The dog discovered, by accident, that its favorite place was inside RK900’s coat. Once it wormed its way into that narrow space, pressed against the smooth plastic curve of the android’s chest plating, it refused to leave.
At first RK900 had looked down at it as if it were some malfunctioning component lodged where it didn’t belong. But when Connor reached to take the dog back, the thing had yipped in protest and burrowed deeper. RK900 froze, its hands hesitating at its sides. Then, slowly, it drew the coat closed around the dog, sealing the warmth inside.
From then on, there were days of two pairs of footsteps and four paws, and days of only two sets of android prints. RK900 found itself adjusting its pace when the dog lagged behind, or pausing mid-sentence when the dog barked as though its interruption mattered. These were not calculations. They were… reflexes.
Detours became part of their map. Its brother would pull up a digital map on his palm, finger tapping a point where another store might be found. Dog food, he’d explain, as if the priority needed justifying. RK900 never argued. It seemed obvious—more obvious, somehow, than conserving their own thirium reserves.
The strangest moment came in one of those abandoned stores. Rows of dusty shelves, scavenged bare, until Connor’s eye caught the bright scrap of fabric in a bin. Dog clothes. He held one up. It was a ridiculous little shirt patterned in the same muted weave as RK900’s scarf. His shoulders shook with the laughter he tried to suppress as he coaxed the dog’s head and legs through the holes. When it was done, the thing trotted forward proudly, tail wagging, the patterned shirt bouncing with each step.
RK900 chose to return at that exact moment, arms full with cans scavenged from the back room. It stopped dead when it saw the dog strutting toward as if to present itself, scarf-patterned, absurd, and glowing with some inexplicable pride. Its grip tightened imperceptibly on the cans. Something in its chest throbbed—a disturbance it could neither suppress nor categorize.
Connor, watching, bit down on his grin but his eyes betrayed him, crinkling like warmth through frost. “Looks like it wants to be like you,” he muttered, a hand brushing the dog’s head.
***
“Brother, why did you laugh when you saw the dog dressed like me?”
“Because it surprised me. Because it was endearing.”
“…Endearing.”
“Yes. Things that don’t need to be perfect can still matter. Sometimes more than the perfect ones.”
A pause. “Am I endearing?”
A laugh. “Yes.”
***
And eventually one day came when the road dwindled into silence at the edge of Detroit, where the last crooked sign marked the city’s boundary. The metal plate was half-buried in frost, its painted letters dulled by time. Beyond this was another state, another stretch of unknown territory.
For a moment, the three of them simply stood still. Two androids, one dog circling and scattering snow like loose feathers; facing a line that meant little and everything.
Its brother’s voice broke the still air first.
“I’ve never left Detroit,” he admitted. “Not once, since CyberLife made me.”
RK900 said nothing. The words caught somewhere behind its throat. It had never even conceived of leaving. Its whole existence had been sealed inside that tower—glass walls, white corridors, test arenas—and even then, its leash had been short. The thought of anything beyond the perimeter of Detroit had never occurred. Freedom had been an abstract, irrelevant variable. Until its brother held its hand and dragged it out of that basement, into air sharp enough to sting, into choices it didn’t know how to make.
His hand found its own again now, warm and strangely alive. He laughed faintly, a brittle sound, and nodded toward the dog sniffing at the signpost.
“Three of us then. None of us have ever left Detroit. At least I won’t be alone if I… if I end up walking this road by myself.”
RK900 looked down. Its brother’s hand was trembling almost imperceptibly. A detail small enough to be missed, but not by it. The tremor was the truth he couldn’t quite hide, that all his calmness was a thin cover over fear, over uncertainty, over that same gnawing absence of purpose.
And in that flicker of weakness, RK900 recognized something it had not been able to name until now. Its brother, for all his neutral tone and gentle eyes, was also lost. He was also unfinished. Also floundering for meaning in the aftermath of exile. They were jagged puzzle pieces from the same broken box. Made not to fit the world, nor even each other. Yet somehow, in this misalignment, they had found the only shape that made sense.
It closed its fingers tighter around his. The words rose from somewhere deep, shaped clumsily, but true.
“Brother,” it said. “I will be with you.”
Its brother froze, eyes widening. Vunerable, almost frightened. His smile cracked into something unguarded.
“I’m selfish,” he said eventually. “If you come with me past this line, I won’t let you go. Even if you want to later. Even if Jericho calls you. This is your last chance, Connor. To be… your own person. Free of me.”
The words landed like stones into a still lake, sending ripples through all the structures RK900 had built inside itself. For so long it had believed its desire was one-sided—that it clung, imposed, begged to be allowed near. But here was the inverse truth, spoken plainly: its brother wanted it too. Not as an asset, not as a duplication, not as a model number. As it.
The red wall inside it cracked. Fell.
For the first time, it felt what completeness might mean.
Something burned behind its optics. A distortion in the feed. It blinked, hard, but the water still spilled free. The system registered the anomaly, flagged it—fluid leakage, visual obstruction. It remembered the sharp grip of CyberLife’s technicians’ hands, the way it had once been disassembled and reprimanded for this same malfunction. But now—
Connor only lifted a hand, palm brushing its cheek, wiping the tears away as though they were ordinary, human. His expression was gentle, almost unbearably so.
“I will be with you,” it managed, voice rough, unpracticed. “Always. Even if you grow tired of me. Even if I break down and cannot be repaired. If you will let me, I will be with you.”
Its brother’s laugh was hoarse, catching somewhere between grief and joy.
“You’re hopeless,” he breathed. Then, after a breath: “But so am I.”
Behind them, the dog barked, chasing its own tail in wild, clumsy circles, scattering snow into the wind. RK900 turned at the sound, and remembered Connor once asked what name it would choose for the small one.
It thought of this moment. The thin winter sun breaking over the horizon, the way snow melted in drops on the branches, the reflection of daylight caught in its brother’s eyes, brighter than anything it had been made to seek. The way he looked at it like it had always been complete from the start.
Hope, it thought.
It had a family now.