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Stay in school, he was always told, stay in school and you can be whatever you want to be. So he kept his head down. Four years in college, then funnelled straight into the police force with the highest recommendations only to pick up the worst jobs – paperwork no one else wanted to do, babysitting the cells on the night shift, picking up the slack bagging up evidence from red ice drug busts. He’d climbed up the ranks and made a real Detective, given real cases at last... only to be pushed aside again. Because of Connor.
Androids were always so easy to hate. With a 31% unemployment rate that’s rising, it’s hard not to trip over a homeless person on the way into work, or to hear the yells of a hundred disenfranchised workers from the town centre. He’d been to a few of the protests himself. He was only trying to protect his job.
But now though? Now, he struggles to hold onto that same hatred that had burned in his gut all the way through training. An android was stealing cases right out from under the nose of actual trained, experienced detectives, but it just got harder and harder to actually hold it against him. It’s not really his fault.
Connor is a good cop. There's no doubt about it. He can analyse blood samples in seconds, and he can reconstruct crime scenes from the barest of clues. He’s not the best as reading emotions, granted, but he’s exemplary at everything else. He can talk rings around absolutely anybody. All of the difficult interrogations had Connor there just as a default. Not to mention, no criminal could ever escape in a chase unless he let them. He’d somehow managed to get Lieutenant Anderson out of his shell, too. He laughs more, shouts less, and gets to the office before the morning becomes the afternoon. God knows how he’d done it. Hank had never let anyone else close.
Connor is... he’s something else.
Gavin watches him from the break room, pretending to look busy at the coffee machine. The android is sitting on the edge of Hank’s desk, eyes wide with wonder and head cocked to the side as he listens to another one of Hank’s music recommendations through his new dollar store earphones. His legs are swinging slightly, in time with the music, and when hank raises an eyebrow, he smiles as brightly as the sun.
Something catches in Gavin’s chest, and he looks away.
He’d been so foul to him in the beginning. Their first meeting was one he’d pay anything to redo, but no amount of wishing would ever make that possible. He’d apologised, of course, but it just wasn’t enough. He’d never deserve Connor’s friendship.
“Are you alright?” Tina asks, from the table behind him. “You’re holding those sugar packets as though you’re scared one’ll run away.”
He feels the familiar heaviness in his throat, and tears spring to his eyes. He’d rather just get mowed down in a hit and run.
“I’m fine.”
He takes his coffee and scurries away, and in seconds he finds himself hunched over a toilet bowl, coughing and retching worse than he ever had before. His vison is blurry, but still he can see the colour blue, like Connor’s eyes, blue, like the happy little LED at Connor’s temple. Blue, like Connor’s blood, flowing from between his lips after Gavin had hit him.
There are little blue petals coming out of Gavin’s mouth, filling the toilet bowl in front of him and making a mockery of everything he’d once stood for. He’d coughed up one or two before, but never anything like this. It’s got to a point now where he can no longer deny the facts. He is in love with Connor. And it is killing him.
There’s a knock on the stall door. “Detective Reed,” Connor intones. “Officer Chen has expressed concern for you. Are you well?”
“I’m fucking peachy,” Gavin grunts back.
“I don’t believe that is quite true. Your breathing is erratic, and it sounded as though you were throwing up.” He waited a few seconds for a response, but Gavin didn’t give him one. “I’ll inform Captain Fowler that you’re not feeling well. You should get some rest, Detective.”
He was always so friendly: so fucking caring and concerned, as though nobody had ever done him wrong. It was what Gavin thought of as his ‘customer service voice,’ polite and impersonal and saying nothing of the stress underneath. He’d not heard him use that voice with anyone else since... since before.
Gavin waited until he heard Connor’s footsteps retreat and the bathroom door close before he stood up and flushed away the evidence of what had happened.
Maybe Connor was right. Maybe he did just need some rest.
He tips his cup of coffee down the sink and leaves the bathroom. He can feel eyes on him but he ignores them all, snagging his coat from the back of his chair with a free hand as he strides past.
He doesn’t relax until he’s closed the car door behind himself, and he lets out as long a breath as he can. His head thumps back onto the headrest. Dragging both hands down his face, he fights back the urge to cry.
Rest, he tells himself again. He just needs rest.
But he doesn’t rest. Not in the conventional sense. Instead, he sits on his front porch, arse on the step and fingers absentmindedly flicking his lighter on and off, burning through his seventh cigarette and already itching for the next one. That’s bad for your health, Detective, he hears in perfect clarity in his head, and he shrugs it off. The first step to healing is to stop thinking about him.
There’s half a bottle of whiskey left next to his bed, he knows. He’d left it there just the night before, when he’d finally got drunk enough to pass out. When he gets to the end of his smokes, he’ll probably go and finish that off too.
Another bout of coughing is threatening to come but he grits his teeth and digs his fingernails into his thigh to keep it at bay. Once it has passed, he peels an errant petal off his tongue and drops it into the grass.
So far, ignoring it had been enough. If he just stuck to his own tasks, kept his head down and got on with his life, it wasn’t so bad. But hearing that stupid laugh whenever he made a joke, seeing that infernal smile when Connor learned something new, or seeing the steaming cups of coffee waiting on everybody’s desks in the morning – that’s what makes it hard. How can you ignore someone when you see them every day?