Deviant Behavior (Connor x Reader)

On Burning Wings

When all that exhaustion, all that mental and physical fatigue caught up, you'd wanted to go back to sleep.  You'd earned it.  So you collapsed faster than the city whose pavement you landed on while it begged you to stand up and save it.

The snow was cold against your cheek, numbing the pain the last week had wrought.  Freezing out the love it'd brought, with it.  One did not come into being without the other.

That was the catch in this "thing called life."  What good that came out of it was temporary.  The struggles – constant.  The question of it was, "what's the point?"

To wake up.  Go to work.  Spend your prime years slaving away for a pay check just to pay the bills, being too tired or exhausted at the home you were paying for to really enjoy living.  To retire when you were too old to do all those things you'd dreamed of doing.

Elijah had tried to answer this question with androids.  A band-aid solution to a gash in rationality that continued to bleed after the limb was severed.

You couldn't shake the feeling that you'd forgotten something.  Had missed some vital information during conversation, the point lost in transit on its way to your common sense.

You wanted to figure it out, and had given up, asking yourself what the point really was...

The pieces of your armored resilience were left scattered; a breadcrumb trail of lost sanity, strength, and hope that you plated yourself with along the way.  But those pieces were worn down.  Grinded, and malformed.  Chipped, and dirtied.

Bloodied...

But unbowed.

The ground trembled underneath you.  Shook and shivered in fear, crying aloud for someone to put a stop to the terrors chasing it.  A burning smell danced across your nose – a familiar scent of heated metal, black powder, and odorized rust.  Smoke pillared towards the sky, twisting and pluming.

The point of it all, was that with nothing left to lose...

You had everything to give.

You clawed trenches in the snow, dragging your fingers under your chest.

"Out of all the possibilities that I was designed to calculate within seconds..." Connor took your arm in his hands, trying to help you up, "When I saved you on that terrace, I had no idea that I'd be saving the world."

You pushed, your arms shaking worse than the foundation they claimed.

"Ensuring freedom for my people."

Your knees buckled, and he caught you.  He always did.  Over, and over, and over-

"I had no idea I'd fall in love with you."

Fire burned in his eyes; yellow and orange curtains of determination and all-consuming vengeance that not even the nearby gunshots could waver.  Muted bursts of rounds formed a symphony, highlighting his words.

"Amanda sent me to that hostage situation for a reason other than what she'd previously stated.  But things didn't go according to her plan, did they?"

You stumbled in place, trying to regain balance.  Saw the remnants of the explosion, blazing a few blocks away.

The spark of revolution that'd ignited a political disaster...one that you'd walk through the fire to correct.

"N-No..." You choked on the resurgence of hope, of strength, of will, "Amanda and Elijah were wrong about everything from the very beginning."