Archive of Our Own ^beta

Felicia comes like she always did, brightening up Hayden’s day just by showing up at his house-now-prison. They’re on good terms now, as good as one could be with your father’s murderer. He appreciates it. He feels alone here, his only company the ever turned on television and radio, racking up electricity bills until he feels like he’s going insane.

“Art’s taken up baking,” Felicia says, holding up a tray of cookies.

“You brought me food?” Hayden asks. This is new territory. Before, all she would bring was coffee, sometimes, until he bought the supplies to make it and would have a steaming pot waiting for her. Already now, the house smells like the roasted beans of her favorite blend, and he’s pretty sure he’s figured out how to make a latte, even if the nerve damage in his hands means he’ll never perfect the art.

“They aren’t good,” she warns, setting them down on the small table between two armchairs. It’s routine now: she arrives, Hayden gives her her coffee and takes a cup for himself. They sit down, table between them, and never touch. Sometimes they talk about her book. He likes the idea: he’s read the sensationalizing pieces. She could never trash him as badly as half of them do, nor glorify him to that extent.

Hayden steps into the kitchen, grabbing the mugs. One he ordered for her, the other that he found lying in the cabinets. He sets them down on the table.

Felicia sits easily. Her hair is long and dark, pooling down her back. Her eyes are dark too, studying him. She does look like a scientist, even as writing has quickly come to suit her. Her hands wrap around the coffee mug.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asks.

“Not the lab,” she says the way she does on the days where her anger is high, where the fact she leaves yelling is better than her trying to hurt him. Not that he minds, really. Forcing himself to want to live is still an ordeal every day. “What have you been doing?”

“Trying to bake,” he says, and describes how it goes wrong. His hands seize, and he puts in too much because he can’t move them. Or too little, because they twitch. “What do you think? Better or worse than Art?”

“You try a cookie and decide.”

Hayden takes one of the small peanut butter cookies, and nibbles on it. It isn’t bad. Sure, it isn’t the best cookie he’d had, but it isn’t bad. “I’ve made worse.”

Felicia chuckles, taking one for herself. “Read anything recently?”

“Been tearing my way through Shakespeare’s plays. My favorite is Macbeth. Watching old television. Anything new makes me sick. The graphics are too sharp.”

Felicia nods, seeming to think for a second. Hayden tries not to follow her every move, but he craves life. He sees so little of it off of his television screen, now that he’s locked in a house he’d never much cared for in the first place. “Are you going to read my book when it comes out?”

“Are you almost done?”

“Not really. I’m still figuring out what’s for people and what’s for us.”

“Everything that way for us is public knowledge anyways,” Hayden says, taking another cookie. “Did you know they’re trying to recover Horatio’s data? To figure out what exactly happened? Do you think they think we’re liars?”

“And you’re alright with that?”

“Stipulations of not going to prison: I can’t interfere with how the Elsinore tragedies are investigated. Can you answer me?” Hayden snaps the last part, and Felicia glares at him.

She’s scary when she wants to be, and it’s funny. She’s holding a bright pink mug and her sweater is baby blue. She’s shorter than Hayden. And yet, her glare is sharp and reminds him of her, gun in hand, only in control of her own madness. And then the look is gone, and she’s sipping up her latte with the poorly done heart on top. “Emotions make us unreliable.”

“But we aren’t liars!” Hayden insists again.

“No one knows what happened. Not even us. Not even Horatio.”

Horatio’s name gives Hayden pause, as it always does. He knows that Felicia knows this, knows that she exploits it. When she gets tired of Hayden talking over her attempts to get anything out of him for her book, she removes it from the velvet case they both keep it in and tosses it to him. It sits on his tongue and he can barely speak.

He thinks it isn’t right of her to use it like that, but the list of things he’s done to her that aren’t right piles up. The most he can do now is promise her and himself not to lie to her.

“I have an actual question about Horatio,” she says then, and her notebook comes out of her bag, pen over creamy white paper.

“Shoot,” Hayden says, because what can he say? Keep his name out of your mouth, maybe, but that’s probably under the list ‘things he shouldn’t say to Felicia”.

“Can I put him in the book?”

Hayden forces himself to meet her eyes. “You’ll have to, won’t you?”

Her look stills him, disapproving. “You know what I’m asking. Can I put you and Horatio in the book?”

“They know about the neuromapper–” Hayden starts, and she cuts him off:

“Dammit, Hayden, you and he were in love!” He looks at her. He blinks. “I thought we weren’t lying to each other. Do you want me to include how you begged on your knees for him to survive and told the air you loved him, or do you want it kept out?”

Hayden’s lips part. They’re wet, and he remembers the way Horatio manipulated his nerves to make them spark, teasing and beautiful in a way no physical relationship could be. “Please don’t,” he says, embarrassed that his voice comes out in a pitiful whine.

“Thank you,” Felicia, and they’re both back at baseline, back at the routine. Hayden’s coffee steams. It’s black, and right now sounds like it will make him throw up if he drinks it. She jots something down in her notebook.

Baseline. Comfort.

Not that it’s ever really baseline with Felicia. They’ve been through too much for that.

“You know, if you tell them about that, they’ll never let it go.” Hayden doesn’t know to whom he refers as them, only that he’s right. “I’ll be the crazy boy in love with an AI. At least right now everyone just thinks I’m crazy for normal reasons.”

Felicia chuckles humorlessly. She smells like a strong floral perfume he’s sure she didn’t choose. Probably Art. Probably a gift.

“What’s the weather been like? I don’t get much chance to leave. They get paranoid when the tracker says I’ve been in the backyard even.”

Hayden tries not to think about the secret lab beneath his feet he may have neglected to tell the authorities locking him in this house about, because Felicia can tell when something’s on his mind and he doesn’t want to lie to her. But now that they’re talking about Horatio, or they have talked about Horatio and they’re talking about the weather but it’s actually about Horatio, he can’t stop thinking of it.

The parts strewn out on the table, all surrounding the all important thing: the data chip he absolutely isn’t supposed to have.

There’s a clone, somewhere in evidence, and that’s considered the original data chip. But it isn’t. Horatio may be gone, but that one has nothing of him on it. This one has his ghost.

“Could Horatio be brought back?” Felicia asks, responding to a banal comment about Denmark’s rain. “I’ve been thinking about it. He erased himself fully, but nothing digital is ever truly dead, right?”

“I thought you were a biologist.”

“I’m problem solving.”

“Is that part of biology?”

Felicia shakes her head, and then starts thinking aloud. Hayden tries to stop her: after all, she’s too smart. She’ll find all the problems he had, and pick them apart, and then he’ll have no plausible deniability that he hadn’t known anything.

“You could extract him from the data chip, if you had it. Him only? Not the Sisyphus Formula?”

“Only his base code. It would be code, not anything else encrypted.”

“But that wouldn’t be Horatio.”

“I know,” Hayden gets up, tidying up the perpetually messy prison-house. He can’t sit still, can’t hear her say exactly what he did, can’t let her realize exactly what she’s getting at. “It would be almost a brother, none of his memories or feelings but a similar AI with the same purpose. He could be trained, but you couldn’t call him Horatio. Something like Kent, or Puck, or–”

“What did Horatio have to do with Shakespeare?”

“Nothing, really. I just have it on the brain. So we can’t bring Horatio back.”

“Not so fast,” Felicia stands, approaching Hayden, who can’t help but flinch away as she reaches out for him. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t touch me,” he says, which is the closest he can come to saying that he hasn’t felt gentle touch in so long now that the idea of warm skin against his sounds absolutely blood-curdlingly repulsive. “Just say what you want to say.”

“Couldn’t you use what you got of him in the neuromapper?”

Hayden pauses. He reaches up, almost unconsciously, brushing away his blond hair that is getting too long now, and presses his fingers to the base of his skull, where the space between vertebrae is all too filled. It makes him want to puke, and sheer will and the determination not to embarrass himself in front of Felicia is all that keeps him from doing it.

“Couldn’t you?”

He could. Horatio would get a little too much of him, all his fears and breakdowns and problems, but he’s built to filter that out. He’d be back to Horatio in no time. So Hayden not only could, he will. It will hurt him, probably give him a few more chronic problems, but that’s not much against what he has now.

But therein lies the rub: right now Hayden is the boy who went crazy after his father’s death. Sure, crazy. Insane. He’s seen the tabloid headlines. They weren’t flattering for him, and they shouldn’t have been. After all, what he did to Rasmussen was brutal. Felicia should have shot him. It would have been deserved and perhaps a mercy.

If he does this and it gets publicized, he’s fucked. Your father’s death is a fair enough reason to go crazy, especially when it’s followed by a bipolar diagnosis. It’s the most sympathetic reason, at least. Hayden doesn’t care much for publicity, but he cares for not getting metaphorical rotten tomatoes thrown at him, so he’s not about to go:

Actually, guys, if you didn’t think I was crazy enough, I’m bisexual and fell in love with the security AI. We had a sexual relationship!

“Think about it,” he says, trying to dumb this down, “I don’t want that to be the last chapter.”

“Not in my book.”

“This was crazy. There’s going to be books. Lots of books. And I want the last chapter to reflect on me as a person, somewhat favorable. Crazy, sure. A murderer. Someone who deserves this house arrest. But if I bring Horatio back, that’s the last chapter. Everyone died, and I brought back an AI because I loved him. What does that become in a book?”

She knows what he means. He can see it in the way she looks at him. With sadness. With pity.

“What is the last chapter when it can’t end with my arrest?”

“Wouldn’t they understand you loved him?”

“Pretty sure AI-human relationships are viewed like homosexual ones were in the 1600s. They’d rather believe I fell back in love with you.”

Felicia makes a gagging sound. It might be fake, for a joke. It might not be, which is almost funnier to Hayden. Yeah, that was long past. They could have made it work, if they’d never made it romantic. They’re doing just fine now, not touching in Hayden’s prison.

“You see why–”

“Are you?” She cuts him off. “Are you bringing him back?”

“Do you really want to know?” Felicia meets his eye. She nods. He bites his lip, and nods too. “If I can. I can’t bring anything else back.”

“Are you lonely?”

“It’s about more than that.”

“I know, but are you lonely?”

What can Hayden say? Of course he is. Loneliness is a way of life for him, now even more than before. He must move through life, unbearably lonely, nothing to have next to him. And, worse of it, the pain in the back of his skull reminding him where he once got to carry another through the struggles.

He’s so lonely.

But Felicia can’t do anything about it.

“I make do.”

“Sure. Did you know Art’s getting married?”

“Poor woman. Or man. Are you Best Lady, or is he eloping?”

“Full wedding. It’s what…” she falters at the name. “It’s what Dad would have wanted, after all. We’re honoring his memory.” And then, before Hayden can say anything: “Don’t apologize.”

Time’s almost up, and Felicia will undoubtedly be leaving soon. He doesn’t want her to. He needs human companionship, and she’s his link to the outdoors. He can’t see his mother. He’s barely had any other friends. It’s just him and Felicia. Against the world. Against each other.

The fact she’s forgiven him is crazy. He couldn’t be more grateful.

She starts to pack up, putting everything in her bag. Her hair is messy, which is beautiful. Sometimes Hayden forgets that she’s not perfect. Even though it’s an incredibly traumatizing moment he hates to remember, her covered in blood and holding a gun, hair and clothes messy, snarl on her face… It's one of her best looks. When she lets this guard down.

Hayden hands her the cookies, but she waves them away.

“Keep them.”

“Really?”

“Art’s going to keep baking, and I’m sick of cookies. Keep them. I’ll order you food, too. Don’t think I can’t tell you’ve just been living on sandwiches and pasta.”

“I’ll pay.”

“Alright, next time I come. And I’ll bring a meal. Art and I are learning some Chinese dishes now.” Hayden holds the tupperware of cookies and smiles. “See you then, Hayden.” She turns towards the door, and he follows her to see her out like a good host.

She pauses with her hand on the gold doorknob.

“Will Horatio be here when I come back?”

“Maybe not next time,” he says, as close to a confession as he can get, and she smiles and leaves.

He goes back into the house, the thin silver anklet of his monitor beeping slightly, dismayed he got so close to the outside world. He turns the radio up, listens as the announcer talks in Danish about the current politics. He pours another cup of coffee, setting the cookies down.

Subconsciously, his hand drifts up to the neuromapper. It makes him sick to touch, especially with the taste of coffee in his mouth, but he can’t help it. He’s nearly there. Nearly at the point he needs to link up to it.

It’ll be painful. Not surgery painful, but the electricity itself will damage even more of his nerves. He may lose use of one of his pinky fingers. Maybe his toes. Hopefully nothing more severe than that. But he doesn’t care! Better to have Horatio and be a little bit more disabled than to be locked up in this house, still disabled!

He takes his mug and a cookie, and opens the door to the basement lab. Carefully he enters, breathing in the dusty air. He sets everything down, plugs his phone into the speaker and flicks on one of the playlists Felicia doesn’t realize he still listens to.

Florence + the Machine drifts through the air. Usually he likes a louder, harder sound but it's calming to work to. He turns it up, turning to the metal pieces he’s working on. He grabs the welding gloves and helmet, pulling them on.

Florence sings, and Hayden picks up a heavy metal hand, wired with electric nerves. Everything to make a moving body. In front of him lies a fake body, one an AI could control with ease. Brown skin, curly hair, tall but not too tall. He looks vaguely like an actor Hayden used to find attractive mixed with his platonic ideal of a man.

It’ll be done soon, and then he’ll tap into the data chip and neuromapper, and then Horatio won’t only be back. He’ll be someone Hayden can touch, can hold onto, can have and hold. His laptop displays how to make sensory detecting prosthetics. It might not work right away, but once Horatio’s in the body, he can work with it to make it so it can feel sensations, feel everything.

Feel how it might feel to kiss.

“I'm the same, I'm the same, I'm trying to change,” Florence Welch sings. Hayden reaches over, changes it to something harder that he can hear over the sound of the welding torch, and turns to the silk skin feeling of Horatio’s body.