Puzzle Pieces (Connor (Detroit: Become Human) x Reader) Part 1
Everyone has a soulmate!
At least that’s, what everyone had always said, that’s what everyone’s still saying, the only difference for now is that you don’t believe it anymore.
Because you don’t have a soulmate, there is no name written on your wrist, no name written in a bright red over your pulse. There is just skin, nothing more, nothing less.
There was once a time where you had believed in a soulmate, you had truly believed that you were just like everyone else; until the day you realized there was just no name on your wrist.
Your six- year old self had used mirrors back then to find a name, maybe it was just somewhere else on your body, but no, you haven’t found anything. Crying and utterly confused and scared you run to your mother on that fateful day, begging her to look for a soulmate’s name on your body. It had just to be somewhere! This must be just one awful big mistake!
But even your mother couldn’t find a name.
This was the first time you remember that you broke down crying and cursing the whole universe, wondering what it was that made you so unlovable, so undeserving of a partner that was a part of you, who lived in your heart just like you would live in theirs? What had you done that you were dismissed this gift, that everyone should have, that everyone around you seemed to have?
It was so unfair that, until this day, you were so convinced, that there was someone out there for you, someone for who you would be the missing puzzle piece of their soul, as the people always have said.
“Humans are not made for being alone. Each and everyone of us has someone out there who completes the puzzle that we are, we just need to find each other and then it’s true bliss…”, usually this speech was accompanied with a stupid grin towards their soulmate or a longing look towards the sky.
But as time passed your convictions about your soulmate shuffled into a black gaping void of “There is everything wrong with me that I don’t have a soulmate!”. And with even more time this idea settled into your soul and you truly believed it.
Of course you hoped, you prayed, for a miracle to happen and for a name to appear on your wrist, to wake some day up and to find a name, the proof that you are not doomed to never experiencing true love but this miracle never came.
Since the day you were seven years old, a good year after you realized the missing name on your wrist, and having a year filled with unattained hopes for a miracle, you started to wear long sleeves whenever you left the house, not minding the weather, no one, absolutely no one, should see that you didn’t had a soulmate! Because then, everybody would just know that there is something wrong with you…
When people around you, often your friends and acquaintances, were talking about the names on their wrists and how they imagine them to be or who they hope they are, you were either answering very harshly, sometimes even mean, or tried to change the subject, when you were asked about yours.
It was in your first year of high school; during a lunch break you sat together with people you called friends or ‘when we have to go to school we can do it together’ and a girl named Lydia bend over the table and whispered with sparkling eyes and a smug smile to you and the three other girls that were with you at the table: “I think I know now that Garrett Cruz is my soulmate! I saw his arm the other day when he threw a ball during training and I am pretty sure that I saw a L, a Y and a D!”
Her face was full of satisfaction and confidence and while the other girls showered her with screeched “OMGs” and “This is amazing!s” You fought the urge to roll your eyes.
Everyone knew that Garrett was the current crush of Lydia and she didn’t seem to have really seen anything on his arm, especially not her name. She probably just saw a shadow of what she wished would be there. And the other problem was that on her wrist were written in the bright red letters with her soulmate’s handwriting the name Sascha. A very feminine handwriting to be precise.
“But what about Sascha?”, you asked slyly, not banning a little evil smile.
“What is about him?”, she snapped back.
“Well”, you answered and put your chest out and shoulders back, gaining confidence, “firstly, you don’t know if he’s not a she and secondly, whatever they are, they are your soulmate. Not Garrett.”
You finished your statement with a small shrug and a too sweet smile.
Lydia stared at you and gasped, she opened and closed her mouth a few times, trying to say something but whatever she wanted to express, it didn’t found it’s way out.
“How do you know”, she finally managed to say, “that this Sascha is my soulmate. Maybe I’m their’s but they’re not mine. Because I want Garrett. And he has my name on his arm!”
You sat there, baffled. Did she really believe that? Did she really wanted to throw away what she was granted when her puzzle piece’s name were written on her wrist, when she decided to ignore that and chase after only a temporally and also unimportant crush?
But what if she was right, what if there weren’t puzzle pieces that always fit. What if there are puzzle pieces that don’t belong to each other? Even though the names are there? Or just kinda fit but no one ever realizes that they should not be next to each other and never realizing that this choice of partner was wrong. What if the universe has made a mistake?
Or just doesn’t care?
Since you were standing on the outside, looking into the world but never being able to be a part of it, it made you painfully aware of everything that could be wrong about that system...
Not always was it so easy for you to not talk about the lack of letters on your wrist, when you sat down during sleepovers on the beds, with warm, dimmed lights around you and soft sleep wear and these 3 AM conversations. Usually these conversations would eventually bring up the topic of soulmates and the connected dreams and stories, like how do the people imagine the first meeting or the first kiss or what they think their soulmate is like based on their names and handwriting. Or exchanging the actual stories of how they first met, as you grew older and more and more of your peers came across and found their soulmates.
As much as you enjoyed sleepovers, you always feared for this topic to come up. You would then usually grab a pillow, pull down the sleeve of your sleep shirt, hug the pillow tight and tried to become invisible. It sometimes worked, silence can be a mighty ally if you want to disappear, but sometimes people still asked. For responding, you usually barked answers about how soulmates are always the most important thing in life, when they are other topics like climate change that should be a priority and how annoyed you were by ‘soulmates here and soulmates there’. The people then usually looked shocked, often hurt, a few laughed but typically you distracted them enough to release you from the question. Either turning back to their prior conversation or you were able to give another input for a new topic.
Even though you had accepted that you were just wrong and unlovable a long time ago there was always this feeling of betrayal lingering inside you that you didn’t had a soulmate, that you hid that fact from the majority of people. Just your parents, your little sibling and later two of your best friends knew.
“By the way, why do you make such a secret of your soulmate? We are always the ones to talk about ours. Why do you never talk about yours? ”, a friend, a really good and caring friend, asked you with a warm smile at such a sleepover occasion, after she had talked about how she was sure that she had met her soulmate and was now thinking about her next steps, asking for your advice.
You knew very well, that she asked you about your soulmate, to give you room to speak, to make you feel included, that you should not be the one to always listen, she was offering you to talk as well, to spill your heart out. Absent minded did you rub your wrist, as she spoke, the wrist were a name should be, the wrist, where was only skin. Looking around the room, you looked into two of your best friends faces, people that you trusted, that you decided to tell finally the truth.
You looked at your friends, kind and wonderful people, took a deep breath, closed your eyes for a moment and when you opened them again you quickly said, eyes towards your sleeve: “I don’t have a soulmate!” You pushed the fabric of your shirt up to reveal your bare wrist.
Your friends stared at you in disbelief, both crying out a horrified “WHAT?”
You just looked at them sadly with tired eyes, eyes that were heavy from the weight you’ve been carrying your whole life.
After their surprise, their scepticism and a look at your wrist and your encouragement that you really have looked everywhere, they believed you. There was pity in their faces, but on the same time they told you what an amazing human being you were, they told you about your bright, honest smile, how you always lend an ear, how you cared for the people around you, how you would never let someone down that you cared for and what masterpieces you could create out of flowers.
It made you smile carefully and for the first time in your life, you were nearly okay with having no soulmate, when you had people around who cared for you nonetheless. And these people even cared for you because they wanted to, they weren't bond by a name written on your bodies, tied and forced to be together, forced to care.
'Yes', you thought by yourself, 'maybe, just maybe this isn't the end of the world. Maybe there is another way.'
In the following time your mind calmed, you decided that you would fall in love with yourself, the only person at this moment, that you could truly love without having to share with somebody else. And so you did. Beginning with wearing short sleeves, according to the weather, turning to skin care routines and Quote collecting from an old Internet page called tumblr, to working hard in school for learning about all the things you were truly interested in that you would learn to smile about life itself someday and not curse life for not having a soulmate.
With each day of growing self acceptance it got easier for you to see beauty and grace in life and the times of dark clouded thoughts and a heavy, dull heart got fewer, until they would nearly completely disappear, just leaving a lingering shadow of questions behind. The question and the longing to experience a wild, unconditional, unquestionable and true love, a desire you could not ban from your heart completely. It became a part of you just like the blossoming joy for life and the soft and careful peace you made with you just being different.
It was summer 2038, when everything you knew, everything you tried to give order and structure to, crumbled at just the sight of blue letters, appearing out of nowhere on your wrist.
You were on the train, after a quite ordinary day at work, letting your legs stretch out, closing your eyes and breathing in the golden summer evening, relaxing to your favourite music, when a sharp prickling pain on your wrist let you nearly jump in your seat and made you inhale air sharply.
As fast as the pain came, as fast it faded, and as you inspected your wrist, to find the reason for the pain, you just stared at it, paralyzed, with an open mouth and a thousand and not one thought at once in your head. After the initial shock you couldn't help but laugh out loud, in disbelief and utter surprised joy, right there in the crowded train, you had a soulmate! You had a soulmate!
Connor...
Connor.
Connor!
You had a real soulmate and his name is Connor!
People probably stared at you, but you didn't noticed it, and also didn't care, you were hypnotized by the blue name written in a clear, clean fond that didn't seem like a handwriting. Thinking about the letters, you found your soul mark very odd, and even odder with each passing moment.
The joy about your soul mark slowly faded and left you with very uncomfortable questions in your heart. Weren't soul marks supposed to be red and written in the individual handwriting of the soulmate? And this one looked like it came straight out of a computer. And did not soul marks appeared the day the soulmate was born on their partners wrists? Did your soulmate, Connor, was just born this very moment? Was this even legal? And were you supposed to wait for Connor to grow up until you could be in a relationship? Was this even acceptable?
And why was your mark blue?
The odd color nearly bothered you the most, it felt weird, just not right...
Blue was such a technical color, cool and clean, not something you associated with a hot burning love, with passion and devotion. Blue was chilly, it was structure and security, it was metal, durable and strong but not bendable, not alive at all.
You couldn't put it into words, but there was something about your whole mark that made you feel out of place again; a calm blue instead of burning red, a computer fond as handwriting, you never ever heard of someone with a mark like yours. Once again, you weren't like the rest of the world.
And a part of you hated it, another part of you just gave in to your fate of just being you and being you meaning to be different, and being proud about that, and yet another part of you wanted a soulmate so badly, that it still couldn't believe that a name appeared.
'A name is a name', you thought a few stops before yours, 'and that's all I ever wanted!'
Unbeknownst to you, around a hour away from you in Detroit, in a laboratory at the CyberLife headquarter, a new Android prototype, the first Android Detective in the history of Androids, was firstly activated.
"State your ID!"
"RK800 #313 248 317 - 51"
"Your name is Connor."
"My name is Connor."
Little did he know that there was a irregularity on his Android body, his true body, right at his wrist, that CyberLife was not able to get rid of.
Whatever they tried, and they tried everything, it did not work. A new material, a new alloy for the Android bodies, a new mould for casting the arms, a new casting and moulding procedure were created, they even rebuild the whole machine, responsible for the body parts but all of this effort did not pay off. The perfect, smooth surface had an unevenness, not to be seen with a human's eyes but it was prominent as light of day for the advanced technology of CyberLife. So they decided to not talk about it, to maintain silence, since it did not affected the Androids in any way. Nobody knew that this unevenness existed, no one outside of CyberLife, that not on one, not on a few, but on all Androids they ever made. CyberLife's scientists wondered and searched about the nature of this unevenness but they did not find any answers. It was a miracle they said, a little wonder that is the price for the most advanced technology ever created by mankind. "As long as it does no harm", they said, "we don't need to explain everything."
Even Elijah Kamski said something about the "scratch" as the CyberLife members referred to the phenomenon.
"We created artificial life, maybe we, Androids and humans, are more alike than we think. They were made in our image, at least", with that he smiled his sly, mysterious smirk and rubbed his right arm, right over where his soulmate's name probably stood.
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Part 2
Welcome to my very first Detroit: Become Human fanfiction. Thank you so much for reading. There is more to come. This was also posted on my Archive of Our Own account with the same title but the username „Myvanway“.
GOOD ENDING ❤
Our first shippy photoshoot. You would think after 13 years of being and cosplaying together we would done so sooner. Here we are! Thank you my goof, Hank, for convincing me to do this!
Hank - @yourlegaldrug
Connor & editing - @neverdreamchild
Photographer - @justisaisfine
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