Work Text:
“You are going to have the empathy sequence reinstalled in me,” The android states one day, a touch more mechanical than his usual lilt that sets Erwin on edge before he registers the words.
There’s an odd quality to his voice, and Erwin looks up from his papers. He watches him pour a cup of tea, stirs two spoons of honey in, the way Levi used to make it for him.
He hasn’t had tea since Levi was alive, and the thought of accepting that cup from that thing makes his stomach flip.
Through sheer force of will alone, Erwin forces the nausea down. “What’s wrong?” He asks gently, purposefully avoiding the use of his name.
The android stares him with something close to real hatred—which, Erwin realizes with a jolt, shouldn’t be happening. The previously installed microchip, the one a group consisting of himself and what was left of Nile Dok’s team slaved over to smooth out its glitches, is supposed to be defective in this model. Because if the chip was working properly, the synthetic neurochemicals would be doing their job—Levi wouldn’t be this husk of a person: a glorified memory card at the crux of it all.
(It has to be the memory chip, because Erwin can't breathe, can't function, if this the end. If building Levi a new body from scratch, inscribing the genetic sequences of whatever viable memory traces they could salvage from Levi's preserved brain into a code armed with stolen experimental equipment and a hypothesis years in development wasn't enough, and it was all for nothing; Erwin can't—)
That’s what Erwin finds so off-putting about this thing, with its humanoid face: all silicon skin and black synthetic hair; a decision he and Hange made fresh in the wake of Levi’s death, when the aftermath of Levi’s death was sharp and they were high on the arrogance of their combined brilliance and the sheer injustice of it all. If they were going to recreate Levi, they would build a nearly identical body for him to come back to as well.
Instead, the final result is nothing more than polished scrap metal; a beautifully crafted android, complete with complex pre-programmed human dialects and a state of the art empathy sequence designed and modified by Dr. Hange Zoe herself, working together with an operating system Erwin procured from the pits of developmental government laboratories against all legalities that would (will) surely have Erwin lined up for a quiet execution. This is what they deserve, for playing god, for having the gall to attempt to bring a man back from the dead.
“You’re killing me to bring him back.” He says bluntly. Erwin’s chest aches; they shouldn’t have done this, they should have left well enough alone—
“That’s not true,” Erwin says quietly, though the guilt settles in his stomach like stone. “I’m making you whole, Hange and I, we’re going to bring you back—”
“There’s no one to bring back!” He yells. “What do you think that’s going to accomplish, he's dead."
"Stop." The word shakes, anger rattling his bones, alive and sentient.
The android's head tilts and Erwin can easily visualize the way the wires and supporting structural plates follow the movement, mimicking muscle, the electrical signals he calibrated making it possible in a truly elegant array. "You don't think it's cruel? To try and drag him back here? You're really arrogant enough that you can't see you were doomed from the start?"
Erwin's eyes flutter shut, deliberate. "Enough."
"—because this?" The android gestures to himself in an angry wave of his hands, "is cruel, doctor. This is as good as you're going to get, a robot with a file of meaningless, half-formed memories, and it's cruel." He turns around, not stopping to gauge Erwin's expression.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Shut up,” He hisses, whipping around to glare at him. The mug shatters under the pressure of his clenched fist, paying no mind to the pain he should be feeling as the scalding tea soaks through his shirt. Erwin flinches. “I know exactly what I’m talking about, if you wanted me to be mindless, you would have programmed me as such, like every other android,” he spits the word, “out there. We’re not the same. I’m not him, and that’s not enough for you. That’s your problem.”
Erwin stands up, rounds his desk. He doesn’t approach him, but he’s in no mood to calm this parody down, not when his Levi is at stake, so close out of reach. Not when he razed everything to the ground to get this far, Erwin will not stop now.
(He owes it to himself—to Levi—to see this through, has to prove to him that it was worth it when Erwin sees him again.)
“Did you ever once stop to consider that maybe, maybe I don’t want, nor do I deserve, to die for a dead man?” The android says, advancing toward him.
A chill settles over Erwin, on slow-moving horror creeping up his spine to slide around his neck, tighter and tighter, because no, he hasn’t considered anything this Levi could potentially want at all, didn’t even think to consider that developing an android with the closest thing to freewill they could program would have consequences backfiring as spectacularly as they are right now.
“That doesn’t matter, your software isn’t working properly, you can’t feel—” Erwin’s voice cracks on the lie. He looks away, unable to watch the angry disappointment wash over Levi’s face.
Levi’s on him in less than a second, gripping his tie and dragging him down to look him in the eye, cutting off his oxygen. “You’re delusional,” Levi breathes, “go on. Check. Get into my interface and troubleshoot if you’re so convinced I’m defect.” And tilts his head to the side, exposing artificial flesh where a pulse should be present, beating steadily.
Erwin doesn’t want to take the bait, but with a perverse need to repair his wounded pride and a staggering grief that leaves him breathless, Erwin finds himself lifting the cover of the concealed control panel, still unsoldered due to Hange failing to deem him fit and entering the code that defaults the android’s face to the neutral typically donned by his kin, eyes lit up in a just as typical loading sequence.
Slack-jawed and automatic in the simplest sense, Erwin enters his access code. “Hello, Dr. Smith.” The android recites, eyes wide and unblinking. Obedient. Robotic.
Somehow, this is worse. A breach of privacy that leaves Erwin crawling all over. Here, he has the power to give any android the equivalent of a human lobotomy. It's painfully easy: a long combination of thoroughly memorized code entered in quick succession and Erwin can wipe every file, every synthetic memory away in a fifteen second long death sentence. He has the power to unmake this near-human from the inside out in a breath he's taken time and time again and right now, he's suffocating.
Sick to his stomach, Erwin logs out, and the raw emotion dilutes Levi's expression once more is a relief. Levi drags him closer and carries on talking, uninterrupted.
They aren’t programmed to remember calibrations—Erwin could wipe the android clean and he would reset without ever registering a change.
“I can feel—and even if I couldn’t.” He leans in closer, and Erwin can smell the sweetness of his breath, from the sugar water that helps sustains him. “That doesn’t make me any less of a person.” His eyes flash, an artificial blue light circling his pupils, beautiful, even in its strangeness. “I think, I feel, I have the ability to make conscious decisions, you made me able to do all of that. I am not less than you, and I'm not going to sit here and let you take that from me.”
Erwin doesn’t move, even when his head starts to swim.
The android loosens his hold on the tie, which Erwin is grateful for, but he doesn’t let go. “You won’t even say my name.” He says, disgust near tangible in his voice, and Erwin's had enough.
“You’re not him.” Erwin says, relishing in the way the android’s eyes widen slightly at the outburst. “You’re not Levi.” Erwin says again, the statement loaded with the weight of bitter acceptance.
The android’s eyes narrow. “No, I’m not your Levi, but that’s still my name. The least you can do is use it.”
Erwin looks away—this is too much, he feels like Levi’s judging him from beyond, all his crimes laid out in front of him, naked and exposed.
Levi never would have approved of this, would have shut them all down from the start.
“You and the other doctor barely succeeded in converting the sequence of his memories into readable software. Some of them are corrupt and completely inaccessible, the rest are hazy at best and they mean nothing to me, Dr. Smith.” He taps his fingers against his temple, a condescending motion that has Erwin clenching his fists to stop himself from lashing out. “The emotion behind them isn’t relevant to me because that isn’t me. But the gist of it isn't too hard to figure out.” He says.
“He was in love with you, and I can see that. That woman? Essential to him, he loved her, too. I see it the same way you load a USB onto a computer, and I do not give a shit about you.” He whispers, soft, a caress, each word a knife in his chest. Erwin shuts his eyes against it, against this thing wearing Levi’s face, using his voice to tell him these things that Levi should have told him himself—
“I could go anywhere I wanted, there’s nothing holding me back, not really.” He says, leaning forward to brush his lips across Erwin’s tauntingly, a calculated movement with no warmth behind it— and he has the nerve to talk about cruelty. Erwin tries to jerk his head away, but the android’s hold is absolute, and Erwin, at the end of the day, is just a man.
He’s not Levi, but right now, it’s close enough.
Erwin presses forward, barely registers Levi’s hand going slack around his tie. His lips mould against the android’s, familiar and foreign, the shape of Levi’s lips combined with the strange texture of the artificial skin lining his mouth. Erwin pulls his bottom lip between his, sucking lightly, and then sinks his teeth into the soft fleshy material in a moment of pure frustration, angry, endlessly angry at this thing for not being his Levi. The android doesn’t kiss him back.
But then he is: he’s kissing Erwin back, learning quickly like Hange programmed him to. He presses his teeth into his upper lip and swallowing the moan that comes deep from within Erwin’s chest. Erwin’s hands find his way to the android’s hips, fingers digging into the material there hard enough to bruise, to hurt, but the android—Levi, Levi, Levi—can’t feel it, not physically, improperly, but the intent is there, the receptors work and it’s enough to make him gasp sugar-sweet into Erwin’s mouth.
Handcrafted and beautiful. If nothing else, Erwin is, and always will be, an artist.
Erwin takes the opportunity, slips his tongue in his mouth, surprised at the softness of Levi’s tongue sliding hotly against his. Levi tilts Erwin’s head, angling his mouth to kiss him deeper, following Erwin’s lead as he walks them back to the desk, pinning Levi against it and using his grip on his hips to lift him up and step into the space between his legs. Levi’s legs lock tightly around his body even as the grip in Erwin’s hair relaxes into a languid repetitive tugging, lightly scratching his nails against his scalp and soothing the ache from yanking so hard before. He does it again, even increments of three that Erwin can’t stop noticing once he does, sending chills down his spine. He breathes, presses his cock into the juncture between Levi’s legs searching for an answering hardness that isn’t there, and that’s what shocks him back to reality, a stifling this isn't right flooding his mind in a wash of sickening poison.
“Then why don’t you?” Erwin breathes against his mouth, pulling away as he stands at full height. He’s nowhere near as calm as he’s coming across, and he wants to scream at the pure degeneracy of it all.
The android—Levi, his name is Levi—doesn’t answer.
That night, Erwin lies on his designated side of the bed holding the microchip tightly in his palm. The space next to him, Levi’s side of the bed, is empty and cold, the scent of him fading with each passing day. He thinks about what the android—what Levi said.
He drops the new chip into the half-empty glass of water on his bedside table, flanked by the framed photo of him and Levi, an eternity old and all sunburnt cheeks and unguarded smiles, in the same sunlight that stole Levi’s life away from him in a cancer that ripped his body to shreds. He pulls Levi’s pillow to his chest, tries and fails to stop the tears that come silent and unbidden, leaving his eyes throbbing under the pressure of silence.
Silent and unbidden, he sends Hange a message asking her to remove him as administrator in Levi’s software.
It’s the least he can do for him—for both of them.
"Some guys a few floors down tried to bring a child back from the dead." Levi says casually, like it isn't one of the sicker things their company is trying to cover up.
"Yeah, I heard." Erwin glances up, watching Levi stir tea in rapid figure eights. "It's unbelievable."
"Hubris." Levi murmurs, distracted as he makes his way over gingerly, a slight limp in his step. "I think Dok was trying to sequence his kid's genome into one of the androids-- shit, can you help me with this?"
Erwin's already out of his seat before Levi finishes his request. He strides over, taking one of the cups out of Levi's grasp, answering his grateful smile with a kiss to the temple. "Thank you. Yes, his youngest daughter. It's tragic what happened to her, but it wouldn't have worked; she wouldn't have been able to grow and learn like a normal child would."
Levi takes a seat perpendicular to him, wincing slightly when he shakes out burnt fingers. "I think it worked, in a purely technical sense." Levi says around a sip of tea. "She would have been, what, five, forever? It's sick, who wants to be a copy of someone? Like some kind of preserved corpse. They're getting charged, right?"
"It is, and they are. The process is criminalized for a reason. People get irrational loved ones are involved." Erwin agrees, concern creeping into his expression when Levi scrubs a hand down his thigh, rubbing out an ache. It's a movement Erwin's witnessed more often recently. "Is your leg still hurting?" He asks.
Levi grimaces. "Yeah. I don't know, it's not getting better." He says, and Erwin's immediately on edge, mild concern augmenting into cold panic.
Levi's not one to admit pain, and Erwin can only imagine how badly it must be hurting for him to say something with little to no prying.
"We're going to get that checked out." Erwin says, already scheduling the appointment from his phone. "As soon as possible, I don't want to hear you complain about it."
Levi rolls his eyes, but his face is still pinched. "Relax. It's probably nothing."