strangetrip | OTA: First, I'm gonna drink this, and then I'm gonna throw up.

CW: severe alcoholism.

Jackson had not, for lack of a more colorful expression, been doing well lately. Not since his stint as an android. At first he'd turned to sex, and Corbie. It was about reconnecting, he had told himself. About feeling again. Being returned to his original self was a goddamn gift, no two ways about it.

But maybe it wasn't all good and rosy, because he kept reaching for knowledge that his mind could no longer hold onto, and his frustration was growing with each passing day. So of course, he'd started drinking even harder than he usually did. Drunken hazes anesthetized his brain, smoothed everything over until nothing mattered but the next swill of liquor down his throat. And there was only one way to get through his increasingly terrible hangovers, and it wasn't Reid's god-awful concoction. Good old hair of the dog, of course.

By the time Jackson found himself suturing his own temple with trembling hands, after passing out and knocking his head against a table corner, he had to admit that he might have taken this too far.

So he'd gone the only stupid way he could: cold turkey. Treated himself through the shakes, and now he was finally on the other side of that. His mind was clearer than it had been in a while, but it still wasn't enough to be half the man he'd been when he had been changed. Perhaps not man, exactly - definitely not man, exactly. Doctor, absolutely. He had managed to retain it all, all the knowledge in all of his books, and it had all made sense. He had been able to apply it. To help. Clarity, precision, efficiency. The speed of his thoughts, the acuteness of his senses.

Now he was left floundering again, caught between what he had learned in his lifetime and what he was trying to make sense of from his books. He refused to think that he was too old or too stupid to learn as much as he needed, now matter how sluggishly he thought, how fuzzy the world seemed. He was too stubborn, by far, and his obstinacy would see him through.

That was how Jackson ended up taking a rather radical route to understanding and memorization. Some markers, the clinic walls, and his books. Drawing anatomical schemes, outlining the steps in one surgery after another, listing drugs and their posology. Laying that information out, actively rephrasing and rearranging it in a way that would hopefully help it all stick with him.

He fully expected the Inn to do its thing and wipe the clinic walls clean during the night, but that wasn't an issue, on the contrary. It meant that he could start over in the morning. But for now, the clinic looked an awful lot like a madman's den, with Jackson ready to play the part, his hair mussed up, his clothes rumpled, and exhaustion darkening circles under his eyes. The smell of tobacco lingered in the air, and the ashtray on Jackson's desk overflowed with cigarette butts, when he was usually so good about stepping outside for a smoke. He hadn't wanted to step away today, and they so rarely got patients anyway.

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Of course he would make Jackson say it. The doctor gritted his teeth, then forced himself to say it. "You were human there for a few days."

"Right." Connor would have tensed were he still human. "Technically the term is "Spider-person."

Jackson leveled a very unimpressed look on him. "You weren't a goddamn machine anymore." That was the point. Why had he even brought it up? He pulled on his cigarette angrily.

"Correct." Connor admitted after a moment of hesitation. "I was, a few quirks aside...effectively human."

What the android was was, mostly, not answering Jackson's goddamn question, and he was in no mind to ask it again. Instead, he asked another one. "What are you doin' here?"

Jackson bit back the kid he would've normally used to address Connor; now that he knew what it was like to be Connor, it didn't seem to fit anymore.

"Visiting." The term 'wellness check' seemed like a ticket straight back out. As the particulates overwhelmed his field of few every time he assessed them, Connor even more grateful not to be burdened with human lungs.

"...It was enlightening." He added slowly. "I don't know else to describe it."

Fucking useless answer, but Jackson wasn't sure what he'd been expecting. Careful not to burn any of the books with the cigarette in his hand, he turned to close them and pile them up. He could take at least some of them to his room, maybe keep working there a while.

Watching Jackson shuffle anxious heightened the discord within him manifesting in a frantic yellow blinking of his LED. Connor looked away. "And terrifying."

Jackson looked up at that, frowning at Connor. The android looked more human now, looking away, than he had in the entire time Jackson had known him. Jackson was ready to bet what his LED was doing right now, even if he couldn't see it. "How's that?" he asked, after taking another drag on his cigarette. Jackson's tone had gone guarded now, a little too even.

Silence. The precise words were hard to find and Connor felt as if he were drawing on a well of knowledge that was forbidden to access. Instead, he fell back to logic. Simple, clear explanations.

“Emotions are an irreversible error for androids. Those who experience such a cascading failure are hunted down without exception.”

Jackson waved that away. "You're back to your emotionless self. No cascadin' failure there."

Connor, again, didn't reply right away. Jackson's assurance, while dismissive, at least broke his state. "Why do you ask?"

Jackson shrugged. "Curiosity." He looked at the walls, his scribblings and diagrams. "Emotion ain't half bad, but your mind's a fuckin' wonder, all the same."

Regarding Jackson's reply silently, the LED flickered an urgent yellow a few times before returning to normal. A loose paper rustled somewhere underfoot as Connor shifted. The conclusion was clear.

"So...you were an android." If one listened closely, one could have heard his voice crack.

Jackson frowned, looking over at Connor to check out the state of his LED. "Y'all right, kid?"

A facsimile of a smile rose on Connor's face as he composed himself. "That was simply unexpected."

"Yeah," Jackson agreed, very sarcastically. "'Cause unexpected often got you soundin' all... emotional."

"Unexpected didn't have me birth a den of graffiti, either." Connor knelt to to take up a loose page with a pencil sketch of a brain cross-section, inspecting it--the dim lighting made no difference. When he had committed it to memory, he glanced back up at the man just a few long strides away. The eerily smooth skin was touched by creases at his brow, mouth twitching with something unsaid.

"Hey, watch what you're callin' graffiti," Jackson retorted. This was a damn sight better than graffiti. He stepped closer, and held the hand out for the drawing Connor held. "Come on. Out with it." Whatever Connor wasn't saying yet.

Connor slowly handed the paper over, taking a second longer than he ordinarily would have. "You should take the day off, Captain."

Jackson slid the paper back into the appropriate textbook, and offhandedly replied, "All we have here are days off."

Connor lowered his hand. "I'm concerned."

"Sounds awfully close to an emotion," Jackson remarked.

"Maybe." He acknowledged. "Or part of my Social Relations programming. Truth be told, I'm not sure which anymore."

Jackson looked over at Connor, gauging him for a few seconds. "You ain't?"

OTA: First, I'm gonna drink this, and then I'm gonna throw up.

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