“How do you like it so far?” Taekwoon asked at the end of their impromptu tour as they stood in one of the many examination rooms at the sanctuary. Taekwoon had some questions that were meant to be discussed in private.

“It seems nice,” XV confessed. XV still seemed somewhat skeptic, and Taekwoon found himself holding his breath because Heiligtum was probably the perfect place for him, and he wanted him to see that. It was conspicuous enough to keep XV out of the special corps’ watching eyes, and he could have all his needs supplied there and much more. Heiligtum had dozens of rooms full of rechargers and operating stations well as a highly trained staff and most importantly- heavy security. But XV’s shoulders were completely stiff for the entire first fifteen minutes of their stroll (much longer than expected for a seemingly unharmed droid) before relaxing only slightly into a defensive slouch.

Androids never felt any pain as long as it was physical, but they did get distressed just as humans did. Years upon years of working with androids and studying their mechanics had granted Taekwoon enough exposure to help him achieve the title of an engineer, but he had always considered himself a scientist, if only for the vagueness of it. He knew to care for every injury and fix any malfunction; he knew the wiring, the anatomy, the chemistry and mechanics of every model up to XIV… He was the professional multitasker, and was very proud of it. But standing before him was an XV, and for the first time in a while he found himself completely gobsmacked, and not just due to the walking-talking innovation before him.

Taekwoon lived right beside the sanctuary in an old apartment building. The Heiligtum staff had their own living quarters in the facility, but they were two stories under the floor level, and Taekwoon couldn’t help but feel slightly claustrophobic there. The quarters were completely normal-sized and fairly adjustable, but he couldn’t stand his ears popping just as he’d forget that he was twenty feet underground. He preferred to live two stories above ground level, in a much smaller shoe-box of an apartment. At least he had windows there.

The alarm system of the nearby public charger was deafening, mostly because Taekwoon was residing just above it. He was meant to be asleep for another hour or so before arriving to his shift at Heiligtum that day, but he got a startling early wake up call. He assumed it was another lone android running out of power, deciding to break into the charger as a last resort- or in other words, a potential patient (that, or a bored teenager showing off in front of his just as bored friends). He looked out his window to find his theory being assessed, because he could in fact make out a humanoid silhouette sneaking into the wailing apparatus.

Taekwoon jumped out of bed and dressed in a hurry, knowing that the cops will probably be alerted soon and that meant bad news for the droid. Rogue androids (as the officers called them) were deactivated upon sight, and so Taekwoon flew down the stairs, holding onto the railing as to not trip in the darkness, hoping that he wasn’t too late.

 He thought he was prepared, because this kind of case happened once every two months give or take, and there were dozens of patients still being cared for at Heiligtum thanks to Taekwoon’s rescuing efforts, but nothing could prepare him for what, or who, he saw leap from the charger.

He thought he was still dreaming, tucked tight into his narrow bed still snoring up a storm, but his heart was beating too loudly in his ears for this to be a hallucination. And then he went right back to the delirium theory when his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw an exact robotic replica of his (what even was he to him?) Hongbin crouching in the shadows. The bizarreness continued when the android opened his mouth to moan a disoriented “Leo?” before his knees buckled and he proceeded to pass out on the pavement. And if Taekwoon wasn’t concentrated on hauling the barely conscious droid to safety he would have fainted right along with him.

“Can I ask you a question, XV?”

XV nodded, but Taekwoon kept silent. He was unable to word whatever it was he was trying to ask, because where should he even begin? He was standing beside the most intriguing android on earth, and he had to bite his tongue from unleashing his unceasing stream of urgent questions. But now that he mustered the nerve to voice them out, he didn’t know what to say.

“You called me Leo back there, when…” It was more of a whispered statement than a question. But whatever it was, it was so loaded that it actually felt heavy in his mouth. He had to force his tongue to cooperate, and did so with only partial success.

Hongbin and Taekwoon met during their freshman year of college. They both started out as starry eyed robotics majors and had the (questionable) privilege or rooming together all throughout those four years. But the glint in their pupils was soon replaced with a dull shimmer as they pulled all-nighters to finish assignments and study for tests. Taekwoon couldn’t sleep if he knew that Hongbin was up cramming and he wasn’t, so they both always ended hunched over their desks until the crack of dawn, the only sound audible being the unceasing scratching of their pencils across their notebooks, or the rapid tapping of their fingers on their laptops. Taekwoon was competitive, but that was just another quality he shared with his soon to be best friend.

 “I knew Hongbin.” XV offered in an attempt to answer the unspoken inquiry. “I mean, sort of.”

Taekwoon shot him a puzzled glance. Up until now he assumed that Hongbin had finally lost his mind and decided to create his own illegal, and if that wasn’t enough- model it after himself. But if that were so, that could only have meant that something bad had happened. Why else would XV be stumbling around a foreign city all by himself?

 “What happened between you two?” XV went on to ask, and Taekwoon wasn’t sure whether XV had misinterpreted his silence or was trying to evade the subject.

“Well, you did, sort of.” Taekwoon smiled through the annoyance the memory brought up. “I opened up my own android repair shop after I graduated and hired Hongbin as a partner. It wasn’t the most… government authorized business. Repairing illegals is pretty much as punishable as owning one, but we often disregarded that.”

“People from all over the country came to patch up their droids, but we weren’t tweakers- we fixed what was broken and nothing else. We didn’t upgrade illegal software. So you can imagine my surprise as I stumbled upon a brand new illegal model just sitting in our storage, just waiting to be modified and put into action.” Taekwoon his lips and took a deep breath. It has been years, he thought. How am I still angry over this?

“Apparently Hongbin had been working on his secret project for months now, completely behind my back, and that was perhaps more hurtful than the fact that he was jeopardizing our business. So we fought, hard, it honestly felt like the end of our friendship.”

Taekwoon took a pause to examine XV’s face, and was astonished to find that reflected there was the widest range of emotions he has ever seen from an android. His eyes drooped, his brows furrowed and arched up in surprise, his mouth even fell open in disdain before clenching shut in apprehension. He was responding just like a human would to the story, and Taekwoon then went on to wonder if XV was generating them from his internal manual, or just mimicking whatever expressions Taekwoon was making as he spoke.

“Eventually we were found out. I don’t know what brought the special corps to raid our storage but they found what they were looking for. Hongbin was away at the time, so they blamed it on whoever was present.”

“I went through it willingly, of course. I would have never allowed them to arrest Hongbin too. I truly believed that I was at fault just as much as he was, if not more, since it was my business, but that didn’t mean that both of us needed to accept the punishment. I bore the weight for us both, and I am not bitter about that. I am—was bitter about what lead to that point, though.”

Taekwoon fell silent all of a sudden. He wasn’t a man of many words, but there he was spilling out his entire life story onto this poor android that might not even be comprehensive of what he was being told. For all Taekwoon knew XV could have simply practicing his empathy on Taekwoon and nothing more. But then XV opened his mouth to speak, breaking Taekwoon’s contemplative silence.

“Then what happened?” His voice came out as a mere squeak, barely audible even in the dense acoustics of the room. This wasn’t an echo, Taekwoon realized; XV was creating his own original response. Perhaps he was more conscious than he thought.

“Nothing,” He said. “I convinced Hongbin to not turn himself in, so at least one of us has a clean slate. He was present during the trial and played along with the lie, but didn’t come visit me once during the year I spent in prison, and that only made me more bitter and angry at his ungratefulness. So I did my time and decided to not contact him after my release, and we haven’t spoken since.”

XV didn’t ask further after that, causing Taekwoon to feel suddenly uneasy. Something bad did happen.

“How is he?” He went on to ask, somewhat hesitant.

XV kept his gaze unwavering, and this, noted Taekwoon, was an automatic action. Something told him that whatever setting XV had on default, it was meant to be of aid in this kind of situation, whatever that was.

“He died.” Was all XV said. His voice was steady, but not unsympathetic. He sounded like a parent announcing their child the death of their goldfish- slow, careful.

Taekwoon’s heart broke into a stutter. “When?” He managed to croak out.

“About a year ago.”

“Wait…” Something was off. The tests conducted on XV as he recharged stated that he was about two months old. Who made him if not Hongbin?

“Did Hongbin not make you?”

XV shook his head. “It was Leo, an XIV.”

Taekwoon was overtaken by a nauseating dizziness. What is going on?

 “You mean…?” He uttered in disbelief. XV nodded without needing to hear the rest of the question.

You mean my friend/accomplice/whatever created an exact replica of me out of… what? Guilt? Nostalgia? You mean he died alone and left his own creation to fend for itself? You mean you’re all that’s technically left of Hongbin?

 “Nobody called me Leo but him,” Taekwoon then said, hoping that if he continued to talk the world would eventually stop spinning. “That’s why when I first saw you I hoped…”

XV remained silent, allowing Taekwoon to take in the terrifying turn of events.

“Our shop’s name was ‘Da Vinci’” He explained. “We thought it was suitable because Da Vinci was known for his futuristic machinery. Hongbin called me Leo as a joke.”

Taekwoon didn’t say that he nicknamed Hongbin after Da Vinci’s assistant- Gian, or Salai, which was Gian’s own actual nickname. It meant “little devil” in Italian, which coincidently also seemed grossly accurate for Hongbin.

“I think he was ashamed.” XV then offered. “He was foolish and you made such a large sacrifice for him. Perhaps he thought his way to repay you was to not have anything to do with you anymore. Perhaps he thought you were better off without him.”

That was the longest Taekwoon has ever heard XV speak, and he was taken aback by how… profound it was. If he thought XV was unreceptive, he was now convinced completely otherwise. This android was brilliant.

XV took Taekwoon’s loss for words as an opening to elaborate. He told him about Hongbin’s illness, and the way Leo took care of him during his last days. He told him about how Leo died (“had been deactivated”, he corrected himself), and how he found himself stumbling through Taekwoon’s neighborhood, fighting for his life.

Taekwoon was silent for a while. This was a lot of information to take in. He definitely didn’t imagine having this conversation with a rescued android; he thought that part of his life was over, that he would no longer be haunted by his past once he’d get through his jail time. And yet something led him to believe that XV was perhaps some sort of apology from Hongbin, an invitation to start over. Perhaps Hongbin was offering him his own clean slate.

“I’m sorry.” XV apologized.

“Don’t be,” Taekwoon rubbed his eyes as if trying to rid of a pesky itch, but that only made them sting more. “I’m glad you’re here, I really am.” He didn’t look like it, he was sure, but Taekwoon hoped that XV would be able to feel his sincerity despite it all.

“Well,” Taekwoon sniffed and tried to put on a semi-cheerful expression. That was enough heartbreak for the day, he concluded. Time to put on the professional face again.

 “I do hope you choose to stay. Know that you’re welcome to make Heiligtum your home.”

 “Thank you,” XV seemed to try and match his smile to Taekwoon’s, though it looked more like a grimace than anything. Is that what I look like right now? Taekwoon tried to smile wider, but he was more of a subtle grin kind of man. He shook his head at the ridiculous sentiment. He was holding a smiling contest with an empathic android.

The door was then suddenly thrown open, and a dark-haired, ponytailed head peaked in from the entrance.

“Doctor!” the specialist exclaimed. She was a short, assertive young doctor herself, her glasses too big for her face that was contorted into an urgent scowl.  “There’s another batch coming up, a big one.”

“Thanks, Seungmin.” Taekwoon replied, giving her a firm nod. Only then she turned to XV and flashed him a brief polite smile. “Welcome”, she chirped before hurrying off to where she came from. XV didn’t even have the chance to respond to her greeting.

“Walk with me,” Taekwoon then said as he took off in a wide stride towards the door, XV tagging along effortlessly. “How is your knowledge in robotics?” He asked.

 “Quite decent.” XVconfessed after a short silence.

“Good, because we could use your help.”

They walked up a long narrow stairwell and exited into the ground level of the sanctuary- the chapel.

XV’s head whipped around the empty church in awe, his gaze landing on empty pews and an unoccupied podium, then shooting up to the high ceiling held up by wooden arches before moving to look down at the colorful stained glass decorating the walls. They were walking towards the large heavy doors at the entrance, where Seungmin was awaiting impatiently.

The founder of the sanctuary was actually the church pastor. Once the first android was built, practically every religious movement was divided into two main congregations, the Christian equivalents being: creationists, and pro-lifers. Both of those terms existed long before there was even talk of taking robotics to the next level, but innovation lead to a redefinition. The creationists believed that androids were an abomination, the antichrist itself, and denounced their existence altogether. The pro-lifers, on the other hand preached that the androids were sentient beings, man-made creatures with a soul from god, and viewed them the same way they viewed animals. Pastor Hwang was a pro-lifer, an avid one. He built the sanctuary directly under the church in which he served, and received his discrete funding for it from many loyal supporters of his cause; Five years and counting, so far.

It wasn’t an illegal practice per se, but every once in a while the sanctuary would accept into it an occasional illegal that needed to be patched up. XV was now one of them.

“They’ll be here any minute now.” Seungmin said after a quick look at her watch.

“You ready?” Taekwoon turned to XV, who was still trying to make sense of the seemingly separate world he’d just entered.  “XV?” He tried to catch his attention, and XV shook himself out of his stupor before moving on to stare at Taekwoon with wide disconcerted eyes.

He looked like he was going to say something, but the heavy doors then opened with a creak as old as time and the three stepped backwards as to not be hit by it. The next thing they saw were stretchers, five of them, carried in with a rush and an incomprehensible amount of urgent mumbling coming from their handlers. The feverish expedition was lead by Pastor Hwang, and Taekwoon didn’t waste any time as he knelt before one of the stretchers.  He turned back and motioned XV to come closer with an encouraging smile and XV was still apprehensive as he approached the injured android on the stretcher.

Taekwoon went on to run a physical examination on the dazed android, lying down and blanking at the ceiling, seemingly unaware of his surrounding as he cradled his own severed arm to his chest. This was a common case with new arrivals. Many androids were abused by their owners, mutilated and thrown out to rust in the rain, but it’s been a while since they’d had so much of them at once. None seemed to be in pain of course, but their distress was apparent in the blank look in their eyes, indicating some sort of trauma. Taekwoon took a look at the metallic stump peaking from the android’s left shoulder and wondered what, or who did this to all of them.

The android then turned his head to the side and fixated his gaze on something beside Taekwoon. Taekoon looked over to see XV crouching beside him, returning the injured android’s inquisitive glare, though his was softer. XV suddenly looked… professional. The way his eyes skimmed over the android’s wound exempted nothing but experience and he no longer looked terrified out of his mind. Must be the empathy again, Taekwoon thought. And if he weren’t surprised enough already, XV opened his mouth before Taekwoon had the chance to utter his usual words of comfort.

“Everything will be alright, you’re safe now.”

He then reached out to remove the android’s detached arm from his protective clutch, his fingers tender around the oil-stained flesh. He did it without breaking eye contact with the android, who seemed entranced by XV’s delicate care. Taekwoon didn’t need a better hint. He stood up slowly and backed away from the stretcher, allowing XV to take charge.

He stayed a safe distance behind him and folded his arms over his chest, letting his gaze roam over the other caretakers tending for the injured androids. He then realized that XV fit in perfectly, and not only thanks to his humanoid appearance.

Taekwoon was baffled from the moment XV was connected to the charger. The sanctuary’s equipment was too outdated to map out XV’s inner wiring, and thus incapable of deciphering his main default setting. But as he watched XV operate just like one of their skilled specialists, he concluded that perhaps that was what he was mad to do, and couldn’t help but smile. Hongbin was just like that. Taekwoon didn’t even know the note on which their relationship ended all that time ago, but he found that XV made him feel fond towards his deceased friend. Like somehow he was the closure he needed. He still had miles to go, of course, but everyone deserves a second chance, even Hongbin.

He concluded that he should take XV to see Pastor Hwang later on to discuss taking him in as part of the staff. It wasn’t abnormal for androids to work in a place like Heiligtum, as they were an efficient working force and knew everything there is to know about the patients. XV could make a wonderful edition. Taekwoon didn’t know exactly what he was yet other than an illegal, but if XV chooses to stay he’d have plenty of time to find out. In fact, he couldn’t wait.

Everyone deserves a second chance, he thought again. Even me.

A/N: Hi again! Upon high request, here's another final bonus chapter to close off the story and answer some important questions. I am planning on revisiting this universe very soon, and adding some new characters, so you can look forward to a sequel! But until then, thank you all again so very much, I hope you enjoyed the story!