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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[konstant]

K shakes his head, twisting to look up at him curiously.

[hippie_ninja]

"I used to do it all the time. It pulls you back to center--lets you clear your head, calm your emotions." He loves it, has for years. "Only I can't do it here. I can't settle."

[konstant]

"How did you first discover that it helped you?" K asks, folding his legs under him, leaning his shoulders back into the bed.

[hippie_ninja]

He sits on the floor facing K. It feels too odd to sit on the bed with K down here.

"Oh, some counselor when I was a kid recommended it. It didn't work at first because I was impatient. But I kept coming back to it and after a while it helped. It helps with a lot of things--stress, fatigue, pain."

All things he faced daily, hourly, back home.

[konstant]

He tips his head, following Jesus's movements closely with just his eyes - for a couple reasons.

"If it didn't work, why did you keep coming back?"

[hippie_ninja]

"Nothing else helped, either," he lifts a shoulder. "And I was too young to get my hands on the things other people used to get away from their emotions. You know, no one in my house drank, so that wasn't a reliable escape. Luckily for me. But I could control my breathing when I was trying to fall asleep. The rest came with time."

[konstant]

He nods, hearing familiarities in what Jesus is saying, although mostly from other people's lives, other people's stories.

K has always drank, even though he has memories of a time when he didn't.

"Would it be... Strange to you, for me to talk about memories that aren't mine?"

[hippie_ninja]

He shakes his head, although yes, the concept is strange. Strange but intriguing.

"I'd like to hear what it's like. What they are. I'm probably going to have questions."

[konstant]

"I don't mind questions." He minds being yelled at for stealing memories, stealing humanity, even though he didn't have anything to do with it; even though they aren't real human memories.

Well.

"I just don't want to try to tell you about things I remember through the eyes of a child, of a teenager, if it's going to be upsetting."

[hippie_ninja]

"Even if they didn't happen, they still are part of you, though, right? They still effect you." So they're real in that sense, real in a way that some of Jesus's long faded memories aren't. K's memories were given to him for a purpose.

[konstant]

"Their express purpose is to influence me, yes," he allows, slowly, relieved.

"They're installed before activation to help stabilize us, to shape our personalities the way we've been commissioned."

[hippie_ninja]

He nods to show he understands the concept, at least. "If that was really reliable, though, they wouldn't have needed you."

Stable replicants don't need a blade runner.

[konstant]

"It's new as standard for the Nexus-9s," he tries to explain, opens his mouth to talk about how messy the Nexus-8s are, then stops when he realizes he's not counted as stable anymore.

The corner of his mouth twitches and he looks down, refocusing.

"There are glitches."

[hippie_ninja]

"Because they don't count on how you'll grow into a life they didn't program?" It's his assessment so far. K talked about replicants becoming dangerous if they feel too much, but he's seen K feel a fair amount in their short time here. He's not dangerous.

[konstant]

"We're not supposed to grow into a life that wasn't programmed," is the company line, one K delivers with perfect steadiness, perfect cadence.

It's only in the follow up that any of the doubt whatsoever starts to show, and even then it's just the slightest of softening somewhere behind his eyes, hidden deep in his voice. "That's always been the problems with the ones that go rogue. That start hurting people. They don't value the lives of the people around them anymore, or aren't capable of thinking about that."

[hippie_ninja]

"But you do." He is studying K intently, but with an easy warmth behind it. "I feel safe with you, even though this is... Definitely not the life they planned for you."

[konstant]

K is not self conscious, does not have trouble under scrutiny most of the time, but there's something about the combination of this subject and the way Jesus is looking at him now that makes him uneasy.

"Sometimes the deterioration is gradual. Maybe I just haven't been exposed to an effective enough stressor." He shifts a bit, leaning forward over his lap instead of back.

[hippie_ninja]

"It happens to humans, too." He looks away. "Where I'm from, most people broke."

In some of the most literal ways that sentence can be taken. "Stress kills us all if we don't learn how to manage it."

[konstant]

K doesn't look away. Not this time.

He has definitive proof that he is way off baseline, way outside the parameters for which he was designed; you don't look like you on the inside. But Jesus is struggling.

"Do you know what's most important to you?"

[hippie_ninja]

"Survival." Nothing matters without that. But it's not a whole truth. He's been willing to die for his ideals.

He looks at K with a wan smile, another little shrug. "What about you?"

[konstant]

K meets that smile not with one of his own, but it's not a harsh or a blank look either. Simply receptive. Taking in what Jesus is telling him and what he's not.

"That I help," he answers, and it is the most basic truth about him.

[hippie_ninja]

He knows K was built for that purpose but, like he'd said, this life is not that one. And other replicants shirked their duties.

"Why?"

[konstant]

K blinks, surprised by the question.

"Because..." He struggles for a moment to put it into words that aren't just repetitive, aren't self defining for something he's never thought to try to explain.

"I've seen what happens when people are hurt. Hurting. When they don't have what they need. I don't want to contribute to that. I want to alleviate it."

It is, as he said, important.

[hippie_ninja]

And there it is again: that unexpected, not wholly welcome flip in his gut that makes him smile and makes him want to kiss K again.

"You help me."

[konstant]

K hears the words, they're not frivolous in any sense, but he's much busier just now watching the silent conversation Jesus isn't having with him.

He tips his head as if it might help him hear what isn't being said, brow furrowing faintly. He almost forgets to answer.

Almost: "I hope so."