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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[konstant]

"Yes but the system thinks that means you're reformed now."

Jesus is the one who brings it up - kind of - so K considers him for a moment before cautiously offering, "I didn't give you the chance to tell me much about that. If you wanted to."

[hippie_ninja]

"It got rough. My friends got me out of it." He has had time to sit and think about what happened, but there are parts he doesn't want to go into detail about. The whole of it is, "I don't want to go back in."

[konstant]

K thinks they knew that part was likely; other people told them as much. He also thinks that means Jesus has made a decision regarding the things to do or not do that will lead back to that place.

He offers the chocolate again, watching intently.

[hippie_ninja]

He takes one, but the other things he has to say about the situation sit too deep in his ribs.

"What about you? How did the injection go?" Because, his tone says, he's probably in line for that punishment next even if he does stay out of the Zoo.

[konstant]

It worries him, the things Jesus won't say; but he can't make him, and he can't be someone Jesus trusts or wants to tell about it if he's not. He'll do his best to be better, he thinks. He didn't do much for Jesus the last time they sat in a room together and spoke. Next time, if Jesus lets him, he will.

K's eyes drop immediately the moment the injection is mentioned. His mouth goes dry, and he has to work even harder than usual to find words.

"I found someone to... Help." Which reminds him of something he'd thought at the time and now glances up, uncertain in a way that might actually be resolvable: "Is that okay?"

[hippie_ninja]

He hates to see that look on K's face, hates that he had to go through it at all, hates that it looks very much like how he feels thinking about the Zoo. But the question draws him up short in surprise.

"Yes," he says, and laughs softly because, "I wondered the same thing when..." He trails off. Just when. Whenever he's so much as kissed anyone, trying to find ways to make quota, his thoughts have flitted to strange Officer K.

"Are you okay?"

[konstant]

It makes him feel... something in turn. Surprised, certainly, and something faintly like pleased but sharper, more private; it occurs to him only after a moment that he should perhaps say something in turn, although it's not something he would ever have thought to give something as entitled as permission for: "It's okay."

When, it's okay.

As for the other, he struggles not to fidget, ends up rubbing one thumb over the other's knuckle anyway. "It's... a difficult choice. Possibly hurt others, or hurt myself. I don't like it, even though I know which one is right."

[hippie_ninja]

He says it's okay, and of course it is, why wouldn't it be, but he's so relieved to hear it anyway that he's smiling. At least until K goes on.

"It isn't right that we have to hurt ourselves. Nothing makes that right. But for now it's the only choice we have... And I know that. I'm still sorry you had to go through that."

He brushes his thumb along the side of K's hand. "Are you going to miss quota? On purpose, I mean?" He won't judge whatever choice he makes.

[konstant]

"I don't think I can."

K watches Jesus reach for him, watches the path of his light touch almost impassively; almost, except there's always something going on behind K's eyes, and this time he's suppressing a shiver, well aware that there's more behind it now than there ever has been.

Aware that now he knows.

"I don't want to feel like that again. I don't know if it's the same for humans, if it would be the same for you, but - I retired replicants that couldn't control themselves. That weren't themselves on the inside anymore."

[hippie_ninja]

He studies him and nods again. "It's not a good choice." But like he said: it's the only one they have right now.

"I can live with choosing to meet quota. I don't know if I could live with being forced. I'm...glad that you're making that choice, too." Of the options it seems like it will cause less harm.

[konstant]

It helps, hearing that the man with whom he'd agreed there was ample reason to not meet quota thinks this is the right choice. He could definitely, he knows, do much worse than Jesus as an example to follow in how to navigate this new life doing the least harm to others possible.

But it does raise a new problem, and he turns his hand over to offer more of it to Jesus's touch.

"But now everything else will change, too."

[hippie_ninja]

Things will. It's inevitable, but he thinks they might be able to navigate it anyway. Maybe, if they want, they can even decide some of the ways things will go.

He glides the backs of his nails along K's palm. "What are you worried will change?"

[konstant]

"Things that might have been 'want to' become 'have to.' I know -" Vrenille says that doesn't have to be the case. So do others.

None of them are KD6-3.7 though. None of them, he thinks, can really understand what it's like to have one line, one thing he did whatever he could to keep for himself, and now it doesn't matter. Now he's being told it doesn't matter.

He shakes his head. "I don't know how else to explain it." Quota will forever be woven into anything physically intimate he chooses now; the LIES program will overshadow everything, is his concern.

[hippie_ninja]

He looks down, but he still has K's hand. "I liked the things we did that were just for us. If I'd made quota that month, it still would've been- different."

Which scares him now that he's saying it out loud.

He puts that aside. "We could find things that are just 'want to'. To do besides the things we do for quota."

[konstant]

"For me too, but not -" He tries to choose his words carefully. He doesn't want to frame it in a way that makes Jesus feel like K does occasionally - not, specifically, with Jesus but with everyone - like Jesus wouldn't have ever wanted anything to do with K if it weren't for quota, for the LIES program.

"This isn't how I would have behaved, if not for this place. Maybe eventually, and I'm not saying I don't like the things we did, that we do, because that's not true. But it makes me wonder if you would have liked what I was before. What I was without this."

The black mark down his throat he's always, always aware of even though he's always had the mark under his eye, too.

[hippie_ninja]

"If we had met in my world, I think our friendship would have unfolded very differently. The rules here are different. The only way to thrive here is...different. I still would have liked you the same way I do now, but I wouldn't have been bold enough to kiss you." And with everything that was going on at home, he has no idea how much time they would have really had to sit and be together like they have here. "But I met you here. And this is our friendship, and I like it, too. I want what we have."

Maybe things between him and K are better here than they would have had the chance to be back home.

"What were you without all this?"

[konstant]

K knows, without doubt, that things between them are better here than they would have been in Los Angeles. Even how everything ended aside, there was a divide there that simply doesn't seem to exist for most people in other places, that exists here but in a different incarnation than K is used to.

"A civil servant," he says after a moment of trying to make his own vocabulary fit with what he needs to convey. "A tool for the department. In most peoples' eyes, an enemy of one kind or another. Anything but a sex model, although -"

He shakes his head. "It's not a judgment. It's just not what I was. It's what I worked not to be. My job was hard enough without any respect, but if everyone around me thought they could just touch me or claim me on top of that?"

[hippie_ninja]

"I don't know what I would have been in your world. I don't know if we even would have met." Jesus had as little to do with cops as he could. When they did interact, it wasn't exactly friendly. "I know that I've never felt entitled to anyone. I know that I always try to respect people, even the ones who hurt me. Maybe I would have been some odd outlier who just treated you like I do here."

It's impossible to know but he can understand how that must haunt K, not knowing how 'real' anyone's affections for him are. "What are you here, without the department?"

[konstant]

"Then you would have been part of the underground, or thought to be, and I wouldn't have been able to have anything to do with you without risking retirement." It's not that K has never been aware that the system was rigged and counterproductive, it's not that it never occurred to him that he is more alive than Wallace wanted anyone to believe.

It's that it didn't matter - except K is discovering that he really, really wants to trust that it does matter now.

"I don't know," he answers, not recalcitrant, not modest, but literal. He has no idea what he is now except - "Miles from baseline," he quotes, lips quirking briefly, wryly. "A Submissive."

[hippie_ninja]

He looks up at K, studying him, clearly hating the notion that just sympathizing with whatever K is would have put K in danger. But yes, he's pretty sure he would have been part of the underground. That seems to be where he always finds himself happiest.

"You're also a friend," he says. "And if you weren't allowed to have those before, then it's one thing I'm grateful to this place for. Whatever you are here, I like it."

[konstant]

He's waiting for the staunch, well meaning insistence, the denial that anyone where K came from had any idea what they were thinking, that they were cruel and wrong. The invalidation of everything K has done and lived for as long as he's been activated, the choices he made up until he didn't.

He is not terribly surprised, he discovers, that Jesus doesn't do any of that - but only after it doesn't happen. He traces the contours of the fine bones of Jesus's knuckles, the faint scars from using them to fight, and tries to figure out how to relax from being braced for a blow that doesn't come.

"I want that to be true," he admits, softly. "I want that to keep being true even if it turns out I'm not real."

[hippie_ninja]

"How do you know if someone is real?" He asks, but there's a note in his voice that's pained. This is a question that has dogged him since he died and then wasn't dead at all. K doesn't mean it the way Jesus does, he doesn't think; so he wants to understand.

[konstant]

"It's the constant debate in my world. The constant struggle." I want to be real for you.

A real boy now. Loved. Wanted.

I have memories, but they're not real.

"Replicants aren't born, we're made. Constructed to order, put together out of parts of other things, out of the imaginations of humans, to the whim of humans. Artificial. Realistic, the closer the better, but never real."

Anything real should be a mess.

"We don't have souls, we only feel pain - feel anything - because we were given the ability to, we're only alive because someone else paid for us and only so long as we're serving a purpose. We don't have a right to exist in and of itself. We're not real."

[hippie_ninja]

"It seems like a human trait in any world, to want to be able to control what we create." To design it so specifically you could pick what your children will be. To predict it, at the very least.

"The funny thing is it never works out that way, does it?"

[konstant]

"I'm not a good option to ask." We're all just looking out for something real.

Is it real? I don't know, why don't you ask him?

K lets his fingers rest, briefly, over Jesus's pulse point in his wrist. He feels the beat of his heart immediately, strong, steady. Real. Then he lets go.

"What do you mean by it?"