hippie_ninja | IC INBOX

"I'm grateful for you." He looks back at what he's doing but doesn't quite focus on it, distracted by K's presence beside him. "I never really had a good Thanksgiving. There was always a lot of fighting."

Finally, something K doesn't have to ask about. He covered holiday shifts for patrol officers. He responded to some of the kinds of calls that come in when families get together because they feel obligated to, for tradition.

Or just in general. "Is it something you'd want to give another try here?" is the most pertinent question as he goes back to cutting up potatoes, four words he never expected to hear tucked carefully close to his heart behind a smile.

"As long as I didn't have to plan it." Didn't have to pin any hopes to it. He looks up at K. "Is that something you'd want?"

"I've never had a family holiday," he says, which isn't an answer, just thinking aloud.

"Not really," he hedges a moment later; he has a memory, but even more than before now, he knows it's not really his. "But those sound like things that make sense to me to celebrate. And I think we could avoid fighting."

K, personally, doesn't fight.

He pictures it: a table with the people he's gathering up here. Rosita and V and Vrenille and K. Maybe some of their people. Maybe enough they'd need a large table, need to rent a room.

"I'd like that," he says, but quietly, afraid to commit to it.

Well that pretty much resolves that. K slides the pile of potato pieces over to the edge of the cutting board nearest Jesus.

"When is Thanksgiving?" His own voice normal, steady.

"It's the last Thursday in November." Not far off, really. He finishes putting butter on the turkey and washes his hands, then frowns at the potatoes. He's not sure how to make them into mashed potatoes, so he cheats and decides they'll be roasted, too.

That... Is not a lot of time for the amount of ground he has to make up. He glances surreptitiously towards the bedroom, then nods.

"I'll do my best," he promises. "What else besides turkey?"

He catches that glance, hears the promise and wants to back out just because he doesn't want to hope for it only to not get it. But K promised. K deserves a little faith.

"Well, anything, really. The point is to share what we all have--we could all bring a favorite dish."

It's nice already to have something else to focus on, something to look forward to; backup plans to make in case V backslides or isn't feeling up to having people over yet.

He nods readily.

"I just also want to be ready in case that makes someone not want to come. Or not be able to." Like him, who is now watching Jesus with keener attention.

"We always had a company that brought us food. We could always cater, but I don't mind cooking." He shifts uneasily. "Who would you invite?" A glance at V's door. "Besides him." Because of course V is invited. And if he can't make it, there will still be a plate for him.

"Vrenille and his house. Sara and hers. There's a few others here and there, but definitely them."

He's watching Jesus now too, trying to find the root of the nerves.

"Who would you want there?"

"Them." Vrenille and his people. "And Drake and Ephemera--my Dominant and his boyfriend. My friend Rosita." He finds a vegetable peeler and starts in on the carrots, then looks up at K and offers it to him to try.

"Are you serious about it or just curious?"

"I'm serious," he answers without hesitation. He's still studying Jesus though, even after accepting the carrot, sniffing it again.

"Shouldn't I be?" he asks, then shakes his head, tries again. "Would you rather not?"

It sparked with Jesus. If he doesn't want a big deal made, K will bring him a turkey sandwich on the last Thursday of November and go from there.

"I want to," he looks up at him quick. "I've just never had anyone do this."

K wouldn't be planning this without Jesus and it makes it seem more real, more important, than all the sullen holidays he'd had as a kid.

He doesn't know how to explain the way it stokes an old fear in him. He does know he doesn't like that he's making K second guess himself, though.

"I want to do it."

He takes a small bite off the end of the carrot, chews it thoughtfully while he considers, presses his nail lightly into the crisp surface of it.

He doesn't know what to make of the mixed signals he's getting, so the best he can offer is, "If you change your mind, it's okay." K won't be angry.

"I've never done anything like this. I don't know how good I'll be at it."

"I won't," he promises. "It's just-"

He checks the oven, which is still preheating. "I always hoped for a dinner with family. That I'd get to spend it with my actual family. And I never got it but it didn't stop me hoping for a while." He looks up at K, wondering if he's experienced anything like that kind of loss. "So after a while I learned not to hope. This is like unlearning a survival skill. It's just... Hard. Scary. But I'll be okay."

He has. Only it was never his, not really, so he hasn't. It's a complicated clash of emotions that he would normally be able to suppress except he wasn't expecting it just now. Except he's already suppressing so much else, so for just a moment his entire face falls before he clears his throat and marshals resolve into its place.

"If you do, it's okay," he says again, because unlearning survival skills is hard, scary, and anything but linear. It's on the table. "But I think life is better with hope. I want to help."

Jesus watches him, sympathetic without knowing any specifics. He has seen a look like that, many times, but never on K.

"How do you keep hoping?" K, specifically.

It was never his, but he knows exactly how it felt; it was never his, so it's not like he can actually say that.

He picks up a tomato, runs his thumb over the thin, smooth skin while he considers.

"There's no hope in Los Angeles. The planet is dying. Everyone left on it will die if they can't get off it. There's no saving it, no going back, and that... takes its toll. It's hard for people who have no future to imagine trying to build one anyway." This is the world he was activated into. "I remember some of those people I knew, when I start to wonder what the point is. I remember how hard it was to live that way, and how much better everything became when I met someone with hope."

Jesus is that person for so many others. He's the one with the vision, he's the one who sees potential in people and pulls them together. He's doing that here, or starting to, but some days are harder than others. Some days are increasingly difficult.

"Who gave you hope?"

K knows that a lot of people would name Freysa with all her smoldering anger and forceful strength, but not K; maybe it's something about his programming, something that makes him more protective of humans because he's a civil replicant and an officer, but it doesn't really matter. Most of the rebellion holds replicants superior over humans, and most of that thinking results in killing. Senseless, useless, pointless killing.

Both exist. Neither has more of a right than the other to exist, and so it's not Freysa he thinks of.

"Ana," he says, gently, eyes lowered. The warmth in his voice is not exactly love, but isn't exactly not; he does love Ana, even though she hurt him more deeply than anyone else could have. He traded his life and everything in it for hers even though she'll never know it, even though no one else will ever know the shared misery that overlapped between them. She will never know how K spent a week imagining possibilities for the first time in his life, and when all of it was dashed out for him, he couldn't bear to do the same to her.

"She's... a memory maker. Among other things."

There's something complicated in there, and the possibilities for it are too many for him to dare to make any guesses. He smiles slightly, looking up at K, reading him and drinking in every emotion that shows.

"She made your memories? The ones you were-" What was the word K used? "-Created with?"

K nods, the faintest hitch halfway through because for at least one that's not technically correct but then again maybe it is; she lived it, so she still made it, but in a different sense. So he nods, hesitates, finishes.

"She's the best in the business. Wallace uses memory implants on the higher intelligence models to make us more... stable," he explains. "I had to talk with her for the last case I worked. When I asked her why hers were so good, part of what she explained was that she thought of it as... kindness. She said replicants live such hard lives and she can't change our futures, but she loved giving us something good to think back on and smile."

There's a bittersweetness to that sentiment because he believes she meant it, he knows she did, and that made him believe in her in the moment; but she also gave him something that was anything but, and even though he wouldn't trade it for anything now, he has to wonder if she knew when she uploaded that sequence to his file.

He likes that about her already. Replicants, from what he can tell, don't get kindnesses in their lives. They don't have rights.

There's still something in how K is talking about her that Jesus can't pin down, though.

"What memory makes you smile?"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject