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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[konstant]

"I'll ask," he hedges, because he's not just going to steal someone's dog, and there's still that ingrained habit of expecting not to be trusted by just anyone.

But he does like the idea. There's only one more hesitation: "What about Nibbles?"

He doesn't know anything about dogs, but he does know the phrase fighting like cats and dogs.

[hippie_ninja]

"I read you can introduce them slowly. And with a baby, maybe Nibbles can teach it to respect cats." Instead of, you know, the dog chasing him up a tree. "Nibbles is a street cat. He knows how to hold boundaries."

[konstant]

"I'll ask," he promises again, sliding his phone away, fingers brushing Jesus's in passing.

"Now that you've said that, actually, I think that might be what Sara looked so pleased about when she showed me. I couldn't figure out what I was seeing." A plan working out, his experience told him, but he couldn't imagine what the plan was.

[hippie_ninja]

"She wants you happy," Jesus says, grinning. It feels like being on a team even if this team's only focus is getting K to smile like he had in the video when he hadn't realized he was being watched. "I like her. I'm glad you found her."

[konstant]

"She found me," he corrects, but he's smiling when he does it now; he's glad they met, glad they get along.

"The guards were hassling me about my coat. She stopped to make sure that was all they did, and then showed me around a bit."

He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, pulls one out of the pack, moving a bit around the corner of the island now that he clearly intends to light it and doesn't want to stand directly over the food when he does.

[hippie_ninja]

He likes the James Dean vibe, but he's also grateful K takes the ash away from the meal. He gets the potatoes in the oven and then leans over to take the cigarette gently, then just as gently kisses K before he hands the cigarette back.

"How did you meet Vrenille?"

[konstant]

K holds still until he figures out what's going on, and by then he's kissing back warmly. He picks up right where he left off, settling on one of the island stools, close enough to easily talk but letting the quiet fan system in the kitchen pull the smoke away.

"After our orientation, there were those workshops." He didn't see everyone there, but he was still in shock at the time, still numb and unsure. He might have missed them, or he might have imagined how mandatory it seemed. It doesn't matter. He remembers that part clearly because of Vrenille. "They put me in a room with a blindfold, told me not to take it off. Dominants could come in and... I wasn't clear on the rules, if there was a time limit, or boundaries of any kind, or if it was different for everyone. One of the Doms was angry about my not being enthusiastic enough to kiss him back, and then Vrenille came in."

[hippie_ninja]

K has never so much as mentioned any of this before, and though it's over--months ago now--Jesus looks at him in alarm. There's nothing he can do about it except hate that it happened, and be glad Vrenille came in because he knows Vrenille would never have taken advantage.

"What did he say?"

[konstant]

K can't allow himself to have any feelings about it either way. He knows it happened, and he ignores it, he'll never talk about it again unless it's in reference to Vrenille. It wouldn't ever come up again if not for that.

He gives Jesus an apologetic glance - if he'd known his friend would be upset by it he would have prefaced it - but the best he can do now is answer the question.

"He said he wasn't going to do anything I didn't want him to, but that people were watching so we had to touch at least some. I didn't know him so I didn't believe him but there was nothing I could do except let him take my hand." He hadn't been able to see, hadn't known what was happening anyway or what was going to happen next. He didn't even really believe he was actually alive at the time, it was so soon after they arrived.

"He was kind. He talked to me a bit, asked me a few questions, and then... portalled?" He still doesn't understand. "Took us out somehow. I don't really remember, but he gave me a quiet place to sleep, let me sit in his garden and his library for a bit, and he and Hakkyuu and Jacob and Kim gave me breakfast in the morning."

It was so little for them, and it meant so very much to K.

[hippie_ninja]

"His garden," Jesus echoes. "Probably the first plants you'd seen?" In at least a while. He has no idea how dead K's world is but he's seen him marvel at the veins in a leaf before.

[konstant]

"I was so shut down, Jesus," he says softly as he nods. He barely remembers the trip, but he remembers that garden clearly. He remembers being told he could just stay there a while and how he'd been grateful enough that it made him feel weak.

"I thought it was a dream at best, some kind of diagnostic or punishment program at worst. My first food here, too. I don't remember sleeping, but he said I could use the shower, and I don't know how long I stood in it before I realized there was no timer to shut the water off." Much, much longer than the three second blast back home.

[hippie_ninja]

The first kindness Jesus encountered here was a shower, too. He hadn't had hot water in so long he'd ended up taking a cold one out of habit, then a warm one when he realized he could.

"I couldn't believe his house when I first saw it," he admits. "Nowhere I live could have that much glass. That much light."

[konstant]

K's lips quirk.

"I'd never seen the sun either. Not - the ozone is gone in my world, and the pollution will protect you a bit, but direct contact burns in minutes, blinds in less if you're outside the biome." Of all the things K had been baffled by, Vrenille had expected the manor itself to be on the list just as it had been for Jesus, but ironically:

"I've seen mansions like that before. Took case reports from the richest people left on the planet for where to find their wayward house replicants. It was the only part that seemed real." Surreal, even, among the rest.

"You've been?"

[hippie_ninja]

"A few times," he nods. "We're friends, we do things outside work sometimes." A pause, a small laugh. "Like fighting monsters or searching for people when they're abducted."

It's an even split at this point between the two of them working on some mission, or playing.

"...People just abandoned their help? The replicants?"

[konstant]

K nods - good - and turns his head to blow a smoke ring over his shoulder.

"He's good people. They all are," K agrees, still warm, but a bit more sober than he normally would given he knows all of Vrenille's partners were amongst those kidnapped.

"Sometimes, if their turn to go off planet came and they couldn't afford or didn't want to pay for the replicants to go with them. But mostly the cases I dealt with, their help abandoned them."

[hippie_ninja]

"I've met Hakkyuu, but not the rest of his people." And with what's happened he's not sure when the opportunity will arise.

"It's hard to blame them." The replicants. Why scrub toilets if you know you'll probably just be abandoned?

[konstant]

"Kim talked to me about the library, let me read some of the books." Which K had never been allowed to do before, even though he'd glimpsed rooms full of them before in passing. "Jacob brought me a sausage sandwich. With ketchup." His personal favorite, one he was eager to share with K.

As for the replicants - K has an answer for that, but the way his eyes drop away betray that perhaps he's not as stalwart in his belief as he was once supposed to be.

"It's what they're made for. It's why they exist. They know better." He knew better.

[hippie_ninja]

"But they were made able to learn. Nothing that learns can be fully controlled." Nor should they be. "You learned."

He doesn't know what turned K from a blade runner into an ex-cop, but he trusts that it was important.

[konstant]

"Some of us," K answers. For people who know him as the only replicant they've ever met, he's a bit of a skewed sampling.

"I'm... very expensive." He flicks ash off the cigarette into a tray, watches the way it crumbles and the way the smoke curls up from the glowing tip.

[hippie_ninja]

"Expensive enough they never thought you had free will," is his guess. And to be honest, K wears that part of him close. If Jesus hadn't seen him willingly go to jail to protect part of himself, the most basic kernel of his self, he might not have understood how much K must have gone through to get his freedom.

He glances at K, remembers what he'd said. That he'd thought he was still dead. That he'd thought there was some sort of punishment programming being initiated. "You died learning how to have it, didn't you?"

[konstant]

K flicks ash from his cigarette, a practiced, smooth motion. He doesn't look up, doesn't answer, his shoulders subtly taut.

Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing? Interlinked.

He flicks ash again, turns the cigarette ever so slightly between his fingertips.

Within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked.

You don't look like you on the inside - miles from your baseline.

"It was the only way to keep whatever it was I had," he says, very, very quietly.

[hippie_ninja]

He lets K have the quiet. He doesn't press, and he doesn't backpedal. "What was that?"

[konstant]

"Not much," he says, and hates that something bitter and hurt curls around the edge of it, adds boneless, strangling weight to two syllables he meant to be anything but a glimpse of the kind of wound he's been walking around with in silence since those early days of arriving here not KD6-3.7, not a blade runner, not Joe, no one's son.

He clears his throat, tries again. "Just a choice I made. I don't know if I can explain it."

[hippie_ninja]

It's a tone he's never heard from K and he looks at him, hand starting to reach for him then pausing partway, uncertain if it would even be welcome.

"Are you glad you made that choice?"

[konstant]

"I am," he says without hesitation, because even if he's not sure it would mean as much to anyone who isn't him, even if no one ever thinks of him ever again in Los Angeles unless it's to curse his face and name, he does know that.

"It was the closest thing to right I could do."