IC INBOX

[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

Comments

[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."

[hippie_ninja]

"Then you've done something a lot of people never do." Something most people would, and have, refused to do: to give up what they have to do what little right they can.

[konstant]

"Yes, well." He takes a long enough drag off the cigarette that it burns down to the filter, and he uses it to light another in between letting out the smoke in a long, slow exhale.

He is glad he did what he did at the end; he does not regret it, not even a little, not even a shadow of doubt. But it still hurts more than anything he'd ever done - more than anything he knew even could.

Which is, he supposes, the price of free will. "Sorry, it's just - complicated."

[hippie_ninja]

"Doing the right thing usually is." Despite what people say, it's rarely clear, there are rarely signs. There is, in Jesus's experience, only you with your own compass, and everyone else telling you what to do instead.

[konstant]

K has come a long way since the steps outside Stelline Laboratories. He's able to not think about it most days, to just stay where he is which is where people want him anyway. To not think about a place where having free will and everything surrounding it was dangerous, where he wasn't considered as something that had real feelings or real rights. Where he was a thing and not a person.

It's harder today in general, and impossible when he's actively talking about it. When he has no idea why Jesus is looking at him like that, and remembers that everything he did was in direct contradiction to everything he was made to do and be. He knows he did the right thing. He also knows the next right thing would have been to turn himself in as defective, but he couldn't be left alive, either.

Doesn't matter. He's here. The new cigarette is only half gone but he stubs it out anyway.

"How do you know which ones to peel?" he asks, trying to anchor himself back here and now.

[hippie_ninja]

"It's cosmetic mostly. In the old world, all the vegetables were peeled. In the new one? None of them are." No reason to waste anything edible. Honestly the thought of peeling vegetables makes Jesus uneasy now, when he's scraped the last crusted bits of jam from broken jars out of desperation.

But he wants it to look nice for V. "Here's how you do it," he takes the carrot and shows him over the sink.

[konstant]

K is grateful when Jesus answers his question, lets him out of the corner he somehow found himself backed into; it lets some of the tension start draining out of his shoulders, lets him focus on something that matters considerably less in one sense - it's not a life or death decision - and considerably more in another - this is where they are right now, and this is what they're doing.

He finds himself staring at the pile of peelings, thinking the same thing Jesus had: it looks wasteful. "Alright," he agrees. "Let me wash my hands and I can do that, probably."

[hippie_ninja]

He still has questions, but he can see the change in K between being asked questions about his past and being offered a chance to be in the moment. So he packs the questions away.

Jesus eats some of the carrot peelings and offers one to K. "Try to remember how it tastes when it's raw like this, and how different it is when it's roasted."

[konstant]

K obediently chews the peel as he's told, savors it as if it's poached in butter and finished with truffle. He's starting to develop favorites, it's true, but he's never disappointed.

He picks up the remaining carrots and the peeler, and sets to work mimicking what Jesus had done.

"I hope I never get used to having this much food available," he says sincerely. He doesn't ever want to just take it for granted.

[hippie_ninja]

"I don't either. I worried at first that I'd forget things," things that have kept him alive. "Or that I'd get used to how easy things are here. But now I don't think I ever will."

And he has, he can't admit out loud, been doing things to keep himself sharp. He disagrees fully with Carver about the idea that every community will fail, but he's going to survive again if it happens here.