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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[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.

[konstant]

"Is that how you want it?" he asks, because he remembers some of their first conversations, how Jesus's survival skills made it harder for him to sleep or turn off.

[hippie_ninja]

"It's who I am now." He glances up at K. "I like who I am. I don't want to go back to being who I was before the fall."

[konstant]

"You're changeable. Adaptable." This is a curious statement, not a judgment of any kind.

"We both have to be someone different than who we were before here," is what he means.

[hippie_ninja]

They do. But Jesus isn't sure he wants to be the sort of person who could easily survive being here.

"I know," he says, looking away. "Maybe I just haven't given up on the hope I can go home someday."

He knows he can't. His hand absently reaches up to touch his chest where that knife had nearly penetrated all the way through.

[konstant]

K watches that motion, not the first time he's seen Jesus do it and furthermore he's seen the skin underneath, seen there's no mark there he can discern. He'd ask, maybe, if it had come up a different way.

Not this way, though. "People do disappear from the city," he offers, neatening up his pile of peelings but watching Jesus from the corner of his eye. "Some say they do go home."

K would miss him - terribly, even. But he wants that if that's what Jesus wants.

[hippie_ninja]

"I died," he says quietly, and he still can't quite believe it. Whenever he starts to hope he was mistaken he remembers Rosita's face, and how she gets whenever she thinks he's being reckless.

"There's nothing to go back to. Just a coffin."

He's so tired. He can't think about this right now or he doesn't know how he'll get through the next minute, so he does what he's done since he fought his way out of an apartment in DC and made his way to the woods. He takes the pain and the loss and the confusion, and he puts it aside and focuses on the carrots and the potatoes and the chicken he's meant to be cooking.

"Do you know how to make bread?"

[konstant]

"No," K answers the question he's asked, but that's not the conversation he's having. He's watching what moves over Jesus's face between words, the way he visibly tries to reset himself - but K can still see the afterimage.

He was already drying his hands off to move to the next task, whatever that is. Now he goes ahead and reaches out to touch the back of Jesus's hand, lightly, just so he knows he's not here alone.

[hippie_ninja]

His hand turns and his fingers brush K's. K, who is also dead, and who had even less to go back to than Jesus did even if he had survived.

"Life here would be harder without you," he tells him quietly.

[konstant]

There are a lot of good things about being here. K is rattled by the bad in ways he wasn't in Los Angeles, but he never forgets that there is good, too. He never lets himself in the quiet moments when the bad threatens to overwhelm him.

He stretches his fingers under Jesus's, shifts them so they lace together loosely, and rubs his thumb over Jesus's knuckle.

"Yes," he agrees; it would be harder without Jesus, too. "I'm sorry we both have to be here. I'm grateful it was at the same time."

[hippie_ninja]

"It's better than being dead." He does, at least, still believe this. He doesn't know if he counts as alive, he doesn't know what death even means here, but that's something to puzzle out later. Somehow.

"-Oh. Bread. I think you'd be good at it. You need some patience to make good bread. I learned how to do it in the Hilltop; I can't wait to try making rolls with the flour available here."

[konstant]

K is curious about the bread but he's not more worried about it than he is addressing the things that still haunt Jesus. He watches a moment longer, then smiles.

"I'd love to learn." He always loves to learn, and he likes learning about food best just now. "Why patience?"