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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[hippie_ninja]

He frowns. "I think I phrased it badly. I had two options when I got here: I could adapt or I could suffer. I chose to adapt by getting close to people, when I never did back home. This place didn't force me to do anything with you. This place could take away my choices. I know that. But so far it hasn't. I hate the things like- like the fog, or the drugs, but right now there's nothing I can do except avoid them..."

He's rambling, just a bit, thinking out loud about things he's pushed aside to keep going.

"Sometimes it does scare me how much I like you, K. Historically it doesn't go well for me. But I'm happy when I'm with you, and happiness is a rare thing. I want it while I have it."

[konstant]

Jesus is rambling but K pays quiet, steady attention anyway, quietly collecting private fears and the way he rationalizes them; he lets the other man decide where and when he stops, what he says, and he bears witness.

And what he finishes on is something that... doesn't scare K, but doesn't not, he doesn't know what the feeling is it leaves with him, except that it starts deep in his gut and roots there. It's a big responsibility, what Jesus is saying. His smile fades, but he's watching still.

"That's... intimidating. But you're still choosing it."

[hippie_ninja]

He meets K's gaze and he's terrified but steady. "I can stop if you want. Anytime it's too much for you, I can stop."

[konstant]

"I don't want to stop." Jesus wants to be happy while he has it, and K -

"I don't know how well replicants are meant to handle emotions outside of their baseline. I don't know how much of the rhetoric is true, that we malfunction, that we're untrustworthy past a certain point. I don't think I've reached it yet if it is true, and I don't want you to stop."

[hippie_ninja]

He has his own issues surrounding happiness with other people. Hearing K's--that being too close, feeling too much could cause something in him to snap or could have spelled a death sentence--answers things he wouldn't have known how to ask.

"Then let's keep going," he says, carefully, like he isn't sure it should even be said too loud.

[konstant]

"Okay," K agrees, and he moves the hand he was petting Nibbles with to find Jesus's instead.

"Is it alright with you if I keep the picture?" he asks as he tries to work out what to do with the phone in his other.

[hippie_ninja]

"Yeah," he grins slightly. "But it makes me wish I'd tried a little harder to make it look like a picture."

In the one he took, Nibbles is blurry from looking up to see what he's doing, and Jesus is slightly out of frame.

[konstant]

It's strange for K, who has never let himself imagine anything like this outside of his department-sanctioned relationship with Joi, to think about keeping a memento like this. That anyone would want him to for any good reason.

He kisses the back of Jesus's knuckles, then holds up the phone again to work on getting all three of them in frame.

"I just needed to ask, you know, in case the network distributes this picture during a malfunction and people find out you're a dirty replicant lover," he teases, gently, then smiles to take a few new ones.

[hippie_ninja]

He waits for K to get a couple of photos, then reaches up to turn his head and kisses him for one more. Even if it does get leaked it won't arouse many people, it's too sweet a gesture, but he means it.

[konstant]

K isn't worried about arousing other people - he's thinking what he suspects Jesus was when he took the first one, that it's good to have something to keep close, some record just in case. He's thinking what he's thinking every time he sees something new and amazing and beautiful in this strange life he has in this impossible place, that he wants to be able to look back and remember this exact moment later.

When the kiss breaks, K leaves their temples leaned together, staying close while he scrolls back through the gallery until he finds the picture he's looking for: a very similar picture to the one Jesus just took, except it's K almost out of frame, and Nibbles is curled up in V's lap beside him against the headboard of the Up suite they'd shared for a month.

He was here. He existed. K's lips quirk just a bit.

"I still wonder, sometimes, if this is all just my programming malfunctioning somehow. If it's some kind of simulation or diagnostic program running. But I'm learning what happy feels like, too, I think."

[hippie_ninja]

"I've worried about that for you. That you wouldn't find any happiness here." But he looked happy in the picture with V. He believes that right now K is happy just lounging on the sofa with Jesus and the cat and a camera.

"I've enjoyed getting to be a part of that. I like learning to see things in new ways because of the way you see them."

[konstant]

K has already told Jesus what he thinks the festival changed about him; how it stripped away every part of Wallace that still influences him, the ones he's aware of and the ones he's not. It left behind a man who was very sure of exactly who and what he is, and who and what he wanted.

And he'd come straight to Jesus, for whatever that's worth.

"They give us... memory implants. To make us more stable. The higher the intelligence of your Nexus-9, the more implants needed for the biggest impact. I have the most that I'm aware of." The LAPD had not been interested in deploying an automaton of a blade runner, after all. Especially not when they could pay him a fraction of what they would a human blade runner for each case closed and replicant retired. "One of them introduced me to that feeling in the abstract, the day I put on my uniform for the first time. That's what... Joi was for, too. Keeping me happy. Keeping me content to go through the motions of the life I had, such as I had. That's not what... any of this feels like."

[hippie_ninja]

He is watching him, the way he tends to watch K when he speaks. There's always a lot there if you pay attention.

"What's different about this?"

[konstant]

K takes his time deciding how to answer the question, how to explain the ways this is different, the ways it feels real when the other examples hadn't.

"You know how sometimes... you hear someone telling a story, and it sounds like it could be about you? All the details match up, you can clearly imagine what the situation would be like, how it might make you feel, how you might have dealt with it the same way, you can empathize, but at the end of the day it's not you. It's someone else."

That's not quite it - almost, but not quite. "The memory I have of putting on the uniform wasn't the first time I actually put it on. I was activated wearing it, so I don't have a real memory of it, and in the implant - I can't see my own face, just my badge with my number on it. I'm standing in a room I've never seen since, but that the memory tells me is my living room. There's a man whose face I can't clearly make out and couldn't describe to you now, but I know he's my best friend, and he's slapping me on the shoulder, congratulating me. He says he knows it's always been my dream to carry a badge. He says I've worked hard to get here, and I deserve it. He says I have a lot of successful years ahead of me, and I believe everything he says in that memory."

K shakes his head. "It doesn't connect to anything though. I don't know his name, or how we met, or why we don't speak now. I've never owned or rented a house. I didn't work to be accepted onto the force. It's all about someone else, even though I know what it feels like."

[hippie_ninja]

He wonders if this is part of where K's deep wells of empathy come from: he was 'born' empathizing with someone who is, and is not, him.

"I used to make up stories in the group home. In the foster homes. I'd tell them to the other kids and they didn't know it wasn't real, so in a way it became real. Everyone in the room believed it, and I told it so often I could recall vivid details of things that never really happened." It's as close as he can come to understanding what K is saying.

"I never imagined I'd have anything like I do now. Which must be doubly true for you."

[konstant]

"Yes," he agrees - not that it's doubly true, but he could not have made this up. Any of this.

"I never tried. I couldn't. That's part of how I know this is real - but also, it just is. You just are. I know the difference, now." His thumb is stroking over the back of Jesus's hand, the hard lines of bones, the raised roads of veins, the soft planes of skin and the relaxed cushion of muscle. "You're real."

[hippie_ninja]

"You seem as sure of me now as you did last week," when he'd cuffed Jesus to a table, and when he'd stayed after. "I'm glad. I knew it was you--that it wasn't a drug making you see me the way you did."

But he'd worried K would have second thoughts.

[konstant]

K smiles, warmly but a little sad, too. Bittersweet.

"You show me honesty when I look at you," he tries to explain. "Before, then, now. I'm the one who changed, not you. That can be... hard for me."

[hippie_ninja]

"It's usually the other way around: it's harder for people when other people change." He turns his hand palm up for K. "What's been hard about it?"

[konstant]

K takes a breath to answer, then just holds it and lets it out slow again, looking down at where he slides their hands together, laces their fingers between one another.

Nibbles is asleep now. K's committed to being here for the night already, and they've agreed that they have no regrets about things that happened during Tumenalia; K has promised to follow Jesus's lead in contracting. It all adds up to being able, probably, to go either way at this point - to trying to explain something he hasn't been able to so far, or to just tap out.

He hedges. "I don't... know how much sense it would make. You're not used to replicants, you don't know the history."

[hippie_ninja]

"Is it something you need me to understand perfectly?" There are some stories that are like that, stories that get locked away over time. There are some stories Jesus doesn't tell anyone, because they simply weren't there. But he wants to listen if it isn't one of those.

[konstant]

"It's..." Something that hurts, still. Something he's embarrassed by, and something he would do again if he was given the chance. Something he's still afraid of, and something he would never mention again if Jesus reacted negatively to it even now.

"Something I traded everything I had, everything I would ever have, for."

[hippie_ninja]

He knows K gave up what little he had. He has no idea why, and it's such a raw wound and he has no way to soothe it, so he hasn't asked. But K is talking about it now and he curls his fingers against K's, just listening, just waiting for him to offer what he will.

[konstant]

It takes several minutes for K to even know what to say, where to start, if he should - although it's obvious that he's actively thinking. A muscle in his jaw tenses and releases, tenses and releases, and multiple times he starts to take a deeper breath that goes nowhere. His grip tightens on Jesus's hand, though never painfully, and relaxes again.

Finally he says, "Humans have good reason to fear replicants. The first generation that saw widespread distribution was the Nexus-6's, and they were unstable. They abandoned assignments regularly, killed any humans that tried to stop them, and were nearly impossible to spot or retire. The Nexus-8's staged a rebellion - they attacked Los Angeles, used an EMP that knocked out power to the entire city for days, crashed the economy of the entire globe as a consequence. All of it, every human-replicant conflict that's ever happened over decades, has been based on human ownership of replicants - because we need them to create us, and they feel they have a right to us because they do. We can't procreate. It defines everything. It's a universal truth, a natural law, that we cannot reproduce on our own no matter how lifelike we are, and so we are not alive. We cannot be alive. Do you understand?"

[hippie_ninja]

It's a peculiar way to decide someone doesn't deserve rights, but he's read up on history, he's seen less reasonable delineations. So he nods; okay. That's how LA decided to keep the replicants down.

The fact they needed that rule after what the Nexus-8's did, though, means the humans were less certain of their role as superiors than they're letting on.

"And if you aren't alive, you're just a thing. A servant," he says, understanding.