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[hippie_ninja]

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[hippie_ninja]

"What's it like for you?" His fingers stretch, gently flex under the attention. "If you were made to protect humans, and now you have one wanting to be your friend?"

Wanting more physically, too, sure; but K is good looking. Jesus doubts he's the first human to notice. He doubts K's looks were randomly given to him, if he was built.

[konstant]

He is most assuredly not the first to notice, and after years of working alongside Joshi and seeing the way she looked at him, the way she talked to him, he is also very aware that it's no accident.

He captures one of Jesus's fingers under his thumb, slowly caressing from knuckle to pad, feeling the way the natural tension in the tendon resists without resisting while he considers his answer.

"Being made the way I am isn't the... hard part," he explains. "I can see it, you know. The way a person looks at another person is different from how they look at a car, or - an animal." Though that's new - knowing how people look at animals, real animals, not synthetic recreations. "I'd see it sometimes when children looked at me, too young to know yet what a replicant is. But I see it all the time here."

[hippie_ninja]

He's watching their hands, part of his mind fixated on the warmth of K's fingers, the other half filling in context for what K is sharing.

"I think that would be confusing for me." Not knowing what to expect. Not knowing what other people expect. How can you assimilate into a new place without knowing either of those things?

[konstant]

He doesn't answer while he traces the miniature crescent of Jesus's nail, rubs back along the slick surface of it to the first joint of his finger, lightly back along the line of the crease.

"It feels like balancing on a rail, and not knowing when it will give." People are clearly trying to befriend him; people clearly expect him to be human, and everything that entails. They expect him to be real.

And he expects that once they understand, like every other human he's ever been around, that will all change.

[hippie_ninja]

He understands. For different reasons, coming from a vastly different background, but that same feeling... He understands.

"You're still willing to take that risk," he points out.

[konstant]

"How can I not?" Finally he looks up from the paths his hands are tracing, meets Jesus's gaze steadily.

"It's..." Not all he's ever wanted, but a significant portion. "Vital. And if people change, if they decide they don't actually want anything to do with me, or that I'm of better use somehow else - that's one thing. But if I'm the one that refuses them? Refuses you? How can I claim you were ever important?"

[hippie_ninja]

He exhales softly in what is almost a shudder. A person can't just say things like that and mean them.

"That's why I was afraid to tell you. I didn't want you to think I was trying to get you to do anything for me." Because yes, he heard that: of better use somehow else. As if it's a foregone conclusion that Jesus is using him.

[konstant]

K is silent while he weighs that exhale, that reaction; while he tries to decide what it means, if he said something wrong.

Finally, cautiously, like someone unsure of the words they've been taught in a foreign language meaning what they want them to mean: "I know you're not. I can see that too."

The way he'd once tried to convince Joi, a bit helplessly, that she was real to him and didn't need to do anything at all to prove it.

[hippie_ninja]

He looks up at him. He knows it won't make sense to K, he can hear that it doesn't. But K sees it and he trusts it and for now, that's enough. That's all he wants: that K knows it's true.

He kisses him slowly, gently, to punctuate the fact that this, too, is not because Jesus is trying to use him. This has nothing to do with the expectations of the city, and everything to do with the person K is despite all the reasons he has to be someone shuttered and bitter.

[konstant]

K is a visual person; he's spent his life watching, picking up details no one else does, preempting threats, experiencing from the outside. It's only been since coming to Duplicity that he's started even considering how he can relate to the world by touch, although Jesus has certainly born the brunt of that process.

He is also someone who speaks with actions much more than he ever has with words, and that makes this easy enough - to stay still, open and willing rather than frozen in fear or tension, to hear the message Jesus is offering. It makes it easy to turn a bit more towards him, to lean into that kiss and reflect it back to him in kind.

[hippie_ninja]

He's reluctant to break it. He only does because a horn blares nearby, one angry motorist to another, and noises like that always make him reach for a knife. He calms quickly; there's no danger and despite how fast his reflexes are, he isn't so tightly wound that he needs a fight to calm them again.

He looks at K again once the car has sped off. "That's been the hardest thing for me so far." Not the sex, not the contracts. "There's so much noise here."

[konstant]

K doesn't exactly startle, but he does react to the noise because Jesus did, glancing over. When there's nothing there to defend against he goes still, watching the other man cautiously - not wary, just careful not to do anything that might catch on those abruptly raw nerves.

He relaxes only when Jesus does, folding his hands back into his own lap again.

"You don't know how to turn off."

[hippie_ninja]

"I," a hesitation, a small, sad smile. "I don't think I should turn it off."

There's no danger here. Not like at home. And he's never going back to Virginia, no matter what happens to him here, no matter how much he wishes he could.

But he can't give up on the things that kept him alive. It's not stubbornness or pride or even fear. He simply can't let himself do it, the way he can't let himself stop breathing even though he's dead.

[konstant]

K cocks his head slightly, trying and failing to make sense of that, knowing he's going to ask before he does even though he gives it the consideration it deserves.

"Will you tell me more about why?" he asks, willing to accept no, hoping he won't have to.

[hippie_ninja]

"I died because I was careless." He rolls a shoulder, subconsciously feeling for the place where he was stabbed, even though it doesn't exist anymore. "People I care about might be dead because of that."

It won't happen again.

[konstant]

"But this is a different environment," he points out, not arguing, just trying to understand.

"The threats here are different." Are in the form of contracts and laws, which Jesus is openly defying, rather than the reanimated dead.

[hippie_ninja]

"I don't know what all the threats here are yet." Which is part of why he's diving into the ones that are known, to learn where the boundaries really are.

"I know it isn't entirely rational. But I think about what happened sometimes," all the time. Constantly when he's alone, when he's trying to sleep, when he has nothing to take his mind from it. "And I can't let it go. It gets worse when I try to remember how to just be a civilian."

Because then, instead of just reflexively reaching for a knife, he jolts. He grows suspicious, he finds himself even less able to relax. "If I just let myself be what I learned to be, life is more simple."

[konstant]

He understands. Wasn't he talking before about how hard it is for him to adjust because he can't be a blade runner here, because he has no purpose and no idea what he's supposed to be now?

If he could just reclaim something of his old life - if he could just be Officer KD6-3.7 again - maybe it would be easier. So, he nods.

"Emotions aren't rational." Everyone agrees on this, he's pretty sure. "And you've survived something we were always told wouldn't be survivable. That humans aren't meant to survive. It's understandable not to know how to process."

[hippie_ninja]

"I just didn't think adjusting to a life with luxuries would be difficult." He'd never thought he'd have luxuries like this again, sure. But that's not the point.

"I feel ungrateful being here and struggling when what I fought for for years was food, shelter, people I liked having around."

[konstant]

He understands that, too, now that he's not on a planet that is slowly killing everyone still on it. That will kill everyone still on it.

"Do you think I'm ungrateful, thinking how much easier it would be to be back home in Los Angeles, where the food and water are poisoning everyone who isn't starving outright, and where billions of people will die because they're poor?"

[hippie_ninja]

"No." He lets himself sit with that, with what it means and what he knows K means by it.

It does help. It loosens the tension still in his shoulders. It will give him something to show his mind when all the guilt starts to bubble up again tonight, when he's alone.

"Do you hate being here?"

[konstant]

"Sometimes."

He's glad to see that relaxation, that release, however small. He rubs a fold of the cloth of his pants between his fingertips.

"Do you?"

[hippie_ninja]

"I should know better by now than to hate how things are." He shrugs. "Things are the way they are. You live and adapt to it, or you change it."

Which is one of the oblique ways he answers things when he's uncomfortable. He looks down at his hands, rubs a scar over one of his knuckles.

"I haven't been homesick in years, but I'd do a lot to be able to go back to the Hilltop right now."

[konstant]

"Would it help you to talk about it?" he asks.

"Or more just to know that I hear you, and I don't blame you, and you can feel what you want with me?"

Because he does, he doesn't, and he can.

[hippie_ninja]

The latter.

Jesus is more able to talk about things than his friends are--but rarely about himself. Rarely about anything that is currently painful. He wouldn't know how to put it into context here, anyway, and he's sure that's something K struggles with, too.

But it doesn't change the fact they do see each other. There are some things that are simply known and understood.

"It helps to know that I could talk to you, if I wanted," he says softly, his hand on K's without as much of the hesitance from earlier. "But it helps most knowing you see as much as you do and you don't judge me for it."