"I thought it was me." He remembers drawing that figurine out of the coal, like reaching into his own mind and making it real in his palm.
"I'd never been so terrified. It didn't make any sense, but it was the only thing I could think of that did, and I couldn't talk to anyone about it. I told Joi, but that -" He shakes his head. You're too special for K. A real boy now. "She said my mother would have named me. She didn't want me to go by K anymore. She couldn't hear anything else, any other possibilities, but if the LAPD found out - if Wallace found out - if anyone found out..."
He swallows. In none of these scenarios could he come out alive. In none of them could his life just go back to the way it was.
Jesus knows what he would have done. But he wasn't created to be loyal to anything or anyone in particular. He has the freedom of fighting and bucking orders he doesn't like; he's done it before, negotiated his own way forward. He has never been property.
"I kept working the case." What else was he going to do?
"I went to see the best memory maker in the city, to ask how to tell the difference. To ask what made her memories the best. She told me she could look at mine and tell me - she confirmed it was real, that someone had lived it. She seemed sorry." He couldn't figure that out at the time, other than Ana seemed like someone who empathized easily. A rare human that wanted better things for replicants than they got, but not in a way that made her dangerous for a blade runner to speak too long with.
"My lieutenant had me picked up outside her laboratory. I failed the baseline test. She said I didn't look like me on the inside anymore, yelled at me for fucking around at a memory lab rather than tracking down the child. I've never been so angry."
It's hard to picture K being angry, but Jesus is angry on his behalf so he can imagine it. Imagine K having to hide even that much from the world, from the woman who would have had him killed for showing it.
He remembers how upset she'd seemed, layers upon layers, and maybe one of them was at the idea of losing him in particular to Wallace. Moreso though, losing her best shot at putting the lid back on what she imagined could be contained, losing her favorite toy.
"I told her I'd found the child. I told her I did what she asked. She was so relieved, she told me she'd give me forty eight hours to sort out my baseline. Took my gun, and my badge, and told me to get out of the station, get out of Los Angeles. So I did."
That case stole his identity in more than one way - in layers, just like Joshi's distress. First his private, inner self, then the trappings of the job he was created to do.
"I had Joi, and I had the case," he says, quietly. "The apartment and everything in it was the LAPD's. It was the first place they'd look for me, so I had to go. Other blade runners would be only too happy to get rid of me after I'd taken out so many of the listings, so - I took the figurine down to the black markets and had it analyzed. It had a certain pattern of radiation, distinct to an area that used to be Las Vegas - too dirty still for humans to survive, I thought. So we went."
And there, he found Deckard.
"Imagine my surprise when I found a man living there who used to hold the title of most retirements before me, back when blade runners were always human - before he disappeared with a replicant himself, anyway, thirty years prior."
The numbers all start to seem familiar after a while.
And I had the case. Jesus frowns at him, because K didn't really even have that, not with the lie his lieutenant had believed. It says something about K that he pursued the truth anyway.
Jesus might have done the same thing, had he lost everything but that.
"So I'm not the first human to form a relationship with a replicant," he says, lightly, as he pieces it together. "Did he know who you were?"
"Deckard has an order on his head to shoot on sight," K answers, dully, too mired in his old life - what was left of his old life - to feel up to teasing just now. He's stopped looking up at Jesus, barely looks at Nibbles, not quite sure what to do with himself and so holding as close to perfectly still as he can.
"I didn't tell him anything he didn't already assume. He insisted on a name, not my serial number, so I gave him the one Joi picked. I told him I was there to ask questions, that I was looking for his kid, trying to find out what happened to the mother. He couldn't tell me anything though. He'd split up from the Nexus-6 he loved to keep her safe before the child was born. He left her with other replicants, and instructions on how to hide the child."
Sometimes to love someone, you've gotta be a stranger.
Jesus keeps his hand on K's, resting it there, not wanting to lose contact with him while K seems so distant.
"And they hid the child in the orphanage when she died." He's following all of this so far. But the underside of it he doesn't understand yet. "Everyone thought you'd killed him. The 'child'. But you were still following leads no one else would have found."
He needs, in some way, to hear it: the thing every other orphan he's known, the orphan he's been, has wanted. To find their parent. To go home.
"What else was I supposed to do?" Jesus isn't familiar with his world, there's no way he can answer this question in any real manner. If K himself couldn't come up with an answer, he has no expectation that anyone here will either.
But if Jesus needs to hear what K says next, then maybe K needs to finally repeat over and over and over the senseless, bewildered, aching questions he never got to ask at the time.
"If I was the one with all the pieces, I had to try to put them together didn't I? I had to know -" He is intensely aware that he never actually lived this, that he has no right to any of it, and Jesus did. K had someone else's memory of it, no more, no less, so why does it still twist at him even knowing what he knows is the truth: that he wasn't ever at that orphanage in San Francisco before he set foot in it that week.
"I wanted to know why I remembered being dumped at an orphanage. Why living alone with a dog in a shelled out desert city was better than raising his kid himself, why he got rid of the baby the love of his life died creating."
Those are the questions that fester. Those hopeless questions become gangrenous, bone-deep poisons in a person that erode every relationship you will ever have the rest of your life if you don't confront them. And sometimes you can't. More often than not you never find the lost father, you never hear words from your mother that give you closure.
K had the chance to meet one of his parents. He had the chance to ask. And clearly he didn't get any answers that salved his wounds any better than simply not knowing ever did for Jesus.
"I'm so sorry," he murmurs, his arm sliding to loop with K's, his weight leaning slightly against him in a gentle embrace. He's sorry because he knows there's nothing anyone can say that makes those questions stop echoing.
K hasn't been actively holding onto Jesus's hand for several minutes now, but he leans into that embrace, tipping their heads together briefly. He regrets starting this, now. All it's done is rake up things he'd thought he'd started to put behind him.
"No," he murmurs, crooking his arm to mirror Jesus's, "I am." There's still so much between that conversation with Deckard in the bar at the casino and laying down on the steps alone in the snow. Losing Joi and losing any inkling of family he might have thought he found and losing the purpose he was created for and losing and losing and losing.
He doesn't have it in him right now, so he summarizes: "I found the woman in the picture at Sapper's - or rather, she found me. She was there when the replicant buried under the tree gave birth, and died. The child was a girl. I'm not anyone, Jesus. I never was. I wasn't born, Deckard is not my father, Rachael is not my mother, I'm not anything now. The memory I have is an illegal implant of someone else's life and that's all I can ever have of it. I didn't mean to mislead you."
Because he can see that empathy in Jesus now when he looks up; he can see the connection it forges between them, the way Ana forged one with him, not through anything he's said or done or is but because his bundle was the one Ana chose to upload that memory into one day at Stelline Laboratories. That's all.
He's quiet, and then quiet even longer, imagining the breadth of that sort of loss. That sort of hope--pale as it was because, again, the sense of abandonment never leaves--suddenly dashed. He knows how that feels, too, he's had families who weren't his who decided they didn't want him after all anyway.
"You didn't." Didn't mislead him. Not maliciously, at least. He was telling the story in a way that best explained it, and that meant including how he reached his conclusions. "You didn't choose what was implanted into you. The memory might not be yours, but the empathy is." And K's empathy is something Jesus trusts first and best about him.
The memory is the only thing that made K special for a week, at least above and beyond his status as a blade runner, as a sort of trial of his kind; it was the only piece of the puzzle that he had and no one else did besides the person who lived it, who couldn't make the connection to the rest of it on her own. K was the only one who could have bridged the gap deliberately.
He nods. "I did. It was obvious, once I knew Rachael had a daughter." Jesus sat quietly with it, and K has come back just a bit from wherever he was, but not entirely. It all still hurts in a way he has no idea if it will ever stop - and here's Jesus beside him showing him that maybe it never will, even if K is comparatively late to how formative that lack of knowing can be.
"I didn't recognize it at the time because I was too distracted with my own narrative, but - the memory maker's name was Ana Stelline. She told me she'd been left behind by her parents when they went off planet because of a genetic disease she needed special equipment to survive, and the colony they went to didn't have the support for it. But when I showed her the memory... she wasn't surprised. She was upset, and guilty. Not the reaction of a top professional in her field discovering the only crime that applies to it, but of a little girl that knows what it is to be isolated through no fault of her own - and who had the means to try to form a connection anyway."
"You were the only person in the world who could ever have that connection with her," he says. Someone with the exact memory of guarding the one link she had to her real parents. Jesus doesn't consider himself a lonely person, but a part of him aches at the thought that anyone could have that link to another person. To be just a little less alone with that pain.
And she had a kill order on her head. And K, through no fault of his own, lost everything because of it. He lays his head on K's shoulder. It's all he can do.
He does not say it was the only thing he could do this time; it wasn't. He had options, although it is true that he couldn't guarantee what any of those outcomes would be: if the LAPD would accept him back even if he gave them Ana, considering he'd lied to Joshi about the child. If the rebellion would let him join, given that he was a blade runner. If Ana herself would have the resources and the knowledge to escape Wallace cutting her apart to learn what made her tick.
But he did have one direct option, and one person he knows had already evaded everyone searching for him for years, except the one replicant Ana could have given that memory to that could put it together even without her knowing who she was.
"Freysa - the woman from the picture, and a major player in the replicant rebellion movement - wanted me to kill Deckard before he could lead anyone to her and, through her, to Ana. She..." Well, she didn't save K, who survived because he was resilient, who would have eventually scraped himself up off the floor in Las Vegas. Just not in time. "...found me, patched me up a bit, and gave me a new charge pistol. She was there when Ana was a baby but didn't know where she was as an adult. She wanted time to find her, to put her at the head of her replicant army. Wallace wanted Ana because she bridged the gap between replicants and humans and might tell them how to do it, too. The LAPD would have killed her so no one ever had proof she existed. None of them cared about her, or the fact that she had no idea who or what she was. Only what they could do for their cause, or prevent by being killed. She'd never even see it coming, and all she'd ever done was exist."
K is a man of few words normally, but he's never had the chance before to explain, to vent or make sense of any of this, not out loud. Not to anyone he trusted completely. He feels vaguely nauseous now but it's nothing at all to do with Jesus beside him, Jesus who asked one question and didn't know what dam he would break. K takes a deeper breath now, and offers the one part that he is absolutely sure of, the one, single thing he knows he would do over and over and over again and never regret.
"So I took Deckard to her. I gave him back the toy he carved for her before she was even born, and I took him to where she was. It was all I could think of to do that gave either of them even a chance."
He lifts his head, looking at K, feeling something stir behind his ribs that is almost like awe.
"You gave them back to each other. You gave her a father." Something she must have given up yearning for years ago, the way Jesus had when he turned a certain age.
"You were supposed to kill her or give her to a cause, and instead you let them have each other." It isn't awe. He doesn't know what it is, only that it runs deep and quiet and strong.
K is experienced with reading Jesus now, and even at the beginning he wasn't exactly difficult; he has no idea what this is now either, only that it's strong, and Jesus is looking at him.
It makes him nervous in a way, because he doesn't know where it stems from, what it will lead to - and strong emotions tied to replicants are, historically, rarely good. He tries to shut it out and instead focuses on what Jesus is actually saying.
"Freysa had an army, Wallace is the biggest corporation on the planet, the LAPD is the largest government body in the country. Ana didn't have any of that. I wanted her to have someone on her side. I wanted her to have someone that cared about her."
No one but the woman's father and Freysa and K knew the truth. They had a good chance of hiding together, of living a life how they wanted, as much as anyone can. But they'd be together. They'd finally have family.
And K?
K was left with nothing. He lost everything and instead of trying to regain favor with the LAPD or the rebellion, he chose to give her a chance.
He reaches up, hand on K's cheek, and just tips his forehead against K's temple. "You did the right thing." The kindest choice, even though it damned him.
Ana and Deckard could still choose to go find Freysa, or try to make a deal with Wallace - or some other corporation. They could choose to do none of that. K has no idea how things will go and now it doesn't matter for him, but he does hope they get a chance.
He hopes it mattered for longer than the day.
K breathes out, relaxing into Jesus's hands, eyes closed so he can just listen to his voice and feel his touch. "I'd do it again if I had the chance. It's the only thing I'm sure of."
It's a word that K frequently pays more attention to than those around him just as a matter of course, but it sticks out especially after being reminded of a time when he thought maybe, impossibly, he was - to be born is to have a soul - only to have it stripped indelibly away again. He shivers involuntarily under the lightness of the kiss, and doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything.
He lays his cheek on K's shoulder. "Why would I be angry? You're telling me about something that ended your life as you knew it. You're telling me about something that a lot of people I know wouldn't ever be able to talk about." People he knows just bottle it all up until it turns them bitter.
Somehow, K is not bitter. It stirs up that awestruck, deep-veined feeling again.
"You did something for her that no one else I know would have done."
K is a replicant, and a blade runner, and an officer; there are only a handful like him in Los Angeles, and none of the others want anything to do with him, and he understands. The last thing they need is to appear to be banding too closely together when everyone in the city hates them - or when they might be called to go after one of the others.
But those three things also means K has encountered so many people that hate him for feeling like he's taken something from them, taken their place without earning it. Stolen valor, after a fashion. He reaches up to smooth his hand over Jesus's hair, letting the intimacy of it comfort him as much as it will.
"I wouldn't blame you if you were, is all. I'm glad you're not."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 01:17 am (UTC)"I thought it was me." He remembers drawing that figurine out of the coal, like reaching into his own mind and making it real in his palm.
"I'd never been so terrified. It didn't make any sense, but it was the only thing I could think of that did, and I couldn't talk to anyone about it. I told Joi, but that -" He shakes his head. You're too special for K. A real boy now. "She said my mother would have named me. She didn't want me to go by K anymore. She couldn't hear anything else, any other possibilities, but if the LAPD found out - if Wallace found out - if anyone found out..."
He swallows. In none of these scenarios could he come out alive. In none of them could his life just go back to the way it was.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 01:38 am (UTC)"What did you do?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 02:04 am (UTC)"I went to see the best memory maker in the city, to ask how to tell the difference. To ask what made her memories the best. She told me she could look at mine and tell me - she confirmed it was real, that someone had lived it. She seemed sorry." He couldn't figure that out at the time, other than Ana seemed like someone who empathized easily. A rare human that wanted better things for replicants than they got, but not in a way that made her dangerous for a blade runner to speak too long with.
"My lieutenant had me picked up outside her laboratory. I failed the baseline test. She said I didn't look like me on the inside anymore, yelled at me for fucking around at a memory lab rather than tracking down the child. I've never been so angry."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 02:22 am (UTC)"She didn't retire you then, though, did she?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:10 am (UTC)He remembers how upset she'd seemed, layers upon layers, and maybe one of them was at the idea of losing him in particular to Wallace. Moreso though, losing her best shot at putting the lid back on what she imagined could be contained, losing her favorite toy.
"I told her I'd found the child. I told her I did what she asked. She was so relieved, she told me she'd give me forty eight hours to sort out my baseline. Took my gun, and my badge, and told me to get out of the station, get out of Los Angeles. So I did."
That case stole his identity in more than one way - in layers, just like Joshi's distress. First his private, inner self, then the trappings of the job he was created to do.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:13 am (UTC)His thumb strokes K's knuckles.
"Where did you go? Where could you go after all of that?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:20 am (UTC)And there, he found Deckard.
"Imagine my surprise when I found a man living there who used to hold the title of most retirements before me, back when blade runners were always human - before he disappeared with a replicant himself, anyway, thirty years prior."
The numbers all start to seem familiar after a while.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:24 am (UTC)Jesus might have done the same thing, had he lost everything but that.
"So I'm not the first human to form a relationship with a replicant," he says, lightly, as he pieces it together. "Did he know who you were?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:30 am (UTC)"I didn't tell him anything he didn't already assume. He insisted on a name, not my serial number, so I gave him the one Joi picked. I told him I was there to ask questions, that I was looking for his kid, trying to find out what happened to the mother. He couldn't tell me anything though. He'd split up from the Nexus-6 he loved to keep her safe before the child was born. He left her with other replicants, and instructions on how to hide the child."
Sometimes to love someone, you've gotta be a stranger.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:48 am (UTC)"And they hid the child in the orphanage when she died." He's following all of this so far. But the underside of it he doesn't understand yet. "Everyone thought you'd killed him. The 'child'. But you were still following leads no one else would have found."
He needs, in some way, to hear it: the thing every other orphan he's known, the orphan he's been, has wanted. To find their parent. To go home.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 07:01 am (UTC)But if Jesus needs to hear what K says next, then maybe K needs to finally repeat over and over and over the senseless, bewildered, aching questions he never got to ask at the time.
"If I was the one with all the pieces, I had to try to put them together didn't I? I had to know -" He is intensely aware that he never actually lived this, that he has no right to any of it, and Jesus did. K had someone else's memory of it, no more, no less, so why does it still twist at him even knowing what he knows is the truth: that he wasn't ever at that orphanage in San Francisco before he set foot in it that week.
"I wanted to know why I remembered being dumped at an orphanage. Why living alone with a dog in a shelled out desert city was better than raising his kid himself, why he got rid of the baby the love of his life died creating."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 07:08 am (UTC)K had the chance to meet one of his parents. He had the chance to ask. And clearly he didn't get any answers that salved his wounds any better than simply not knowing ever did for Jesus.
"I'm so sorry," he murmurs, his arm sliding to loop with K's, his weight leaning slightly against him in a gentle embrace. He's sorry because he knows there's nothing anyone can say that makes those questions stop echoing.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 07:19 am (UTC)"No," he murmurs, crooking his arm to mirror Jesus's, "I am." There's still so much between that conversation with Deckard in the bar at the casino and laying down on the steps alone in the snow. Losing Joi and losing any inkling of family he might have thought he found and losing the purpose he was created for and losing and losing and losing.
He doesn't have it in him right now, so he summarizes: "I found the woman in the picture at Sapper's - or rather, she found me. She was there when the replicant buried under the tree gave birth, and died. The child was a girl. I'm not anyone, Jesus. I never was. I wasn't born, Deckard is not my father, Rachael is not my mother, I'm not anything now. The memory I have is an illegal implant of someone else's life and that's all I can ever have of it. I didn't mean to mislead you."
Because he can see that empathy in Jesus now when he looks up; he can see the connection it forges between them, the way Ana forged one with him, not through anything he's said or done or is but because his bundle was the one Ana chose to upload that memory into one day at Stelline Laboratories. That's all.
That's all.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 06:45 pm (UTC)"You didn't." Didn't mislead him. Not maliciously, at least. He was telling the story in a way that best explained it, and that meant including how he reached his conclusions. "You didn't choose what was implanted into you. The memory might not be yours, but the empathy is." And K's empathy is something Jesus trusts first and best about him.
"Did you ever find who the child was?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 07:59 pm (UTC)He nods. "I did. It was obvious, once I knew Rachael had a daughter." Jesus sat quietly with it, and K has come back just a bit from wherever he was, but not entirely. It all still hurts in a way he has no idea if it will ever stop - and here's Jesus beside him showing him that maybe it never will, even if K is comparatively late to how formative that lack of knowing can be.
"I didn't recognize it at the time because I was too distracted with my own narrative, but - the memory maker's name was Ana Stelline. She told me she'd been left behind by her parents when they went off planet because of a genetic disease she needed special equipment to survive, and the colony they went to didn't have the support for it. But when I showed her the memory... she wasn't surprised. She was upset, and guilty. Not the reaction of a top professional in her field discovering the only crime that applies to it, but of a little girl that knows what it is to be isolated through no fault of her own - and who had the means to try to form a connection anyway."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 08:06 pm (UTC)And she had a kill order on her head. And K, through no fault of his own, lost everything because of it. He lays his head on K's shoulder. It's all he can do.
"What did you do?"
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 08:20 pm (UTC)But he did have one direct option, and one person he knows had already evaded everyone searching for him for years, except the one replicant Ana could have given that memory to that could put it together even without her knowing who she was.
"Freysa - the woman from the picture, and a major player in the replicant rebellion movement - wanted me to kill Deckard before he could lead anyone to her and, through her, to Ana. She..." Well, she didn't save K, who survived because he was resilient, who would have eventually scraped himself up off the floor in Las Vegas. Just not in time. "...found me, patched me up a bit, and gave me a new charge pistol. She was there when Ana was a baby but didn't know where she was as an adult. She wanted time to find her, to put her at the head of her replicant army. Wallace wanted Ana because she bridged the gap between replicants and humans and might tell them how to do it, too. The LAPD would have killed her so no one ever had proof she existed. None of them cared about her, or the fact that she had no idea who or what she was. Only what they could do for their cause, or prevent by being killed. She'd never even see it coming, and all she'd ever done was exist."
K is a man of few words normally, but he's never had the chance before to explain, to vent or make sense of any of this, not out loud. Not to anyone he trusted completely. He feels vaguely nauseous now but it's nothing at all to do with Jesus beside him, Jesus who asked one question and didn't know what dam he would break. K takes a deeper breath now, and offers the one part that he is absolutely sure of, the one, single thing he knows he would do over and over and over again and never regret.
"So I took Deckard to her. I gave him back the toy he carved for her before she was even born, and I took him to where she was. It was all I could think of to do that gave either of them even a chance."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 08:31 pm (UTC)"You gave them back to each other. You gave her a father." Something she must have given up yearning for years ago, the way Jesus had when he turned a certain age.
"You were supposed to kill her or give her to a cause, and instead you let them have each other." It isn't awe. He doesn't know what it is, only that it runs deep and quiet and strong.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 08:39 pm (UTC)It makes him nervous in a way, because he doesn't know where it stems from, what it will lead to - and strong emotions tied to replicants are, historically, rarely good. He tries to shut it out and instead focuses on what Jesus is actually saying.
"Freysa had an army, Wallace is the biggest corporation on the planet, the LAPD is the largest government body in the country. Ana didn't have any of that. I wanted her to have someone on her side. I wanted her to have someone that cared about her."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 08:44 pm (UTC)And K?
K was left with nothing. He lost everything and instead of trying to regain favor with the LAPD or the rebellion, he chose to give her a chance.
He reaches up, hand on K's cheek, and just tips his forehead against K's temple. "You did the right thing." The kindest choice, even though it damned him.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 09:04 pm (UTC)He hopes it mattered for longer than the day.
K breathes out, relaxing into Jesus's hands, eyes closed so he can just listen to his voice and feel his touch. "I'd do it again if I had the chance. It's the only thing I'm sure of."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 09:06 pm (UTC)Better than his builders ever intended.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 09:17 pm (UTC)It's a word that K frequently pays more attention to than those around him just as a matter of course, but it sticks out especially after being reminded of a time when he thought maybe, impossibly, he was - to be born is to have a soul - only to have it stripped indelibly away again. He shivers involuntarily under the lightness of the kiss, and doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything.
Except: "I'm glad you're not angry."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-20 11:49 pm (UTC)Somehow, K is not bitter. It stirs up that awestruck, deep-veined feeling again.
"You did something for her that no one else I know would have done."
no subject
Date: 2022-12-21 12:03 am (UTC)K is a replicant, and a blade runner, and an officer; there are only a handful like him in Los Angeles, and none of the others want anything to do with him, and he understands. The last thing they need is to appear to be banding too closely together when everyone in the city hates them - or when they might be called to go after one of the others.
But those three things also means K has encountered so many people that hate him for feeling like he's taken something from them, taken their place without earning it. Stolen valor, after a fashion. He reaches up to smooth his hand over Jesus's hair, letting the intimacy of it comfort him as much as it will.
"I wouldn't blame you if you were, is all. I'm glad you're not."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: