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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[konstant]

K takes them as they walk back into the room and can't decide if he's more or less amused because of the shapes. He knows for sure he's touched by the gesture.

"Share them with me?" he asks, opening the package and offering it out.

[hippie_ninja]

He takes one and lets it melt on his tongue. It's velvety and soft and he means it when he says, "Thanks."

The place is as tidy as the last time he was here, only K isn't huddled in bed this time. "Should I take off my boots? They're-" the ones he used to kill walkers for a very long time. "--I should take them off."

[konstant]

He wants to, kind of. He's upright and there's color in his skin and he's not shivering but he does keep watching when Jesus moves.

It's not much as far as nerves go, but K doesn't show much of anything.

"If you're comfortable," he offers. K isn't wearing boots. "Thanks for coming here. I - if we were in public I'd have to go shirtless." Which he doesn't particularly want to do.

[hippie_ninja]

He kneels down to untie them. "What happened?"

It's a mild punishment, compared to some he's heard (and the one he went through, but his was intentional so he doesn't know if it counts).

[konstant]

K, in comparison to most people garnering punishment, is a very mild offender. He considers the chocolate in his hand again while he sinks down to sit on a loveseat in the area not occupied by two beds.

"The SIN guards hate me having my coat zipped up. I didn't remove it when I was told. That's all."

[hippie_ninja]

He offers a small, sympathetic nod. He hates the mark on his own throat; he has no tattoos, had never wanted so much as henna on his skin.

"Well, I don't mind being here. I'm surprised they've let you have the place to yourself this long."

[konstant]

Jesus nods. That's it, just nods. K presses his lips together thoughtfully and finally, with alacrity, pps one of the chocolates into his mouth.

It melts some part of him even as it melts itself, and he smiles again until he's glancing up.

"Maybe I'm just too much of a trouble maker. They don't want to expose anyone else."

[hippie_ninja]

"I've been to prison now," he points out. He has no regrets about it, and now there aren't even bruises to show for it. "Maybe I'm rubbing off on you."

[konstant]

"Yes but the system thinks that means you're reformed now."

Jesus is the one who brings it up - kind of - so K considers him for a moment before cautiously offering, "I didn't give you the chance to tell me much about that. If you wanted to."

[hippie_ninja]

"It got rough. My friends got me out of it." He has had time to sit and think about what happened, but there are parts he doesn't want to go into detail about. The whole of it is, "I don't want to go back in."

[konstant]

K thinks they knew that part was likely; other people told them as much. He also thinks that means Jesus has made a decision regarding the things to do or not do that will lead back to that place.

He offers the chocolate again, watching intently.

[hippie_ninja]

He takes one, but the other things he has to say about the situation sit too deep in his ribs.

"What about you? How did the injection go?" Because, his tone says, he's probably in line for that punishment next even if he does stay out of the Zoo.

[konstant]

It worries him, the things Jesus won't say; but he can't make him, and he can't be someone Jesus trusts or wants to tell about it if he's not. He'll do his best to be better, he thinks. He didn't do much for Jesus the last time they sat in a room together and spoke. Next time, if Jesus lets him, he will.

K's eyes drop immediately the moment the injection is mentioned. His mouth goes dry, and he has to work even harder than usual to find words.

"I found someone to... Help." Which reminds him of something he'd thought at the time and now glances up, uncertain in a way that might actually be resolvable: "Is that okay?"

[hippie_ninja]

He hates to see that look on K's face, hates that he had to go through it at all, hates that it looks very much like how he feels thinking about the Zoo. But the question draws him up short in surprise.

"Yes," he says, and laughs softly because, "I wondered the same thing when..." He trails off. Just when. Whenever he's so much as kissed anyone, trying to find ways to make quota, his thoughts have flitted to strange Officer K.

"Are you okay?"

[konstant]

It makes him feel... something in turn. Surprised, certainly, and something faintly like pleased but sharper, more private; it occurs to him only after a moment that he should perhaps say something in turn, although it's not something he would ever have thought to give something as entitled as permission for: "It's okay."

When, it's okay.

As for the other, he struggles not to fidget, ends up rubbing one thumb over the other's knuckle anyway. "It's... a difficult choice. Possibly hurt others, or hurt myself. I don't like it, even though I know which one is right."

[hippie_ninja]

He says it's okay, and of course it is, why wouldn't it be, but he's so relieved to hear it anyway that he's smiling. At least until K goes on.

"It isn't right that we have to hurt ourselves. Nothing makes that right. But for now it's the only choice we have... And I know that. I'm still sorry you had to go through that."

He brushes his thumb along the side of K's hand. "Are you going to miss quota? On purpose, I mean?" He won't judge whatever choice he makes.

[konstant]

"I don't think I can."

K watches Jesus reach for him, watches the path of his light touch almost impassively; almost, except there's always something going on behind K's eyes, and this time he's suppressing a shiver, well aware that there's more behind it now than there ever has been.

Aware that now he knows.

"I don't want to feel like that again. I don't know if it's the same for humans, if it would be the same for you, but - I retired replicants that couldn't control themselves. That weren't themselves on the inside anymore."

[hippie_ninja]

He studies him and nods again. "It's not a good choice." But like he said: it's the only one they have right now.

"I can live with choosing to meet quota. I don't know if I could live with being forced. I'm...glad that you're making that choice, too." Of the options it seems like it will cause less harm.

[konstant]

It helps, hearing that the man with whom he'd agreed there was ample reason to not meet quota thinks this is the right choice. He could definitely, he knows, do much worse than Jesus as an example to follow in how to navigate this new life doing the least harm to others possible.

But it does raise a new problem, and he turns his hand over to offer more of it to Jesus's touch.

"But now everything else will change, too."

[hippie_ninja]

Things will. It's inevitable, but he thinks they might be able to navigate it anyway. Maybe, if they want, they can even decide some of the ways things will go.

He glides the backs of his nails along K's palm. "What are you worried will change?"

[konstant]

"Things that might have been 'want to' become 'have to.' I know -" Vrenille says that doesn't have to be the case. So do others.

None of them are KD6-3.7 though. None of them, he thinks, can really understand what it's like to have one line, one thing he did whatever he could to keep for himself, and now it doesn't matter. Now he's being told it doesn't matter.

He shakes his head. "I don't know how else to explain it." Quota will forever be woven into anything physically intimate he chooses now; the LIES program will overshadow everything, is his concern.

[hippie_ninja]

He looks down, but he still has K's hand. "I liked the things we did that were just for us. If I'd made quota that month, it still would've been- different."

Which scares him now that he's saying it out loud.

He puts that aside. "We could find things that are just 'want to'. To do besides the things we do for quota."

[konstant]

"For me too, but not -" He tries to choose his words carefully. He doesn't want to frame it in a way that makes Jesus feel like K does occasionally - not, specifically, with Jesus but with everyone - like Jesus wouldn't have ever wanted anything to do with K if it weren't for quota, for the LIES program.

"This isn't how I would have behaved, if not for this place. Maybe eventually, and I'm not saying I don't like the things we did, that we do, because that's not true. But it makes me wonder if you would have liked what I was before. What I was without this."

The black mark down his throat he's always, always aware of even though he's always had the mark under his eye, too.

[hippie_ninja]

"If we had met in my world, I think our friendship would have unfolded very differently. The rules here are different. The only way to thrive here is...different. I still would have liked you the same way I do now, but I wouldn't have been bold enough to kiss you." And with everything that was going on at home, he has no idea how much time they would have really had to sit and be together like they have here. "But I met you here. And this is our friendship, and I like it, too. I want what we have."

Maybe things between him and K are better here than they would have had the chance to be back home.

"What were you without all this?"

[konstant]

K knows, without doubt, that things between them are better here than they would have been in Los Angeles. Even how everything ended aside, there was a divide there that simply doesn't seem to exist for most people in other places, that exists here but in a different incarnation than K is used to.

"A civil servant," he says after a moment of trying to make his own vocabulary fit with what he needs to convey. "A tool for the department. In most peoples' eyes, an enemy of one kind or another. Anything but a sex model, although -"

He shakes his head. "It's not a judgment. It's just not what I was. It's what I worked not to be. My job was hard enough without any respect, but if everyone around me thought they could just touch me or claim me on top of that?"