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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[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?"

[hippie_ninja]

"I don't know what I would have been in your world. I don't know if we even would have met." Jesus had as little to do with cops as he could. When they did interact, it wasn't exactly friendly. "I know that I've never felt entitled to anyone. I know that I always try to respect people, even the ones who hurt me. Maybe I would have been some odd outlier who just treated you like I do here."

It's impossible to know but he can understand how that must haunt K, not knowing how 'real' anyone's affections for him are. "What are you here, without the department?"

[konstant]

"Then you would have been part of the underground, or thought to be, and I wouldn't have been able to have anything to do with you without risking retirement." It's not that K has never been aware that the system was rigged and counterproductive, it's not that it never occurred to him that he is more alive than Wallace wanted anyone to believe.

It's that it didn't matter - except K is discovering that he really, really wants to trust that it does matter now.

"I don't know," he answers, not recalcitrant, not modest, but literal. He has no idea what he is now except - "Miles from baseline," he quotes, lips quirking briefly, wryly. "A Submissive."

[hippie_ninja]

He looks up at K, studying him, clearly hating the notion that just sympathizing with whatever K is would have put K in danger. But yes, he's pretty sure he would have been part of the underground. That seems to be where he always finds himself happiest.

"You're also a friend," he says. "And if you weren't allowed to have those before, then it's one thing I'm grateful to this place for. Whatever you are here, I like it."

[konstant]

He's waiting for the staunch, well meaning insistence, the denial that anyone where K came from had any idea what they were thinking, that they were cruel and wrong. The invalidation of everything K has done and lived for as long as he's been activated, the choices he made up until he didn't.

He is not terribly surprised, he discovers, that Jesus doesn't do any of that - but only after it doesn't happen. He traces the contours of the fine bones of Jesus's knuckles, the faint scars from using them to fight, and tries to figure out how to relax from being braced for a blow that doesn't come.

"I want that to be true," he admits, softly. "I want that to keep being true even if it turns out I'm not real."

[hippie_ninja]

"How do you know if someone is real?" He asks, but there's a note in his voice that's pained. This is a question that has dogged him since he died and then wasn't dead at all. K doesn't mean it the way Jesus does, he doesn't think; so he wants to understand.

[konstant]

"It's the constant debate in my world. The constant struggle." I want to be real for you.

A real boy now. Loved. Wanted.

I have memories, but they're not real.

"Replicants aren't born, we're made. Constructed to order, put together out of parts of other things, out of the imaginations of humans, to the whim of humans. Artificial. Realistic, the closer the better, but never real."

Anything real should be a mess.

"We don't have souls, we only feel pain - feel anything - because we were given the ability to, we're only alive because someone else paid for us and only so long as we're serving a purpose. We don't have a right to exist in and of itself. We're not real."

[hippie_ninja]

"It seems like a human trait in any world, to want to be able to control what we create." To design it so specifically you could pick what your children will be. To predict it, at the very least.

"The funny thing is it never works out that way, does it?"

[konstant]

"I'm not a good option to ask." We're all just looking out for something real.

Is it real? I don't know, why don't you ask him?

K lets his fingers rest, briefly, over Jesus's pulse point in his wrist. He feels the beat of his heart immediately, strong, steady. Real. Then he lets go.

"What do you mean by it?"

[hippie_ninja]

He frowns, trying to find the words. "Once you create something, it isn't really yours anymore. You don't get to decide how it's affected by the world, or how the world interacts with it. The greatest pieces of art in history always mean something different than the artists intended. Think of the song we talked about last time I saw you. It means something different to you than it did to Elvis. You heard something in it that I never had before."

[konstant]

He listens. He does. He takes in the tone and timbre and inflection of Jesus's voice and follows the words along to the concept they're describing.

He hears. It makes him smile just a bit and say, "Rebellion for sure."

[hippie_ninja]

"Well," yes, he grins a little and shrugs. "I didn't exactly turn out how my parents wanted, either."

[konstant]

"I like how you turned out."

K likes... quite a lot about Jesus, and he's learning more every time they talk.

It feels dangerous to him, too, but in a different way than he's seen Jesus himself balk at, he'd wager. "I like you a lot."

[hippie_ninja]

And dammit but he's grinning to hear it.

The thing is, hearing it now--after what K told him just moments ago--makes him hear it a little differently. "They would have retired you for that, wouldn't they?"

[konstant]

K nods, pulling one leg up under him for something to do, something to put his attention on while he admits to something he never would have been able to before.

"If they found out, yes. If it altered my baseline too much."

[hippie_ninja]

"It must make it hard to get close to people here." With a whole lifetime behind him spent effectively isolated from too much contact, from being able to confide too much in anyone.

[konstant]

"Everything is hard here," he can say with confidence, not completely oblivious to the inherent double entendre, but it's not what he means all the same. Not really.

"But it's easier one on one. For now." Jesus has seen him at work, when he's not knocked off balance by something else; he's not uncomfortable there, when he has a role to fill and a job to do. It's only when it's just him, just K, that he fumbles.

[hippie_ninja]

"It's hard for me. But it always has been." It seems only fair to tell this to K, someone he is in fact getting closer to.

"You said you were worried that not fighting quota will change things between us."

[konstant]

"I can see that sometimes," he admits. It's part of why he's careful, but not the main reason or even a particularly large one.

"It's just... always going to be there, now. It's inherently attached to sex here. It's something to report to someone else."

[hippie_ninja]

"Unless I just don't report that I've been with you." They know if he hasn't met quota, they know if he lies. This is just a little stubborn, pedantic streak in him talking. "If I had sex with three other people and you--I could keep what I do with you to myself."

[konstant]

"What if you don't make quota without me included?" K can be pedantic if the mood strikes, but just now this is more indicative of scenarios he's been thinking about.

"Or one of us uses them and one of us doesn't? Is that some kind of betrayal, is that tension we don't need? Do we have special times and quota times? And even if none of it actually becomes an issue, it's there, always."

He's been worrying about his relationship with Jesus a lot.

[hippie_ninja]

He watches K, his expression softening as he realizes. K's right, of course: it will always be there. It will always be counted in their tally, and if they put too much pressure on it, it will become a tension. He doesn't want that.

"Then let's have something else that's just ours. The sex can be whatever it is for us in the moment."

[konstant]

At least when they agreed neither of them would make quota, it was an automatic nonissue; but K can't stomach the thought of potentially being in a position to hurt Jesus if the injections get stronger. He doesn't want to avoid him for a week every month. (He doesn't want to feel like that ever again.)

So, a compromise; he glances up at Jesus.

"Do you have an idea?"

[hippie_ninja]

Here the problem is that he doesn't know what he's allowed to ask for.

"You're the only one I sleep around. Who I have sex with." He sleeps around Rosita just fine. There's just a level to it that he likes with K, that he hasn't had with anyone else. "It doesn't have to be that--I'm just thinking of things I'm comfortable with you that I haven't been with anyone else."