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[hippie_ninja]

This is Jesus. Leave a message.

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[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."

[konstant]

"So - we wouldn't sleep, literally, with anyone else? As an example."

Jesus could ask him for almost anything, honestly but just now he's genuinely trying to work out what the other man has in mind.

[hippie_ninja]

"If that's what we decided. I don't know," a laugh, helpless, a little self-conscious. "I just want something that feels like not making quota with you did. I liked that. It's not really about excluding anyone else--if you wanted to sleep with someone after you slept with them, I wouldn't care."

[konstant]

That laugh is a sound that matches how K feels, and it makes it easier for him to relax. It means neither of them have a good answer, but he agrees with what Jesus says: he liked that too. If they could find something else, then maybe -

"I... can't imagine doing that, honestly," he admits. He'd tried to get away from Vrenille as fast as he could - with limited success, but he never even considered staying tangled up with him.

[hippie_ninja]

"Yeah, I don't usually stick around," he admits, and feels as guilty saying it as he does whenever he pulls on his clothes and makes excuses about early meetings. He'd done it even with boyfriends in the old world, sometimes. "And the rules here about where we can stay just make it easier to leave."

[konstant]

"Why stick around with me, then?"

And they are in open defiance of the rules about where they can stay, although K is a bit worried about that in the long term as well.

[hippie_ninja]

The shrug this time is accompanied by a little smile. Why indeed? His answer won't be satisfying with how simple it is. "Because I like being around you."

[konstant]

It's simple, but it's honest - and it's easier to smile back.

"I'm happy that you do." He likes being around Jesus, too.

"I... missed not being around you. The week you were gone, the week I had to be."

[hippie_ninja]

"I missed you, too," he says, feeling younger--or maybe not younger, but more like a version of himself he hasn't been in years. "I worried about you. And when I was in the Zoo... I don't want you to end up in there."

[konstant]

K doesn't want to end up there, but it's likely inevitable. That isn't why he lingers on the mention of it.

He watches, instead, like he had when he asked earlier. Like he should have been when Jesus was first released from it, but he didn't.

"I'm sorry I wasn't a better friend while you were there. I did think of you often." He did answer messages when he could, but of course there was the stretch of time when he wasn't anywhere, let alone capable of answering his phone.

[hippie_ninja]

"You died," he points out. "Or whatever it is that happens to us when we're hurt here. If I thought you wouldn't have answered if you could have, I probably wouldn't be here right now."

Not like this, not comfortably.

"If I see a SIN guard hurting someone, I'm still going to step in. I'll probably end up in a cage again. Maybe I'll be disappointed in myself if I don't do anything to end up there again. But you lived without the choices I've had all along. The thought of you losing more of your choices," he hesitates, looks at K, not certain this is even okay to admit to worrying over. "It bothers me more."

[konstant]

"I didn't die," he says automatically, a leftover from... his life, yes, but the lingering forced reindoctrination of it all. He's still trying to shake it, but when he's focused on something else, it still takes over.

But his eyes are there to catch Jesus's, steady and something troubled in them.

"If I end up there, chances are good it will be a choice, too."

[hippie_ninja]

"Okay." He won't like it. There are no good options around the Zoo, but if a choice is made that can be lived with, he can support it. It's what he hopes others would do for him.

"If you didn't die, what happened?"

[konstant]

K is trying, he really is. But Orla told him to go begging on the network for a contract and he just - couldn't explain to her, apparently, why that idea makes his stomach turn.

"Replicants can't die," he clarifies, although there's a faint sigh in it when he realizes what he'd said, that he has to say this now, too. Another thing that usually gets argued with, so he goes ahead and adds: "It probably was the equivalent, though. But not just that. I remembered more."

[hippie_ninja]

If they were anywhere else, somewhere Jesus could die, he'd dig deeper into that. But they're here, where being stabbed through the heart doesn't mean death, and so any questions he has can't be answered by anyone but those in charge.

Besides, what K follows up with is more important. "What did you remember?"

[konstant]

If they were back in Los Angeles, K wouldn't talk about this at all. If he'd ended up in Duplicity, somehow, without ever knowing anything about Ana Stelline other than she's the best memory maker Wallace has, maybe he wouldn't either.

But the loneliness of not having anyone to confide any of it in, no one to even talk it through with except an unfairly biased AI who may or may not have been passively spying on him for Wallace or the department or both, means that he hesitates now to dismiss the opportunity. Maybe, if he can just admit to some of it, he'll feel better.

And he desperately needs to feel better about it if he can, so he takes a deeper breath.

"The blade runner hunted me down, but it didn't just retire me like I would have another replicant. It... I remember being locked in somewhere. It seemed like days and hours at the same time. And I could feel... things."

[hippie_ninja]

It's the fact that Jesus has spent twelve years around the worst parts of humankind that allows him to listen. Jesus being Jesus he is still horrified, but there's a mute acceptance to it. Horrible things happen. He wants to know what they were so he knows how K is coping with them now.

"What things?"

[konstant]

K himself is resigned; he is a Nexus-9 replicant, and a blade runner as well. He is capable of knowing with equal certainty two opposing, mutually exclusive things to be true. He knows he deserved to be retired for his actions in Los Angeles. He also knows they were the only thing he could have done. He knows the former is the conditioning, programming, coding, whatever one wants to call it; he knows how it feels like his own personality regardless.

He knows it's not, and yet here they are.

"One was my baseline script, over and over." A constant mantra, almost like it was playing on a speaker somewhere nearby, but also inside his head, in his own voice. "Another was... shame. For dereliction of duty. Guilt went with that one. Failure, because more than any other replicant anywhere it was a betrayal for me to go rogue. For daring to think I could be... special."

[hippie_ninja]

Felt things. Jesus, who has been tied up and left for dead on more than one occasion, had expected K to talk about physical things, torturous things. What he describes instead is a more persistent, perhaps more dangerous kind of pain.

"Was that what made you go rogue?" Feeling special?

[konstant]

"No," he can say with certainty. He felt angry, when he lied to Joshi that first time; terrified, maybe. A myriad of things, but not special.

"I went rogue because it was the only thing I could see to do. The only thing that was right. I know it was right, but I also know - I knew at the time - it was against everything I'd ever done up to then. Everything I was."

But not, in the end, because he was special. "I just got confused for a while in the middle. It was stupid, and I suppose I knew that too."

[hippie_ninja]

He listens, but there is so much left out, he doesn't even know what 'the middle' would look like. K hasn't really given him a beginning or an ending to go from, except for the part where he is here and he is not the person they created him to be any longer.

"Do you regret it?"

[konstant]

He knows he's being vague, but he has less than no interest in getting into all of it when he's still answering the most basic questions about his Los Angeles, about replicants. It all still hurts so much, and the blade runner nightmare hadn't helped even a little.

But he still shakes his head. "No," he offers, quiet but sure. "I can feel disgraced about it at the same time, and I do. But I don't regret it."

[hippie_ninja]

He's quiet a moment. "I've never felt special, either."

And being here, among people who have saved their worlds instead of merely survived them, around people with literal supernatural powers, has only driven home how small his own life was.

"But I like who I decided to become and what I decided to do with the things I could influence. And I hope that's true for you, too." He doesn't press for details. K will give them when and if he wants. "And anyway, you are special--to me, anyway. As small as that is. And part of that is because you decided not to be what they made you to be."

[konstant]

"Small?" K echoes, the word that not only sticks out of what Jesus is saying but stings enough to get a reaction.

There's the rest of it too but that feels too big, too complicated to get an easy read on right away. This, though, he can say immediately: "Most replicants go their entire activation knowing absolutely no one cares about them. That they don't matter to anyone." And K is no exception. "It's not small to me to know that someone thinks... anything about me."