konstant | . .. IC Contact

Maybe always. Maybe he will always want to run.

"It's different this time. Every boyfriend I've ever dated, I've left, K. And I never felt guilty about any of them. I just felt relief. But I don't now. All I want is to go back to yesterday and undo what I did, and I can't, so I'm trying to find a way forward."

"Boyfriend."

Jesus has never used that word with him; K has never pressed for it, never needed it. Replicants can't be equals, can't be partners, so he just never expected it. That isn't to say K doesn't know he's important, or that Jesus is any less important to him, but - Jesus says it now.

K echoes it back, just to make sure he heard.

"Why do this now? What changed?"

"I never felt love before the world ended, K. If I did it was just-" It always ended when the foster families inevitably returned him to the system, until he was just stuck in a group home until he aged out.

"But I learned how, I started to, when I had to think about putting all of my friends down if a mission went wrong. And then I came here where no one dies. No one is ever going to reanimate into a walker. I'm free here to just experience it, to just feel love, and I do. And I realized that's what I'd been feeling for you, for Drake--even with deeper friendships like one I have with Rosita or Vrenille. And I panicked. I was past the point where I was always safe in my relationships before."

They've talked about this before. K has mentioned that he sees that it's hard sometimes for Jesus to be around him, that it's hard to settle with him, and they moved past it.

K wants that for him. He wants him to find whatever it was he was missing before, because the truth is that K loves him, too.

K has no idea what to do with it either. "And are you still panicking now? Is that what this is - wanting to reverse it, wanting to undo it?"

"I'm not panicking." He knows what panic feels like. If he knows any feeling in the world it's panic. "This is me wanting to fix something I broke."

K isn't angry - not at Jesus anyway, not specifically. He doesn't resent him or blame him for wanting to protect himself. All of that was true.

But there is still something broken, something shifted from where it was before even if K doesn't have a name for it. He has a name for so few things when it comes right down to it.

Dreadfully distinct against the dark.

Distinct. "I just don't want to keep doing this, Jesus. I don't know what I'm doing, either."

"You won't have to." His word doesn't mean much right now. He knows that.

It doesn't. That he wants to say it does, that he means what he's saying does, and K can see that he does: he looks for them and every single marker is there, and not a single trace of dishonesty. K knows how to look under a person's skin, find the pieces of them they're trying to hide - replicants, yes, that was what it was built for, he was meant to find the barcode printed under a subject's eye if it was there to find in their mannerisms, their delays, all the ways that they were close to and yet not quite human. But he learned more than that too.

His original cigarette is out. He picks up the pack off the table in front of him, pulls another out, lights it and draws on it in silence. He has no idea what to say, no idea what to explain, so he doesn't.

He just doesn't.

"What do you want me to do right now?" Stay, go. Keep talking, shut up. He has no idea what he's doing still, only what he wants to do, but K is the one who was hurt; K has the right to decide where things go.

"Could we just -" It comes out sharper than K ever is, frustrated with them both, with the situation, with the fact that he's already established there's no one to really blame and yet.

And yet. He sucks down a third of the new cigarette in one draw, catches himself, forces himself to let it out slow. The edge is gone when he speaks again.

"What do you want to do?"

He deserves this. He hears the heat in K's tone, something that has never been there before, and accepts that.

"Could we just what?"

He wants to reach up and rub the bridge of his nose, the corners of his eyes. He doesn't.

"Could we just... sit here, for a bit. And not talk." Just be, and let K think.

He nods, expression worried but guarded. Of course they can. As long as K wants.

K is capable of sitting for hours without speaking, barely moving; he's comfortable in it. More comfortable sometimes than speaking with anyone, it must be said. No one can punish him or degrade him or be suspicious of him with thoughts he keeps to himself. He doesn't have to struggle to put anything he's thinking or feeling into words.

He finishes the current cigarette, lights a third off of it and smokes that one down, then a fourth - not frantically, not in distress, but steadily. Methodically. He fidgets with it in his hand occasionally, flicking ash off with his thumb or just idly moving it up and down, doesn't look at Jesus, doesn't look at anything if he's not actively doing something with his hands. The smoke curls up from his nostrils, from his mouth, in even, measured breaths.

Finally he puts out the last one, deciding Janus has been trapped in his jar long enough. The morning is well under way when he stands up, turns to open the window a little bit wider to let more of the smoke clear out, then sits down again where he was before.

"When Drake told me you thought you were protecting us," he finally says, and his voice is low but the tension from earlier has smoothed out of it. "All I could think was - what did I say? What have I done, or not done, that makes people I love think I want some flimsy illusion of safety instead of them? That it's something you have to do for me, that I can't for myself."

"I made a decision that wasn't really mine to make," Jesus says, watching K.

He stays sitting, stays still, giving K space to move or have distance as he needs. "Back home we learn you can't make choices for other people. It's what I wanted my community to be built around: everyone gets a choice. And I took that from you and I'm sorry and I want to make that right. I want to never do that again. It wasn't fair to you."

There's a note of desperation that creeps in when he says, "K, I'm so sorry."

It's the desperation that keeps K quiet, that stops the rest of what he was going to say - that makes him wonder if it matters. Really, on the whole of it, does it matter - and when did he start thinking that it did?

Jesus made a mistake. He's already here trying to fix it, and K already knows he doesn't want to stop seeing or talking to or knowing Jesus, so the choice becomes obvious. Why does it still feel like trying to use a dislocated joint, then?

Probably because it's new, he thinks. Probably because this is just part of it he doesn't understand, but he looks at Jesus, he listens to him talking about choice and saying he's sorry, and he already knows where this ends up.

So he swallows the rest down, he nods, and he says, "It's okay."

"Is it? It doesn't feel okay," he says, almost gasping the words, and he looks down at his hands to steady himself.

"I love you, K. And I'm not sure how to love anyone yet. But I want to know. I want to figure out how to be good at it."

K is not unaware of the magnitude of someone that he didn't feel comfortable naming a date a date around suddenly saying that he loves him. He doesn't miss it, but it seems like the sort of thing that he shouldn't try to grab hold of either. It's not a surprise after all. Not to K, who has been watching Jesus love him for weeks now.

Not that this means it's nothing. It's the reason he can say again, "It's okay. I don't know either, but it's okay."

"What can I do?" To make this up to him. He'd do anything.

"What would you want?" he says after a long moment of considering.

"If you were in my position. What would you need?"

He shakes his head. "Time. To see you prove it. But I don't know what would prove it to you besides me just being present."

"I don't know either." This is a placeholder, not a verdict. A verbal hand held up to reserve space while he tries to come up with something more substantial, more helpful.

"I know you're not lying, now or then. And I've known for a while you sometimes feel... conflicted. And sometimes not." He can always tell, which is the gift and the curse of the Voight-Kampff modification combined with his intimate knowledge of Jesus specifically.

"And I... ignored. What I knew, because things are different here. Because I can usually see what you're feeling but not why, not the intention. For those I have to trust what's being said, and - I do. And this still happened."

"What would it have looked like if you hadn't ignored it?" But more importantly, "I'm hearing that you feel- fault, maybe, for being hurt by this. There's no fault on your end."

A muscle in K's jaw tenses and releases, his eyes still lowered.

"I don't know. I don't know if what I'm feeling is what anyone else would feel or if it's... Some flaw, some warning spark in me. I'm not made to do this. I'm not made to be this."

A flaw. A warning spark.

Jesus isn't a replicant but oh, the ways he empathizes with that way of thinking.

"Made to be what?"

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