konstant | . .. IC Contact

"I'm sorry. I'm having second thoughts, I did the second it happened but I just- I don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm doing, K." And that, for Jesus, is terrifying.

"It didn't happen -" he points out, his voice low, calm as it ever is, but cool on the consonants, crisp in a way that disappears when he's relaxed.

"You made a choice."

"You're right. I'm trying to distance myself from it and I shouldn't. I did this." And he's desperate right now to make it right, but again, there's no sense of which way is up or down or what is right or wrong.

K watches the orange glow of the cigarette slowly eating its way down the paper, watches the dead grey ash gathering on the opposite side; Jesus said he was sorry. K believes that. He believes he's having second thoughts, believes he doesn't know what to do.

Problem is, neither does K. He taps off the ash, takes another long, deep lungful of smoke, breathes it out slow through his nose.

"Have a seat, if you want."

He does. Carefully, like K might change his mind in a moment.

"Have you ever been afraid of feeling safe?"

K doesn't move, except to hold onto the ashtray in case Jesus's weight on the couch shifts something. That, and to shake his head.

No, of all the myriad things K has been afraid of in his life, he has never been afraid of feeling safe.

"It must be difficult."

"It's not. Because I never feel safe." He's watching K, heart in his throat. "But I did with you."

He knows.

He knew then.

Do they teach you how to feel, finger to finger? Interlinked.

"Then why?"

It's not my role.

I don't belong with you.

And he hears Rosita's voice and he fights those answers back. "Because it scares me. And it's not the kind of fear I know how to think through. I always ran before; I ran now. But it feels wrong."

K drops his head forward, cards his free hand back through his short hair, scrubs it forward again. He flicks ash into the tray, then sets the cigarette in it, sets the whole thing aside.

"Drake said you told him you were trying to protect us."

"It would be easy for the city to use him against me. It's what I was afraid of to start with--having to make that choice again." Between the job, the mission, and a person.

"But it didn't feel like I was leaving you at the time. Not until I was running and trying to make it make sense to myself."

What K hears is that Jesus wasn't thinking about him at all; the moment after that he tells himself there's no real reason he should have. The contract is between Jesus and Drake, and K doesn't have anything to do with their relationship or vice.

Except the part of any of this that hit K the deepest, that he didn't see coming, that he doesn't know how to just set aside and remind himself that he already knew.

He finally, finally looks up, eyes somber in the half-dark, features wounded - and his voice is very, very soft when he says, "You said we'd be in this together." When there are no right answers, sometimes it helps to just have someone with you.

He did say that. He meets K's gaze--he owes him that much.

"And I wish I hadn't run." He's not the same person who once crawled out a window to escape a boyfriend. He's clearly not the same person who chose to end relationships secure in knowing he was right.

"If I came back could you ever forgive me?"

"It's not that simple, Jesus," he says, not unkindly, not harsh - but there's not much strength to it either.

"Because I already have. I'm not angry anymore. I can't hold fear against you. You've never lied to me, not intentionally."

"You can. Most people would." Have. Do still. "I wouldn't blame you if you did."

"I -" He leans into it, firm, certain of this much: most people might, but he is not most people.

He's not even a person, and sometimes lately, he thinks that's better. "Won't do that."

He believes him. He doesn't know what to do with that, with someone who doesn't offer him a wall of anger and resentment.

"Would you let me try to earn back your trust?"

"Do you want to?"

It's an earnest question, and K's eyes are on Jesus's now, unblinking, studying and searching for whatever it was that he might have missed before, if indeed there's anything.

"Do you want to risk feeling this way in another couple of months? Maybe always?"

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.

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