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KD6-3.7 ([personal profile] konstant) wrote2037-07-05 07:23 pm
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cryfrustration: (54)

[personal profile] cryfrustration 2023-04-02 12:57 pm (UTC)(link)
It's such a small thing, but Vrenille watches K take those packs of cigarettes feeling as though he's managed to send a little care package across a no man's land of isolation that he's still trying to find his own way across. It's not much maybe, but at least a not nothing.

"You," he acknowledges firmly, taking a neighbouring seat on the couch, "understand a helluva lot, K. And if we don't acknowledge that often 'nuff then we oughta." We, he says, because he doesn't think he's necessarily excluded from the people who've, inadvertently, made K feel this way.

"I think with humans...I'd say a lotta times, we want so badly for things to be different with us, different in our lives, in what we do and what happens 'cause of it. We really go in with the best intentions, believing what we say, and then somehow, there's the same shit happening again, even when we tried to avoid it. We think we're taking a different road, going somewhere new, we really feel like we are. And then we end up back in the same place again, and maybe we don't even know how we got there; we just got there." He's seen the pattern too many times with too many people not to have noticed it by now.

"None of that's on you though. We both know Jesus didn't set out to hurt you, but here you are still hurt nonetheless." He swirls the whiskey in his glass, looking at the amber of the liquid, not yet taking a sip before looking up at K again.
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[personal profile] cryfrustration 2023-04-07 06:59 am (UTC)(link)
"I am so sorry you lost him--when, how you did." There's nothing to be done about it, but that doesn't make it less grievable. "Everything in this place is so fucking arbitrary, so gods damned unfair." But K, he thinks, has had to live through more unfairness here than most, which is saying something.

"For what it's worth 'n everything you've said, I believe what he was telling you, that chance for you together. I wish to all the gods you'd had time to find out. But that and a gold will get you on the airship, as they say." Wishes are cheap and they change nothing, and ultimately the sentiment is pretty peripheral. Wanting K to be able to be happy is all well and good, but it can't overwrite listening to him--listening to the uncomfortable real of what he's saying.

"Do you regret it? Saying yes to him? You've done this twice now to keep from hurting others--all us humans who wanna see you free. Two contracts you've signed to keep us from hurting. Two people who've made commitments they meant to keep." Commitments that they each, for reasons beyond simple choice and without assigning any blame for it, ended up breaking. And K himself is the one hurt in the process. "Do you wish you'd stayed in that cell?"
cryfrustration: (23)

[personal profile] cryfrustration 2023-04-08 02:08 pm (UTC)(link)
It's not Vrenille's place to tell K that he should want life, want freedom, want comfort or nice things or anything whatsoever. As much as he's wanted all of those for him, been happy for him when he's seemed to have them, he's also been trying to back K's choices ever since he chose to miss his first contract deadline.

Even all those months ago, standing in the aquarium's viewing tunnel together and listening to him talk about what he'd chosen not to do, Vrenille had told him he'd support whatever he decided. He'd been ready to support the contract too, when it happened, though it seemed to be gone in the blink of an eye.

Vrenille's not been one to plead with K about signing, not the first time or the second. He's not weighed in on either occasion, in part because he's sensed this divide in him, this deep ambivalence about all these good-willed promises held out before him and the risk that, yes, they might become something of a poisoned chalice, regardless of everyone's best intentions.

So he can hear this hard truth now probably better than some could; he can hear it without railing against it, or quibbling, or rationalising, or needing to defend the promise of a good, happy life. He can listen, and nod, and feel the weight of this truth--this half of the truth that's counterbalanced by its equal in the elements K doesn't regret, each only taking its meaning when it's viewed alongside the other.

"There is a lotta turmoil in love. There's bliss 'n happiness too, but anyone who says that's all there is is selling something. Love is a mess, like anything real," just like Ana Stelline told him. "Like really being alive," like K has come to be in his time in this city, for better or worse.

"Wanting it to all just stop sometimes--wanting life to stop so it doesn't hurt, doesn't wear you down, so it just lets you rest and gives you some peace? I don't think anyone's lived who hasn't felt that. And it can be--" he casts about for a strong enough word for a moment "--suffocating, like it'll never ease up and there's no way out."
cryfrustration: (60)

[personal profile] cryfrustration 2023-04-23 10:47 am (UTC)(link)
"I wish I knew what to do, K. How to help." Because yes, even now, here, with the two of them sitting together so close, talking, saying these things, he knows that K is also profoundly alone. There's no one like him here, no one who can truly relate to his experience, and even if there were, would it be possible?

He thinks of what K told him about Sapper, the inevitability of how their meeting ended, and he wonders, if they could meet again here, if they could talk--just talk, not be forced to be at odds in spite of themselves--would that change anything?

"I don't know how to make it stop, even how to make it pause. And every solution I can think to offer, I know would just come with more problems." He wants so badly for K to be happy, but he can't wish that into being; it's not for him to make it so.

"If you can tell me what you need, what you want, if it's something I can do, I will." But even that, he thinks--just to say what he needs--even that can be a big ask.
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[personal profile] cryfrustration 2023-05-09 09:52 pm (UTC)(link)
There is, at some point, on some level in life, a destitution--not something material but something subjective. It's a sort of absolute, something that Vrenille has witnessed in others, something that he's encountered in himself, and something he recognises well enough to know now that not being human hasn't exempted K from encountering it all the same.

He's not surprised, therefore, that there's no answer. Or that in place of an answer there's the recitation, the return to this script that has anchored K's whole existence. His touchstone, familiar now not just because Vrenille's heard him echo lines of it, but because he can remember from when it was shared in his memory.

And so, because there's little here he can offer beyond his presence, his ear, his attention, he murmurs back like he's sharing in a mantra, lending himself to it. He may not remember the whole thing, but he remembers the line that comes next: "A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked...within one stem."