K doesn't know what to expect, exactly, when he arrives. He doesn't know what Vrenille needs from him other than to come here, to be here, to be present. He can guess and some of them might even be correct, but he doesn't know.
And then he's here, and Vrenille is alone in a site that's either destroyed or in the middle of being built depending on how one looks at it, and then he's spotted K. Then he's throwing his arms around K, his weight against him, and K shakes his hands out of his pockets to catch him.
This time though, he knows what to do. He catches him, only swaying at all so his landing is soft, and he wraps his arms around him in turn.
"Hey," he offers, low, an acknowledgment and permission and apology.
Just his presence in itself goes a long way, just the solidity and security of feeling K's arms around him, the living movement of his body, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes and the transfer of warmth through the layers of his coat. It matters that K is here, alive despite having gone home to die, despite the sense of finality with which they believed him dead.
It's not that it gives him hope about Carver. It doesn't. He knows better than to try and enter into that kind of calculous. But it does give him comfort of a sort.
This time the tears don't bubble up though. He's almost surprised they don't, that whatever barrier has kept them at bay still holds. The ache of them is there, only knotted up, without the relief of release. Instead he just holds onto K for a long moment before he finally manages back his own small, "Hey."
Once, in the second year after K's activation, he'd worked what the human officers all called a good old fashioned homicide. Human on human violence, a jealous lover and a lot of liquor, and K had been called in to help run crowd control simply because he was available. The woman's son had been much younger than Vrenille, but he'd seen everything, including his dead mother; something about K had reassured him when the other officers terrified him, and so K had stood directing traffic around the corner with a ten year old hugging his hip and half-shielded under his duty coat until a protective agent had come to take him away.
That boy hadn't cared that K was a replicant; neither does Vrenille, and grief is grief. Loss is loss. K stands still for the first several moments but by the time Vrenille has hold of himself a bit better, he's moved one hand up to stroke the back of his head fondly, as reassuringly as he can.
"Let's go inside out of the cold. Yeah?" he suggests, but makes no move to pull away until Vrenille does.
"Not yet," Vrenille looks up, leaning his head into K's touch and managing a small, wan smile. He turns his head towards the crates, the larger centre one and the two smaller on each side.
"I wanna remember him here a minute. Was the only time he ever came here. Never when this place was whole. Just that once, and we sat there together."
It sound strange without context, maybe, this grief for someone so rarely in his space, makes it seem--well, he doesn't know how it might seem. But it matters that it's K he's saying this to. He doesn't know anyone else he could tell, no one else in this whole city, so he doesn't mind staying out in the cold a while.
It hurts, a little, to meet Vrenille's eyes and see the pain there. However strange it might sound it doesn't really matter when compared to the fact that what Vrenille is saying is real. How he feels about it is genuine.
He knows the name Carver. He can even picture the man, snarling in the cell next to him, feral and armored and locked so deeply inside of himself that he clearly hoped no one would be able to reach him. He knows he's important, and little more, but he does know.
He looks over at the crates. "Why'd he come?" he asks, willing to listen. To remember, too.
"To get drunk," Vrenille's smile broadens, but now his eyes do swim a little too. It's true, so far as answers go, but it barely tells half the story.
"His contact partner 'd disappeared. Permanent contract. Was a powerful bond--it hit hard."
He makes a small gesture towards the ruins of the house, "All this had just happened, and...you were gone too. Not long, only a few days." Vrenille had still been reeling from it, as much from K's loss as the shock of the quake, the trauma of the two events laminated together in his experience, inextricable even now.
"But he was still here, and I wanted him to know he wasn't alone. I called, didn't really know if he'd accept, but..." He did.
It had occurred to K on the way over here, very briefly, if anyone had done this for Vrenille when he'd vanished. Who the other man had reached out to then, had asked to just come, to just be here. And maybe that wasn't Carver in the same capacity, but it was in some way, and so he can see some of it now.
He breathes out, breath fogging in the air, and lets his eyes travel around as Vrenille gestures.
He thinks it did help--wants to believe it at least. Carver was always a difficult person to comfort though; he was never wholly at ease with comfort. It was always something of a paradox, comfort being hard to bear, but when he came here and found all this, not an easy comfort but one interspersed with turmoil, textured by it so the friction didn't slip away too easy, so there was something that dug in...maybe what helped was that it wasn't too comforting.
"We spoke about you," is what he says by way of answer, the best that he can give. "We spoke 'bout Grayson, his old Dominant too. 'Bout ghosts and the dead and what to do with loss." They listened to each other. It had taken a long time for them to figure out how to do that together.
"I didn't know what to do with you being gone any more than he knew what to do with losing Grayson. But together in a way, we could say those things."
"It's important," he agrees, quietly. "Having someone to hear."
Having someone to listen. It's what he can offer now, as he studies the little impromptu table where the library once was, as he eases them a bit closer to it like they might still be able to hear the conversations of the two men sitting there when it was all fresh.
"I met him, I think. I remember him being around, but I don't remember talking to him at all."
"He wasn't an easy man to talk to if he didn't know you, didn't trust you," Vrenille acknowledges, "and he didn't trust easy."
He moves with K towards the little table, looking at the spot where Carver had sat, thinking of the soft brown of his eyes as they'd looked that day, the evolution from the expression that had been in them the first night they met when Carver had been ready to kill him on sight, thinking of the steps on the journey they'd made together and how much he values each one, hard as they'd sometimes been.
"Their world--his and Jesus' and Rosita's--it's a brutal place. And it hadn't been kind to him. He learned not to be kind back, not to share the kind parts of himself with anyone but his family. He was always looking for the angle, the trick--everyone's an enemy and the enemy's always trying to get you on the ground, and if you let them you deserve what happens to you, so you can't let your guard down, that's an awful sin, and you can't ever ever flinch."
It was something Vrenille had to learn to understand, this position from which Carver encountered the world. He had to find a way to meet him there, even when Carver didn't necessarily want him to do it.
K listens, stores away the details where they're safe for as long as K is online, is active. He can picture it alongside the man he has two distinct impressions of: one snarling, quite literally, naked in the cell beside K's. And one much quieter, much more settled, working in the dirt shoulder to shoulder with a woman, with Jesus, looking content not from the focused expression on his face but from something deep within him.
"That's a hard philosophy to have to live, especially if family isn't in the picture." Duplicity doesn't let it be, from what he's seen. "But he let you in?"
"Family's something you can make, you can find, you can choose even," he looks at K directly as he says is because those words matter for more than just speaking about Carver.
"Carver's was his unit back home. And then here, in the end, Ro and Jesus. It was only 'cause of them that he let me in at all, I reckon, and it took a damn long time 'cause he didn't like me at first. I got under his skin, even when I was trying not to--in fact, more I tried not to, worse I seemed to do it.
"He was worth it though, y'know? Worth the trouble to keep trying."
Maybe some people wouldn't see that the same way he does; maybe there's a lot who wouldn't think Carver worth it at all, who would see the volatility and the traces of what looked simply like madness, the paranoia, the auditory hallucinations, the myriad dysfunctional trauma responses, and simply write him off. That's not what Vrenille saw.
"His world had done horrible, unjust things to him, and he'd done horrible unjust things right back. But he had loyalty and faithfulness and heart. He was true to his people. In spite of everything, no world could take that from him, not the one he left or this one either."
K has never had family, and never been a part of one; he couldn't. He's observed them from the outside but it's a bit like watching birds knowing he'll never have wings, so clearly delineated as something he is inherently excluded from ever knowing.
He still understands what Vrenille is, likely, trying to say now; it's not the point though, Carver and Vrenille's grief is, so K is silent and Vrenille continues.
"Is that how you'll remember him, then?" he asks, more to give him an opportunity to speak on it than because he doesn't know the answer. "How you'd want others to?"
Vrenille gives a small, slow nod, his eyes on the makeshift table where they sat. He would like people to remember Carver for that, yes, and he will remember him that way. He'll remember his love for the son he lost who wasn't his by blood but was his nonetheless. He'll remember the way he sought to honour his people and the sacred way he treated the ones he'd lost, the respect he gave to the truth of grief.
"He said they're heavy, the weight of souls, and I told him how your world denied you had one, but how I knew you did 'cause I feel it when I'm with you...I felt it when you were gone." When K was gone and they knew in his world he died.
"Carver's dead in his world." And of course he doesn't need to spell that out--this place was a second life, an interval, and now he is just dead, and Vrenille feels that weight of his soul, the way his knees want to buckle with it, how he could beat the ground with his fists and scream at how breathtakingly unfair and arbitrary it all is, losing him this way. He could, for all the difference it would make, which is none.
"I wanted to bring him to mine. Wanted to see him have the chance for a life there. In my mind when I'd picture it, he'd be with us. But I never got a chance to ask him, never made the offer. I dunno what he woulda said."
He doesn't actually flinch at the idea that Vrenille was here, assigning him a soul, grieving for him the way he is now for this man who was still largely a mystery to K. This man he wanted to bring home, along with the other people he loves.
Few enough people get a choice, get warning, about losing the people important to them. Here there's an extra degree of cruelty though, in that there's no body to prove finality, no guarantee they won't ever come back. They're just not here now. K remembers Joi's face flickering over his, her eyes terrified and desperate, trying to tell him she loved him before Luv crushed the emanator and she simply blinked out of existence like she never was.
He shakes his head. "Do you know what he'd want you to do now? What the funeral rituals were for his culture?"
"Some," Vrenille says softly. But then again, "Not funerals exactly, but the aftermath. I know a little how he'd honour his own dead--his ghosts." It was always an uneasy haunting for Carver, the spirits of the dead who clustered near and gathered in his corners, full of the recriminations he had for himself but heard in the voices of the people he'd lost--in Pope's voice most of all.
Vrenille had dreamed what Tyrian magic could make of that. He'd told Carver that part: that revenants are people who carry echoes of the great and the terrible dead, that it was how he saw him. He still believes it could have been possible. It wasn't even about the magic--he believed it could be possible, someday, for Carver to find strength in a place that seemed like weakness, that seemed a liability. He never believed he needed to banish his ghosts, only find a way to be more at peace, less tormented by them.
"When someone important was gone he'd say he'd light a candle for them--it was a sorta honour, as I understood it, a respect to those he felt mattered, which wasn't everyone. I'll do that for him now. But the rest...I think that'll be up to Rosita. I'll...have to ask her and Jesus what they want."
And he needs to sort himself out, pull himself together so that he can be there for the two of them--for Jesus, because Rosita asked him to be there for Jesus, and doing that, he thinks, is the first thing he can offer her as well.
K has never had cause to consider with any kind of weight what death must be like - what it could be like. He was never a living thing back home, never had a soul to go on when he didn't. He'd either be destroyed beyond repair and that would be that, or he would be patched, salvaged, repaired and sent back out into the world as the next version of himself.
But others around him have, and he knows the various and sundry mourning rituals are as wide and varied as the belief systems they develop from; he knows that it is, more than anything, down to the individual.
So he nods to agree that he should do that, should light a candle, should honor this ghost of his dead. That he should speak to Rosita, to Jesus; K will need to check in with the latter as well.
But here and now, he steps in front of Vrenille and offers him his hand, palm up, fingers steady. "How can I help?"
Vrenille's fingers are a bit cold when he takes K's hand, his grip curling softly into his palm, letting the warmth of skin shield against the bite in the air.
"You're here. You dunno how much that matters, just that you're here. I dunno what I'd do if you weren't."
With a gentle tug he follows the hook of their hands in so that they're interlinked between them, a little knot of contact pressed between their chests as he tucks his head under K's chin and just soaks in his presence. Utter trust and no hesitation, a feeling of safety and solace, faith.
"Just be here," it's a murmur, small. How K can help, what he can do--not an action or a service, just him, the person who he is, how much he means in Vrenille's life now.
And then, finally, he looks up at him, finding a smile, sad but genuine, as he nods towards the door inside, "And maybe come have a drink? I think I could use a drink."
It's not that K doesn't feel cold; he does. He has before, of course, in a time and place far from this one and yet far too recently to not think of the last time he stood in snow and ached for someone else.
But his hand over Vrenille's is warm, and though he mostly holds compliantly still - mostly lets the other man do whatever he's going to do, exactly as he's going to do it - he's more than content to thread their fingers together just the same. Careful, so careful, and grateful too when he helps reel the other in as he comes.
"I can do that," he agrees, low, shifting ever so slightly to block the slight wind a bit better. He can do that, can be present, can be here, can make it so Vrenille is not alone with this just here, just now. They still have a ways to go with rebuilding all the bridges between them, but there's more than enough for this.
He does not rush him but stands, one arm lifting around him, fingertips brushing slowly, lightly along his back. And when he speaks again, K simply agrees.
"Of course." They can go inside, and have a drink or two or ten, and K will stay here. K will be here, will be himself.
And, because he does have a small inkling of how much it means to Vrenille - because he can search his eyes, his face, and fill out that answer with what he can read as easily as text - he offers, first, a kiss at least twice as sweet as it is tentative.
He's not expecting the kiss. He wouldn't have ever thought to ask for it with things as they are. But it's offered so purely, so genuinely, this moment and act that K is choosing, not out of some obligation or requisite script, but just as a sign of care, of affection.
It's being unnecessary that makes it so special, and Vrenille tilts his head up letting it be slow and tender and almost chaste, this first kiss since K's been back which makes it, in a way, their first kiss all over again--a little love token that makes his smile when they break a touch less sad, a reminder of what life is still here and how to go on living it.
"C'mon," he says without moving away, and portals them inside.
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And then he's here, and Vrenille is alone in a site that's either destroyed or in the middle of being built depending on how one looks at it, and then he's spotted K. Then he's throwing his arms around K, his weight against him, and K shakes his hands out of his pockets to catch him.
This time though, he knows what to do. He catches him, only swaying at all so his landing is soft, and he wraps his arms around him in turn.
"Hey," he offers, low, an acknowledgment and permission and apology.
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It's not that it gives him hope about Carver. It doesn't. He knows better than to try and enter into that kind of calculous. But it does give him comfort of a sort.
This time the tears don't bubble up though. He's almost surprised they don't, that whatever barrier has kept them at bay still holds. The ache of them is there, only knotted up, without the relief of release. Instead he just holds onto K for a long moment before he finally manages back his own small, "Hey."
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That boy hadn't cared that K was a replicant; neither does Vrenille, and grief is grief. Loss is loss. K stands still for the first several moments but by the time Vrenille has hold of himself a bit better, he's moved one hand up to stroke the back of his head fondly, as reassuringly as he can.
"Let's go inside out of the cold. Yeah?" he suggests, but makes no move to pull away until Vrenille does.
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"I wanna remember him here a minute. Was the only time he ever came here. Never when this place was whole. Just that once, and we sat there together."
It sound strange without context, maybe, this grief for someone so rarely in his space, makes it seem--well, he doesn't know how it might seem. But it matters that it's K he's saying this to. He doesn't know anyone else he could tell, no one else in this whole city, so he doesn't mind staying out in the cold a while.
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He knows the name Carver. He can even picture the man, snarling in the cell next to him, feral and armored and locked so deeply inside of himself that he clearly hoped no one would be able to reach him. He knows he's important, and little more, but he does know.
He looks over at the crates. "Why'd he come?" he asks, willing to listen. To remember, too.
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"His contact partner 'd disappeared. Permanent contract. Was a powerful bond--it hit hard."
He makes a small gesture towards the ruins of the house, "All this had just happened, and...you were gone too. Not long, only a few days." Vrenille had still been reeling from it, as much from K's loss as the shock of the quake, the trauma of the two events laminated together in his experience, inextricable even now.
"But he was still here, and I wanted him to know he wasn't alone. I called, didn't really know if he'd accept, but..." He did.
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It had occurred to K on the way over here, very briefly, if anyone had done this for Vrenille when he'd vanished. Who the other man had reached out to then, had asked to just come, to just be here. And maybe that wasn't Carver in the same capacity, but it was in some way, and so he can see some of it now.
He breathes out, breath fogging in the air, and lets his eyes travel around as Vrenille gestures.
"Did it help him, do you think?"
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"We spoke about you," is what he says by way of answer, the best that he can give. "We spoke 'bout Grayson, his old Dominant too. 'Bout ghosts and the dead and what to do with loss." They listened to each other. It had taken a long time for them to figure out how to do that together.
"I didn't know what to do with you being gone any more than he knew what to do with losing Grayson. But together in a way, we could say those things."
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Having someone to listen. It's what he can offer now, as he studies the little impromptu table where the library once was, as he eases them a bit closer to it like they might still be able to hear the conversations of the two men sitting there when it was all fresh.
"I met him, I think. I remember him being around, but I don't remember talking to him at all."
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He moves with K towards the little table, looking at the spot where Carver had sat, thinking of the soft brown of his eyes as they'd looked that day, the evolution from the expression that had been in them the first night they met when Carver had been ready to kill him on sight, thinking of the steps on the journey they'd made together and how much he values each one, hard as they'd sometimes been.
"Their world--his and Jesus' and Rosita's--it's a brutal place. And it hadn't been kind to him. He learned not to be kind back, not to share the kind parts of himself with anyone but his family. He was always looking for the angle, the trick--everyone's an enemy and the enemy's always trying to get you on the ground, and if you let them you deserve what happens to you, so you can't let your guard down, that's an awful sin, and you can't ever ever flinch."
It was something Vrenille had to learn to understand, this position from which Carver encountered the world. He had to find a way to meet him there, even when Carver didn't necessarily want him to do it.
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"That's a hard philosophy to have to live, especially if family isn't in the picture." Duplicity doesn't let it be, from what he's seen. "But he let you in?"
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"Carver's was his unit back home. And then here, in the end, Ro and Jesus. It was only 'cause of them that he let me in at all, I reckon, and it took a damn long time 'cause he didn't like me at first. I got under his skin, even when I was trying not to--in fact, more I tried not to, worse I seemed to do it.
"He was worth it though, y'know? Worth the trouble to keep trying."
Maybe some people wouldn't see that the same way he does; maybe there's a lot who wouldn't think Carver worth it at all, who would see the volatility and the traces of what looked simply like madness, the paranoia, the auditory hallucinations, the myriad dysfunctional trauma responses, and simply write him off. That's not what Vrenille saw.
"His world had done horrible, unjust things to him, and he'd done horrible unjust things right back. But he had loyalty and faithfulness and heart. He was true to his people. In spite of everything, no world could take that from him, not the one he left or this one either."
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He still understands what Vrenille is, likely, trying to say now; it's not the point though, Carver and Vrenille's grief is, so K is silent and Vrenille continues.
"Is that how you'll remember him, then?" he asks, more to give him an opportunity to speak on it than because he doesn't know the answer. "How you'd want others to?"
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"He said they're heavy, the weight of souls, and I told him how your world denied you had one, but how I knew you did 'cause I feel it when I'm with you...I felt it when you were gone." When K was gone and they knew in his world he died.
"Carver's dead in his world." And of course he doesn't need to spell that out--this place was a second life, an interval, and now he is just dead, and Vrenille feels that weight of his soul, the way his knees want to buckle with it, how he could beat the ground with his fists and scream at how breathtakingly unfair and arbitrary it all is, losing him this way. He could, for all the difference it would make, which is none.
"I wanted to bring him to mine. Wanted to see him have the chance for a life there. In my mind when I'd picture it, he'd be with us. But I never got a chance to ask him, never made the offer. I dunno what he woulda said."
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Few enough people get a choice, get warning, about losing the people important to them. Here there's an extra degree of cruelty though, in that there's no body to prove finality, no guarantee they won't ever come back. They're just not here now. K remembers Joi's face flickering over his, her eyes terrified and desperate, trying to tell him she loved him before Luv crushed the emanator and she simply blinked out of existence like she never was.
He shakes his head. "Do you know what he'd want you to do now? What the funeral rituals were for his culture?"
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Vrenille had dreamed what Tyrian magic could make of that. He'd told Carver that part: that revenants are people who carry echoes of the great and the terrible dead, that it was how he saw him. He still believes it could have been possible. It wasn't even about the magic--he believed it could be possible, someday, for Carver to find strength in a place that seemed like weakness, that seemed a liability. He never believed he needed to banish his ghosts, only find a way to be more at peace, less tormented by them.
"When someone important was gone he'd say he'd light a candle for them--it was a sorta honour, as I understood it, a respect to those he felt mattered, which wasn't everyone. I'll do that for him now. But the rest...I think that'll be up to Rosita. I'll...have to ask her and Jesus what they want."
And he needs to sort himself out, pull himself together so that he can be there for the two of them--for Jesus, because Rosita asked him to be there for Jesus, and doing that, he thinks, is the first thing he can offer her as well.
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But others around him have, and he knows the various and sundry mourning rituals are as wide and varied as the belief systems they develop from; he knows that it is, more than anything, down to the individual.
So he nods to agree that he should do that, should light a candle, should honor this ghost of his dead. That he should speak to Rosita, to Jesus; K will need to check in with the latter as well.
But here and now, he steps in front of Vrenille and offers him his hand, palm up, fingers steady. "How can I help?"
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"You're here. You dunno how much that matters, just that you're here. I dunno what I'd do if you weren't."
With a gentle tug he follows the hook of their hands in so that they're interlinked between them, a little knot of contact pressed between their chests as he tucks his head under K's chin and just soaks in his presence. Utter trust and no hesitation, a feeling of safety and solace, faith.
"Just be here," it's a murmur, small. How K can help, what he can do--not an action or a service, just him, the person who he is, how much he means in Vrenille's life now.
And then, finally, he looks up at him, finding a smile, sad but genuine, as he nods towards the door inside, "And maybe come have a drink? I think I could use a drink."
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But his hand over Vrenille's is warm, and though he mostly holds compliantly still - mostly lets the other man do whatever he's going to do, exactly as he's going to do it - he's more than content to thread their fingers together just the same. Careful, so careful, and grateful too when he helps reel the other in as he comes.
"I can do that," he agrees, low, shifting ever so slightly to block the slight wind a bit better. He can do that, can be present, can be here, can make it so Vrenille is not alone with this just here, just now. They still have a ways to go with rebuilding all the bridges between them, but there's more than enough for this.
He does not rush him but stands, one arm lifting around him, fingertips brushing slowly, lightly along his back. And when he speaks again, K simply agrees.
"Of course." They can go inside, and have a drink or two or ten, and K will stay here. K will be here, will be himself.
And, because he does have a small inkling of how much it means to Vrenille - because he can search his eyes, his face, and fill out that answer with what he can read as easily as text - he offers, first, a kiss at least twice as sweet as it is tentative.
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It's being unnecessary that makes it so special, and Vrenille tilts his head up letting it be slow and tender and almost chaste, this first kiss since K's been back which makes it, in a way, their first kiss all over again--a little love token that makes his smile when they break a touch less sad, a reminder of what life is still here and how to go on living it.
"C'mon," he says without moving away, and portals them inside.