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"You're hurt," K says again, the emphasis gentle, even a bit pained. K is hurting but there's nothing actually wrong with him, and anyway, he's a replicant.

That doesn't mean anything in particular to anyone here, but it means something to K still.

It's that pain in K's voice that stops him. His friends, when they're worried about him and trying to do something nice for him, get angry with him. He's prepared for that. He's wrongfooted by such direct, empathetic kindness.

"I want you to be comfortable, too," he says, a tad helpless about it. If they're going to break the law together--and they've already agreed they will be--he wants to take care of K how he can.

The mattresses in the Down public housing are nothing fancy, well worn and broken in by dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies sleeping in them over the course of their lives.

K is still absolutely sincere when he takes another draw off his cigarette and says, "Gold standard," and smiles, just barely. "We'll switch. Or adjust when we feel different."

He looks at him and gives in. Mostly. "Eat your sandwich. I'm going to make your bed."

If he's worried about K being comfortable he is more than capable of making sure that K's space on the floor is cozy.

He will eat the sandwich; if nothing else, Jesus spent money on it, and someone else brought it here, and K never wastes food. And he doesn't argue the compromise in turn seeing as how they're making one about arrangements.

But he does raise a hand before Jesus starts to move off the bed, offering it palm up, fingers relaxed. He doesn't try to touch Jesus or block him. This is, very much, a question and a tentative offer.

He hesitates, only to look at K and make sure he's reading this offer right, and he slips his palm gently over K's. His fingers don't interlace with his; instead he touches just his fingertips to K's.

K holds steady, waiting, as long as Jesus needs - only moving to tap ash off the cigarette, to hold it out of their way.

The only thing he changes is he closes his thumb, just a bit, up over the edge of Jesus's hand; he smooths it along a short, soft line, just enough pressure to be felt, to feel in turn.

A soft touch, for the harsh ones they've both endured most recently.

If he lets go, he doesn't know when he'll get to have this again, so he stays. It chips away at the wall he's resisting being built up in him. He doesn't want to isolate himself and he doesn't want K to be alone, either, and here they both are, trying to be there for each other.

"Thank you," he murmurs. "For not shooting me."

He's said this to multiple people before, but never to anyone who wasn't a survivor of the same plague.

Whatever else K is feeling - whatever else he's expecting from the solid world around him - there is still a kind of wonder that he's allowed this. That Jesus leaves his hand, trusting, in the hand of something that could crush every bone in it without even trying. The force it would take for K to break any part of a human body is negligible.

He never forgets that, even if the people here don't seem to know it at all. He might have, before now, lifted Jesus's hand to kiss some part of it but just now he contents himself with this, with tracing something soft and good in his life and finding it not withdrawn from him.

"You're welcome."

He takes K's hand gently with his other, and trails his fingers along the lines of his palm, the creases where his fingers bend. "Is this okay?"

K blows smoke out at the wall, takes another lungful to distract himself from the complicated twist that happens somewhere under his skin, but he doesn't resist for even a moment.

He nods, letting his fingertips twitch naturally when Jesus finds a sensitive spot, brow furrowed faintly.

"What are you looking for?" he asks, ever so faintly unsure.

"You're the first person in twelve years who's touched me kindly." In a way that wasn't purely platonic. He's embraced his friends, often was the one initiating affection, was always quick to receive it back. But K broke a very long dry spell.

"I'm just...trying to feel." Period. To keep himself from numbing himself to deal with the last week, the last month, the last decade.

It's an answer that lets K relax again, as much as he can right now; an answer he can trust, one he believes. He might even have gone so far as to hope for it if he'd known it was an option.

Which doesn't mean the first part makes him happy. He rests his hand more heavily in Jesus's. "I want to help." Which isn't what he means, not really - or rather isn't what he really wants to say to that: "Choosing to feel is the harder option."

And he's glad Jesus is choosing that one.

It is. And right now, for reasons he can't understand, it's harder than he would have thought. He's survived so much worse than this stay in the Zoo.

"I've been having strange dreams since I came to the City," he says slowly, feeling it out as he says it, not certain he wants to bring this up at all. "Have you?"

No one newly arrived to the city has an easy time of it and K would never compare his arrival to anyone else's - but it's true he hasn't been very stable since they met. He thinks about it, reaching over to put out his cigarette when he catches sight of the hesitation in Jesus so he can pay better attention.

"Since coming here? No." The last week or so yes but not the first few months necessarily. "Strange how?"

Edited 2022-08-10 00:28 (UTC)

He exhales slowly. His fingers curl against K's palm, flex again so their fingertips press gently together.

"I dream this place and my home city are the same place. Certain cafes from here, some buildings from there. And everyone is dead. You're all walkers, except you just live your lives. I ride the bus, I buy a bagel, everything is normal except everyone is rotting. Sometimes I know I have to put you all down, so I'll talk for a while--we talk about the weather, or weekend plans. And then I put everyone down, one by one. No one ever reacts to me killing everyone I talk to, so I keep going. Then I just wake up."

It is, of course, horrifying. But that's not the word that Jesus used when he asked about them, he just said strange. K remembers their earliest conversations, the once or twice Jesus mentioned the walkers before, mentioned having to put them down and that everyone is infected.

It would be a stretch to say it makes sense when considered together, but he can at least see how a sleeping mind would make the jump. He watches, hand trusting between Jesus's, attentive for the most easily missed cue.

"And the dreams are new? Do they already mean anything to you?"

"I had some like it when I first joined a community. Those were more violent." These, by comparison, are almost peaceful. Unsettling instead of something that makes his heart beat so loudly it wakes him up.

"But I wake up sometimes and I can't remember who's already dead. So when you didn't answer, I thought...." Well. He broke into the apartment. It's clear what he'd thought.

"I'm sorry." He doesn't know for sure what happened to him, he doesn't know how long he laid in the bathroom before Orla found him or here in the dark before Jesus came in, but he might have tried harder to figure it out. Either way, he didn't want anyone - Jesus - to worry.

"How often are you having them?"

He shakes his head; it's fine, he didn't want to make K feel bad, he just wanted him to know that Jesus isn't usually so willing to break into his friends' homes.

"Whenever I sleep. It used to be more sporadic, but the second night in the Zoo set them off."

It hadn't occurred to K to be upset about it; he's never had a home, especially not one that was ever barred to someone else to come into on a whim.

But his focus is entirely on Jesus now.

"When was the last time you were able to sleep?"

"Last night." At Rosita's he'd been able to doze off fast. "But I didn't in the Zoo."

It was a very long week, but he knows how to handle that. He knows how to steal ten or twenty minute naps, he knows how to wake up clearly alert. It still took a toll.

"I've had nightmares for years," he says, meaning this to be comforting, because he doesn't want to worry K, either. "They can be useful. Sometimes you can figure out a blindspot by what your subconscious mind fixes on."

It's debatable, anyway. Most people disagree with him about it. "They've just been the same nightmares for so long that having them change is throwing me off. That's all."

In his downtime, with how quickly he reads and how much he likes to learn about people, K has picked up a lot of random bits and pieces of knowledge. Dreams are not one of them other than being aware of them, other than knowing it's widely accepted that they are both the mind processing and possibly messages of one kind or another. K doesn't even know if the dreams he has feel like the dreams humans have.

He knows that Jesus is trying to convince him of something that is normal for him, and K lets him try, as vigilant as he can be right now.

"Lack of sleep combined with stress can cause significant cognitive changes," K answers, slowly. "You don't need to downplay the importance of it with me. It's human."

It is. It's just that it's such a universal problem where he's from that he doesn't know how to talk about it anymore, even though he wants to explain.

But something in that statement makes him blanche a little and he's looking at their hands again instead of at K. "I'm not sure I am human anymore."

K hasn't been restless or loud, but he sees Jesus's reaction and goes a bit more still, a bit more focused. It's a statement that perhaps means a bit more to K, from Jesus, than it might otherwise.

"Jesus?" he asks, quietly.

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