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[konstant]

                                                                 

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[hippie_ninja]

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.

[konstant]

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of it but just now he contents himself with this, with tracing something soft and good in his life and finding it not withdrawn from him.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."

[hippie_ninja]

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?"

[konstant]

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.

[hippie_ninja]

"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.

[konstant]

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.

[hippie_ninja]

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?"

[konstant]

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?"

[hippie_ninja]

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."

[konstant]

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?"

[hippie_ninja]

"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.

[konstant]

"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?"

[hippie_ninja]

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."

[konstant]

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?"

[hippie_ninja]

"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."

[konstant]

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."

[hippie_ninja]

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."

[konstant]

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.

[hippie_ninja]

"I'm not alive," he says, and there's a tremor in his hand. He looks up at K, choosing to let himself feel this, too. "What am I now?"

[konstant]

K has made this same assertion multiple times since coming to Duplicity, with mixed results; he doesn't think a single person has understood what it means to him, not really, but he's not surprised. It means that he's watching carefully and he considers, very seriously, his friend's face when he hears that sentence now.

He wipes his other palm down his thigh, drying sweat and some residual thought to rid it of lingering smoke, and holds it out for Jesus's, silently asking permission.

[hippie_ninja]

There is no answer to that question. Even if K had one, he doesn't have the relationship with the dead that Jesus does; his answer won't have the context Jesus needs. He can't bring himself to ask it to Rosita, not after she already had to bury him. His death is a topic they've mutually agreed to box up and move past.

It's what he'll do now that he's said it to K, too.

He grasps K's hand. If he can't pack up the emotions and the steady, invasive fears he has now, he can at least accept some comfort.

"You still haven't eaten," he points out, but he doesn't let go.

[konstant]

But K shakes his head, dismissing any thought of the sandwich, forgotten while he gives his attention to Jesus.

Jesus, whom he lets hang onto him as tightly as he wants to in this moment, using their clasped hands to slowly, carefully, turn Jesus's until the inside of his wrist is facing upward.

"Here," he offers, the fingertips of his other hand tracing along the physical markers until he finds Jesus's pulse nestled against the fine bone of his wrist. He reaches, then, to bring Jesus's hand up to the same place.

[hippie_ninja]

He complies, and he immediately counts the tiny bump of his pulse against his fingertips. He gets to a count of twelve--his breathing just a tiny bit steadier for it--before he looks up at K.

[konstant]

When he sees that Jesus is focused on his pulse, he lifts their other joined hands and, so, so gently, works his own hand free so he can spread Jesus's palm on his own chest. So he can feel his own chest rise and fall with each breath.

He lifts his eyes back to Jesus's, and lets them sit like that for a few cycles of breath.

"Your heart is beating," he offers, quietly. "Your lungs are working. Your skin is warm, your muscles work, and you know yourself. I don't have a philosophical answer, but you were born human. You're alive now. These are facts."

[hippie_ninja]

He is alive. He is, because he's not a walker.

You know yourself.

There is no other phrase that could have landed for him.

He leans against K, just enough his shoulder is against K's chest. His weight is barely there at all; it would hurt to lean too far but he's also not in a place where he can be both mentally sore and physically needy. So this: this is all he can do.