. .. IC Contact | Duplicity .. .

[konstant]

                                                                 

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[konstant]

[There's a light on by the time K is opening the door for Vrenille, at least.
K can see just fine without it, but he knows how it looks, and anyway Vrenille will probably need it so he turns on one low lamp in the corner and pours a few drinks while he waits. Waiting is always hardest.

He was always good at waiting.

K is also holding what is both very obviously a puppy still and on her way to becoming quite a sturdy, large adult pit bull, solid, rich butterscotch in color; he has her over one arm like she's still only weeks old, held to his chest so that when she starts wiggling excitedly upon seeing the newcomer, he can steady them both.

She lets out a soft whuff of sound that gathers in the next one to slightly louder, but he murmurs to her and strokes between her ears and she doesn't bark again, only wiggles harder.]

This is Mango. If you pet her a few times, I can put her away with a toy and she won't make the neighbors hate me.

[It's hit or miss sometimes, she's still a puppy, but he's confident he can keep her quiet anyway. Nibbles has already moved to the bed.]

[cryfrustration]

The first thing Vrenille wants to do when he gets through the door is throw his arms around K's neck and hug him.

There's a puppy in the way though, and he can absolutely tell by all the wriggling, that there's going to be no settling down without a greeting. So he dutifully presents his hand for sniffing, licking, nibbling, or the overeager combination of all three that one sometimes gets with puppies.

"Mango," he repeats the name first to smile at K for how adorable that is before greeting the dog herself. "Hi, Mango." He rubs her chin and one floppy ear, hopefully offering what counts as a satisfactory puppy greeting. His experience with animals has never extended to being a natural with them, but it's not at all lost on him how important these companions K is accumulating seem to be for him, and that matters to him a great deal.

"Hard to imagine you not getting on with your neighbours." K is so polite and respectful of people. But then he's also the single submissive who lives next door, and sometimes people will use any petty excuse to complain.

[konstant]

"I never have," he admits, and he smiles when he does but it's neither happy nor reaches his eyes. "At least the ones here don't write things on my door."

Mango is all too happy to make a new friend, pawing the air as if she can paddle closer to Vrenille, tail wagging furiously when it's not caught against K's chest or side. K lets her for a minute or two, and then murmurs quietly, "That's enough." It doesn't cut things off, per se, but when he steps back and moves to put Mango down inside her crate, she doesn't whine or bark. He hands her a chew toy and closes the door, and even though she still stands and stares expectantly between the two men, tail still going, she does settle down to it a few minutes later. She doesn't bark.

K brushes hair off his shirt, glancing back up at Vrenille uncertainly, then away. The animals make for good conversation starters, or buffers; he's not evasive enough just now to try to keep Mango out as a permanent distraction, but it's also true he isn't quite sure what to do now.

"There's um. Drinks there," he finally lands on, nodding at the counter where indeed there are drinks, but he's pulling his cigarette tin out of his pocket again.

[cryfrustration]

While the puppy remains a factor, Vrenille rubs absently behind her ears and strokes along the top of her head. It's just what seems necessary though, a basic level of placation. He's thinking about the apartment he saw in K's memories, the ways people in his world spoke to him, the counterpoints with this one.

It shouldn't be difficult to score a mark on the plus side when the bar is literally on the floor like it has been in so many of K's past experiences, and yet somehow, things in this city seem to keep kicking him while he's down.

"I got you two," he says, pulling twin packs of cigarettes out of a jacket pocket and setting them down for K.

And then he takes the liberty of pouring a drink for them both, selecting something from the available bottles, opting for whatever looks hard but smooth, or at least as smooth as possible. (He and Hakkyuu drink whiskey when they want to drink something strong, so if that's an option, he'll choose it now.) He waits until K's lit his next cigarette before passing him a glass.

"You said you're not angry," his eyes are worried. Maybe K will just tell him he doesn't want to talk about this, maybe it won't do any good...but maybe it will do, maybe talking it through will help a little. "What are you feeling?"

[konstant]

The request shouldn't have been so poignant; the fact that Vrenille actually did it shouldn't be, either, both for its simplicity and for the fact it's Vrenille and yet he blinks a moment when he sees the packs. Two, even. He swallows subtly, and nods.

"Thank you," he offers, quiet, touched as he takes them. He brings them with him over to the couch so he can work on transferring them to his tin - where he's obviously been sitting either often or for a long time, judging by the state of the ashtray. This is where his lighter is, too, so he just stays there while Vrenille brings over, yes, whiskey. He nods again, but sets the glass down on the coffee table for now, focused more on taking long drag off the cigarette while he doesn't answer and doesn't answer and doesn't answer.

What is he feeling? "Not angry with Jesus, I guess," he finally settles on, sighing out smoke. "He was doing what he thought he had to do." It's not for him to say what someone else should and shouldn't do, not for him to decide what's a valid reason and what's not. "But - this keeps happening, and I keep saying I'm afraid of it happening, and I keep being promised it won't. And then it does. But I'm the one who doesn't understand how things are?"

[cryfrustration]

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.

[konstant]

Here he is, still hurt nonetheless. K turns the cigarette between his fingertips, studying it. It does help, a little, to receive that acknowledgement even if he wonders then at the way some instinct in him, some reflex, rears up immediately to absolve the humans around him from any fault. Is that him? Is that how he feels? Or is it the programming, keeping humans safe from him and what he might do if he did blame them?

He doesn't look up, and only barely manages not to say it, not right now.

"When I was in jail over my first deadline," he says instead, "V begged me to sign with him, for three days straight. Give him this chance. Let him help, it could be different than what I thought, we could make it something else together. He was from a nomad culture, and I think it actually hurt him to see me confined even though the only part I minded was the guards, and even they were... predictable." He draws a lungful of smoke, holds it.

Lets it out slowly while he speaks. "I went in, then, knowing that the city would be forced to do something with me eventually. Assign me to someone - like they did, after he was gone. Inject me with something to take away my choice, like they did when I missed quota. Or just get rid of me. I knew that. I accepted it. I watched it done in Los Angeles, with the rebel replicants we did manage to bring in alive. But V begged me, and it was hurting him, hurting Jesus, hurting you and Sara. So I tried." Here, finally, gently as though it has sharp edges that cut under too much pressure, as if it's something lodged so deep that any movement aches: "He didn't want to go, not for a moment, but V is still gone. There's no together with only one."

[cryfrustration]

"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?"

[konstant]

He lets that empathy sit for a moment, lets himself feel it. He still misses V but Jesus was the only other person K knows who knew him, and they didn't talk much about him then, and still don't. Jesus likes to keep his grief private, likes to move on and not focus on it, and K understands.

But V was so effortlessly, completely, transparently friendly with him at a time when K was only just learning that was even possible; he was so immediately enraged and protective on his behalf at any slight. He was warm, and he was loyal, and his smile and his laugh were infectious and he was the type of person it was just easy to be around, and K misses him.

He glances over at Nibbles, the cat he inherited when V went home; he watches him for a time, listening to Vrenille, considering his question. Considers lying, now that it's a thing he can do; others might like it better if he did, but he rubs one thumb with the other and says, "Yes." It means so much that there's anyone at all, now, that wants him to feel happy, but sometimes he feels like that comes at the expense of the reality of the situation they're in.

Things don't necessarily have to be a certain way, but here, frequently they are.

"I don't regret helping him, because he did need someone to sign or he would have ended up in jail himself. But sometimes I really, really wish he would have spent that effort on someone else and left me there. I don't regret the extra time with Jesus, or getting to live here, but -" He looks around then at this apartment that is, by Los Angeles standards, unimaginably luxurious, that feels like he's not really supposed to be here.

"At least in Los Angeles, I knew what to expect and so did everyone else. When I knew I wasn't going to survive, I accepted it. It was peaceful at the end, and somehow in spite of everything, I knew I wasn't going to hurt anymore. It's hard not to want that."

[cryfrustration]

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."

[konstant]

Anything real should be a mess. K's surprised to hear words he still holds up to himself sometimes, clear as day in the voice he first heard them in, coming from Vrenille now. And he knows that. He does.

He flicks ash from his cigarette, watches it burn down to the filter, and rolls it out in the accumulating pile before immediately pulling another.

"It's not love that's the problem," he says, rolling the new cylinder between his fingers, wondering at the sudden tightness in his throat. He swallows past it like he always does, because the fact of it is not the wonder - rather, it's which point has hit deep enough to bring it back this time. "I understand that. I see it. Or if I don't, it's not like... I can expect more from myself. From anyone else."

He has a lot of grace to give for love, which means a lot to him, which is new and varied and provable and so very human and yet. And yet.

He flicks the lighter, closes it again. Flicks it, closes it, fidgeting with it in his hands but finally lighting the new cigarette with a sigh.

"I don't know, Vrenille. I'm tired." Not defiant, but with that same deep-cutting loneliness as before.

[cryfrustration]

"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.

CW: passive suicidal ideation

[konstant]

It is a big ask. It would be a big ask at any time, with K's conditioning to be cautious of being asked about such things as preferences, as wants, as hopes, as dreams. To come up with an answer that is believable and human, but not too human. Unique, but not too special.

He misses his life in Los Angeles. There are wonders here, yes, and he will never, ever take that for granted, so perhaps it's how he's programmed or perhaps it's what he learned but it doesn't really matter because it's what he feels regardless. He misses his home, and his absolutes, and his clearcut track of what to do, how, when.

Except that's just nostalgia, isn't it? None of it was clearcut and he knew that by the end. Nothing turned out to be the way he'd always believed it to be, the way he'd been told it must be. He was no one - a rare replicant, yes, an expensive one, but still a replicant - and then he was someone's son, wanted, loved, and then he was even less than no one. Officer KD6-3.7, welcome beside no one, no past, no future, nothing.

Christ, why couldn't he have just stayed there on the steps in the snow, bleeding out, ready, done? He closes his eyes, and takes another long draw off his cigarette, wishing he had an answer but he doesn't.

He doesn't have one, so what he murmurs is low and to himself - "A blood black nothingness began to spin." - and lets it seem like calm.

[cryfrustration]

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."

[konstant]

K hates the script. Words rubbed in his face, dangled before him like a piece of bread before a starving man but that the price for reaching for is death. Words he had to learn the meaning of - not just the definition but the real, weighted, visceral meaning of - so he could say over and over and over again no, I do not have this. No, I do not want this. There is no soft animal in this body to love what it loves.

K needs the script. It is the constellation of who he is, a smattering of data points connected dot to dot to dot that when stepped back and viewed as a whole reveals him. A sounding board, the limits of sonar, the pieces of him they expect to find if they read between the lines long enough, hard enough, no more and no less.

K loves the script. It ends on hope, and maybe they programmed him to feel that way but he still feels that way, still thinks of it like others think of a middle name: something they don't reveal to just anyone for any reason, that exists nonetheless, fleshing out in a measurable way who he is. What he is.

He has never heard a human echo his lines back to him. The words were programmed into him from the beginning, and the only pieces of it the humans ever bother with are the prompts, directing him to which stanzas and lines he's to present today, which desert to walk on his knees repenting. It surprises him, and he looks across at Vrenille, studies him like he hasn't since he came in, the calculating, searching gaze that more than half of the sixty-three replicants he retired over the course of his activation saw from him.

And then, he nods. Then, he takes another draw on the cigarette in his hand, lets it out, and slouches down on the couch until his knee falling wide leans against Vrenille's and his neck is stable on the back cushion. Then, he closes his eyes and breathes.