. .. IC Contact | Duplicity .. .

[konstant]

                                                                 

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[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.