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It’s nice, K thinks as the cold flakes softly touch his face. He’s only ever seen snow when he came to visit Dr. Stelline first
(he’s not calling her Ana, he’s not)
and he didn’t take time to appreciate that, nor paid it too much attention.
He can afford to, now. He doesn’t particularly mind the cold, and there’s something almost gentle in the way those flakes are caressing his face as they fall.
Too bad that in a short while that snow might turn red, but he doubts he’ll be there to see it, anyway. Not that it’s important.
Dying for the cause is the most humane thing you can do.
Well, he is doing it now, isn’t he? Being human definitely takes a whole shitload of suffering, K thinks, but right now it’s bearable, and for a fleeting moment he thinks, is this how it feels to have a soul, because even if he’s bleeding out and he’ll probably be dead sooner rather than later (there’s a limit to how more human than human his kind gets) he’s feeling like at least he did it right. Didn’t he?
He breathes in the freezing cold air
(will the cold slow down the bleeding? he ponders inconsequently)
and he thinks, what if I do have a soul, where does it go?
He wonders if there’s some God of biomechanics somewhere. He thinks, will Joi be there, or at least his Joi, not her infinite replications that made other men in the world somewhat less lonely.
Or maybe there’ll be nothing. That would be fine, too – after all, he was nothing before he was put into the world with his
(her)
implants, so it’s fitting he’d be nothing after, and at least he’d have gone doing the right thing, wouldn’t he –
That is, until someone grabs him by the shoulders and forces him into a sitting position and he groans out loud because shit that hurt, damn –
“And were you going to say anything about this?”
Right. That’d be Deckard. Looking at his wound like he’s not approving of K’s life choices, not at all, and for a moment he wants to ask why would he even care, but then he’s being dragged to his feet and thrown in the car’s backseat.
“What –” He croaks, suddenly feeling out of place. He had been so ready to just end it that he can’t compute the fact that Deckard is not inside the facility but rather here, because it makes no sense, he shouldn’t be –
“I’m okay my ass,” Deckard sighs as he moves next to him. Is he holding a first aid kit in his hands?
How much time has it passed?
“An hour,” Deckard snorts, and shit, did he talk out loud? He probably did. “Good thing your generation is made to last, if you had been a six you’d have been dead by now. Probably.”
“Shouldn’t you be with –”
“We talked, and she asked me who brought me here, and I told her you were outside, and she told me you already came to see her, and she said she wanted to talk to you, and then I came to get you and noticed you were fucking bleeding out on the stairs. Don’t move, I have to take the bullet out.”
K doesn’t move.
He doesn’t even think he has the strength to – he lets Deckard do his job and patch him up, and he shivers as Deckard pulls down his ruined sweater to cover the red-stained bandage.
For a moment, neither of them says a thing.
Then –
“Lie down, I’m driving.”
“What –”
“I’ll come back,” Deckard says, “of course I will, but I’m supposed to be dead, no one should find me here and I certainly don’t want anyone assuming she is my daughter now, do I? Catch some rest.”
K would like to protest, but he is tired, and so he does, and when he wakes up, a long time later, he realizes that Deckard threw his jacket over him.
They’re still driving.
The jacket is hiding most of his face.
He buries his face in it, pressing it against the seat, and breathes – it smells of seawater, of course it does, and maybe something else very faint that he can’t put a name to, but it’s nice, and it’s warming him up, so –
He goes back to sleep.
--
He wakes up on a bed, which is not what he had expected.
He can also hear waves from outside the window of the small room he’s in, which he supposed means they’re somewhere near the sea. Deckard is standing at the door, looking like he needs some more fucking sleep.
“Where are we?” K groans, not even trying to sit up.
“Salinas. Or, what used to be Salinas, I guess,” Deckard says.
Salinas – oh. Yes, it’s near the sea, but he didn’t even know people still lived there.
“That’s why we’re here.” Oh, he spoke again without realizing it? “Because no one lives in the area and it’s not too far from Ana,” Deckard goes on. “Nowhere near as nice as it was a long time ago, I guess, but beggars can’t be choosers. How are you feeling?”
“I’m –”
“Don’t say you’re okay because I’m not gonna believe you.”
“… I could be worse,” he settles on, not really knowing what to do with someone who apparently cares about how he’s doing and is not Joi.
Shit, he does miss Joi the way he’d miss a fucking limb, except that there’s nothing to do now, is it?
“I’ll take that,” Deckard sighs, and leaves the room to come back a moment later with a plate and a glass.
He expects some of those protein-filled worms, but no, it’s instant ramen that might have come off a pre-Blackout package, for all he knows.
“People haven’t lived here in years,” Deckard says, “and that shit doesn’t expire. There’s water in that glass. Take your time.”
He leaves, closing the door softly behind him.
K. eats – he hadn’t realized how hungry he had been until this very moment, and old or pre-heated, ramen tastes delicious in comparison to the protein worms.
--
There are clean clothes on the chair next to his bed. He wears them when he can find the force of will to stand up – they fit, anyhow – and walks into the next room over, after looking through the window. He can only see a large expanse of gray sea – it’s raining, not that he had a doubt whatsoever about it.
He leaves the room and moves over to the next one. It’s a small living room, with a fake fireplace that has to belong to a time way before the Blackout, a sofa and a couple armchairs. It would have been cozy, in another world.
Deckard isn’t there, but K. can hear noise from a door on his right – he pushes it open and walks into a small hallway. There’s a kitchen in front of him, and another couple doors on the left – probably a bathroom and another bedroom. Deckard’s in the kitchen, making some more instant ramen.
“Ah, you’re up,” he says, sounding maybe halfway glad to see that K indeed is.
K isn’t too sure of that, maybe he’s misunderstanding things, but he’s definitely not unhappy.
“Some more ramen?”
He can go on without eating longer than an average human so in theory he doesn’t need it, but he takes it anyway, trying to not think too much about why his stomach had about flipped on itself at the offer.
“Thanks,” he finally says, after two bites of it.
“Given that you saved my damned hide, that’d be the least,” Deckard mutters. “Go sit down, you don’t have to eat that standing.”
K goes back to the living room and sits down.
It tastes better than the previous bowl did, he thinks.
Or maybe it just tastes better than protein bombs that aren’t supposed to have that much of a flavor whatsoever.
--
“Are you sure no one’s after us?” K asks Deckard later, when he comes in with a bowl of ramen for himself.
“Yes,” Deckard says dryly. “No one’s been here in this town for half a century at least. It sure as hell became deserted before Vegas did. Sure, could be prettier, but I’m sure no one’s going to get here for a long while. And I chucked off your old clothes a long way from here, if someone tracked you.”
K nods, looking down at his hands. His side hurts, but he says nothing – it’s enough that he’s alive in the first place and patience if it hurts some.
Deckard starts eating. K keeps on saying nothing.
Then –
“Did you give yourself that name?”
“What? Joe?”
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “My – my AI did,” he blurts, fully realizing how pathetic that sounds.
“Your AI?”
He shrugs. “Wallace doesn’t only build androids. He sells – this very advanced kind of. I’ve had her for a while and – well. All of them eventually – become something depending on the owner, I guess. She – I had bought an adapter. So I could bring her outside the house. I had to delete her from the main memory – she asked me to. So they couldn’t find out anything about me from her.”
“And what happened to her?”
“Luv destroyed her in Vegas,” K says, miraculously managing to keep his voice straight.
“And what was her name?”
K laughs. It sounds very bitter. “Joi,” he says. “All of them are named Joi. But she was mine, you know?”
“I think I do,” Deckard says, not munching on his ramen anymore.
“She – she thought I had to be more than a serial number and that she knew it, and – she came up with it.”
He knows Deckard is being courteous and not saying or concluding out loud, do you realize it’s the male version of her own name. He knows that.
He does.
That’s why he hasn’t really felt it enough until now. He wants to, gods he wants to, but it just sounds fake. Fake like his implants and like his memories, isn’t it?
“Sorry to hear she’s dead,” Deckard says instead.
“Thank you,” K replies, meaning it entirely.
Not that he could have buried her, he thinks sadly, but what’s not sad in this entire blasted situation?
--
“Here.”
He should probably be thankful for his extremely good reflexes since he catches the extra-heavy book Deckard is throwing his way rather than let that hit him in the head, which might’ve been painful, all things considered.
“You said you read,” Deckard says. “Did you ever stumble across that one?”
K grabs it and turns it over in his hands.
The cover reads John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
“No,” he replies truthfully. He’s read a lot, indeed, not much to do with his free time before he got Joi after all.
“Then have a go at it. I think you might like it,” Deckard huffs, shrugging and heading back to the kitchen grumbling about finding something to eat other than instant ramen.
K has nothing better to do and was currently sitting on the sofa staring down at his hands, so he bends his knees, bringing them upwards so he can sit more comfortably, moves his weight down to the side, against the armrest. There’s no plot description on the back, the entire thing is a hardback whose external cover has been torn off way before books could only be read digitally.
He opens the book on the first page. There’s a dedication. He reads it.
“Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.”
For a moment, K wants to stand up and ask Deckard if this is a fucking practical joke. Carving some little figure out of wood. This Pat was obviously the author’s son, he had to be, so why would he –
But Deckard is the reason why he hasn’t bled out on the steps, and he’s admittedly here rather than there, and why would he give this to him just to fuck with his head?
“I’m going out,” Deckard tells him a moment later, and if he saw that he’s having a bit of internal turmoil, he’s not giving it out. “I need to see if there’s something around that’s not ramen. And – I might go back to the lab again. It’s not far. If you want to eat there’s food in the fridge, you can have it.”
“All – all right,” K replies quietly, and Deckard leaves, closing the door softly behind him.
Well then.
He has nothing better to do, does he?
He turns the page to part one, chapter one.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.
Oh, he thinks.
It’s about where they’re living, isn’t it?
--
Salinas, K decides a while in, had to be a lot prettier pre-Blackout and pre-Tyrell and pre-everything.
From what he’s seen, there are no grasses or secret flowers or birds awakened in summer or foothills you might wanna climb into – if he looks from the window, he just sees either dark gray mountains without one tree that’s not dead and gone or that sea which is as gray as the sky above them rather than blue. There’s no streams or animals.
There’s really nothing out of everything that once used to be – no fertile soil with flowers in bloom for sure – but it does sound like a lovely place.
He reads enough chapters to understand who is this book about and more or less what’s going to happen at least in part one, and then he realizes he’s tired, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been or how much time it’s passed since Deckard left, and he figures he can just sleep for a few minutes and go on later.
He lies down and puts his head on the sofa’s armrest, his legs curling slightly against the back of the sofa because it’s a bit cold, and he closes his eyes.
He wakes up from a lovely dream where he’s walking in the middle of a field of golden poppies which look suspiciously like that flower he picked under Sapper Morton’s dead tree, and he realizes there’s a blanket thrown over him and that there’s noise coming from the kitchen.
He could stand up, but for once he’s not cold and the sofa is comfortable, so he goes back to sleep and doesn’t dream anything at all.
--
He reads on, after he wakes up and eats the last of the ramen, insisting that Deckard should get whatever else he found when he was out hunting for food. He would like to ask Deckard if there’s a point in making him read something that’s obviously about siblings and their very complicated relationships, but other than that, that book is engrossing and he’s actually interested in where it’s leading, and so he goes on to chapter eleven.
Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred, the beginning reads.
He has to stop for a moment.
He thinks, does she know? Would she agree? Would she feel any warmth for him, if she knew?
(He’s certainly not perfect. That’s not even up for questioning, as much as Joi would have.)
He could ask Deckard.
He doesn’t, and he reads on.
--
It’s not like he has much better to do.
He spends three days either reading or sleeping or eating or having conversations with Deckard in which it’s obvious that Deckard wants to say something else entirely to him but hasn’t quite decided what and how to phrase it, and when he always wakes up to find an extra blanket thrown over him or food on the nightstand or a note saying I’m at the lab or try the instant mac and cheese if you dare.
(He dares. He can’t die of food poisoning, after all.)
He wonders, was there a point in giving me this?
He thinks there was.
Maybe he just has to go on further, and if the more he goes on the more, in certain parts, his fingers might shake more than just a tiny bit, no one’s there to see it, right?
--
(He’s somewhat halfway through the first time he realized he was crying as he was reading the damned thing.
Timshel — Thou mayest — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if Thou mayest — it is also true that Thou mayest not... makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth ... he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing — maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed — because Thou mayest.
He thought, maybe that’s it, maybe dying for the right cause is not the most human thing you can do but choosing to do it is what differentiates the entire thing, or isn’t it? And maybe if one may, maybe that – maybe that’s enough to give them a soul, might it?
Lieutenant Joshi told him he was getting along fine without one and K knows she liked him, as much as a human can like a replicant under their orders anyway.
But –
Would it have been so bad to want one?
And – if that reasoning is right, would that mean he has one, beyond biomechanics and questions without answers and that it makes him more than a skin job who spent a few days dreaming he might have been different instead, and that –
That he might have a soul that’s a lovely and unique thing and that can’t be taken from him because he may have a choice and he took it?
He kind of wants to ask Deckard.
Maybe he will after he’s finished.)
--
“What’s wrong?”
Good question.
K just slams the book on the table in between the two of them, letting Deckard see what he had been reading that has sent more than a few stray tears falling from his eyes.
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
“Oh,” Deckard says, “you got there fast.”
“I’ve got nothin’ better to do,” K manages to say without sounding utterly pathetic. “Is that what you wanted me to read?”
“Part of it. There was a lot that I’d like for you to read and you’re not done yet.” Why does the bastard have to be this damned cryptic?
“Excellent,” K says, “now I know I’m in for further embarrassment. This makes no bloody sense –”
“You’re crying about a book line stating that every man wants to die loved, it makes a hell of a bloody sense if one knows anything about your life story.”
“I don’t think Freysa agrees too much,” K blurts, and then thinks where the fuck did that come from, shit now I sound like some whiny pathetic –
“Freysa did what,” Deckard interrupts.
“Well, uh, I had – assumed. You know. Because of the memories. She – could have let me down more nicely, I suppose.”
“On one side I’d like for you to elaborate, on the other I know her well enough and I know she – has set priorities.”
“As in?”
“That none of us is as important as Ana, which I understand from her point of view, but never mind her. Those memories did fuck with you, and admittedly the last time we saw each other I told her that I very well hoped that no one would ever come searching for either her and whoever ended up having to be her decoy, but that obviously did not happen. Anyhow, if you had died, it wouldn’t have been a cold horror, but I think you need to finish it.”
“Does it get worse or what?”
“Depends on how you see it,” Deckard replies, always goddamned cryptically.
“That answered exactly fucking nothing.”
Deckard laughs at that.
“K, let’s just say that in this picture Freysa would consider Ana an Abel or Aron or what have you, but do you think that book’s meant to sympathize only with the Abels of the situation? Think about it.”
--
No, K thinks later as he takes back the book and moves on. No, because all the Cains in this thing are deeply flawed people or deeply unlucky people who are shown trying their best, not being considered – wrong, he supposes.
He’s honestly relieved, because every way you spin that story, if you apply it to them, he certainly wouldn’t be the good one.
Even though he tried.
Oh, he tried.
--
It gets worse.
Then slightly better. Then K has no idea where this whole plot is heading anymore.
And then –
Lee started to speak and choked and then what he wanted to say seemed good to say—to say carefully. He hovered over her. “You know, I haven’t wished for many things in my life,” he began. “I learned very early not to wish for things. Wishing just brought earned disappointment.”
Abra said gaily, “But you wish for something now. What is it?”
He blurted out, “I wish you were my daughter—” He was shocked at himself. He went to the stove and turned out the gas under the teakettle, then lighted it again.
She said softly, “I wish you were my father.”
He glanced quickly at her and away. “You do?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
He holds his breath as his eyes go over that part, over and over and over, and then he moves onwards with his fingers wildly shaking as Lee gives Abra his mother’s only ornament, but then –
Then –
“No. I guess not. Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good.”
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?”
“I guess so. Maybe that’s it.”
He doesn’t even try to keep a handle on his dignity and bursts out in tears the moment he reads that –
(now you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good, is that it?)
And he kind of hopes that Deckard’s out somewhere because he hadn’t heard him before and this is way too embarrassing, and he shouldn’t, this is not supposed to happen to him, this is not –
“I see you got there,” Deckard says, and K tries immediately to wipe at his eyes with his sleeve but it’s really not working.
“Was this the point?” He sobs.
“Almost entirely,” Deckard agrees, “but before you get to the end, I think there are a few things I should tell you and a few things you should have.”
“What – what should I have?”
“Well, look up first.”
K wipes at his eyes again and then does, and –
Deckard is handing him a wooden box?
“What –”
“There are still some trees around here. No one would know. I took the liberty of going for it. Now, I’d like you to take this, finish, it’s not long left, and then come find me in the next room over.”
“But –”
“Do it,” Deckard says, and then he stands up and leaves, closing the door softly behind him.
K takes a deep breath and thinks, should I finish or open that first, and decides he’s going to finish.
Might as well do it at once.
He picks the book back up.
He turns the page.
--
He closes the book, the backside of the cover landing on the last page with a soft noise.
He thinks he understood the point, but he’s not quite sure he wants to believe it. He takes the box – his fingers are shaking so hard he almost drops it.
He doesn’t know if he’s surprised to see the wooden horse inside it.
He shuts it closed, breathing in and wondering if he was ever built for handling these many feelings at once, and maybe that’s being human too, or isn’t it?
He stands up, his wound suddenly aching all over again.
He thinks, do I want to believe this means what everything suggests it means?
--
Thing is – he did it once. He doesn’t want to do it again if it means being told no all over, but Deckard, for how much he’s a hard man, is not a cruel one, or so it doesn’t look like.
He wouldn’t. He saved K’s life, hasn’t he?
He walks towards Deckard’s room, the box still held in his hands.
He knocks.
“Come in,” Deckard says. He’s standing at his own window, looking at the sea. It’s not raining today, but it’s still gray. Deckard’s room is about the same size as K’s, with the same furniture and the same exposition, except that he has a pile of books on the nightstand and an empty glass of whiskey on the side.
“I finished it,” K says quietly. “And – I – why?”
“Believe it or not, she insisted. I had in mind to give it back to you anyway when I went in, but I showed it to her when we talked the first time. I asked her if she wanted it and she said that it belonged more to you than to her, and it would have been pure cruelty on her side to keep it.”
He grips the box tighter.
“Oh. I – if she wanted it –”
“She said she didn’t. And anyhow, she was right. You didn’t ask to be put through all that shit and honestly, you went and found it. It should be yours, so – it is.”
“Thank you,” he replies, not even able to come up with more than that. Fuck, it’s not as if he ever owned anything besides Joi, if she ever was his in the first place and not Wallace’s creation first, as pathetic as it sounds.
Deckard stands up, taking a breath. “Ah, and that’s your box.”
He can’t not know what he’s saying, K thinks, still staring at Deckard in utter disbelief.
“You don’t mean –”
“Let me tell you something,” Deckard says. “I said, sometimes the best you can do for those you love is keep yourself away from them. Do you know how badly I missed them? Rachel and the baby, whoever and wherever she was. I did it for the greater good, but I’d have given a limb to live in a world where I didn’t have to do it. You understand me?”
“I do,” he says, thinking about how beautiful it would have been to live in a world where he wasn’t just a mechanical cog in some larger mechanical machine who couldn’t find a shred of happiness anywhere except in another mechanical cog who was the only entity that’s ever loved him even if she might not have been real.
(I want to be real for you, she had said.
You were already real enough, he never could tell her.)
“They put her memories in you,” Deckard goes on. “That – that might not make you part of her or whatever, because you’re your own damned person, and it might have been necessary to cover their tracks, but it still wasn’t right. What did Freysa tell you, honestly?”
K puts the box on the nearest nightstand, on top of the book pile. “That – when she realized I thought, well, that I was – that I was, I don’t really remember it word for word, but the gist was that if I thought I was special I really wasn’t and all of them, us, would have wanted to be special like Ana. That was also when she said that since I led Wallace to you then I should have killed you, too, just so they wouldn’t manage to trace the steps back to Ana, but I guess I really wasn’t that good at following orders in the end.”
“I’m not telling you it was a bad thing, since I’d be fucking drowned otherwise,” Deckard sighs. “Seems a bit rude of me that the first thing I did when we met was punching the shit out of you.”
“Given how many old generation models I retired, maybe it was their late reward.”
“Come on, as if you don’t know how many I retired and how much I wish I hadn’t. It’s a shit job and they built you for it, don’t waste too much time feeling guilty about it.”
It’s a fair point, K thinks.
Then –
“I thought I’d die in Vegas, eventually,” Deckard says.
“What –”
“I made peace with the fact I’d never get to see Ana. I thought I’d die there. No man wants to die unloved, right? But I made peace with that, too. Except I didn’t. And I’ve got to thank you for that. You and the fact that you did everything yourself and took your own damned decisions. Seems special enough, to me.”
“Special?”
“Who said you need to have been born to be? You’re here, you didn’t get killed even though your idiot self was willing to for someone he didn’t even know that he thought might have been his father for two days, and for someone whose memories he happened to share without even knowing them, either. Sounds impressive, if you ask me.”
Thing is – Deckard sounds entirely serious. He sounds like he entirely means it.
K doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do with it.
“It was the right thing to do,” he says finally, even if doesn’t sound anywhere like what he wants to say.
“And do you know what it takes to do the right thing? I didn’t, back in the day.”
“You – didn’t?”
“Long story,” Deckard sighs. “Not the point right now. The only right thing I’ve ever done was run off with Rachel, sure as hell not what I did just before then or for my entire damned life, for that matter.”
“My – my lieutenant. She told me something, when this whole investigation started.”
“What?”
“That for not having a soul I was doing all right.”
“I don’t really think that what you are means you can’t have one. Seems to me like you did a fine job of it on your own. How did that book go? A humane soul is a unique and lovely thing that’s always attacked and never destroyed? Stop thinking it’s not for you. I knew enough people like you who’d have put any human to shame.”
“Thanks, I guess,” K says, feeling like his throat is too tight and he can’t say anything more while still keeping an amount of dignity. His fingers land on the box again.
“So, that’d be –”
“Yours. Ain’t full, but no one said it had to be. I only had that to put in, true, but I think you might’ve understood that it doesn’t have to be literal.”
Oh, he did. He knows, he knows, but then –
“Do you mean that – it doesn’t matter if –”
“I think you understood I’ve always been crap at talking,” Deckard interrupts him. “One of the people like you I’ve known, he could’ve said it a lot better than I did. Anyway, I’m saying it once and I’m not repeating it again. You might not have been her, but her memory somehow did make you what you are, and I have a feeling you might’ve just laid down and waited to die because you thought you were just the replacement and you did your job, didn’t you?”
“I – I might’ve,” K admits. It’s the truth, after all.
“Well, you’re not. I never thought I’d father anyone before Rachel, and even after I met her, because we thought replicants couldn’t have children. Sure as hell I never thought I’d ever see the one I thought I had again. And it’d be beyond my damned wildest expectations to have two, and by the way, she wants to meet you again.”
“What?” K doesn’t know if he’s more surprised at that or at what Deckard has just laid out, even if he had been given hints, but – he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that he actually guessed right.
“She wants to meet you. Said being alone all her life has been a weary thing and she’d quite like to find out how it is to have brothers in real life, if that’s what you might want as well. I’m going in a few. Are you coming or you want to think about it or you think it’s too little, too late? Because if it was, no one would blame you.”
He can’t believe his own ears, really, but –
“What if I want to come?” He says, barely audible over the sound of the waves from outside.
Deckard smiles at that, properly, not just the half-meant shadow of one K’s seen on his face until now.
“Timshel,” he replies.
--
(K thinks no word has ever sounded sweeter to his own ears except maybe the way Joy said that he loved him before she vanished out of existence.)
--
The car stops in front of the building. There’s still snow on the stairs, but it’s not stained in blood anymore.
K walks out of the car, still holding his own side. He might have put the horse inside his coat’s pocket. His hand might be wrapped around the thing so hard it hurts.
Deckard puts a hand on his arm.
“Just one thing first,” he says.
“Okay,” K says, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He still can’t believe this is happening, he can’t believe there’s something so very soft in the way Deckard’s looking at him, and Deckard’s face doesn’t look like a face that turns… soft at any point ever, or often at least.
“You really don’t like Joe, did you?”
He shrugs. “Not really,” he says. “I mean. It was – what she thought was the proper name for someone special, but I’m not that goddamn pathetic. I know that it was because it was hers first. And – she was mine, but –”
“But she was the one that was yours of a lot and you’d rather not have something serialized for once in your entire life?”
He snorts and nods. “Maybe,” he admits. “But I don’t think I have an idea of anything that might fit. Why?”
“Because,” Deckard says, looking like someone who is taking a huge leap of faith here, “if I didn’t have to run, and if I had any say in this whole matter, and if we could have just settled down and raise any eventual children without needing them to be the faces for a revolution, and if any of them had been male…” He stops, looking at the ground, than back up at him. His hand is still on K’s arm.
“Yes?” K prompts, his heart beating maybe too fast – is that how it feels to be human, too?
“We discussed it. She agreed, actually, though it’s not as if either I or her had any say in naming her anyway.”
K can see that whatever Deckard’s thinking about it’s paining him on a molecular level.
“If any of them had been male,” he starts again, “he’d have been a Roy.”
K thinks of what he found of Deckard’s file, of what Gaff told him at that hospice, and –
There was just one Roy mentioned in the entire thing, wasn’t it?
“You mean like –”
“I owed him more than a debt, too. You read the file, didn’t you?”
“I did."
"Well, that file never said that after we fought he had about won, and – he didn’t just let me live. He actually saved my life. And I had tried to kill him all along for – for what? Nothing. He was more human than most humans. His death brought no pleasure to the world, not the way I saw it,” Deckard says, and now he sounded like someone just lifted a damned heavy weight off his shoulders. “Sometimes I think he should have been the one leading rebellions, not anyone else, even if that wasn’t what he wanted, but that’s past the point. Honest, I think he’d have liked you. Sure as hell he had it in himself to go beyond any expectations programmers might’ve had when it came to replicants. If you like it better than Joe, it’s yours. I’m not saying better than your fucking serial number because anything would be better than that.”
Oh.
Oh.
He thinks about it for a moment.
It’s – it’s not what he had expected. It’s nowhere near what he had expected. And maybe in this case it wouldn’t be his only, either, but – but it did belong to one person, one which Deckard admired the hell of, and who had a legacy, and from what K knows actually wanted to be normal more than special.
Maybe he doesn’t want a special name.
Maybe he’s all right with a normal one.
And maybe he would like a name belonging to someone who had also died doing the most humane thing he could have, K thinks, and whose death was remembered without pleasure, and who – who was also created the same way K was, at the end of all things.
He tentatively puts a hand on Deckard’s wrist.
“I – I do like it,” he says, his breath caught in his throat. “I like it very much.”
He doesn’t at all expect Deckard to nod, still looking at him with the face of someone who’s seen a miracle more than once, and to move his arm behind his shoulders.
“So,” Deckard says, his voice suddenly taking a lighter tone, “do I call you Roy now?”
There’s just one answer K – no, not anymore – can give to that.
And it’s just one word, look at how uncomplicated it has to be for once, and he’s letting himself smile tentatively as he parts his lips and says –
“Timshel.”
End.