Archive of Our Own

“Ah, shit.”

Deckard comes to an abrupt halt as they leave the Stelline building, cursing as they step back out into the gently-falling snow. It’s piled up in drifts around Officer K, soft swathes and piles covering the dark-green jacket, his face deathly pale. Deckard is well-versed in replicant repair; he knows that they don’t care about the cold, but they do bleed out. That synth blood which powers all their functions carries a charge, just like real blood.

And the clean white ground around the officer is red, red, too red.

“C’mon, help me with this idiot,” Deckard says, but there’s a tight knot of worry in his voice as he leans down to hook his arms under the other man. Beside him, Ana is porcelain-doll delicate, her gloved hands more suited for fine-tuned work — but she helps him heft the motionless body up, dragging it (him) to the car, leaving ruts and furrows behind in the snow.

She keeps pausing to look up and around them, her dark eyes blown wide with fascination. It’s too much. So much sensory stimulation, so much to take in and see and remember.

Once K is propped against the door, Deckard presses his fingers against the blade runner’s exposed throat, measuring the weak pulse in stutters and fits. Normally their pulses beat steady and strong, not an erratic anomaly to be seen. He remembers his palm splayed against Rachael’s belly, timing the beat of her heart, waiting for their baby’s kick — and now Ana is here. She’s here, beside him, wrestling K into the backseat of the spinner and lifting his boots with a preciousness like she’s handling treasure. She handles everything like that, careful and precise. His own hands feel clumsy, over-sized and monstrous in comparison.

“We gotta go,” he says. “I know a guy.”

They pile in, the doors sink shut, and Deckard breathes heat on his palms before activating the car. It ascends into the sky, taking off into the cold dusk.

And K wakes with a gasp.

His ribs are on fire, and it feels like something is dreadfully, awfully wrong inside him. It’s where Luv twisted that blade in his gut, causing all sorts of wreckage and internal damage. If he were one of the older models he could run his own diagnostic, scanning the body for damage and repairs needed — but they did away with those features long ago, in the name of verisimilitude. Hard to behave human if even you treat yourself like a machine.

He’s breathing shallowly, the noise rattling in his lungs.

A masked face appears above him and gives him a thumbs up. A stranger’s voice comes muffled: “Got you just in time. You ready for this?”

Then the pain begins.

As his back starts to arch off the operating table (or assembly line), a hand suddenly catches his, and when he glances over to the side he sees Dr. Stelline — out of her enclosure, out here, in all the rust and grime, her fingers tight around his, her face pale with concern. She nods, once, and then he passes out, his processor shutting him down for what comes next.

The next time he wakes up, he’s… not fixed, exactly, but better. Even humans go into surgery when they need intensive care. From the looks of things, the medi-gel and glue holding him together, someone had to go rooting around his insides in order to reconnect everything and bring it back into working order. A replicant specialist.

Whoever it was, they’re gone now, and it’s like he dreamed it.

Beside him, Ana smiles and he tries to figure out where he is and how he’s gotten here, sprawled in a nest of blankets on this beat-up sofa with stuffing leaking at the seams.

“I thought you had… an immune system thing,” K says, his voice a dry croak. “That you couldn’t leave the lab.”

“That wasn’t real, either.” Her hands are still warm against his. “We came up with that cover story to keep me safe, tucked away. So no one would ask questions.”

There have been so many lies. He feels so hopelessly naïve, now. I know what’s real.

Another movement at the corner of the room. Deckard, stepping through the doorway and into the living room. “Joe. You’re up.”

“No, I… don’t call me that anymore.” He can still feel the bitter sting of the Joi ad stooping to look him in the eye, coquettishly tearing his heart out of his chest. Joe. He wasn’t special at all. She called all her customers that. “I’m K. I’m fine being K. No number, though.”

His gaze drifts to Ana. He thought he might feel that sick jealous bitterness when he looks at her, but instead it’s weary acceptance, exhaustion. K got these two people reunited. He did that. He did a good job. Almost died for them, too. What more could they ask of him?

“Why didn’t you just leave me there?” he asks. He’d been willing to be left.

“That’s not what people do,” Ana chides.

“Besides, kid, I owed you one.” Deckard is heating up water for noodles, settling himself in an armchair with a long sigh, the groan of aching muscles. “And I’m too old for this. Decided I could do with a partner.”

Ana’s still looking at the older man with a skittish awed expression, even as he does something so wonderfully mundane as slurp down his dinner.

But whenever her back is turned, K sees that Deckard is the same: he keeps sneaking glances at her, measuring Ana’s features against his own and what he must remember of Rachael’s. Putting them together, getting the composite back. His daughter.

“I can go,” K says suddenly. He is wrong, here. He does not belong. “Thanks for everything. But I can go.”

The older blade runner laughs, a gruff noise. “No, we’re in on this together. Wallace is still around, and they’ll be after you. And me. Although they don’t know about her.” Deckard stares down at his hands. “Sorry to pull you into our mess, but frankly, you pulled me back into the game too, so turnabout’s fair play.”

“No, it’s…” K’s mind keeps lagging (evidently still healing from such near-fatal damage), and so he struggles to think of the next few words. “You saved me. I was ready to die, but I’m still here. So I’ll stick it out.” A shrug of his narrow shoulders, the meaning clear: Where else am I gonna go? The lieutenant is dead. Even Joi is gone.

All he has is this grizzled old blade runner and this wide-eyed brilliant ingenue, and if that’s what he has to go on, then so be it.

Skinjobs heal faster than humans do, even after a catastrophic cascade failure. K finds himself probing his wounds, touching the edges of the synth-specialised bandages while Ana watches him. At least he doesn’t have to worry about infection. Just needs a little time and a little rest for his well-crafted body to piece itself back together.

“You gonna be ready to pack up and move out tomorrow, kid?” Deckard asks, peering out through the metal shutters of the building they’re currently holed up in. K simply nods, and chooses not to point out that he’s never been a kid.

When they’re back in a spinner, flying low to avoid the atmospheric scans and satellites, cruising along in the hours-long traffic while Ana peruses the news in the backseat, K finally decides to ask the question that’s been looping through his head for the past month.

“Did you really just keep me because I’m useful?” Everyone at the LAPD always said that to him. He was there because he was a good tool, a sharp implement. Be useful, but not too useful. Stay in your box.

Deckard glances to the side, seems on the verge of volleying off another bit of pithy sarcasm. But there’s something about the hangdog curiosity in K’s face; he sees something lost and searching in the replicant’s pale eyes. “You remind me of myself,” Deckard says after a pause. “Quieter, yeah, and maybe less of an asshole, but… Still a bit of an asshole. And you don’t let go of a lead once you’ve got your teeth into something, either. It’s familiar.”

K half-smiles to himself, turning his head aside to look out through the rain-lashed window and the eternal smog.

And it turns out that Rick Deckard is very, very good at living on the run. He has dead drops scattered throughout the wastes of California, cash and resources squirreled away into various encrypted accounts, multiple underground contacts who wouldn’t think of crossing the old cop.

He’s reluctant to get involved in anything political, though; he just wants to go off-grid again, carve out another safe corner of the universe to live in peace with his daughter. But Ana is stubborn in her insistence that they need to reach the resistance. They need to find them, stand up for something bigger than themselves. Listening to her haranguing the old man, K can suddenly see how she might be a figurehead. How she could lead.

After Deckard finally grumbles in exasperation and storms out of their latest lair (which really just means that she’s won), Ana stops by K’s usual spot at the window. Her fingers flutter at his temple, combing his messy dark blond hair back. “I’m sorry. For what they did to you,” she says. “My memories in there.” She taps the side of his skull, but gently.

His hand catches hers. “It’s okay. Something we share, anyway.”

They’re tied together somehow.

What am I to you? Deckard had asked him, once upon a time. K had been silent back then, both because the pain had been overriding the rest of his priorities, but also because he couldn’t think of the right way to summarise it or even explain it to himself.

But as time goes on, he’s slowly starting to figure it out. He’s not technically the man’s son after all, but that doesn’t mean they’re not family, that he doesn’t share his daughter’s memories, that they occupy a similar space. Sister, maybe. Maybe that’s the right word.

“I can get you another one, if you like,” Ana says one day. He raises his eyes to hers, quizzical. “Another Joi,” she clarifies. “I can download the latest version and jailbreak it. Portable emitters are cheap if you have the right connections.”

He considers that offer. Sorts through the pros and cons, searching for a bottom line, a possible conclusion.

In the end, K shakes his head. “I’ve got the two of you,” he says, and in a way, that’s enough.