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Life on the run was not as exciting as most media portrayed it to be. K knew this already from the perspective of the hunter, before. Now, as the prey, he felt a quiet rage from the understatement of it all. They never really mention the constant skin-crawling sensation of being watched, even while being alone in a dark room with sights set on every access point; the fact that every new place they settle down in is so full of traps for anyone dogging their steps that K has become immune to sleeping inches away from a tripwire that, if set off, would certainly kill him instantly.
The tripwire he sleeps beside is not the first one along the path, but it is the last one. K is always the one to set it, much to Deckard’s clear displeasure. To Deckard, this is just one thing in a line of many displaying K’s continuing battle with his will to live, and how it never seems to rise above general apathy toward himself. To K, he knew that if any of the traps they set before his tripwire were to go off, he would be awake and aware in the half-second it would take for the sound to reach him. To K, if someone were smart enough to bypass their traps, his last-ditch hope was that by seeing him, they would let down their guard just enough not to see the tripwire clinging to K’s shadow. To K, his own life was worth saving someone like Deckard’s if he could take out the threat before he himself went. Deckard did not agree.
K had gotten complacent with the idea of his death being the solution to some sort of violent problem he would be too dead to see. He knew this instantly when he woke to a hand around his throat and gleaming eyes looming over him in the dark of the bunker they were residing in.
A quick glance to his right saw the tripwire completely dismantled. To his left saw Deckard still fast asleep, facing away from K and the replicant intruder.
Saliva was pooling in his mouth, but something small and blunt, the same something that had him fail his baseline when things all really started going to shit, kept him from swallowing and giving the hand holding his throat the pleasure of feeling something so intimate. Instead, he tensed the muscles in his toes, his thighs, and narrowed his own similarly glowing eyes.
It was pitch black, and even his enhanced senses were having trouble picking out details on the shadow kneeling over him. The silence was deafening, even as K’s heart barely picked up in speed. The slow reveal of gleaming white under the twin orange dots barely registered in his mind as a smile.
Silently, he calculated his odds of grabbing his gun that lay a scant few inches from his twitching fingers, all while the shadow just watched. K forced himself not to be unsettled by the prolonged silence, the lack of action. He had the decided thought that the replicant above him was a cat, and K was the mouse held lazily beneath one outstretched claw. th
Between one second and the next, K was moving: in the same shallow breath that he began to reach for his gun, he shot his leg up in an attempt to knee the figure above him in the groin. His knee met solid thigh muscle before being grasped by hard, digging fingers, but his own fingers managed to curl around the grip of his gun.
The hand on his throat had only tightened in the half-second since he’d moved, but K knew he had to get out from under the other replicant in the next few moments or else it’d be over before it could even start.
With a solid hold on his gun, he planted his one remaining foot against the ground and twisted, right toward the other replicant, which they evidently hadn’t been expecting judging by their startled grunt at the impact. The hand on his throat was gone, but the one on his knee remained firm and forced K’s leg to turn at a burning angle that he knew would turn into a dislocated mess if he didn’t break it.
Before the other replicant could make a move, K doubled down and launched himself bodily into them while slamming the grip of his gun into their temple. The two of them scrambled sideways and K was only allowed that one blow before his wrist was held in an iron grip, stalling the gun.
K didn’t pause, and neither did the shadow next to him. Swinging with his left arm, he tried desperately to keep ahold of the gun with his right while the replicant managed to twist away from K’s obvious haymaker.
Weighing the odds, K allowed his gun to fall from numb fingers even as he wrenched himself up, dragging the other replicant with him by the grip on his wrist. Startled, the replicant had no time to brace before K was driving his shoulder right into the other’s sternum and ramming him right into the concrete wall at their backs. The foundations were solid, so only a bit of dust rained down from the ceiling at the impact instead of the whole wall crumbling.
K knew that the advantage he’d gained by the move was minimal; he’d been shoved through enough walls to know it would only slow a replicant down for about half a second. Still, he took that half second to dive toward his gun right as the singular bulb in the room flared on.
Though blinded by the sudden light, the location of the gun was burned into his brain the second he dropped it and he had no problem finding it around the sudden halo suffusing his vision.
He’d had his back turned too long and half expected the other replicant to drive him right back into the ground, but when he turned, he saw the male replicant looking at a now-awake Deckard with palpable interest.
“You two were not easy to find,” he said quietly, tilting his head consideringly. K noticed with a faint sense of nausea that the other replicant’s gun was still holstered; he hadn’t even drawn it yet.
In the light, K could see that he did not recognize the model for this replicant, but judging by its lithe yet powerful form, he could guess that it was made specifically for hunting down prey bigger than itself. K knew this because he was built just the same.
“Yeah?” Deckard retorted gruffly, “wasn’t meant to be,” he said, finger tightening around the trigger of the gun pointed between the replicant’s eyes.
K saw the intent in the other replicant’s eyes even before Deckard started pulling the trigger, but neither of them were fast enough to stop the replicant from lunging at Deckard like K had just done to him. K’s shot landed, but not in the heart like he’d been aiming for, but instead straight through the shoulder joint. There was a brief moment of satisfaction when he realized that the replicant’s arm would now be immobile, but it was quickly lost by the sound of Deckard’s skull cracking against the cement wall with far more effect than K’s move had done to the other just moments prior.
Immediately, Deckard crumpled to the floor, boneless, completely unconscious. K loosed another shot but the replicant just danced out of the way while drawing his own gun finally and squeezing off a shot that tore fire through K’s hip in his far less successful dodge.
For a moment, they only circled each other, their respective wounds slowly coloring the clothes they both wore darker. Then: “D’you wanna hear something interesting, KD6-3.7?” The man asked, the barest hint of something smug in the curl of his lips.
“Not especially,” K murmured, keeping half an eye on Deckard’s still body even as he kept his arm up and his elbow locked at a slightly-bent angle, finger soundly on the trigger.
There was a considering hum that rang false from the other replicant. “The LAPD has changed the baseline test for us newer models; too many vulnerabilities in the field with the one for you older Nexus-9’s, you know,” he said, eyes never leaving K’s. K felt a prickle of sweat bead on his forehead, and another trickled down his spine.
K did not like the mention of his baseline test, it was irrelevant entirely in a situation like this, but by bringing it up meant that it somehow was relevant and K just didn’t know how yet. He did not like not knowing things, and in this moment especially he found the not-knowing was putting a pit of dread deep in his stomach.
The thing about a baseline test was that it affected a replicant very little if they were on baseline. K remembered that last one very well due to the fact that he was very much affected by it. He remembered the whining pitch drilling into his skull and ringing in his ears as he stumbled out. He’d known he was off baseline the moment that droning pitch started, but he still had to slip into a bathroom on his way to the lieutenant's office to throw up bile; the threat of retirement then was all too real, and at that moment he really, truly, did not want to die, not with Deckard in the wings and Dr. Stelline unaware. And, some selfish part of him had whispered, because he simply did not want to die.
This replicant’s mention of it made the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up. Replicant blade runners did not know how a deviated baseline felt, K certainly hadn’t, not until he’d gone so off-course so as to never rebound back into shape; he was a rubber band stretched out of shape and suffering the consequences of his inadequacy to put himself back together.
This replicant mentioning it here, at this exact moment, meant that he knew.
Before it even registered what he was doing, K was throwing himself right into the other replicant with the intent to wrap an arm around its throat and squeeze. His frantic attempt was made pointless by the same fucking hand grabbing him by the throat midair and slamming him into the concrete floor so hard that he felt even his near-impenetrable bones rattle.
He sucked in a breath choked by dust and threw a disoriented punch in the replicant’s general direction while he bucked beneath him. The punch landed, but it seemed to do nothing, and the grip around his throat only got tighter. Lungs burning, he started clawing at the replicant’s own throat, his nails digging in just beside the carotid artery and causing him to bleed sluggishly.
It only seemed to draw the other replicant’s ire in a way none of his other actions had until now, as before he could get enough purchase with the ends of his fingers to tear, he was being dragged up off the floor by his throat before being thrown back down, twice, three times, four, five… He lost count when his vision started to gray out, but it eventually stopped, even though the grip on his throat did not relent.
The other replicant leaned in close enough for his breath to fan against K’s jaw and make him shiver. “You’re lucky. Wallace wants you alive; you’re the first KD model to break conditioning. He wants to know how.”
Despite his earlier refusal, K couldn’t stop himself from swallowing against the hold on his throat this time. A harried glance toward Deckard showed the man still unconscious. K needed to hold the replicant’s attention for as long as possible, a thought that made a single frisson of fear dance up his spine.
Unlike K, this was a blade runner who liked to play with his food. It would hopefully work to Deckard’s advantage, but K was unsure of how much he could last through. The man above him did not strike him as the kind to be gentle with his toying.
“Why does any replicant deviate?” K asked, voice so quiet yet vibrating harshly against the hand holding his throat. It was meant as a stalling tactic more than anything, but the other replicant tilted his head almost thoughtfully, though his pressing hold never slackened.
“How many times did you ask yourself that question before becoming one of them, I wonder?” The other murmured, fingers tightening just slightly. K got the feeling that the other replicant was taking pleasure from this, and it made something oily press up his throat and against the backs of his teeth.
K didn’t have an answer, at least not one the other replicant would want. In truth, he’d never asked; never truly cared for why the replicant he’d just left a broken mess on the floor of wherever they’d ended up working or living had broken away from what they were built for. Not until it was his own eyes looking back at him after his failed baseline, the whites of those eyes showing like so much prey; like the prey he often found himself retiring with a detached air.
His silence only continued to incense the replicant above him, who seemed to be reaching the end of his rope, as between one second and the next, K’s head was once again thrown right into the concrete floor. If his head wasn’t throbbing in agony before, it sure was now. A strangled gasp escaped him before he could bite it back, and the replicant’s grin above him turned feral.
Slowly, the replicant leaned down, close, closer than anyone had truly been to K since Joi… Instinctively, his thoughts flitted away from Joi, and he was immediately glad for it when the other replicant ran his tongue from his jaw to his hairline, uncaring of the stubble bristling against him.
K shuddered, revulsion crawling up his spine in a way that was not unfamiliar to him, but nauseating all the same. Desperation was sinking its teeth into him in a way he was afraid the replicant above him would try to do, so he tried to bite first. Straining against the hand at his throat, he snapped his teeth a scant few millimeters from the other’s nose, fury at his missing setting in instantly.
The other replicant simply sighed, the condescending pitch to it made K’s skin crawl.
“You know what they used to do to dogs that bit?” The hand from his throat released, but even before K could try and use it to his advantage, the grip went to his jaw, clamping so hard that he felt something creak somewhere beneath his molars. “They got muzzled,” he whispered harshly.
Something was most definitely splintering in K’s jaw, but the dread that had been steadily building during this entire interaction was eclipsing into sheer terror. The other replicant slowly pulled a small, slender device from one of his pockets, being sure to keep it in K’s line of sight. All K could see on it was a small button, and some ridges along it like it could transmit sound.
“Recite your baseline for me, officer K,” the replicant ordered, the glee in his tone impossible to miss.
K knew then what that device was for, and he started bucking against the weight holding him down with the desperation of a trapped animal. For a split second, he understood why animals would chew off a limb just for freedom.
It was hopeless to even try, K knew it, but some self preservation instinct that Deckard would be proud of made him give it a last-ditch effort anyway. For just a moment, he managed to dislodge the weight above him just enough that if he shifted his hips, could flip the replicant off of him for K to get the upper hand again. But before he could, white-hot static pierced straight through him, straight to the center of his brain, his spine, rattling through his teeth.
He went stock-still immediately, mouth parted in silent agony. Distantly, he felt the hold against him let go, but the idea of moving any part of his body made saliva pool in the corners of his mouth with an iron taste.
“Interesting,” the replicant breathed, eyes tracing the lines of K’s face taut with pain. “They told me what would happen, but seeing it is just…”
K could hear the words, and he knew they should make some sort of sense, but the tone drilling through both ears subsumed all rational thought. He felt simultaneously cold and hot at the same time, and there was sweat trailing from his temples and trickling along his scalp toward the floor.
The replicant stood with a long sigh, drew his foot back, and kicked K directly between two of his lower ribs. The pain broke through the static suffusing his body enough to make him wheeze, his fingers curling into aching claws that dug into the unrelenting concrete below him.
“Please…” he managed, voice tinny and warbling to his own overwhlemed ears. In response, the other replicant’s hard boot just pressed against his outstretched hand, the pressure increasing with each ounce of the other’s weight. It wasn’t long before the sound of crunching floated alongside the growing static.
The longer the tone went on, the less the pain from his once-aching wounds managed to get through. He could feel the static curling along his spine, down down down to his extremities and into his organs.
“Recite your baseline for me,” the other mocked, but K could barely distinguish the emotion away from the words trying to puncture a hole through his brain. The tips of his fingers were beginning to feel numb and fuzzy, unable to feel the rough texture of the concrete anymore. There was a sensation shooting through his lower abdomen that felt like when he had to take a piss. Something about that realization shot a wave of humiliation deep in the recesses of his mind. Everything was starting to feel layered, with any thoughts getting blurred about the edges.
His tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth, but he knew everything would unstick and resume functionality even just the second he begins his baseline. Still, he refused, a silent resolution already cementing itself despite the fine tremors beginning to wrack his body. The tone somehow felt like it was growing in pitch, and it was causing pinpricks of a sharp and stabbing pain somewhere behind his eyes.
“Hm… perhaps you just need your memory jogged—How did it go again? Within cells interlinked?”
Something about those words made a flash of hot agony shoot straight from his head to the tips of his toes. He choked, throat feeling swollen on top of everything else, and the taste of blood made him realize he’d bitten through part of his tongue at some point. His shaking was only getting worse the longer he refused. That numb, buzzing sensation that had started with his fingertips was slowly crawling its way along every inch of skin.
A hand in his hair, wrenching him up dragged out a low keen, something he felt from his lungs.
“Look at me!” The other replicant snarled, shaking K’s already splintered jaw to force his attention. With an effort he could feel coming from every part of his body, he managed to drag his eyes open and stared aimlessly with blurry eyes at the furious face in front of him.
“And blood-black nothingness began to spin.” The hand in his hair tightened impossibly further; K could feel his fingernails attempting to gouge out parts of his skull. The stinging pain of it forced a gasp out of K.
There was no part of K that wasn’t drenched in sweat while shivering, or without that disconnected buzzing. With a small movement from the other replicant, the tone got louder. For nearly ten seconds, K forgot how to breathe, and that sensation in his abdomen finally caved to the pressure; warm urine was trailing down his legs and pooling uncomfortably in his boots and around his knees. Still, he couldn’t move, but the words were forced from somewhere far within him.
“And—and blood-black nothingness began… began to spin,” K gasped out, some of the pressure squeezing his brain down as far into his spinal cord as it could diminishing.
“Good boy,” the replicant cooed, stroking an almost tender hand through K’s sweat-drenched hair. Kneeling on the floor in his own piss, as well as the gentle touches on his body with that fucking tone playing was just too much. The nausea whorling in his stomach made acid build at the back of his throat, and he knew absently that he was going to throw up incredibly soon.
“Within cells interlinked,” he murmured so softly, the repeated attempt completely overtaking the last vestiges of K’s self-control.
“Within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked,” K intoned, shaking so bad that his teeth chattering could be heard throughout.
“Cells,” the replicant purred, continuing to stroke K’s hair.
There were tears in K’s eyes, dripping down his face and pooling in his collarbone. He could barely feel the wet, just the trail of warmth left behind. The confusing warm/cold from earlier had left. He was just so cold.
“Cells,” he whispered.
“Oh, this little noise turns you into such a docile little thing, it’s almost unfair how pathetic you get like this. I suppose I can’t really blame you for your own design flaw,” he murmured, trailing a fingertip along K’s jaw.
K could only tremble, the noise never ceasing, and his instability away from baseline only furthered his agony.
“I think I’ve muzzled you enough that we ought to be leaving,” said the other replicant, gentle hand falling to K’s shoulder and turning hard and bruising. “Walking outside is not a suggestion.”
Mercifully, he lowered the volume of the sound just slightly, just enough for him to regain some sort of function outside of crying uselessly. On shaky, weak legs he climbed to his feet properly, lurching to the side before something in his hindbrain snapped his spine straight.
K managed to spare a brief thought toward Deckard, faint relief coursing through him since it seemed the replicant was only taking K, but then the dread of being alone again nearly made its way through the noise.
Still, he staggered in unsteady strides in the direction of the exit, vision wobbly and faded, the colors grayed out. Somehow, he climbed up the stairs leading to the surface with only a numb hand dragging along the wall as help, the other replicant trailing slowly behind.
K soon came across the access hatch left open, and a sharp smell in the air obvious enough that he could tell the hinges were greased. It explained why K hadn’t heard him enter.
With one hand already finding a shaky grasp on the first rung of the ladder up, he was preparing to grab the next one when there was an earth-shattering bang! directly behind him.
He had about half a second to be relieved until without any warning the tone tripled in tone and pitch, blotting out any and every thought that could ever exist in his head. Immediately, his whole body seized and he collapsed hard onto the ground, twitching uncontrollably. The nausea that had been building during the entirety of the tone's existence finally won K's desperate battle. Through the buzzing shaking apart his brain, some kind of survival instinct from somewhere far within him had him tilting his head to the side just in time. The ensuing gag made his stomach contort so badly that he felt the broken ribs in his chest shift. The second gag hurt just as bad as the first, but this time saw him spewing bile beside his head. The taste was acrid and burning and made him want to gag some more, but all he could do was let out these choked whimpers while a line of saliva slid down his face and into the bile below him.
For an unbearable amount of time, all K could do was lie there, but suddenly there were warm, familiar hands resting against his face.
“Fuck—kid, what in the hell did he do to you?” Deckard breathed, somehow there.
The only thing swirling around his head was his baseline. Desperately, he peeled his eyes open and gazed up and to the left, black object visible despite the indistinct haze over everything.
“Cells,” he murmured absently, jerking in another spasm.
For a long moment, Deckard only continued to stare in some kind of silent horror before something seemed to click in his head and he followed K’s gaze.
Exhausted, K’s eyes slid shut once more, but between one gasping breath and another, the sound disappeared. Instantly, his crying went from a completely silent affair to a sobbing one, unbearably loud to K’s sensitive ears.
Only a moment later there were hands back on his shoulders, and the gentleness made him gag for a second before it registered that the touch was coming from Deckard. Blearily, he could see the other replicant lying at the bottom of the short staircase, a rapidly pooling circle of blood forming beneath his head.
K couldn’t stop crying and the only thing he seemed able to do was clutch onto Deckard with fingers that could feel once again, feeling too much.
“Alright, I’ve—I’ve gotcha, kid, don’t worry about it,” Deckard murmured, almost awkward even if his response was genuine.
“I’m sorry,” K choked out, shivering even harder at the shame of allowing himself to be bested so totally, the shame of letting Deckard be injured, the shame at the state of himself and how he’s allowing Deckard to hold him when he was filthy.
A pained noise escaped Deckard, and it only made K feel worse. He’d fucked up, he’d trusted in their traps too much, trusted in K’s ability to sense an ambush. He needed to pay more attention, be on alert. He would not allow this to happen again, if Deckard let him stick around. K knew he was the stray Deckard felt responsible for out of guilt, but to K, it all felt like something more, something tangible and writhing in his stomach.
“Kid, you did nothing wrong,” Deckard said, voice tight. “Our luck was bound to run out soon anyway. We were due.”
K just stayed silent, shivering and freezing and contemplating throwing up again at the feeling of his soaked clothing sticking to his skin.
Deckard seemed to realize some of the problem with K, and he simply sighed.
Somehow, K ended up back at the bottom of the bunker, sitting on the floor with his knees to his chest while an endless stream of tears disappeared into the shadows beneath his jaw. There were faint sounds of dragging, and a lot of banging and cursing.
K wasn’t sure how long it was before Deckard came stumbling back, a hand clutching his head and his eyes squinted. In his other hand held a bucket, though, and K felt another rush of shame flood him, alongside the hot relief that he can wipe the worst of the filth and memories of this encounter off his skin.
Deckard quietly brought over K’s duffle before shuffling beside K and sliding down, but he quickly shifted to where he was facing away from K.
Taking the hint, K stripped and gave himself the most perfunctory of wipedowns with the cold water and washcloth he’d been given. Occasionally, his arm would brush against Deckard’s clothed back, and the warmth from him made something tight form behind K’s eyes and deep in his chest.
He dressed as quickly as he could, uncaring of the fact that he was still damp. His thoughts were still muddled and disjointed; the idea of stringing together a sentence or trying to move with any sense of urgency just weighed him down with exhaustion. Still, he found it within himself to hope that Deckard would share that warmth with him, somehow.
Still, he couldn’t help jolting with surprise from where he was slumped against the wall when he felt Deckard scoot a little closer, pressing their sides together. A warm arm slung itself around his shoulders and tucked him a little closer.
A protest tried to form from K, but all he could do was slump down and tremble helplessly. The gentle touches from that replicant filled him with nausea, but Deckard was just warm, warm in a way he hadn’t felt since he first realized what Ana’s memories being real could imply, before he’d realized they were actually Ana’s.
“Don’t worry about me, kid,” Deckard assured, somehow knowing, though even K could admit that he was sometimes predictable on certain matters. “I’ve certainly got a concussion, so I’m better off staying awake anyway. I’ll keep watch while you’re out of commission.”
The smell of blood was still thick in the air, and the sight of his soiled clothes and picked-apart tripwire taunted him. But the relieving silence and the warmth of Deckard pressed against him gave the exhaustion dragging him down new strength.
Even in the silence, there were still remnants of a buzzing in K’s ears, but at some point in the next few minutes, it melted away, and K was drifting off.
Distantly, K was aware that when he awoke, they would be abandoning this bunker and making way for the next one. Knew that he likely wouldn’t be able to rest as long as he needed, but there was this small, starved thing within him that saw the gesture of Deckard giving him any time to rest, and saw the sacrifice for what it was.
K slept dreamlessly.