[Fic] Bodies at Rest 1/2
Oct. 29th, 2009 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle: Bodies at Rest
Fandom: Blade Runner
Characters: Gaff, Deckard, Rachael
Word Count: 11,218 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Gaff chases Deckard. Deckard chases Rachel. Rachel chases a half-formed dream, the nature of which she knows not. All of them turned upside down by the events of the film, all of them searching for a kind of equilibrium they can only find with each other. In the end, they find it in the strange construction all three of them make together. This is not a love story. This is a story of connections.
A/N: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
polybigbang 2009. Mix by Epporsimuove here.
DECKARD
It rained the first time Deckard died.
Acid rain poured down in beaded sheets, covering everything in shimmering gray. The smell of wet plastic and concrete wafted up from the roof, wet asphalt and piss, papers in the corners drifting up from the ground. At this rate his last thought would be something like, this place stinks. Poetry. In the white-stained bedsheet sense of the word, cheap motels and gaslight making it tawdry. He didn't see any way out of it, but damned if he didn't feel like a heel for thinking it. That bastard.
It had rained when Roy died, too. Symmetry.
But he didn't get any doves. He had no one there to watch him. The roof was barren even of tiny bird-brained life. Only the ice cold rain dripping down the back of his two dollar shirt and some handcuffs dangling from his wrist. His favorite coat stained in the effluvium of human driftwood, fluids from both ends. Human beings were disgusting. Gaff was a piece of work.
He didn't even get to say goodbye.
This is not a love story.
GAFF
Gaff meets Rachael by the diner, dark faux marble punctuated by pale chopsticks and pork noodles. She's not bad looking, for a skin job. Holds herself tall and straight, shoulders back and chest popping forward. Legs stiff on stiletto heels. Like any other woman who believes being sexy is a part of her job; in other words, like every other female secretary in the city. Not bad looking at all. He wonders if it's because she doesn't know what it's like not to be human.
"You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl."
He's seen all the footage of her tests. He's seen all the surveillance footage they have on her and Deckard, which isn't much. Deckard was careful. He gives the old bastard that, Deckard was good. But he was sloppy. Got too close, too involved. Maybe he started wondering if he was a Replicant. Gaff won't make that mistake. If you started thinking like that you started doubting yourself, everything you knew was real. You doubted yourself int to madness because there was no solid place left to stand. Gaff won't fall into that trap. He has his eye on a nice little apartment at the top of the arcology, a cushy job where he got to pound the streets as much or as little as he wanted, and he has no plans to screw that up.
Voight-Kampff tests are no longer considered reliable. Tyrell's records are a sham; Rachael is the only one on file but no one knows how many Replicants are running around with memories, with emotional responses. There's no telling who won't be thorough enough, or even if there is such a thing. Paranoia reigns over practicality. Gaff gets the promotion he wanted but it's curdled from all the fear, sweat, and gossip. Bitter aftertaste. This isn't what he wanted.
What is, though? He accepts with a shrug and a burst of street-lingo philosophy. It annoys them when he does this, lapsing into an organic-grown pastiche of all the most common languages of the sprawling electric mass. It isn't even the language of one group or another, it's pidgin-talk. Trade language to be understood between factions.
Talking like that allows him to feel superior to the rest of the bottom-feeding lazy-ambitious cops who don't even try to solve cases anymore, just do enough work to get a paycheck and the government benefits. He knows how to talk to people, speaks the language of the streets. He also uses it to say what he really means because no one understands him.
He goes to see Rachael again because she knows what it's like not to be human.
DECKARD
There's a disconnect point between living and dead. When you're alive you have thoughts, you have words, you say and do things and you feel about them and the people you're around. When you're dead you're a thing. An object. Your jaw locks open and your body stiffens. They make the incisions and determine what caused the machinery of your life to malfunction and shut down. Just an object. Deckard feels the disconnecting process of his mind rejecting his body as a part of himself and putting it into a box to be shelved forever.
He's paralyzed. Can't move. He died thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes ago, according to the witch doctor in the sterile clothes and pale blue suit. His heart stopped beating, his skin turned cold. Pupils fixed and dilated. Flat line.
One by one his fingers twitch; the muscles contract and relax in response to little pinpricks from robot-controlled needles. At first there's only light, and then lines of darkness create shapes and colors come back into focus. Red first, then yellow, then blue. The sounds come to him slowly and through an underwater warble. He can't make sense of it yet; he needs more time.
The doctor comes and shines another light in his eyes and says something in words that aren't English or Japanese or Cityspeak and don't make sense. He repeats them, exaggerating the lip movements until Deckard realizes he can move his eyelids and squints to read his lips. Questions. That demand answers but the un-freezing process hasn't moved to his jaw or tongue or vocal cords yet. He blinks his eyes until the doctor understands that he's talking to a wooden man and leaves. Deckard wishes he could move if only to punch the man.
More doctors. More tests, more pinpricks of needles on robot arms and taking blood, looking at daytime television on clotted screens until he begs a nurse with rolling white-rimmed eyes to turn it off before he goes insane. More insane than he already is. No, he doesn't say that. He can't. He wants to say something.
The lights go out before he can move his mouth enough to speak.
RACHAEL
Rachael stands in the doorway. It's raining too hard for her to light a cigarette.
She wants one so bad her hands are shaking. Not the nicotine, which is no longer put in the brand of cigarettes she smokes, but the act of putting the cigarette between her lips and drawing tobacco smoke into her lungs. It comforts her to taste it all the way down her throat. She needs that comfort now. She has no idea how long she has left.
Deckard said that that was part of the human condition. Not to know. Rachael never found that very comforting and she finds it even less comforting to think of that when Deckard is gone. Banal, maybe. Disquieting, for certain. She could be gone before he ever gets back, falling over in the doorway for no good reason, the coroner would only be able to scratch his head and pronounce her dead of natural causes. Fallacious; she was not born of natural causes and so she cannot die of them. She has to die an unnatural death at the end of a pre-determined span, but she doesn't know what that is.
Deckard would be able to find out what that is, if he wanted. She resents that he doesn't want to know. She hates that she isn't capable, in some way, of looking into it. Of finding out what she wants to know. It should be simple. It's not.
There has to be a way. If she still worked for Tyrell she would know what to do but she doesn't. Tyrell's dead. Killed by one of the Replicants. A cousin? A brother? What was Roy Batty to her? He was Nexus 6 which makes her Nexus 7, Nexus Next Gen. She doesn't like the sound of Nexus 7. There's something unsexy about the number seven.
She wants Deckard back. She wants Tyrell back, she wants her life back.
Right now she wants a damn cigarette.
GAFF
He meets her in her apartment. He finds her waiting at the door for a man who will never come back to her, who realized the idiodicy of what he was doing, or at least that's what he wants to think. He still doesn't like Deckard.
Gaff walks her up to her room like a gentleman and if he's smiling under the moustache and behind the collar of his coat no one can tell. Drip-dry. His clothes are the garb of a Prohibition-era gangster, blank and well-tailored. Shoddily woven fabric sewn with care. A contradiction, like Gaff himself. There are no labels, names, or explanations.
"What are you doing here?"
He barely twitches. It's not as though it's an unreasonable question, or even unexpected. She knows him as a police officer, the man who shadowed the blade runner who was sent after her. And if Deckard was scary, imagine what he must be like. That probably isn't what she's thinking, but Gaff enjoys the idea that it might be.
"I looking for Deckard."
English doesn't come easily to him anymore. He spent so long playing the role, so long immersing himself into the world of the city underground and playing the bad cop or, in some cases, the worst cop, that it's hard for him to relate normal people. He doesn't know how to behave himself anymore. This doesn't strike him as a problem; nobody knows how to behave themselves anymore. There is no more normal.
"He's not here."
Gaff sees that. "When he return, you tell him I was here."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't look afraid. Unblinking eyes stare at him, her mouth neither thins with tension nor drops to breathe shallow panic. She's being strong, even though there is no one here to be strong for. He doesn't know the difference between fake and real bravery. A bad blind spot for a cop. "How should I tell him to contact you?"
"He knows how to find me."
She stares at him as he makes a circle around the room, picks up the yellowed and faded, its headline still shrieking triumphant about the skin jobs put down. So, Deckard lives in the past. Good to know.
DECKARD
There are no tears for Deckard
He hasn't felt this bad since the rooftop. Five minutes just to stand and take a few shaky steps, one hand on the wall, one hand opening and closing in spasms. Damn doctors. Wanted him to stay in the hospital, get shot up with all kinds of drugs he didn't know what they did. He's had enough of that. Won't be anyone's pincushion.
Later, when he was in a more reflective mood, he would tell Rachael that he didn't want to feel like an experiment. Like the Replicants probably did. Then he would spend the rest of the night apologizing to her for talking about the Replicants as though they were something else, something less than. He forgot that she was one of them. Never that she was different from him, but that she was one of them. The line between us and them was blurred where it intersected perpendicular to the connection between the two of them. She was one of them, and not like them. A new breed. A whole new species, population: one.
But that was later in the night. After they'd fought and made up. Right now he is experiencing something a lot less pleasant than a lovers quarrel.
Deckard is experiencing the delectable aroma of a city dumpster. He stumbled into it stomach first and consequently leaned over the edge to empty what little was left of his dinner. The half digested food and bile mixed in with someone's used sanitary napkins, dirty diapers, old food containers. The smell of vomit alone is enough to make him leave; this is unbearable.
And yet, still better than hospital.
He needs to get home. Back to the safety and dubious comforts of his apartment, back to someone who would take care of him the way he wanted to be taken care of. By standing back and letting him take care of himself, and waiting to be pulled back in.
He still has no idea what is happening to him. He isn't sure he wants to know.
If Replicants had had a choice, would they have opted to know the day and date of their death? Of the end of their four year lifespan? He doesn't know. He isn't going to ask Rachael.
RACHAEL
After the man leaves, she wanted to hit something. Unfortunately there is nothing in the apartment that was worth breaking, so she goes out to the lowest area of town she can think of just to break a few windows on some abandoned buildings. It's not as satisfying as she had hoped.
She still doesn't know where Deckard was. Out playing cop, maybe, she knows how much he misses police work even if he doesn't approve of what's going on with the Tyrell Corporation. Maybe he's out finding another woman to sleep with, one who's actually human. Out buying coffee and Chinese food, maybe, who knows? He could be anywhere. He doesn't tell her these things.
This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. He had pulled her off into the sunset, not on a white horse or with a suit of shining armor, but he had been there for her when everyone else would have turned her in or shot her themselves. He had, against his better judgment, protected her. She thought he understood.
She had hoped he understood. She had counted on it, wagered her entire life, whatever was left of it on the idea that maybe he was trying to understand what it was like to be a creation of some flawed, megalomaniacal human. In his own way, he was the creation of a flawed human, too. She had heard him talk about his old partner and his old captain to begin with. Their influences had perhaps not been entirely good; she thinks their influence is responsible for his present discomfort with himself. They chase dreams that they do not define, they push the causes of their dissatisfaction onto others. Deckard learned this behavior to survive amongst them, and she hears it when he talks about their thwarted (failed) ambitions and their enemies in the department. He talked until he realized that she wasn't hearing what he meant to be saying. After a while he just stopped talking.
After a while, Rachael admits at least to herself, she wouldn't have listened even if he tried.
They make a tragic couple, she heard someone say; an aside, one gossip to another in a hotel lobby full of cigarette smoke and anonymity. She hadn't understood what that meant at first. She had no context in which to put it. Are they tragic? Why? She could die at any moment, and that is the human condition as she knows it, the awareness of one's own mortality driving words and deeds that would otherwise be unacceptable risks. That is not tragic. The only person in the world who could be called her father is dead, at the hands of, what? Her brother? Cousin, nephew? They don't have words in English or any other language that she knew to solve this relational predicament. Is that tragic?
Her life is full of things for which there were no words. The way in which she lives with a man who isn't her lover, who she isn't sure is even her friend. Shares his bed and his meals and pretends to share his life even though they do not share the intimacies of lovers save one, and that merely physical. And yet he was willing to sacrifice everything for her. And she, given the right situation, would do the same for him.
It's hard to know what to think. But right now it's cold, it's raining, the same acid rain that has always fallen on the city she thinks she knows from someone else's memories, and she wants to go home. She wants to go home, tell Deckard what happened that day, and go to sleep.
She goes home anyway, hoping that he'll be there when she gets back.
DECKARD
He is not there when she gets back.
He stumbles in several minutes later, dripping wet and not entirely cogent. She stares at him with arms folded as though it's all his fault, until he gives her a look that says she's being an idiot and whimpers for a towel.
"Where have you been?" she asks, heading towards the linen closet. Her hand trembles a little as she takes down the towel.
Deckard mumbles something that may or may not be actual words and starts to peel off the layers of wet clothing. Whatever he says ends in "... stupid doctors." From that she can extrapolate whatever she pleases. She passes him the towel without a word. Actually, she throws it at his head.
"You couldn't have called me from the hospital?"
"I was dead at the time."
It's a sign of how strange their life is that she believes him. Without question, she shrugs her shoulders and heads into the kitchen to make them both a cup of coffee. The warmth eases them as much as the routine. Dead is a good enough excuse. At least for right now.
"I saw Gaff today."
He freezes up in the act of toweling his face off and stares at her. Of all the things she could have said, that is one of the best to render him speechless and make him forget that he was going to be grumpy and yell at her. "What did he want?" Instead, he will be grumpy and yell at Gaff. Excellent.
"He didn't say."
Deckard doesn't like this. He never much liked the old man, and he liked the old man's dog even less. That's what Gaff always was, the panting, drooling mastiff that everyone sent out to do their dirty work. Someone who would lick the asses of the higher-ups and not ask too many embarrassing questions. Unlike Deckard, who'd gotten into the bad habit of demanding something like accountability, maybe even a little trust. Good police work depended on having people on your team you could trust. When the skin job thing had come up, everyone seemed to forget that.
"Do you think he'll come back?" He takes his cup of coffee with a much milder tone and expression, sipping it as though it was fresh ground instead of that preprocessed stuff. She responds in kind, shoulders slumping a little, expression relaxing. -Truce declared.
Rachael shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't know what he wanted. I don't think he knew what he wanted."
Deckard grunts, and drinks his preprocessed mud-textured coffee.
GAFF
He goes over the footage from Deckard's apartment, watching the two move around each other like furniture in their everyday lives. There was nothing so boring as two people who were content with each other and their lot in life. Not that he believes Deckard is at all content, nor Rachael neither for that matter. But they pretend, even to each other. It's important to them that they pretend, he realizes. It is important that they pretend that the life that they're building for themselves is worth the price that they paid for it. For Rachael, the abandonment of everything that she believed she had worked towards, even the abandonment of believing that she had a life of her own. For Deckard, turning his back on everything that he had stood for, humans, life, biology created by nature and not machines.
Gaff frowns. He isn't sure when he started sympathizing with them, but he doesn't like it. He doesn't like understanding that he sympathizes with them because it makes him think about it, which makes him feel more. Vicious cycle. He doesn't like to feel about them because it means he is that much closer to becoming something like them. Not the skin jobs, but Rachael and Deckard. Someone caught in between being a Replicant and being a living human being.
Never mind. He puts away the footage again, rattling his cup to see if there's any left sloshing around the bottom. There isn't.
He remembers Rachael making coffee for Deckard on their kitchen counter, remembers the way she paid careful attention to him. He remembers the look on her face, polite interest, not something you would expect in a lover and yet it seemed to please Deckard. The presumption of unfamiliarity, the illusion of distance pleased him. Gaff wonders if that means the bloom is off the rose and he can have a clear shot at Rachael. He makes his way over to the machine to refill his cup with the same automatic motions he uses every day, wondering what a clear shot would mean if he had one.
It's not likely that he'll have one. The moment he steps in to make a move, Deckard will be all over him, punching with his weak hands and throwing his weight around. He always was good at that.
Gaff spits out the coffee he poured himself, back into the cup and all over the counter. It's crap. It's the same old crap they always buy, always make, because they enjoy complaining about it too much to change it out for something decent. The whole city is like that. Too secure and comfortable and lazy in their discontent to even try for anything else. Gaff's feral ambition won't tolerate that kind of complacency.
RACHAEL
Deckard's asleep, so she goes out again. Tyrell's arcology is half shut down, all the floors on which he used to live blocked off by crime scene tape, private security, and years of dust. It hasn't been that long. Maybe only a years worth of accumulated dust and memories.
These are her memories now, hers alone. It gives her a strange sense of triumph to have that when her maker is dead.
She slips past the guards with a smile and a professional attitude. They may have changed the decor on the top levels of the monumental structure, but they haven't changed the layout of the hallways nor the architectures of the entrances. She remembers all the back doors in. Her feet know the way and the private security rationalizes that if she knows where she's going she must belong here, like the drapes or the statuary.
If anyone had meant to steal anything from the dead man, they would have done it a long time ago. No one was interested in guarding an old temple of a man who had long since outlived his usefulness. In a very literal sense, too. He was no longer useful, so Roy had killed him. Rachael realizes that she might have done it herself, in time, if none of the other Replicants had.
Maybe he was like a stepbrother. Or a stepson.
She looks around the room, nothing in it coming to life and speaking any kind of oracle that would tell her what she wanted to hear. Or even things that she might not want to hear. Nothing says anything. It's all inert matter, space meaningless without context, and she has absolutely no context in which to put it. She has never been in his private apartments before. The only person Deckard talked about who had, he was also dead. Also killed by Roy. She feels as though she is coming after someone, cleaning up after him, following in the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur. And then she laughs a little, the sound echoing dry and dusty through the still hanging silk curtains. A dinosaur who was only four years old when he died.
She doesn't know how old she is. She doesn't know how long she has to live. It should make her feel human, but it only makes her further from everyone else. She wonders, yet again, if she should leave Deckard. He brings nothing to her life. After thinking this over and running her hand along the bed sheets, remembering all the nights they spent together tangled on the bed and trying to forget, she curls up behind the canopy and goes to sleep. Unlike at home, she sleeps instantly and deeply.
DECKARD
It bothers him that it doesn't bother him that he doesn't know where she is. He lies awake staring at the ceiling and wonders why he doesn't care. She's a big girl, she can take care of herself. That's what she'd say, if she were there. But she isn't.
People who cohabitate as they do should care where the other person is. They've been pretending to be married for years. They don't actually have a license, or a certificate, or wedding photos of any kind. But they indulge in all the offices of a married couple, behave as a married couple, they don't correct the retail and service workers of the public when they refer to them as husband and wife. In a way their lie is more honest than the ones Rachael was told all her life. So what does that make him?
Does it really matter who is lying to whom about what? They're honest with each other. She knows he doesn't love her, that he has no love to give. He knows she doesn't love him. Rachael has no concept of love, is building it from an imperfect model, reflections of a world that was never hers. Even second-hand her ideas of love are flawed, from a man who loved nothing so much as his own godhood. Deckard is no model for love; he killed his years ago from his first divorce. Gaff... no one knows what Gaff is. He doesn't know why he thought of Gaff just now, except that Gaff is the only other person who's been in the apartment besides the two of them in months.
Does Gaff have a thing for Rachael?
The idea is so ridiculous that on the strength of it, Deckard gets up and makes himself a cup of re-heated coffee and a microwaved meal. It's a stupid idea. Gaff's a robot, a grinning, psychotic robot. He doesn't know what that means after having met the real thing. No, Replicants aren't robots. He met Roy, spoke with him, sat with him while he died. Watched as he came to accept his death. Watched as his body became a thing for the rain to drip off of and the birds to shit on. So are there real robots for comparison? Does he only think this because he doesn't like the man?
Is he over thinking this? Probably.
Deckard doesn't know what or how to think anymore. In the last few years it's all gotten jumbled up in that seething mass of cells he calls a mind.
RACHAEL
Dawn wakes her, stealing in and stretching heavy golden warmth over her shoulders. It's nice. Comfortable. She's drooling a little into the silk velvet pillow.
Was she really here all night? A perfunctory part of her brain that still makes excuses like I have a roast in the oven thinks that she was out all night and Deckard will be so worried. Common sense steamrollers flat any little wrinkles of banality. Her face smooths into indifference again.
Her clothes are about what she decides she should expect from having slept in them all night. Rachael plucks at the front of her blouse a little, then gives it up and picks up her shoes, taking the time to wander around the penthouse suite. If she's going to be late, out all night, and worry Deckard, she might as well make the most of it. No one was ever allowed in the arcology penthouse. No staff, anyway. Even when she was the Rachael who believed she had her own life, she had been curious.
He certainly lived it large, although everything in the rooms was tasteful for as ostentatious as the building itself was. Chosen for attention to detail, color-coordination, even the furniture in the room was designed to give it the illusion of space. Looking around the room, she could see elements of the man she had so briefly known. Briefly known, in the real world, at least. Perhaps this was a good way to get to know him better. His office reminded her, in a way, of the offices downstairs. The ones he had given to her and his other top employees. At least he had treated her in ways that he believed were flattering and beneficial. The way he treated himself tells her that.
Rachael moves around the floor. It's still slick, as though someone polished it every day. Her bare feet make very little noise, but every now and again she moves too slowly and the ball of her foot squeaks as it skids along the hardwood. Real wood, too. Were there real trees, too?
Did it matter?
She turns and goes down the hall to the elevator, wondering through the fog of her still sleep-dazed mind if the owl was still in the office.
DECKARD
She has the owl on her arm when she comes in.
"What are you doing with that?"
"I thought I'd keep it," she says, balancing it on her arm. "Doesn't it look nice?"
Deckard shakes his head. "It looks like Tyrell's owl," he tells her. "Did they just let you walk out with it?"
Rachael doesn't seem to care about the answer to that question. She goes over to the kitchen and takes out some leftovers from the old Chinese place, bouncing the bird on her arm a little and feeding it pieces of cold chicken. Deckard leans one hand on the couch and stares at her. "You were gone all night, and you come back and all you've got is an owl and no explanations?" He's more than a little upset, and he's pretty sure he has a right to be. But then again, though he and Rachael had never been anything like normal, they try their damndest to pretend. This is not pretending.
"Yes," she says, and then she says nothing more.
He should go out. He should go out, with no explanation and no reason, and stay out all night. Maybe for a few days. But he has no idea where he would go, anyway, and it's raining again outside.
"That thing better not shit in my apartment." Deckard grumbles, going back into the bedroom and flopping on the bed. He's giving up on the day, on understanding anything that happened, and he's going back to bed. There is no way he's equipped to deal with this. First Rachael, now an owl. He wonders what happened to the days when he was a contented, albeit most of the time cranky, bachelor.
"Hey, leave some for me," he calls, after a second to think. "Probably feed the damn bird all the chicken."
Fandom: Blade Runner
Characters: Gaff, Deckard, Rachael
Word Count: 11,218 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Gaff chases Deckard. Deckard chases Rachel. Rachel chases a half-formed dream, the nature of which she knows not. All of them turned upside down by the events of the film, all of them searching for a kind of equilibrium they can only find with each other. In the end, they find it in the strange construction all three of them make together. This is not a love story. This is a story of connections.
A/N: Written for
polybigbang 2009. Mix by Epporsimuove here.DECKARD
It rained the first time Deckard died.
Acid rain poured down in beaded sheets, covering everything in shimmering gray. The smell of wet plastic and concrete wafted up from the roof, wet asphalt and piss, papers in the corners drifting up from the ground. At this rate his last thought would be something like, this place stinks. Poetry. In the white-stained bedsheet sense of the word, cheap motels and gaslight making it tawdry. He didn't see any way out of it, but damned if he didn't feel like a heel for thinking it. That bastard.
It had rained when Roy died, too. Symmetry.
But he didn't get any doves. He had no one there to watch him. The roof was barren even of tiny bird-brained life. Only the ice cold rain dripping down the back of his two dollar shirt and some handcuffs dangling from his wrist. His favorite coat stained in the effluvium of human driftwood, fluids from both ends. Human beings were disgusting. Gaff was a piece of work.
He didn't even get to say goodbye.
This is not a love story.
GAFF
Gaff meets Rachael by the diner, dark faux marble punctuated by pale chopsticks and pork noodles. She's not bad looking, for a skin job. Holds herself tall and straight, shoulders back and chest popping forward. Legs stiff on stiletto heels. Like any other woman who believes being sexy is a part of her job; in other words, like every other female secretary in the city. Not bad looking at all. He wonders if it's because she doesn't know what it's like not to be human.
"You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl."
He's seen all the footage of her tests. He's seen all the surveillance footage they have on her and Deckard, which isn't much. Deckard was careful. He gives the old bastard that, Deckard was good. But he was sloppy. Got too close, too involved. Maybe he started wondering if he was a Replicant. Gaff won't make that mistake. If you started thinking like that you started doubting yourself, everything you knew was real. You doubted yourself int to madness because there was no solid place left to stand. Gaff won't fall into that trap. He has his eye on a nice little apartment at the top of the arcology, a cushy job where he got to pound the streets as much or as little as he wanted, and he has no plans to screw that up.
Voight-Kampff tests are no longer considered reliable. Tyrell's records are a sham; Rachael is the only one on file but no one knows how many Replicants are running around with memories, with emotional responses. There's no telling who won't be thorough enough, or even if there is such a thing. Paranoia reigns over practicality. Gaff gets the promotion he wanted but it's curdled from all the fear, sweat, and gossip. Bitter aftertaste. This isn't what he wanted.
What is, though? He accepts with a shrug and a burst of street-lingo philosophy. It annoys them when he does this, lapsing into an organic-grown pastiche of all the most common languages of the sprawling electric mass. It isn't even the language of one group or another, it's pidgin-talk. Trade language to be understood between factions.
Talking like that allows him to feel superior to the rest of the bottom-feeding lazy-ambitious cops who don't even try to solve cases anymore, just do enough work to get a paycheck and the government benefits. He knows how to talk to people, speaks the language of the streets. He also uses it to say what he really means because no one understands him.
He goes to see Rachael again because she knows what it's like not to be human.
DECKARD
There's a disconnect point between living and dead. When you're alive you have thoughts, you have words, you say and do things and you feel about them and the people you're around. When you're dead you're a thing. An object. Your jaw locks open and your body stiffens. They make the incisions and determine what caused the machinery of your life to malfunction and shut down. Just an object. Deckard feels the disconnecting process of his mind rejecting his body as a part of himself and putting it into a box to be shelved forever.
He's paralyzed. Can't move. He died thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes ago, according to the witch doctor in the sterile clothes and pale blue suit. His heart stopped beating, his skin turned cold. Pupils fixed and dilated. Flat line.
One by one his fingers twitch; the muscles contract and relax in response to little pinpricks from robot-controlled needles. At first there's only light, and then lines of darkness create shapes and colors come back into focus. Red first, then yellow, then blue. The sounds come to him slowly and through an underwater warble. He can't make sense of it yet; he needs more time.
The doctor comes and shines another light in his eyes and says something in words that aren't English or Japanese or Cityspeak and don't make sense. He repeats them, exaggerating the lip movements until Deckard realizes he can move his eyelids and squints to read his lips. Questions. That demand answers but the un-freezing process hasn't moved to his jaw or tongue or vocal cords yet. He blinks his eyes until the doctor understands that he's talking to a wooden man and leaves. Deckard wishes he could move if only to punch the man.
More doctors. More tests, more pinpricks of needles on robot arms and taking blood, looking at daytime television on clotted screens until he begs a nurse with rolling white-rimmed eyes to turn it off before he goes insane. More insane than he already is. No, he doesn't say that. He can't. He wants to say something.
The lights go out before he can move his mouth enough to speak.
RACHAEL
Rachael stands in the doorway. It's raining too hard for her to light a cigarette.
She wants one so bad her hands are shaking. Not the nicotine, which is no longer put in the brand of cigarettes she smokes, but the act of putting the cigarette between her lips and drawing tobacco smoke into her lungs. It comforts her to taste it all the way down her throat. She needs that comfort now. She has no idea how long she has left.
Deckard said that that was part of the human condition. Not to know. Rachael never found that very comforting and she finds it even less comforting to think of that when Deckard is gone. Banal, maybe. Disquieting, for certain. She could be gone before he ever gets back, falling over in the doorway for no good reason, the coroner would only be able to scratch his head and pronounce her dead of natural causes. Fallacious; she was not born of natural causes and so she cannot die of them. She has to die an unnatural death at the end of a pre-determined span, but she doesn't know what that is.
Deckard would be able to find out what that is, if he wanted. She resents that he doesn't want to know. She hates that she isn't capable, in some way, of looking into it. Of finding out what she wants to know. It should be simple. It's not.
There has to be a way. If she still worked for Tyrell she would know what to do but she doesn't. Tyrell's dead. Killed by one of the Replicants. A cousin? A brother? What was Roy Batty to her? He was Nexus 6 which makes her Nexus 7, Nexus Next Gen. She doesn't like the sound of Nexus 7. There's something unsexy about the number seven.
She wants Deckard back. She wants Tyrell back, she wants her life back.
Right now she wants a damn cigarette.
GAFF
He meets her in her apartment. He finds her waiting at the door for a man who will never come back to her, who realized the idiodicy of what he was doing, or at least that's what he wants to think. He still doesn't like Deckard.
Gaff walks her up to her room like a gentleman and if he's smiling under the moustache and behind the collar of his coat no one can tell. Drip-dry. His clothes are the garb of a Prohibition-era gangster, blank and well-tailored. Shoddily woven fabric sewn with care. A contradiction, like Gaff himself. There are no labels, names, or explanations.
"What are you doing here?"
He barely twitches. It's not as though it's an unreasonable question, or even unexpected. She knows him as a police officer, the man who shadowed the blade runner who was sent after her. And if Deckard was scary, imagine what he must be like. That probably isn't what she's thinking, but Gaff enjoys the idea that it might be.
"I looking for Deckard."
English doesn't come easily to him anymore. He spent so long playing the role, so long immersing himself into the world of the city underground and playing the bad cop or, in some cases, the worst cop, that it's hard for him to relate normal people. He doesn't know how to behave himself anymore. This doesn't strike him as a problem; nobody knows how to behave themselves anymore. There is no more normal.
"He's not here."
Gaff sees that. "When he return, you tell him I was here."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't look afraid. Unblinking eyes stare at him, her mouth neither thins with tension nor drops to breathe shallow panic. She's being strong, even though there is no one here to be strong for. He doesn't know the difference between fake and real bravery. A bad blind spot for a cop. "How should I tell him to contact you?"
"He knows how to find me."
She stares at him as he makes a circle around the room, picks up the yellowed and faded, its headline still shrieking triumphant about the skin jobs put down. So, Deckard lives in the past. Good to know.
DECKARD
There are no tears for Deckard
He hasn't felt this bad since the rooftop. Five minutes just to stand and take a few shaky steps, one hand on the wall, one hand opening and closing in spasms. Damn doctors. Wanted him to stay in the hospital, get shot up with all kinds of drugs he didn't know what they did. He's had enough of that. Won't be anyone's pincushion.
Later, when he was in a more reflective mood, he would tell Rachael that he didn't want to feel like an experiment. Like the Replicants probably did. Then he would spend the rest of the night apologizing to her for talking about the Replicants as though they were something else, something less than. He forgot that she was one of them. Never that she was different from him, but that she was one of them. The line between us and them was blurred where it intersected perpendicular to the connection between the two of them. She was one of them, and not like them. A new breed. A whole new species, population: one.
But that was later in the night. After they'd fought and made up. Right now he is experiencing something a lot less pleasant than a lovers quarrel.
Deckard is experiencing the delectable aroma of a city dumpster. He stumbled into it stomach first and consequently leaned over the edge to empty what little was left of his dinner. The half digested food and bile mixed in with someone's used sanitary napkins, dirty diapers, old food containers. The smell of vomit alone is enough to make him leave; this is unbearable.
And yet, still better than hospital.
He needs to get home. Back to the safety and dubious comforts of his apartment, back to someone who would take care of him the way he wanted to be taken care of. By standing back and letting him take care of himself, and waiting to be pulled back in.
He still has no idea what is happening to him. He isn't sure he wants to know.
If Replicants had had a choice, would they have opted to know the day and date of their death? Of the end of their four year lifespan? He doesn't know. He isn't going to ask Rachael.
RACHAEL
After the man leaves, she wanted to hit something. Unfortunately there is nothing in the apartment that was worth breaking, so she goes out to the lowest area of town she can think of just to break a few windows on some abandoned buildings. It's not as satisfying as she had hoped.
She still doesn't know where Deckard was. Out playing cop, maybe, she knows how much he misses police work even if he doesn't approve of what's going on with the Tyrell Corporation. Maybe he's out finding another woman to sleep with, one who's actually human. Out buying coffee and Chinese food, maybe, who knows? He could be anywhere. He doesn't tell her these things.
This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. He had pulled her off into the sunset, not on a white horse or with a suit of shining armor, but he had been there for her when everyone else would have turned her in or shot her themselves. He had, against his better judgment, protected her. She thought he understood.
She had hoped he understood. She had counted on it, wagered her entire life, whatever was left of it on the idea that maybe he was trying to understand what it was like to be a creation of some flawed, megalomaniacal human. In his own way, he was the creation of a flawed human, too. She had heard him talk about his old partner and his old captain to begin with. Their influences had perhaps not been entirely good; she thinks their influence is responsible for his present discomfort with himself. They chase dreams that they do not define, they push the causes of their dissatisfaction onto others. Deckard learned this behavior to survive amongst them, and she hears it when he talks about their thwarted (failed) ambitions and their enemies in the department. He talked until he realized that she wasn't hearing what he meant to be saying. After a while he just stopped talking.
After a while, Rachael admits at least to herself, she wouldn't have listened even if he tried.
They make a tragic couple, she heard someone say; an aside, one gossip to another in a hotel lobby full of cigarette smoke and anonymity. She hadn't understood what that meant at first. She had no context in which to put it. Are they tragic? Why? She could die at any moment, and that is the human condition as she knows it, the awareness of one's own mortality driving words and deeds that would otherwise be unacceptable risks. That is not tragic. The only person in the world who could be called her father is dead, at the hands of, what? Her brother? Cousin, nephew? They don't have words in English or any other language that she knew to solve this relational predicament. Is that tragic?
Her life is full of things for which there were no words. The way in which she lives with a man who isn't her lover, who she isn't sure is even her friend. Shares his bed and his meals and pretends to share his life even though they do not share the intimacies of lovers save one, and that merely physical. And yet he was willing to sacrifice everything for her. And she, given the right situation, would do the same for him.
It's hard to know what to think. But right now it's cold, it's raining, the same acid rain that has always fallen on the city she thinks she knows from someone else's memories, and she wants to go home. She wants to go home, tell Deckard what happened that day, and go to sleep.
She goes home anyway, hoping that he'll be there when she gets back.
DECKARD
He is not there when she gets back.
He stumbles in several minutes later, dripping wet and not entirely cogent. She stares at him with arms folded as though it's all his fault, until he gives her a look that says she's being an idiot and whimpers for a towel.
"Where have you been?" she asks, heading towards the linen closet. Her hand trembles a little as she takes down the towel.
Deckard mumbles something that may or may not be actual words and starts to peel off the layers of wet clothing. Whatever he says ends in "... stupid doctors." From that she can extrapolate whatever she pleases. She passes him the towel without a word. Actually, she throws it at his head.
"You couldn't have called me from the hospital?"
"I was dead at the time."
It's a sign of how strange their life is that she believes him. Without question, she shrugs her shoulders and heads into the kitchen to make them both a cup of coffee. The warmth eases them as much as the routine. Dead is a good enough excuse. At least for right now.
"I saw Gaff today."
He freezes up in the act of toweling his face off and stares at her. Of all the things she could have said, that is one of the best to render him speechless and make him forget that he was going to be grumpy and yell at her. "What did he want?" Instead, he will be grumpy and yell at Gaff. Excellent.
"He didn't say."
Deckard doesn't like this. He never much liked the old man, and he liked the old man's dog even less. That's what Gaff always was, the panting, drooling mastiff that everyone sent out to do their dirty work. Someone who would lick the asses of the higher-ups and not ask too many embarrassing questions. Unlike Deckard, who'd gotten into the bad habit of demanding something like accountability, maybe even a little trust. Good police work depended on having people on your team you could trust. When the skin job thing had come up, everyone seemed to forget that.
"Do you think he'll come back?" He takes his cup of coffee with a much milder tone and expression, sipping it as though it was fresh ground instead of that preprocessed stuff. She responds in kind, shoulders slumping a little, expression relaxing. -Truce declared.
Rachael shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't know what he wanted. I don't think he knew what he wanted."
Deckard grunts, and drinks his preprocessed mud-textured coffee.
GAFF
He goes over the footage from Deckard's apartment, watching the two move around each other like furniture in their everyday lives. There was nothing so boring as two people who were content with each other and their lot in life. Not that he believes Deckard is at all content, nor Rachael neither for that matter. But they pretend, even to each other. It's important to them that they pretend, he realizes. It is important that they pretend that the life that they're building for themselves is worth the price that they paid for it. For Rachael, the abandonment of everything that she believed she had worked towards, even the abandonment of believing that she had a life of her own. For Deckard, turning his back on everything that he had stood for, humans, life, biology created by nature and not machines.
Gaff frowns. He isn't sure when he started sympathizing with them, but he doesn't like it. He doesn't like understanding that he sympathizes with them because it makes him think about it, which makes him feel more. Vicious cycle. He doesn't like to feel about them because it means he is that much closer to becoming something like them. Not the skin jobs, but Rachael and Deckard. Someone caught in between being a Replicant and being a living human being.
Never mind. He puts away the footage again, rattling his cup to see if there's any left sloshing around the bottom. There isn't.
He remembers Rachael making coffee for Deckard on their kitchen counter, remembers the way she paid careful attention to him. He remembers the look on her face, polite interest, not something you would expect in a lover and yet it seemed to please Deckard. The presumption of unfamiliarity, the illusion of distance pleased him. Gaff wonders if that means the bloom is off the rose and he can have a clear shot at Rachael. He makes his way over to the machine to refill his cup with the same automatic motions he uses every day, wondering what a clear shot would mean if he had one.
It's not likely that he'll have one. The moment he steps in to make a move, Deckard will be all over him, punching with his weak hands and throwing his weight around. He always was good at that.
Gaff spits out the coffee he poured himself, back into the cup and all over the counter. It's crap. It's the same old crap they always buy, always make, because they enjoy complaining about it too much to change it out for something decent. The whole city is like that. Too secure and comfortable and lazy in their discontent to even try for anything else. Gaff's feral ambition won't tolerate that kind of complacency.
RACHAEL
Deckard's asleep, so she goes out again. Tyrell's arcology is half shut down, all the floors on which he used to live blocked off by crime scene tape, private security, and years of dust. It hasn't been that long. Maybe only a years worth of accumulated dust and memories.
These are her memories now, hers alone. It gives her a strange sense of triumph to have that when her maker is dead.
She slips past the guards with a smile and a professional attitude. They may have changed the decor on the top levels of the monumental structure, but they haven't changed the layout of the hallways nor the architectures of the entrances. She remembers all the back doors in. Her feet know the way and the private security rationalizes that if she knows where she's going she must belong here, like the drapes or the statuary.
If anyone had meant to steal anything from the dead man, they would have done it a long time ago. No one was interested in guarding an old temple of a man who had long since outlived his usefulness. In a very literal sense, too. He was no longer useful, so Roy had killed him. Rachael realizes that she might have done it herself, in time, if none of the other Replicants had.
Maybe he was like a stepbrother. Or a stepson.
She looks around the room, nothing in it coming to life and speaking any kind of oracle that would tell her what she wanted to hear. Or even things that she might not want to hear. Nothing says anything. It's all inert matter, space meaningless without context, and she has absolutely no context in which to put it. She has never been in his private apartments before. The only person Deckard talked about who had, he was also dead. Also killed by Roy. She feels as though she is coming after someone, cleaning up after him, following in the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur. And then she laughs a little, the sound echoing dry and dusty through the still hanging silk curtains. A dinosaur who was only four years old when he died.
She doesn't know how old she is. She doesn't know how long she has to live. It should make her feel human, but it only makes her further from everyone else. She wonders, yet again, if she should leave Deckard. He brings nothing to her life. After thinking this over and running her hand along the bed sheets, remembering all the nights they spent together tangled on the bed and trying to forget, she curls up behind the canopy and goes to sleep. Unlike at home, she sleeps instantly and deeply.
DECKARD
It bothers him that it doesn't bother him that he doesn't know where she is. He lies awake staring at the ceiling and wonders why he doesn't care. She's a big girl, she can take care of herself. That's what she'd say, if she were there. But she isn't.
People who cohabitate as they do should care where the other person is. They've been pretending to be married for years. They don't actually have a license, or a certificate, or wedding photos of any kind. But they indulge in all the offices of a married couple, behave as a married couple, they don't correct the retail and service workers of the public when they refer to them as husband and wife. In a way their lie is more honest than the ones Rachael was told all her life. So what does that make him?
Does it really matter who is lying to whom about what? They're honest with each other. She knows he doesn't love her, that he has no love to give. He knows she doesn't love him. Rachael has no concept of love, is building it from an imperfect model, reflections of a world that was never hers. Even second-hand her ideas of love are flawed, from a man who loved nothing so much as his own godhood. Deckard is no model for love; he killed his years ago from his first divorce. Gaff... no one knows what Gaff is. He doesn't know why he thought of Gaff just now, except that Gaff is the only other person who's been in the apartment besides the two of them in months.
Does Gaff have a thing for Rachael?
The idea is so ridiculous that on the strength of it, Deckard gets up and makes himself a cup of re-heated coffee and a microwaved meal. It's a stupid idea. Gaff's a robot, a grinning, psychotic robot. He doesn't know what that means after having met the real thing. No, Replicants aren't robots. He met Roy, spoke with him, sat with him while he died. Watched as he came to accept his death. Watched as his body became a thing for the rain to drip off of and the birds to shit on. So are there real robots for comparison? Does he only think this because he doesn't like the man?
Is he over thinking this? Probably.
Deckard doesn't know what or how to think anymore. In the last few years it's all gotten jumbled up in that seething mass of cells he calls a mind.
RACHAEL
Dawn wakes her, stealing in and stretching heavy golden warmth over her shoulders. It's nice. Comfortable. She's drooling a little into the silk velvet pillow.
Was she really here all night? A perfunctory part of her brain that still makes excuses like I have a roast in the oven thinks that she was out all night and Deckard will be so worried. Common sense steamrollers flat any little wrinkles of banality. Her face smooths into indifference again.
Her clothes are about what she decides she should expect from having slept in them all night. Rachael plucks at the front of her blouse a little, then gives it up and picks up her shoes, taking the time to wander around the penthouse suite. If she's going to be late, out all night, and worry Deckard, she might as well make the most of it. No one was ever allowed in the arcology penthouse. No staff, anyway. Even when she was the Rachael who believed she had her own life, she had been curious.
He certainly lived it large, although everything in the rooms was tasteful for as ostentatious as the building itself was. Chosen for attention to detail, color-coordination, even the furniture in the room was designed to give it the illusion of space. Looking around the room, she could see elements of the man she had so briefly known. Briefly known, in the real world, at least. Perhaps this was a good way to get to know him better. His office reminded her, in a way, of the offices downstairs. The ones he had given to her and his other top employees. At least he had treated her in ways that he believed were flattering and beneficial. The way he treated himself tells her that.
Rachael moves around the floor. It's still slick, as though someone polished it every day. Her bare feet make very little noise, but every now and again she moves too slowly and the ball of her foot squeaks as it skids along the hardwood. Real wood, too. Were there real trees, too?
Did it matter?
She turns and goes down the hall to the elevator, wondering through the fog of her still sleep-dazed mind if the owl was still in the office.
DECKARD
She has the owl on her arm when she comes in.
"What are you doing with that?"
"I thought I'd keep it," she says, balancing it on her arm. "Doesn't it look nice?"
Deckard shakes his head. "It looks like Tyrell's owl," he tells her. "Did they just let you walk out with it?"
Rachael doesn't seem to care about the answer to that question. She goes over to the kitchen and takes out some leftovers from the old Chinese place, bouncing the bird on her arm a little and feeding it pieces of cold chicken. Deckard leans one hand on the couch and stares at her. "You were gone all night, and you come back and all you've got is an owl and no explanations?" He's more than a little upset, and he's pretty sure he has a right to be. But then again, though he and Rachael had never been anything like normal, they try their damndest to pretend. This is not pretending.
"Yes," she says, and then she says nothing more.
He should go out. He should go out, with no explanation and no reason, and stay out all night. Maybe for a few days. But he has no idea where he would go, anyway, and it's raining again outside.
"That thing better not shit in my apartment." Deckard grumbles, going back into the bedroom and flopping on the bed. He's giving up on the day, on understanding anything that happened, and he's going back to bed. There is no way he's equipped to deal with this. First Rachael, now an owl. He wonders what happened to the days when he was a contented, albeit most of the time cranky, bachelor.
"Hey, leave some for me," he calls, after a second to think. "Probably feed the damn bird all the chicken."