Work Text:
K has barely sat there for a minute – still hasn’t moved to get up from the chair she left him sitting in – when he hears the pounding on the door. Short and sharp. Indignant.
Exhaling the smallest of sighs, he rises from the chair, walks slowly to the door. Slides back the heavy latch.
She stalks in past him, imperiously. As if she owns the place. Which, he supposes with a mental shrug, she sort of does, technically. What with the fact that it’s all coming out of her budget.
He shoves the door back in place, and turns to face her. Inwardly weary but features set carefully in a blank, neutral expression. He may have passed his last baseline with flying colors, but he’s acutely aware of something beginning to feel different inside of him in the short time since he retired Sapper Morton. Since the discovery of the miracle child.
That fucking date carved in the tree.
This need to check, to control, his expression is part of it. It’s like something very small – some tiny, single thread inside of him – has come loose. And while he knows that picking at it could cause everything to unravel, he can’t help himself. He is in dangerous territory, he knows. Whatever is happening within him, he needs to quash it. Get it under control.
“Madam?” His voice is softly polite. Just impersonal enough to feign ignorance of what’s going on. Like he can’t understand why she’s back here less than a minute after walking out.
She glaring at him, her eyes practically spitting fire, and yet… it’s a different kind of fury than he’s seen before from her. She’s not just angry, she’s… vexed.
An old-fashioned kind of word.
Dreadfully.
But the one, he thinks, that best describes how she appears to feel at this moment in time. And perhaps, he thinks, he can understand her vexation. He can almost grasp the things she’s so obviously grappling with, the contradicting feelings swirling around inside her – so distinct and yet so muddled together – fuelled by the substantial amount of his alcohol she’s downed.
Want. Need. Desire. Curiosity. Resentment. Loathing.
K stands there, watching his madam, breathing quietly and evenly through his nose, and waits for her next move.
***
“I didn’t have to ask, you know.”
When she finally speaks, her words hang there in the air, thick like something you could touch.
He feels a dull knot clench in his stomach. A distant sort of sensation. He blinks slowly. Considers how – and if – to respond, and decides against it.
She steps toward him. Close enough that he can smell her subtle, obviously expensive perfume.
“All I had to do,” she continues, “was order you.” Her voice is barely audible, yet like steel. “I didn’t want to have to order you, K, didn’t you get that?”
He lowers his eyes. Holds his tongue.
“You get some kind of twisted satisfaction from that, Officer? From humiliating me like that?”
This is too direct a question to ignore.
“No,” he says, quickly. Firmly. Makes himself look her in the eyes. “Of course not. I meant no disrespect, Madam.” A long pause. “My apologies.”
There’s just enough sincerity in his voice, enough gravity in his eyes, to placate her slightly. She stands back a little. Eyeing him, sizing him up.
“You meant no disrespect,” she repeats, slowly, rolling the words around in her mouth as if tasting them. “What exactly did you mean then, K?”
He mentally grits his teeth. The knot in his stomach tightens, heavy and sickening. He formulates his next sentence precisely.
“I just meant,” he begins, his voice as quiet as possible, “that with this latest development, you wouldn’t want me to … waste any time. That the work took precedence over… anything else.”
She’s watching him keenly, weighing each inflection, every flicker of his eyes. He tries his damnedest to go even quieter. Even more still. A fucking living statue under her watchful gaze.
“Is that right,” she murmurs, and he has no idea what that means. Whether she believes him or not, there’s a good probability he’s fucked either way. Literally in the first instance – if she decides to go through with it – or figuratively in the second, if she decides he’s been lying to her.
He stands there trying not to break into a sweat.
Finally, it seems she’s bought it. Turning on her heel, she strides back toward the couch – where she’d sat earlier – and seems to hesitate for a moment. Then she seems to change her mind. She walks over to the opposite side of the room instead, slowly. The one where his fold-out bed stands neatly slotted into the wall. Runs her hand along the wall, finds the switch she’s looking for, hits it.
Stands there looking at him deliberately while the hydraulic system grinds softly as the bed releases from the wall and slowly rotates down to the floor.
K feels the knot in his stomach explode violently through his chest, wedge his throat. It’s suddenly hard to breathe. He holds her gaze, though. Fights to keep his expression blank.
She shrugs her coat off in one elegant movement, sits on the edge of the bed.
“Come here, K.” Her voice is gentler now, less steel in it.
He’s moving before he realizes it, his feet propelling him forward automatically at her command. He stops before her, barely inches away. Much closer than he would ever normally stand.
Because, let’s face it, there’s no more pretending here.
And for a long moment, he’s standing over her, looking down at her. And she’s sitting there looking up at him.
And suddenly, he feels something shift – or rather, he feels the possibility of a shift – in their dynamic. In the balance of power between them. For maybe the first time in her presence, he is acutely aware of his own physical strength. He notices how slight she is, how slim and… breakable. Her upturned face, her exposed neck, make her vulnerable in a way she’s never appeared to him before. He could do anything, he realises, as he stands towering over her. Snap her neck like a ragdoll. Or push her down and fuck her to within an inch of her life. Anything. And she would be helpless to stop him.
And for just that moment, he feels something stir in him, something almost primal. A flare of heat deep in his gut – but then it’s gone.
He could, but he can’t.
He could, but he wouldn’t.
He tells himself the latter is more important. (Sure it is).
The dull leaden weight settles back over him; his constricting reality like a shroud. He feels it like a bitter taste in his mouth.
If she has similarly dark thoughts while she gazes up at her blade runner – whether she feels alarm at the possibility of this encounter turning violent; whether she trusts him or trusts that he is duty bound to obey no matter what – she doesn’t let on.
With you I sometimes forget, she’d said.
She reaches out, takes his hand. Turns it over, palm up, and examines it with a sort of detached curiosity. Feels his roughened fingers, his lightly calloused palm. Her touch is light, feathery. If he were to separate the physical sensation from the storm of emotion raging through him, he would say it felt… nice.
But he can’t seem to separate the two. His highly developed compartmentalizing mechanism, which has served him so well so far, suddenly seems to be sputtering and failing on him, like the dying engine of a malfunctioning spinner. About to drop him out of the sky.
“Take off your clothes, K.” She says it softly, yet it’s clearly a command.
Her words hit him like a sledgehammer.
Something real, he thinks absently, as he mechanically reaches for the hem of his jumper, pulls it off reluctantly over his head. We’re all just looking out for something real.
That's what she'd said, hadn't she? Those exact words. Just a while ago.
Does this mean he is real to her?
She’s always treated him well, unlike the others. She’s been hard on him, sure – but always fair. Never crossed any lines. Impeccable conduct. To the point where he almost wouldn’t have expected this of her.
Now he berates himself for being such a fool. He shouldn’t have been lulled into a false sense of security like that. This evening wasn’t the first time, after all, that she’d looked at him that way; with contemplative, almost longing eyes.
He should have fucking seen this coming.
So he gets on with it, stooping to unlace his boots. His fingers feel strange as he does this – numb and clumsy – so it takes him longer than it should. Standing, he pushes his boots off, and pauses, barefoot on the cool tiled floor, as if he still thinks there might be a chance she’ll change her mind. When the moments stretch out and she says nothing, he raises his hands – definitely shaking now – to unbutton his trousers, his movements slow like he’s underwater. Unzipping, pushing them down, stepping out of them.
Obeying her like he always does.
***
Later, K stares up into the darkness.
She is asleep next to him on the compact bed, her smooth, bare back to him. Her body beside his is warm, radiating heat the way that only a real human body can. Briefly, he shuts his eyes and imagines she is Joi instead. What he wouldn’t give for that to be true.
He dismisses the thought and focuses instead on trying to get a grip. Trying to find some equilibrium again, get himself under control. Part of him is still confused as to why this was so hard for him when he’s been through so much worse.
After all, as sexual encounters go, this was definitely the closest he’s ever had to a consensual one. The standout being that it wasn’t violent. Joshi didn’t do anything outright horrible to him. She didn’t try to hurt him. She didn’t call him names or spit at him while fucking him. If anything, she was oddly tender with him, considerate in a way he wouldn’t have believed was possible if he hadn’t seen it in old movies, or read about it in books. They called it making love.
Yes, that’s it.
Now, he realises that the way she touched him was close to the way he has, on occasion, imagined that Joi might touch him – if Joi could touch him at all – and it saddens him that this happened instead.
****
He’d stood before Joshi, naked, and she had just looked at him, from head to toe, slowly and at her leisure. A sickening mixture of resentment, anxiety and heat mingling in his belly, his heart pounding, he’d let her look, motionless. Looking right back at her, unblinking. Almost defiant. (This much, he could do).
“I wondered when I first saw you,” she’d said finally, “Why they made you look the way you do.”
His voice tight, he’d asked, “What way is that?”
“Strangely handsome,” she’d answered, honestly. “A good-looking boy, but not in the conventional sense. Just something slightly… off kilter. About your face, I mean. Not your body. Your body is… pretty fucking perfect.”
Her tone had been conversational as she said this, as if they were talking in her office across her desk – as if he weren’t standing stark naked inches away, waiting for her to fuck him.
He’d swallowed, silent.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful, K?” She had asked finally. She had looked at him almost sadly as she asked this.
He’d considered this. “A couple people,” he’d replied finally. “But it never seemed like a compliment, you know?”
She didn’t press further. She probably preferred not to know.
She’d touched him instead, brushing the back of her hand softly up his belly, and taken by surprise by the contact, by the intimacy of it, he’d sucked in a sharp breath. She’d continued to touch him, now running her hands lightly over his chest, down his ribs, over his hips. He’d had to steel himself, to stare at a point on the wall and remember to keep breathing, not because it felt terrible, but because it felt good – it was in fact, almost too much for him to bear. Complete sensory overload.
For all his experience with violence and pain in his short life, pleasure was utterly uncharted territory. He’d simply never been touched like this, and was helpless not to react. Despite himself, within minutes he was a mess of jangling nerves and tingling, flushed skin, synapses firing wildly, the pleasure centres of his brain lighting up like it was Christmas. When she ran her hands down the outsides of his bare thighs and then back up the insides, all the way up to his groin, his knees turned to jelly. Panting, his heart pounding wildly, he almost couldn’t stand upright any longer.
Joshi had understood this. She’d eased off. Pulled him down on the bed, let him recover a bit. It was only after his breathing evened out slightly that she’d straddled him. Unbuttoning her dress, slipping it off. Unhooking her bra, letting it slide down her arms. He’d watched her, a fine sheen of sweat breaking out over his body, trapped between the desperate need pulsing through him and the anger he felt at her, even now, even as she was naked on top of him, for doing this to him.
A memory had come back to him… a real one. From his earlier days on the force, not long after his commissioning. A man who’d ordered him into a stock room. He was a lieutenant, like Joshi. Senior enough that it was tricky, if not outright impossible, to disobey a direct order from him.
By chance, Joshi had seen them exiting the room from down the hall, the lieutenant brazenly adjusting his belt and K, his eyes more vacant than usual, a deep bruise flowering on his left cheekbone, walking quietly behind him. She had called K into her office and asked him point blank what had transpired. Unable to lie, K had had no choice but to tell her, but he’d asked her to let it go. Knowing the fallout would be worse for him if she confronted the lieutenant.
“Be smarter, then,” she’d spat at him. “Stop giving him the opportunity.”
“I try,” he had replied, calmly, as if her reaction was perfectly reasonable. “But it’s not always possible. I’ll do better. Look, I’m fine. Can we not talk about this again?”
So they hadn’t. But, whether or not by coincidence, that particular lieutenant had never touched him again.
And now here she was, on top of him, riding him. And yes it felt good, and yes she had been gentle, and yes, right now he was clutching at her hips, his head falling back and his eyes slipping shut, but that didn’t change the fact that he had tried to say no and she hadn’t listened.
***
He turns his head to look back at her. She’s breathing deeply, her ribcage rising and falling. He hopes that she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and decide to steal out quietly. He really doesn’t look forward to navigating an awkward early morning encounter with her.
Right now, all he really wants is to go shower, to wash off the fluids – his own and hers – that cover his body in a sticky film. But a shower means noise and noise means waking her up. He decides his best bet is to try and be asleep when she finally wakes.
He is exhausted, he realizes.
He’s just grateful he doesn’t have a baseline scheduled for the following morning. All bets are off on how that would turn out.