Perchance to Dream of You
Deckard?
Rachael thought of him as she woke with a start; reaching over with her arm, she found no one in the bed beside her. He's gone, she thought. He said he had to finish it; he didn't say what 'it' was, and she didn't have to ask. The sound of the elevator leaving just now was probably somebody from a floor above her.
She remembered the look on his face as he left. A face that had softened and even smiled not long before became hard, stony, and cold.
She remembered.
Or did she? A week ago she wouldn't have questioned her memories, but now she wasn't even sure what memories were hers. She tried to trace her memories back from today until as far as she could. But as she went back, things got more hazy. The parts she remembered clearly were more scattered the further she went back. Did she even exist at all?
Stop, she told herself. That way only led to madness. Don't panic. You'll be jumping off the balcony just to prove something that doesn't need proving.
She felt the sheet under her. That was real. She smelled the staleness of the room, contrasted only by the stench of the city streets below. That was real too. On the shelf, the bottle of alcohol with a unicorn on it was the same as when she had drifted off to sleep. Everything seemed the same.
Maybe she just woke up, and it was someone else's memories of Deckard that she had. Maybe he didn't even exist, maybe...
Stop. Control yourself. Deckard?
She looked down at her body. It was the same body that she remembered being with Deckard, so that was real. She looked down at her hand. It was the same hand that held his gun when she killed Leon. That was real, even though she didn't want to admit it.
The Voight-Kampff test was real. Probing, prodding, trying to get reactions. She could feel the chair beneath her, the cold desk, and the light from the instrument as her cigarette smoke swirled in the air between her and it. Was it really Deckard giving the test? Maybe it was someone like her, maybe...
Wait. Take a breath. It was the same face behind the instrument, the same mask that she saw removed a short time ago in this room. The same man who limped over and bled in his sink, the same man that needed comfort from a bottle that her uncle...
Eldon Tyrell was no uncle. He has a niece, or at least used to have one. It was her piano lessons she remembered. She couldn't remember what her hands looked like; they were too small anyway. Any memories earlier than that couldn't be hers.
She had memories of looking in a mirror, like most teen aged girls did. The face was hers. Was it? Maybe it wasn't hers at all...
She jumped up and found a small mirror above the sink. It could have been the same face; it wasn't a lot different if it was a different one. She was usually paying attention to how she looked, not what she looked like. There weren't any gross differences between what she saw now and what she remembered from her now questionable past.
They probably made her look like the niece. Better to avoid any conflicts in memory by having too large a discrepancy.
That explained it. A replicant wouldn't come to work for the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation as an assistant. She was put there so he could keep an eye on her, his own special project. Maybe he had done horrible things to her and then...
No. Hold on. The memories of working there were intact, no significant gaps. Before that, there was no way to know.
But she had responded to Deckard as if it was the first time for her. Her body seemed as unsure as her mind, but it had been enjoyable. Could she simply have been programmed to enjoy it? Tapped into some type of lust subroutine? What was pleasure anyway?
An emotion. Like the panic she felt at being nobody, the fear that maybe she was somebody else. Maybe patched together with a lot of other peoples' memories, nothing more than some experience buffet where...
No! She wasn't that now, she refused to believe it. It was more like...clothes. They didn't all come from one place, you got your skirt here and your blouse there and the shoes came from somewhere else. Someone else had shoes like mine; someone else has childhood memories like mine too. It didn't lessen who she was now.
She was a woman, in all that mattered. Maybe not a human, but a person with emotions and feelings and even dreams. Did the other Nexus 6 replicants dream? She hadn't been able to find out if they did, but she certainly experienced them. Did they have emotions? Some humans seemed to lack the ability from her limited observation. But she had those too, even if they were a little out of control right now. Not just old memories of having them, but recent ones too. Like love. She didn't remember ever being in love with anyone before, man or woman. But something and everything told her that was what she was beginning to feel now.
She crawled back into bed. Will I dream of you Deckard? Will it be a dream where I wake up and you're beside me, or will I wake up and take flowers to your grave? Be careful, come back to me. Be more than just a dream, or in time just a memory of a dream.
Was that you just now Deckard? Just wishful thinking, any sound that might be you coming home.
She yawned. Coming home to me.
She drifted back to sleep.
The End
A/N: I've only seen the theatrical version, so the 'Deckard is a replicant' theory doesn't fit what I've watched very well; and I have to admit that I want Deckard to be human, flawed as he may be. But Rachael must have gone through some introspection after she learned she was a replicant, and it was probably disorienting and a little scary in that time of identity crisis.