[ That does settle it. There was always far less plausible deniability available to Danse here, because his subconscious only ever works like that when it's borrowing from someone else's, and that has only become possible in these last strange, mentally-communal weeks around the convoy. But he might have believed another explanation, if it was presented to him--might still have wanted to believe something else.
(Would he really have? He's tired, and the vigilance has made for increasingly hard and lonely work, with nothing to support it and everything Arcade's done only managing to erode his suspicions further and further.)
He remembers the name on the signs, anyway. There can't be any more doubt. He listens without judgment or interjection now, only the occasional soft breath of smoke as he focuses. He's not a stranger to this genre of nightmare, at least. This one would have been enough to rob him of sleep even as an adult--even as someone who's never had anything but an adult's mind to process these things. It's hard, makes the heart ache a little, to imagine enduring either the dream or the reality as a child that young. ]
I didn't know.
[ There's only so much that excuses. He doesn't think he has the right to presume he was anything but the catalyst for the dream, if anything. He looks away. ]
...Did you still have your mother, at least?
[ He doesn't know why he wants to confirm that. Not everything about the dream had seemed necessarily so straightforward or factual, at the end, and the question has been stuck somewhere in the back of his mind. ]
no subject
(Would he really have? He's tired, and the vigilance has made for increasingly hard and lonely work, with nothing to support it and everything Arcade's done only managing to erode his suspicions further and further.)
He remembers the name on the signs, anyway. There can't be any more doubt. He listens without judgment or interjection now, only the occasional soft breath of smoke as he focuses. He's not a stranger to this genre of nightmare, at least. This one would have been enough to rob him of sleep even as an adult--even as someone who's never had anything but an adult's mind to process these things. It's hard, makes the heart ache a little, to imagine enduring either the dream or the reality as a child that young. ]
I didn't know.
[ There's only so much that excuses. He doesn't think he has the right to presume he was anything but the catalyst for the dream, if anything. He looks away. ]
...Did you still have your mother, at least?
[ He doesn't know why he wants to confirm that. Not everything about the dream had seemed necessarily so straightforward or factual, at the end, and the question has been stuck somewhere in the back of his mind. ]