[ It isn't right, that his answer--visceral and internal, or aloud to be defended--should change based on where the orders come from. Danse knows this. Something in him has always known it, and it's a rawer surface wound than usual right now, when he can still almost taste the smoke of that burning Enclave base from only a couple nights past. He's justified so much for the Brotherhood, and only for the Brotherhood, and then turned around to full-throatedly condemn the same damn things under any other banner.
Small wonder he'd once overheard someone at the Castle snickering over the name he'd given his rifle. They've taken to calling him "Self-Righteous Authority" behind his back even when he knows they know he can hear them. He's brushed them off before in a lion-with-the-opinions-of-the-sheep sort of way, but even in his dreams, now, it comes back to haunt him.
Maybe they are the same. ]
And what the hell do we do if we are?
[ He doesn't give Zack the chance to respond, not yet. Not for lack of meaning to, or wanting to--he's just a light sleeper at the best of times, and a noise outside the truck snaps the binding thread of the dream as it wakes him with a start.
He doesn't sleep for the rest of that night, either. It doesn't have anything to do with the bristly and uncomfortable new tail now crammed into the back of his coveralls. That's just insult on top of injury. He deals with it in something of a haze, snipping a hole into the back of his clothes and carrying distractedly on with his life and trying with limited success to shore up the wall of his moral philosophy with the bricks that keep falling out of it, until breakfast a few mornings later, when he suddenly finds himself looking up across the buffet line at a pair of alarmingly familiar blue eyes. ]
--I know you. I didn't realize you were--
[ Actually here, maybe, or actually real, though he doesn't know why he wouldn't have. ]
no subject
Small wonder he'd once overheard someone at the Castle snickering over the name he'd given his rifle. They've taken to calling him "Self-Righteous Authority" behind his back even when he knows they know he can hear them. He's brushed them off before in a lion-with-the-opinions-of-the-sheep sort of way, but even in his dreams, now, it comes back to haunt him.
Maybe they are the same. ]
And what the hell do we do if we are?
[ He doesn't give Zack the chance to respond, not yet. Not for lack of meaning to, or wanting to--he's just a light sleeper at the best of times, and a noise outside the truck snaps the binding thread of the dream as it wakes him with a start.
He doesn't sleep for the rest of that night, either. It doesn't have anything to do with the bristly and uncomfortable new tail now crammed into the back of his coveralls. That's just insult on top of injury. He deals with it in something of a haze, snipping a hole into the back of his clothes and carrying distractedly on with his life and trying with limited success to shore up the wall of his moral philosophy with the bricks that keep falling out of it, until breakfast a few mornings later, when he suddenly finds himself looking up across the buffet line at a pair of alarmingly familiar blue eyes. ]
--I know you. I didn't realize you were--
[ Actually here, maybe, or actually real, though he doesn't know why he wouldn't have. ]