This thought process is completely inscrutable to Danse, who has probably broken some record for the shortest time it's ever taken for 'sure, I guess' to give way to 'what was I thinking,' and who has no idea what the shapeshifting process entails or how it works or how accurate it's possible to make it. He assumes it will be a good enough likeness just because he's never known Deacon to be anything other than committed to effectiveness in his disguises, but that only makes him wonder all the more how Deacon could recreate his frame well enough to use it as a tailless clothing mannequin.
He doesn't know what to think about the notion that Deacon's been observing him closely enough to make it look real, as if Danse hasn't just been doing the same thing in his own way for less innocent reasons. And he can't help snapping sharply and disconcertedly out of this reverie at the sound of Deacon's voice, because of all the things he might have expected to hear, this is...not one of them.
"What's wrong?" It certainly sounds like something is. "Are you...stuck like that, or something?" It's the first thing that comes to mind that could account for that note of alarm in Deacon's tone. He was half expecting Deacon to sound like him, too, and it feels like a slight relief that he doesn't, but the rest of this scenario is kind of making up for that.
Deacon scoffs in reply, hesitating another moment while he gawks at the reflection. "No, no... I just really nailed this. I don't want you to freak out on me," he replies, which is a half-truth, because yeah, he did nail it, and yeah, he doesn't want Danse to freak out... but he's omitting the fact that he's having a bunch of realizations right now and those are his real cause for alarm.
Without further ado, he whips the curtain back in a grand reveal, smirking in a way he most definitely has never seen Danse smirk, and mocking the other man's deeper voice.
This is not entirely reassuring him. "Why would I freak out, if it's that accurate? I've seen myself in a mirror before. I thought that was the objective here." Though he hasn't been inside the dressing room yet, and he rarely does actually get the chance to see himself in a full-length mirror, especially not outside of power armor. Danse has less reliable or objective a perspective on his own body than he might.
And whatever he looks like, he thinks when Deacon pulls back the curtain, it can't possibly be...that. (Surrealism entirely aside, which is proving difficult enough to process, between the outfit he's never worn anything like and the expression he's not even sure how to make.) Surely Deacon's pranking him after all, having a little laugh, just an extension of the little 'stick up your backside' and 'furry butt' jabs. It would go hand-in-hand with the way he's being mimicked after all, and he scowls reflexively, even if the imitation of his voice and his catchphrase wouldn't get more than a faint eye roll on its own.
"You're not funny, you know." He's been subject to enough teasing about his ass in the barracks and the showers over the years to be mostly inured to what he sees as a magically-enhanced version of it, at least. "All right. You've had your joke. Now make the proportions accurate so I can get some use out of this, or knock it off altogether."
Danse scowls and Deacon mirrors it, pointing a finger at Danse with a sort of glare.
"First of all, I'm hilarious," he replies, "And second, I got the proportions perfect, bud. You're stacked."
He turns again to look at his reflection, then whips his head back and forth between it and Danse. "Literally. Come get the side-by-side if you don't believe me."
"...Seriously?" There's a lot encapsulated in that 'seriously.' It's about the only response he can make to that too-accurate mirror of his expression, but also to the compliment, which leaves him otherwise speechless.
And to the image in the mirror, when he pushes into the dressing room to prove Deacon wrong, and finds himself completely unable to do so. He turns away, faintly mortified.
"Well--" He has no idea what to say. "Fine. I shouldn't have...doubted you." He folds his arms, glance even further averted.
"Honestly, even if you've got a point about the defense value of the leather, I think you'd pull it off better yourself. You should take it."
Deacon laughs, all-too pleased with himself. "Haha! Aahhh. Yes." Seriously.
It's alarming to Deacon the way that Danse can hardly look at himself. The sort of way he himself has trouble looking in a mirror. He watches curiously as Danse turns away, looking ashamed somehow. Boggles the mind.
"Oh, I plan to find myself some..." he replies, "But this one fits you far too well for you to leave it behind. And anyway, you look good in it. Dare I say cool." He shrugs off the jacket and tosses it at Danse, then nudges him with the back of an arm.
"Now get out of here so I can change into something and someone else. This is weird even for me."
It never used to be hard to look at himself, when he thought his muscles were the normal, human kind of genetic gift maintained by his own hard work. He doesn't want to think about why the Institute made them this way, how every aspect of his appearance was a deliberate design choice by his enemies, or how he's never had any of the control he thought he had over the shape of his own body.
Mostly, though, it's because he suddenly feels intensely awkward talking about his own attractiveness with Deacon, and he doesn't think he should be looking too hard or standing too close as he does. Particularly not if Deacon is going to tell him he looks cool. Danse is many things, but he has never been cool a day in his life, not even when he perfected that maneuver to toss his helmet in the air and catch it before putting it on.
All right. Maybe he will keep the jacket.
"It is," he readily concedes about the weirdness, backing out of the dressing room again and letting Deacon close the curtain. He folds both jackets carefully in his own small 'yes' pile, surprised to see it composed this much of things Deacon's picked, and leans against the wall outside the room for a minute.
"How far can you go with that?" he ventures, curious. "How different could you get?"
"Uuuhhh... let's see." Deacon replies, taking another lasting glance at Danse's ass in leather before he closes his eyes again. The other man may choose not to keep these, but Deacon's vehicle has plenty of storage room to stow them away in just in case he changes his mind.
How different could he get? Well, Danse's form was about as different as he could be from his own form, he thought, but it occurs to Deacon that he's looked varying degrees of different throughout the years, some surgeries leaving him much more unrecognizable than others. Maybe its the presence of Danse that inspires it, but one form in particular comes to mind.
The leather drops from his hips and pools around his feet behind the curtain, and when Deacon opens his eyes again, his reflection has softer, more feminine features. A reflection he hasn't seen in about two decades. His focus shifts to the dress he'd hung over the wall earlier, and when the curtain opens again he's wearing it.
The woman Danse will see is reminiscent of Deacon in all the ways his imitation of Danse himself was. Sunglasses, posture, mischievous smirk. She's slightly tall for a woman, lean, with muscles toned from frequent activity, and her red hair is buzzed short on the sides, longer tufts along the top and back that curl behind her ears. She clears her throat to get Danse's attention.
It's the faintest but strangest sense of deja vu Danse has ever experienced. But he can't tell if it's really familiarity--he's sure he would remember if he'd ever met a woman who looked like this--or just interest, a spark of attraction the way he'd felt at the sight of Deacon in the suit, too, but heightened somewhat now at the strangely erotic sight and sound of pants hitting the floor, and the contrast between soft flared cherry-print dress and the muscle of someone who fights.
And the smirk. The smirk looks good on that face, too. Danse's eyes have swept slowly up to it from the floor, taking in every detail along the way. The dress--in a way the other outfits so far somehow haven't--just adds to the sense of forbidden thrill in admiring someone in civilian clothes, when he's never been allowed to fraternize. It's pretty and impractical and he's never let himself want to see that kind of thing on anyone until just now.
"Well," he murmurs, after a moment. "That's...that's pretty different, all right."
He has so many internal questions--how deep does the illusion go? What does it feel like to inhabit? And what would it feel like to touch? It's this last one that makes him realize he can't ask any of those questions out loud. Decorum is hanging on by a thread, but Danse still clings to it.
A humored exhale leaves her lips, and when Deacon speaks, he calls upon memory of how he'd done so when he'd been this woman before. Her voice is deep, but not as deep as Deacon normally speaks; more sultry than anything. There is a brightness to the tone that makes it more feminine.
"Excellent observation, " she teases, stepping out from the curtain and swaying a bit so that the dress billows around her, "Well? Does it look good on me? I'm still not certain it wouldn't have been cuter on you."
There's a playfulness to the way Deacon steps towards him, gesturing to his tail. "Sure you don't want a turn? You don't even have to cut a hole in the back..."
There's something about the voice that makes him think of the way Assaultrons talk. This is not, he's surprised to realize, a bad thing in this context. Not at all.
The playfulness has a different energy to it now, separate enough somehow from their usual banter--and with Deacon looking different enough for Danse not to be fully reading him as the same person--that the flirtatiousness doesn't prompt the same strength of what are we doing that it otherwise might. (Not that Danse has any room to be talking about that, for as long as he'd let that kiss linger when Deacon still looked and sounded exactly like his usual self.)
Danse is not ordinarily a guy who knows how to flirt or be flirted with and not get tongue-tied about it. But some people have the right kind of charm to warm him up and make it easier, and Deacon's been doing that since he showed up with his armful of clothes, whether Danse admits it or not.
"Trust me," he says, voice softer than it's been. "It definitely looks better on you."
Deacon's eyebrows rise above her glasses, Danse's reply not at all what she was expecting. First of all, why did his voice do that. And second, because it did, that sounded nothing like the typical Danse-patented deflecting she's used to and more like a compliment. Like if Deacon didn't know any better, Danse was flirting with this form. And obviously there's only one way to find out for sure: encourage more of it.
"If you say so..." she sighs, keeping herself from showing any signs of panicking as she wades backwards into the dressing room. "Go ahead and have a seat, I've got another one to try on that I think will take me a bit longer to get into."
The way she closes the curtain is slower, a bit more lingering. Buying time while she makes a plan. It's not until it's fully closed that the little smirk drops from her expression and she stands frozen for a minute, letting herself feel some of the internal screaming happening in her own mind. There are a lot of racing thoughts, but she doesn't have the time to unpack them all, here.
There is no reason Danse should want to see this, honestly, let alone feel a little tingle of anticipation at the idea, but he takes a seat in the old plastic chair outside the stall without thinking to protest.
The surprise in Deacon's expression--the ginger brows rising above the glasses, making Danse wonder how he'd never known Deacon was a redhead before seeing those visions in the water--is not completely lost on him, but if anything, there's a faint satisfaction in that. It's not often that Danse manages to surprise anyone, let alone anyone as usually-collected as Deacon is, though that seems to have taken something of a blow in a place like this and Danse doesn't usually want to push too hard at his composure.
He doesn't know where he's going with this. He's almost never this impulsive in how he talks to people, and never one to take liberties or push the boundaries of propriety with flirting. But he's a civilian now, more free in that sense than he's been for as long as he can remember, and none of this is real anyway, is it? They're joking around. It's banter. Danse never has a great grasp on how to do that normally.
If he still had any memories of Deacon in this form, they would be wildly different from this. Whatever capacity M7-97 had for sexual desire, he was in no position to explore it, least of all with the agent who'd felt more like family for the duration of their journey, with whom he'd cuddled close for warmth on a safehouse mattress with no other thought in his mind but that simple comfort. It's the martial training he's had since then, the time he's spent in the Brotherhood, giving him a taste for the GI Jane type who'd taught him everything he knows now about sex with women. He's still decorously trying not to think too hard about that. It isn't easy.
"Is it that complicated?" he asks, of the dress, more just to break the silence.
Deacon remembers that night. The cold front that blew through the area and had them both shivering at the safehouse. She saw M7-97 very much like a kid brother then, in part because she had sworn off romantic relationships after losing her opportunity for parenthood. Maybe that's why she allowed it. It was nice to be someone's caretaker, even if that someone was a fully grown (and stacked) man with absolutely no life experience.
Deacon collects herself and changes, slipping out of the dress and sliding on another that's still flowy at the bottom but more fitted up top. "Kind of..." she mutters, then opens the curtain sheepishly, her hands pressed to her chest as she moves toward him, turning her back on him where he'll note that the zipper along her spine is still open half-way.
Whatever Danse had expected, it wasn't this. He's already been caught up far beyond his expectation in the appeal of this form, the existing contrast between tough and soft, but the body language and the request just take all of that and amplify it. He swallows, eyes traveling down now from the delicate little tendrils outgrowing from that buzz cut to the smooth line of her neck and then the sensually bared expanse of back. Asking Danse for help with nearly anything is going to please him, but it feels charged when Deacon asks him now, and he doesn't speak as he rises smoothly from the chair to come up behind her.
His hand rests lightly, warmly on one shoulder just to hold the dress in place, the weight of it deliberately held back and tempered, and he doesn't go so far as to skim his other one down along her back before he takes the zipper between his fingers--he knows how to be a gentleman, after all--but he thinks about it as he pulls the zipper carefully upward. This close to her, things feel slightly muddled, because he knows what it's like to hold onto Deacon at this distance (or closer still) even if it was for very different reasons. The height difference feels similar, the scent is the same, and yet when he tries to remind himself that this is still Deacon, it just...doesn't hit with the strength it should.
"Anything else?" His voice near her ear is still soft, and deeper than it should be. It has none of the 'are we done here' curtness that Danse would ordinarily be infusing it with.
Deacon can see behind herself vaguely, from her peripheral vision, the reflection in the dressing room mirror is almost at the perfect angle to catch the way Danse looks at her, the way he delicately zips up her dress, and how big and dark his eyes are when he speaks in her ear. It doesn't escape Deacon how much his behavior has changed since she conjured up a pair of tits, and Deacon thinks wickedly that it's about time she reminds him who she is, and that she hasn't changed in anything more than shape.
Her hands leave her chest, but one moves up to touch at Danse's on her shoulder. Spinning on her heel, her eyebrows rise again above her glasses, but not in surprise this time. Her fingers are following the length of his arm to press at his chest, guiding him back to the chair he'd been seated on.
"Yes. Please retake your seat, soldier," she teases, smirking at him. "Unless you're interested in helping me test how durable this would be in combat."
It's almost as much about giving himself permission as it is about the form itself, about telling himself this has nothing to do with their typical dynamic, and so the reminder is coming at a good time. But that trailing of fingertips up his arm doesn't help, and that light push to his chest really doesn't help.
Only his evergreen embarrassment and fear of being told he's crossed a line puts a damper on what would otherwise be the unambiguous turn-on of Sexy Sparring. The few and far-between women he's been with were all Brotherhood knights and paladins. The idea of testing that little number's usefulness in combat is not remotely a deterrent in and of itself.
But he takes the hint, flushing pink and sitting back down as he's told, finally averting his too-keen gaze again. "No," he says, though it's the closest thing to a lie he's ever told, "that's...not necessary, I'm sure."
"No?" Deacon laughs warmly, not withdrawing her touch even as Danse sits and looks away. "It might be. You never know in places like this. We've been oddly lucky today, don't you think?" Fingers reach up to tip Danse's chin back to look at her as she asks that question.
The flush on Danse's face is exciting, particularly because Danse had caught Deacon off-guard earlier, and now she feels as if she has the upper hand. Considering how infrequently that's seemed to have happened since arrival, she's not about to let it go without taking advantage of it, especially with the moon pulling at her strings and urging that mischief-minded Fae behavior out of her.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not like... complaining that I haven't actuallt needed you to stand guard," she teases, easing herself down into his lap, "I just didn't realize you'd be so game for a different kind of look-out."
His eyes widen faintly at that touch to his chin, the subtle command in the way she manually turns his face to make him look even when he's trying to be reserved and proper, and the tingling heat that spreads through his core as she does. It would be a losing battle not to find that hot as hell, regardless of the circumstances.
But these are not ideal circumstances. In any way. He should be guarding the door, should be more responsible, shouldn't be letting his own usually-controlled libido distract him from the possibility of getting gunned down by cyborgs, and he doesn't know how Deacon, of all the people in this world or the one they came from, has managed to derail him into forgetting this.
(Because he knows he would hear a threat coming before it even got inside, these days, and there's nothing in the vicinity. But more importantly, because Deacon is as calm and unguarded right now as Danse has been, and it's somehow already become second nature for Danse to trust his instincts since they've been here together.)
He might say all this, and might not immediately snap back into guilty, ramrod-straight patrol-duty mode, were it not for the way she slides into his lap like she belongs there, with the same magnetic charisma he always envies and admires from Deacon in every other guise and situation. The shock of it isn't quite enough to override his long-practiced control over his own arousal responses--but he doesn't have nearly so much practice with the curse that is the tail, and to his abject mortification, it thumps audibly against the chair of its own accord.
Maybe Deacon got a bit ahead of herself here, but since coming into her powers and the surge of the moon's effects on the convoy, she's been more compelled than usual to mess with those around her. And Danse is an easy target, because he gets so flustered, or because sometimes, if she's lucky, he'll play along. And lately? Maybe she's just inexplicably really hungry for the way he looks at her with those big, wet eyes of his.
His tail thumps against the chair, and suddenly Deacon has another wishlist item on her Top Reactions list, because it may be the most compelling thing she's witnessed Danse do yet. So he likes this, huh? And he's asking her this why? Because he can't deny it?
"I dunno," she replies easily, "But you seem to be enjoying it..." she teases, nodding to his tail, just before the hand at his chin reaches up to scritch behind his furry ears. "Don't you, good boy?"
The last time Deacon had made so much as a 'good boy' joke about the ears, Danse had been unable to explain and unwilling to analyze why it made him blush as deeply as it did, but he'd still shoved Deacon away from him and let him sink in the lake with no remorse about it after the fact.
This is so, so much worse. He had been entirely unaware, before this exact moment, that the ears were an erogenous zone. He could happily have gone the entire rest of their journey, however long it might be, without ever knowing that. And having his unwanted tail double the pace of its reflexive, enthusiastic thumping at the scratch is the worst possible way he could imagine finding out.
It's probably not the scritching that finally breaks through that veneer of self-discipline, though, but the wicked purr of that distressingly arousing pet name that shoots straight to his dick and makes it respond tangibly under her weight. The ensuing flood of panic leaves him almost ready to shove Deacon off him yet again, and only the awareness that they're not floating in water this time prevents him from sending her sprawling onto the floor.
Instead, without a second thought, he seizes her matter-of-factly around the waist and lifts her off him to deposit her, roughly but not violently, beside the chair. And he gets immediately up from that, as well, hastening to pick up the clothes he's found from the floor and holding them in a loose pile in front of him.
"We're done here," he says, with decidedly less composure than he'd like. "You've got your things and I've got mine. Let's go."
The slow creep of a grin that had been forming on Deacon's lips, growing with the pace of Danse's wagging tail, drops the moment she feels his hands on her waist and her body being unceremoniously lifted off of him. Effortlessly. As if gravity ceased being a thing. It's a display of just how strong Danse really is, and it has Deacon's ears warm and her own body buzzing with a sudden uncertainty when it comes to composure. But unlike Danse, she isn't given the opportunity to really give into how aroused that might make her, because she's deposited as quickly as Danse is moving away and rejecting her.
She should feel satisfied, because her teasing got a reaction, but she doesn't. She feels disappointed and she'll spend the entire evening analyzing why. It's not just because they were having fun and now they're suddenly not. It's not even because Deacon is irritated with herself for taking things too far. It's some more complicated feeling that she didn't even realize she felt until today, and needs to put a name to.
"...oookay." She pouts. "So could you unzip me? Or am I wearing this out of the store??"
Danse just stares at her, almost but not quite uncomprehending, as if the computer component of his brain has taken control and the program is hanging before either resuming or crashing to desktop. He's not well equipped to handle Deacon's typical refuge in audacity even at the best of times, which this is not.
"Jesus," he says finally, with teeth-gritted anger that still manages to be directed slightly more at himself than Deacon. Maybe he's the one imposing more weirdness on the situation than there should be. Maybe this is just more of him not knowing how to have fun like everyone else apparently comes pre-programmed with the ability to do. He's never certain, and never less so than right now, but he concludes that it probably would make things weirder to refuse than to just do it.
There is definitely none of the sensual slowness or care this time as there was when he zipped up the dress in the first place. He grips the back neckline of the dress to hold it in place, yanks the zipper down with a swift irritable movement, and stomps toward the exit without another word.
Asking that question was probably the nail in the coffin for Deacon, but Danse does help, albeit angrily, and Deacon shuffles back to the changing room to return to his normal form and clothing. He can't really bare to look at himself in the mirror as he bundles up all the items he's collected, shoving them all haphazardly into a bag he can sling over his back while sneaking back to the convoy.
He somehow does manage to catch up to Danse, but he keeps his distance, watching his body language tells him everything he needs to know. Still, he at least owes it to him to watch his back for any cyborg attacks as they leave.
His shoulders tense a little as he hears Deacon come up close behind him, but Danse doesn't speed his pace or try to escape him. He can be an adult about this. Sort of. Not really. Maybe.
For what it's worth, he hasn't discarded any of the clothing items Deacon picked out for him, and they're still visible in his arms.
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He doesn't know what to think about the notion that Deacon's been observing him closely enough to make it look real, as if Danse hasn't just been doing the same thing in his own way for less innocent reasons. And he can't help snapping sharply and disconcertedly out of this reverie at the sound of Deacon's voice, because of all the things he might have expected to hear, this is...not one of them.
"What's wrong?" It certainly sounds like something is. "Are you...stuck like that, or something?" It's the first thing that comes to mind that could account for that note of alarm in Deacon's tone. He was half expecting Deacon to sound like him, too, and it feels like a slight relief that he doesn't, but the rest of this scenario is kind of making up for that.
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Without further ado, he whips the curtain back in a grand reveal, smirking in a way he most definitely has never seen Danse smirk, and mocking the other man's deeper voice.
"Outstanding, no?"
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And whatever he looks like, he thinks when Deacon pulls back the curtain, it can't possibly be...that. (Surrealism entirely aside, which is proving difficult enough to process, between the outfit he's never worn anything like and the expression he's not even sure how to make.) Surely Deacon's pranking him after all, having a little laugh, just an extension of the little 'stick up your backside' and 'furry butt' jabs. It would go hand-in-hand with the way he's being mimicked after all, and he scowls reflexively, even if the imitation of his voice and his catchphrase wouldn't get more than a faint eye roll on its own.
"You're not funny, you know." He's been subject to enough teasing about his ass in the barracks and the showers over the years to be mostly inured to what he sees as a magically-enhanced version of it, at least. "All right. You've had your joke. Now make the proportions accurate so I can get some use out of this, or knock it off altogether."
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"First of all, I'm hilarious," he replies, "And second, I got the proportions perfect, bud. You're stacked."
He turns again to look at his reflection, then whips his head back and forth between it and Danse. "Literally. Come get the side-by-side if you don't believe me."
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And to the image in the mirror, when he pushes into the dressing room to prove Deacon wrong, and finds himself completely unable to do so. He turns away, faintly mortified.
"Well--" He has no idea what to say. "Fine. I shouldn't have...doubted you." He folds his arms, glance even further averted.
"Honestly, even if you've got a point about the defense value of the leather, I think you'd pull it off better yourself. You should take it."
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It's alarming to Deacon the way that Danse can hardly look at himself. The sort of way he himself has trouble looking in a mirror. He watches curiously as Danse turns away, looking ashamed somehow. Boggles the mind.
"Oh, I plan to find myself some..." he replies, "But this one fits you far too well for you to leave it behind. And anyway, you look good in it. Dare I say cool." He shrugs off the jacket and tosses it at Danse, then nudges him with the back of an arm.
"Now get out of here so I can change into something and someone else. This is weird even for me."
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Mostly, though, it's because he suddenly feels intensely awkward talking about his own attractiveness with Deacon, and he doesn't think he should be looking too hard or standing too close as he does. Particularly not if Deacon is going to tell him he looks cool. Danse is many things, but he has never been cool a day in his life, not even when he perfected that maneuver to toss his helmet in the air and catch it before putting it on.
All right. Maybe he will keep the jacket.
"It is," he readily concedes about the weirdness, backing out of the dressing room again and letting Deacon close the curtain. He folds both jackets carefully in his own small 'yes' pile, surprised to see it composed this much of things Deacon's picked, and leans against the wall outside the room for a minute.
"How far can you go with that?" he ventures, curious. "How different could you get?"
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How different could he get? Well, Danse's form was about as different as he could be from his own form, he thought, but it occurs to Deacon that he's looked varying degrees of different throughout the years, some surgeries leaving him much more unrecognizable than others. Maybe its the presence of Danse that inspires it, but one form in particular comes to mind.
The leather drops from his hips and pools around his feet behind the curtain, and when Deacon opens his eyes again, his reflection has softer, more feminine features. A reflection he hasn't seen in about two decades. His focus shifts to the dress he'd hung over the wall earlier, and when the curtain opens again he's wearing it.
The woman Danse will see is reminiscent of Deacon in all the ways his imitation of Danse himself was. Sunglasses, posture, mischievous smirk. She's slightly tall for a woman, lean, with muscles toned from frequent activity, and her red hair is buzzed short on the sides, longer tufts along the top and back that curl behind her ears. She clears her throat to get Danse's attention.
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And the smirk. The smirk looks good on that face, too. Danse's eyes have swept slowly up to it from the floor, taking in every detail along the way. The dress--in a way the other outfits so far somehow haven't--just adds to the sense of forbidden thrill in admiring someone in civilian clothes, when he's never been allowed to fraternize. It's pretty and impractical and he's never let himself want to see that kind of thing on anyone until just now.
"Well," he murmurs, after a moment. "That's...that's pretty different, all right."
He has so many internal questions--how deep does the illusion go? What does it feel like to inhabit? And what would it feel like to touch? It's this last one that makes him realize he can't ask any of those questions out loud. Decorum is hanging on by a thread, but Danse still clings to it.
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"Excellent observation, " she teases, stepping out from the curtain and swaying a bit so that the dress billows around her, "Well? Does it look good on me? I'm still not certain it wouldn't have been cuter on you."
There's a playfulness to the way Deacon steps towards him, gesturing to his tail. "Sure you don't want a turn? You don't even have to cut a hole in the back..."
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The playfulness has a different energy to it now, separate enough somehow from their usual banter--and with Deacon looking different enough for Danse not to be fully reading him as the same person--that the flirtatiousness doesn't prompt the same strength of what are we doing that it otherwise might. (Not that Danse has any room to be talking about that, for as long as he'd let that kiss linger when Deacon still looked and sounded exactly like his usual self.)
Danse is not ordinarily a guy who knows how to flirt or be flirted with and not get tongue-tied about it. But some people have the right kind of charm to warm him up and make it easier, and Deacon's been doing that since he showed up with his armful of clothes, whether Danse admits it or not.
"Trust me," he says, voice softer than it's been. "It definitely looks better on you."
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"If you say so..." she sighs, keeping herself from showing any signs of panicking as she wades backwards into the dressing room. "Go ahead and have a seat, I've got another one to try on that I think will take me a bit longer to get into."
The way she closes the curtain is slower, a bit more lingering. Buying time while she makes a plan. It's not until it's fully closed that the little smirk drops from her expression and she stands frozen for a minute, letting herself feel some of the internal screaming happening in her own mind. There are a lot of racing thoughts, but she doesn't have the time to unpack them all, here.
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The surprise in Deacon's expression--the ginger brows rising above the glasses, making Danse wonder how he'd never known Deacon was a redhead before seeing those visions in the water--is not completely lost on him, but if anything, there's a faint satisfaction in that. It's not often that Danse manages to surprise anyone, let alone anyone as usually-collected as Deacon is, though that seems to have taken something of a blow in a place like this and Danse doesn't usually want to push too hard at his composure.
He doesn't know where he's going with this. He's almost never this impulsive in how he talks to people, and never one to take liberties or push the boundaries of propriety with flirting. But he's a civilian now, more free in that sense than he's been for as long as he can remember, and none of this is real anyway, is it? They're joking around. It's banter. Danse never has a great grasp on how to do that normally.
If he still had any memories of Deacon in this form, they would be wildly different from this. Whatever capacity M7-97 had for sexual desire, he was in no position to explore it, least of all with the agent who'd felt more like family for the duration of their journey, with whom he'd cuddled close for warmth on a safehouse mattress with no other thought in his mind but that simple comfort. It's the martial training he's had since then, the time he's spent in the Brotherhood, giving him a taste for the GI Jane type who'd taught him everything he knows now about sex with women. He's still decorously trying not to think too hard about that. It isn't easy.
"Is it that complicated?" he asks, of the dress, more just to break the silence.
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Deacon collects herself and changes, slipping out of the dress and sliding on another that's still flowy at the bottom but more fitted up top. "Kind of..." she mutters, then opens the curtain sheepishly, her hands pressed to her chest as she moves toward him, turning her back on him where he'll note that the zipper along her spine is still open half-way.
"Could you give me a hand?"
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His hand rests lightly, warmly on one shoulder just to hold the dress in place, the weight of it deliberately held back and tempered, and he doesn't go so far as to skim his other one down along her back before he takes the zipper between his fingers--he knows how to be a gentleman, after all--but he thinks about it as he pulls the zipper carefully upward. This close to her, things feel slightly muddled, because he knows what it's like to hold onto Deacon at this distance (or closer still) even if it was for very different reasons. The height difference feels similar, the scent is the same, and yet when he tries to remind himself that this is still Deacon, it just...doesn't hit with the strength it should.
"Anything else?" His voice near her ear is still soft, and deeper than it should be. It has none of the 'are we done here' curtness that Danse would ordinarily be infusing it with.
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Her hands leave her chest, but one moves up to touch at Danse's on her shoulder. Spinning on her heel, her eyebrows rise again above her glasses, but not in surprise this time. Her fingers are following the length of his arm to press at his chest, guiding him back to the chair he'd been seated on.
"Yes. Please retake your seat, soldier," she teases, smirking at him. "Unless you're interested in helping me test how durable this would be in combat."
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Only his evergreen embarrassment and fear of being told he's crossed a line puts a damper on what would otherwise be the unambiguous turn-on of Sexy Sparring. The few and far-between women he's been with were all Brotherhood knights and paladins. The idea of testing that little number's usefulness in combat is not remotely a deterrent in and of itself.
But he takes the hint, flushing pink and sitting back down as he's told, finally averting his too-keen gaze again. "No," he says, though it's the closest thing to a lie he's ever told, "that's...not necessary, I'm sure."
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The flush on Danse's face is exciting, particularly because Danse had caught Deacon off-guard earlier, and now she feels as if she has the upper hand. Considering how infrequently that's seemed to have happened since arrival, she's not about to let it go without taking advantage of it, especially with the moon pulling at her strings and urging that mischief-minded Fae behavior out of her.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not like... complaining that I haven't actuallt needed you to stand guard," she teases, easing herself down into his lap, "I just didn't realize you'd be so game for a different kind of look-out."
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But these are not ideal circumstances. In any way. He should be guarding the door, should be more responsible, shouldn't be letting his own usually-controlled libido distract him from the possibility of getting gunned down by cyborgs, and he doesn't know how Deacon, of all the people in this world or the one they came from, has managed to derail him into forgetting this.
(Because he knows he would hear a threat coming before it even got inside, these days, and there's nothing in the vicinity. But more importantly, because Deacon is as calm and unguarded right now as Danse has been, and it's somehow already become second nature for Danse to trust his instincts since they've been here together.)
He might say all this, and might not immediately snap back into guilty, ramrod-straight patrol-duty mode, were it not for the way she slides into his lap like she belongs there, with the same magnetic charisma he always envies and admires from Deacon in every other guise and situation. The shock of it isn't quite enough to override his long-practiced control over his own arousal responses--but he doesn't have nearly so much practice with the curse that is the tail, and to his abject mortification, it thumps audibly against the chair of its own accord.
"--What the hell are we doing?"
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His tail thumps against the chair, and suddenly Deacon has another wishlist item on her Top Reactions list, because it may be the most compelling thing she's witnessed Danse do yet. So he likes this, huh? And he's asking her this why? Because he can't deny it?
"I dunno," she replies easily, "But you seem to be enjoying it..." she teases, nodding to his tail, just before the hand at his chin reaches up to scritch behind his furry ears. "Don't you, good boy?"
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This is so, so much worse. He had been entirely unaware, before this exact moment, that the ears were an erogenous zone. He could happily have gone the entire rest of their journey, however long it might be, without ever knowing that. And having his unwanted tail double the pace of its reflexive, enthusiastic thumping at the scratch is the worst possible way he could imagine finding out.
It's probably not the scritching that finally breaks through that veneer of self-discipline, though, but the wicked purr of that distressingly arousing pet name that shoots straight to his dick and makes it respond tangibly under her weight. The ensuing flood of panic leaves him almost ready to shove Deacon off him yet again, and only the awareness that they're not floating in water this time prevents him from sending her sprawling onto the floor.
Instead, without a second thought, he seizes her matter-of-factly around the waist and lifts her off him to deposit her, roughly but not violently, beside the chair. And he gets immediately up from that, as well, hastening to pick up the clothes he's found from the floor and holding them in a loose pile in front of him.
"We're done here," he says, with decidedly less composure than he'd like. "You've got your things and I've got mine. Let's go."
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She should feel satisfied, because her teasing got a reaction, but she doesn't. She feels disappointed and she'll spend the entire evening analyzing why. It's not just because they were having fun and now they're suddenly not. It's not even because Deacon is irritated with herself for taking things too far. It's some more complicated feeling that she didn't even realize she felt until today, and needs to put a name to.
"...oookay." She pouts. "So could you unzip me? Or am I wearing this out of the store??"
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"Jesus," he says finally, with teeth-gritted anger that still manages to be directed slightly more at himself than Deacon. Maybe he's the one imposing more weirdness on the situation than there should be. Maybe this is just more of him not knowing how to have fun like everyone else apparently comes pre-programmed with the ability to do. He's never certain, and never less so than right now, but he concludes that it probably would make things weirder to refuse than to just do it.
There is definitely none of the sensual slowness or care this time as there was when he zipped up the dress in the first place. He grips the back neckline of the dress to hold it in place, yanks the zipper down with a swift irritable movement, and stomps toward the exit without another word.
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He somehow does manage to catch up to Danse, but he keeps his distance, watching his body language tells him everything he needs to know. Still, he at least owes it to him to watch his back for any cyborg attacks as they leave.
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For what it's worth, he hasn't discarded any of the clothing items Deacon picked out for him, and they're still visible in his arms.