After months of meeting up with Danse in the house at the edge of Sanctuary, Deacon sort of defaults to it as a place to stay the night when he's in town. It's easier than finding an open cot elsewhere, and more convenient if he plans to leave anything for later. Of course, Deacon is also a night owl, and so there isn't much happening in the way of sleep when he's staying the night. Instead, he reads by lantern light or tends to a few crops in the garden when the sun begins to rise, crashing eventually before it's too high in the sky.
The big cracked mirror in the bedroom bothers him. He tells himself that it's because catching his reflection in it at night tricks him into thinking there's someone else in the room, or that when he does finally doze off, it reflects the light from the windows onto his face. Maybe those things are true, but deep down, Deacon realizes that it really just comes down to facing himself in the mirror at all. He avoids this by draping a worn sheet over it to deal with later. Danse will be joining him tonight, and he intends to be well rested for his arrival.
Danse occupies the house in much the same way Deacon does, at alternate times. When he isn't at the Castle, or providing short-term security to some other settlement in need of help, he sleeps here on this mattress--never in the middle of it anymore, always unthinkingly on one side--and washes and shaves in the dingy little bathroom with the electric razor that seems to just live next to Deacon's clippers in the cabinet now, and drinks his coffee from one of the two chipped mugs in the kitchen.
Deacon is not a man whose presence or absence are supposed to be notable. He's made an entire career out of going unnoticed, and Danse has not typically been one to let him live that down. And yet somehow he manages to fill this house whether he's here or not, because when he's gone, Danse notices all the little things that feel missing, and when he's around, Danse doesn't want to leave his side.
When he arrives that evening, on schedule, after a week's long patrol around the lighthouse and the Slog, nothing in the room looks out of the ordinary to him and he wouldn't notice if it did. There could be a deathclaw standing in the corner with a lampshade on its head, and Danse would still be ignoring it to pull Deacon into his arms and dip him into a kiss.
Deacon has spent the better part of the last decade or two alone or on the road, and the speed with which he's adapted to cohabiting a space with Danse is unparalleled. Deacon has always enjoyed his privacy, to a degree (contentment in self-punishment aside), but he's found himself counting down the days until Danse's return with increasing excitement that bursts the moment he sees him walking through the door.
His heart and stomach seem to trade places as he's dipped in a kiss, skin buzzing from tactile contact as his hands slide up Danse's chest and his forearms drape over his shoulders. He hums into the kiss, pulling back just enough to get a better look at Danse's face, a smile growing on his own.
"Ha-ha," he faux-laughs, teasing, "You missed me."
"Guilty as charged," he murmurs, with a soft smile that creeps into his voice as much as it lights up his eyes. He lets Deacon straighten up again, but makes no immediate move to disentangle himself from the arms around his neck, and he's in no hurry to unwind his own arms from around Deacon's waist either.
He wouldn't always have admitted that so readily, but Danse isn't usually one to deny the glaringly obvious, and he couldn't have hidden the pleasure on his face when he walked into the room if he tried, even if he hadn't already given away the game with a lurid message or two before he left about exactly what he wanted to get his mouth on when he arrived.
"And what have you been up to while I've been knee-deep in feral guts?"
"Ah, you know, the usual. Worked on my tan, took up knitting, started teaching the rad roaches from the old vault how to play fetch..."
Deacon shrugs, beginning to peel himself from Danse, a finger hooked in his clothing to keep them connected as he walks back to the bed. He's thinking about those messages already, eager to see if Danse is ready to keep his word.
"I missed you, too," he murmurs, feeling the bed at the back of his legs, "Honest."
"I believe that." He doesn't believe anything else in that sentence, and he knows he isn't meant to, but the important part, he trusts. He knows how to tell the difference now between the type of things Deacon bullshits for the hell of it and the type of things he doesn't really lie about. It isn't a difficult distinction to understand, when one spends enough time with him--when one knows him, when one is allowed to know him, but Danse is aware that does not comprise a broad category of people.
And he treasures it all the more, for that. He lets himself be tugged along with no resistance at all, pushing Deacon back onto the bed with a gentle little show of force, kneeling between his legs and running hands warmly up the outsides of his thighs. Only then does it begin to register to him that the room has been slightly rearranged, and the sheet that might ordinarily be part of the bedclothes is now elsewhere.
Deacon falls back onto the bed, tugging Danse along, a soft snort of amusement leaving his grinning lips.
"You'd better," he teases, spreading his legs to better welcome Danse into his lap, but the question about the mirror disrupts the flow of things a bit. Deacon's face turns to the wall where the sheet had been tossed over the frame, sheepish in his forgetful neglect to set things back to normal.
"Ah, damn..." he replies, "It's still here. Just covered it up."
Danse is not a man who has ever spent much time looking at himself in the mirror, even when he thought of his body as something he could take pride in, a well-honed product of his own hard work and discipline.
He doesn't like to think much about it now, knowing that it's all Institute artifice, a tool designed by his enemies for their benefit--for weeks after that revelation, he'd found it impossible even to touch himself, his hand seeming almost not to recognize the flesh underneath it. Only Deacon has managed to call him beautiful in a way that doesn't feel like giving credit to monsters, to make him feel like he fully inhabits a body that deserves the pleasure of affectionate touch.
And still, he doesn't flinch to walk past his own reflection. He doesn't want to look or linger, but never has he felt compelled to cover a mirror to avoid the sight of himself. It's a concerning enough notion to make his heart ache, if it isn't for some more innocuous practical reason.
Deacon's issue with his reflection has nothing to do with the body he's wearing, even if it isn't really him. Like Danse's, it is crafted to be handsome; good-looking but not overly strikingly so. The sort of handsome that will grant him privileges without drawing too much attention to himself.
Instead, the issue at hand is the guilt he feels. The sort of guilt that makes a man repulsed with himself. It's a bit better now that the Institute has been dealt with, but there are still secrets that he keeps, even from Danse, and these weigh on him heavily when he's alone.
He answers Danse's question far too fast for it to be honest,."The street lights kept reflecting off of it. Right into my eyes." Of course, Deacon's sleeping mask is literally within view, making it a poor lie at that.
Danse is better at understanding Deacon's lies, these days. There had been a time when he would have refused on principle to believe water was wet if Deacon said it was, but now Danse knows him well enough to have a handle on the kinds of things Deacon lies about, and when, and sometimes why. Context is helpful, because he doesn't usually have tells.
Usually. This explanation does nothing at all to assuage Danse's concern, because he's never heard a lie this uncharacteristically clumsy from Deacon, and something has to be distracting him to cause it. He won't point out the logical flaws in the lie. They can both see that it is one. His hands squeeze gently where they rest on Deacon's thighs, and he reaches one over to take Deacon's hand, fingers lacing gently through his.
"Well," he says, after a moment. "That isn't a problem right now, so why don't I take the sheet off it?" His eyes are intent, searching the rest of Deacon's face behind the impassable glasses.
Deacon knows it was a shit lie, but maybe, deep down, there's a part of him that wants Danse to question. A part that wants to tell him the truth and admit to Danse that he'd been no better than the Brotherhood soldiers that he now critiques so heavily some years ago, that his bigotry lead to horrible crimes, possibly worse than anything Danse himself has personally committed. That as penance, it cost him everything he'd loved, and despite it ultimately setting him on a path to redemption, Deacon can't bare to look at himself for too long.
Maybe he'll tell him tomorrow. He keeps thinking this, because tomorrow never comes, and because it's far from the only secret he's kept from Danse, even when they started fooling around together.
At Danse's recommendation, Deacon shrugs, trying not to seem too bothered by the idea. "Sure," he replies, because he has something much nicer to look at right now, anyway, "Why not."
Reading body language is less Danse's forte than anticipating lies based on observable patterns (or noticing obvious contradictions.) He's not completely convinced by Deacon's attempt at casual breeziness, but he's not flatly certain it's false, either.
Easing up off his knees, and leaning down for a brief kiss, he pulls the sheet from the mirror with a quick no-nonsense movement and tosses it over onto the bed. They can wrap themselves up in it for warmth when they're done, but it's extraneous for now. He joins Deacon on the bed now, sitting beside him rather than kneeling in front of him, and looks over at him, gauging his reaction from the side--able to see something of his eyes behind the glasses at this angle--and what he can see in the mirror, out of the corner of his own eye.
"You know, I always thought you should see yourself when we do this," he ventures. "The way I get to."
Deacon takes a deep breath after sharing in that quick kiss and watches Danse as he tugs down the sheet. Everything is fine until Danse suggests Deacon seeing himself in any way, shape or form. It causes his muscles to tense and his lips to pull tight, face turning slightly to look at Danse with a slightly knitted brow.
"Why's that?" he asks, because it's not an outright no; if anything, he's actually intrigued by why Danse may want such a thing. He thinks he understands, because he is given a front-seat view of Danse's big, beautiful eyes and all their expressiveness, a sight so precious he almost feels guilty keeping to himself. Almost.
The fact that it isn't a no is encouraging, like when the glasses came off for the first time. A no would have left Danse dwelling on the reasons and implications, but he wouldn't have pushed. There's no answer Deacon could have given either way that wouldn't make Danse want to praise and flatter and build him up, but he looks particularly encouraged to be asked, as if he's always wanted to expound on the subject even if he doesn't quite trust himself to articulate it well.
"Because you're stunning," he says, able to manage that much without thought or hesitation. It isn't about looks; he knows that's not what Deacon needs reassurance about, even if Danse enjoys being poetic about those too for the hell of it. "You're never holding anything back when I have you like this. You don't hide the things you think you should. Everything you show me in bed is the truth, and it's beautiful for that." A pause, because he doesn't mean for this next to sound teasing or moralizing, even if it could serve for either. There's nothing but sincerity in it.
Danse's reasoning is heartfelt and lovely and all of the things that Deacon needs to hear, but he can't help feeling like it isn't entirely true. He shifts, rolling onto his side to look Danse straight-on, even though he hasn't removed his glasses. They're protecting him, now.
"It's not, though," he starts, trepidation in his voice, "I mean, I get what you're saying, but I've never been honest with you about who I am. About who I used to be." Deacon pauses, looking down at his own hands. "The truth is, I don't think you'll be able to look at me at all again if you knew it all, let alone still think of me as 'stunning'. I can barely look at myself."
Danse looks ever so slightly taken aback, those expressive eyes dark with confusion at the genuine, audible worry in Deacon's voice. They don't really talk about politics, such as those are in the Commonwealth, or about the particulars of personal morality beyond broad notions like protecting civilian life and giving aid to the needy.
However they might have clashed before about the diametrically-opposed philosophies of the organizations they'd given their lives to, there had been no really sharp teeth to it. Not when Deacon had been willing to concede that Lyons' Brotherhood had done respectable work, and Danse had grudgingly come to accept that he would have been nowhere himself without the Railroad's help, and hardly any of it mattered anymore once the Institute was a smoldering crater.
"I don't understand," he says. "What is it you've done that you think I don't already know about? I mean...nothing you've done for the Railroad would shock me so much as to make a difference. It can stay in the past and I won't judge you for it." They are still dangerous anarchists to Danse's mind, not exactly the shining-armor good guys, regardless of what he owes them. "How much worse could you have been before?"
"Worse." He sighs, and is quiet for a moment as he's clearly trying to build the composure to let it out. He wants it to stay in the past. He'd be thrilled about that. But he doesn't think he'll ever be able to feel better about it all until Danse knows, because it's his past. The real and honest one, not the made-up bullshit he's always spouting. Honesty is important to Danse, he knows, as much as he knows that Danse is burdened with a fake past of his own. That's a whole other rabbit hole. Baby steps.
"You won't judge me out loud maybe, but you'll think I'm a hypocrite. Because as much as I've mouthed-off about the Brotherhood, I was worse." He starts, his voice low, "...A bigot. A violent one at that. Without all the military glory."
It's a along story, but Deacon decides it best to kill the damn mood and recite it. All of it. Of the Claws, of Barbara, of what drew the Railroad's attention. Danse deserves to know, deserves to be angry, disappointed, or any other emotion these tales may summon. Deacon hasn't been vulnerable with him like this ever, but that doesn't mean he's owed forgiveness.
"I don't deserve half the praise you give me. I don't deserve a pass on judgement. Hell, I don't deserve you." And he means it. He can't even look at Danse as he says it.
If Danse were to judge the Deathclaws' motivation for what they did, he would have no right to talk about hypocrisy, military glory or no. A self-respecting soldier of the Brotherhood would be horrified at the thought that a human innocent might have been caught up in that storm of hatred and lynched in place of a synth, but none of them would have shed any tears had the gang been right about that man with the bulging eyes, or had the same crisis of conscience over it that Deacon had.
But it is jarring, unsettling, hard to wrap his mind around the thought of Deacon being so hands-on in his violence, so sadistically gratuitous. The thought of Deacon being cruel is where his mind stalls with refusal to accept it. Danse has known countless aimless troublemaking youth in need of redirection, recruited enough of them over the course of his career to crew the whole Prydwen, but he wouldn't have touched ones like this gang. And yet whenever he fights alongside Deacon, it never is alongside him, because Danse is the one drawing fire and mowing the distracted enemy down with near-feral bloodlust while Deacon picks them off quickly and painlessly from the shadows.
The rest of it would leave him reeling gently were he not already numb from the beginning--the new knowledge that Deacon was married once, the horror of what happened to the poor woman, the strange coincidence that Danse isn't the first synth to fall for Deacon, the further evidence of how chillingly lethal he's capable of being--but the refrain about the past being left in the past still keeps trying to surface in his mind.
"How much material good have you done for people since then?" he asks. Even were he not obligated now to leave behind the Brotherhood's standards of 'material good,' knowing that his own freedom isn't included in them, he's heard Deacon talk with unfalsifiable passion about making the Commonwealth a better place for everyone. He's watched Deacon work for it.
"At what point can you weigh the decades you've spent fighting for the greater good against the years you spent fighting against it, and admit that the former is who you are now? I praise the actions I see, Deacon. You give me reason to do it. They aren't canceled out of the record now because of what you did in your youth."
Danse is so patient with him that it only makes him feel more guilty. He shrugs at the questions he's asked and shakes his head, unsure. "I don't know if it will ever be enough. Nothing erases what I've done."
But perhaps Danse is uniquely positioned to understand, both of them having been lonely and isolated, then indoctrinated by a bigoted group that made them feel like family, only for that group to betray them in the end. It's part of the reason why Deacon has always sympathetized with Danse after all, and been far more patient with him than others have been. Maybe it's not so unheard of that Danse can stomach this too.
His stomach is in knots, and then Danse says something that feels so accepting of him that he melts just a little, eyebrows pinched above his glasses. "You're seriously okay with this?" he asks, still kind of disbelieving.
The incredulity in Deacon's voice breaks Danse's heart. He understands the way certain deaths can drag the soul down in a way others don't, a burden impossible to set aside through any kind of atonement or rationalization.
But he knows now, too, what the power of someone else's belief can do to ease the weight. He's been lucky enough to benefit from grace and patience he hasn't even fully earned, from Deacon's faith in him while he comes to understand just how many apologies he owes to the people around him. And he believes in turn, with every fiber in his heart, that Deacon is a good man.
"Come here," he whispers, reaching out to lay a hand alongside Deacon's face, thumb tracing softly over his cheek. "I know nothing erases it. Nothing erases anything that anyone does. It doesn't have to be erased for the world to be better now with you in it."
Deacon is drawn forward even before Danse beckons him closer, just by the touch to his cheek. He's unbelievably lucky, he thinks, in the same sort of way he felt lucky to be loved by Barbara. Danse looks at him much like she did, both of them with their big, dark, expressive eyes that make Deacon want to dive inside of them and waste away.
His hands find Danse's waist, arms curling around it. The self-proclaimed 'not a hugger' can be rather cuddly these days, but only when the two of them have privacy, and there's a comfort that Deacon can't verbalize in the way Danse holds him that he seeks out more than he thought he ever would.
"I lnow you believe that," he mutters against Danse's chest, trying to lighten the mood, "Because you're a terrible liar. You'd think I'd have rubbed off on you by now, and yet..."
If Danse were willing to let the mood lighten enough here to be brushed off, this would be an opportune moment for the kind of double entendre Deacon has been teaching him to experiment with. But this is not a satisfactory answer to him. Not with Deacon still deflecting, subjectivizing, displacing the forgiveness back onto Danse as if his worthiness of it is only in the eye of the beholder.
He kisses Deacon's forehead as he's held tight, and tilts his face up to press one to his lips, too. "This," he murmurs, "is exactly why I want you to look in that mirror and see what I see when I make love to you." He turns Deacon's face gently toward the mirror again, his lips winding a path of soft warm kisses down the side of his neck. "I'm not stopping until you believe it too, Deacon."
His other hand slips down to skim over Deacon's stomach and rest on the fly of his jeans, a silent request for permission before undressing him.
There's a sort of scoff of irritation at that reply, because he'd just assumed that Danse would let it go without further argument, and his pouting makes that evident. It's still present on his lips as Danse turns him to face the mirror, but it eases slightly as he watches Danse via their reflection, at an angle he's not typically seeing the other man's affections from. It isn't so difficult then for him to relax a bit, even if the next thing out of Danse's mouth makes his heart beat a little faster.
"You have your work cut out for you," he taunts slightly, his own hands pushing beneath Danse's clothes with renewed desire.
"Are you calling me a slacker?" There's a hint of reciprocal teasing, as Danse lets himself be stripped, tenderly pushes Deacon's shirt up and over his head in turn and and slips easily back to his knees to pull his jeans and underwear down and off. From the floor, he gazes up with aching affection as he kisses a trail gently up Deacon's calf and thigh, eyes as dark and wet as he can make them when he knows Deacon loves that the most of all his features.
"Eyes on the mirror," he commands, lips brushing over the juncture between hip and thigh as he pushes Deacon's legs further apart, his breath warm and soft against Deacon's cock. "I'm trusting you, you know. If I catch you looking at me, I might just find myself needing to get up and take a walk."
"I'm saying that I know you appreciate a challenge, that's all," Deacon retorts, a hand sliding into Danse's hair to scratch lightly at his scalp as he watches him trail those kisses higher and higher.
"You can't really expect me to look away from this--" he huffs, "And there's your first mistake. You can't trust everyone."
He's being snarky of course, because he does want Danse to trust him, and that little ultimatum does inspire Deacon's to pry his eyes from the beautiful image between his thighs, but not without a groan of displeasure.
The sight of himself in the mirror is a distracting one. It feels torturous not to watch Danse, moreso than it is to be sentenced to watching himself. Deacon takes a deep breath, exhaling loudly. His eyes focus anywhere but his own face, eventually locking onto the ugly scarring left by his fellow Deathclaws when he tried to break free of them. He's changed his face at least a dozen times, but the scar is a constant reminder of who he'd once been.
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The big cracked mirror in the bedroom bothers him. He tells himself that it's because catching his reflection in it at night tricks him into thinking there's someone else in the room, or that when he does finally doze off, it reflects the light from the windows onto his face. Maybe those things are true, but deep down, Deacon realizes that it really just comes down to facing himself in the mirror at all. He avoids this by draping a worn sheet over it to deal with later. Danse will be joining him tonight, and he intends to be well rested for his arrival.
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Deacon is not a man whose presence or absence are supposed to be notable. He's made an entire career out of going unnoticed, and Danse has not typically been one to let him live that down. And yet somehow he manages to fill this house whether he's here or not, because when he's gone, Danse notices all the little things that feel missing, and when he's around, Danse doesn't want to leave his side.
When he arrives that evening, on schedule, after a week's long patrol around the lighthouse and the Slog, nothing in the room looks out of the ordinary to him and he wouldn't notice if it did. There could be a deathclaw standing in the corner with a lampshade on its head, and Danse would still be ignoring it to pull Deacon into his arms and dip him into a kiss.
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His heart and stomach seem to trade places as he's dipped in a kiss, skin buzzing from tactile contact as his hands slide up Danse's chest and his forearms drape over his shoulders. He hums into the kiss, pulling back just enough to get a better look at Danse's face, a smile growing on his own.
"Ha-ha," he faux-laughs, teasing, "You missed me."
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He wouldn't always have admitted that so readily, but Danse isn't usually one to deny the glaringly obvious, and he couldn't have hidden the pleasure on his face when he walked into the room if he tried, even if he hadn't already given away the game with a lurid message or two before he left about exactly what he wanted to get his mouth on when he arrived.
"And what have you been up to while I've been knee-deep in feral guts?"
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Deacon shrugs, beginning to peel himself from Danse, a finger hooked in his clothing to keep them connected as he walks back to the bed. He's thinking about those messages already, eager to see if Danse is ready to keep his word.
"I missed you, too," he murmurs, feeling the bed at the back of his legs, "Honest."
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And he treasures it all the more, for that. He lets himself be tugged along with no resistance at all, pushing Deacon back onto the bed with a gentle little show of force, kneeling between his legs and running hands warmly up the outsides of his thighs. Only then does it begin to register to him that the room has been slightly rearranged, and the sheet that might ordinarily be part of the bedclothes is now elsewhere.
"...Wasn't there a mirror in here before?"
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"You'd better," he teases, spreading his legs to better welcome Danse into his lap, but the question about the mirror disrupts the flow of things a bit. Deacon's face turns to the wall where the sheet had been tossed over the frame, sheepish in his forgetful neglect to set things back to normal.
"Ah, damn..." he replies, "It's still here. Just covered it up."
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He doesn't like to think much about it now, knowing that it's all Institute artifice, a tool designed by his enemies for their benefit--for weeks after that revelation, he'd found it impossible even to touch himself, his hand seeming almost not to recognize the flesh underneath it. Only Deacon has managed to call him beautiful in a way that doesn't feel like giving credit to monsters, to make him feel like he fully inhabits a body that deserves the pleasure of affectionate touch.
And still, he doesn't flinch to walk past his own reflection. He doesn't want to look or linger, but never has he felt compelled to cover a mirror to avoid the sight of himself. It's a concerning enough notion to make his heart ache, if it isn't for some more innocuous practical reason.
"Why?" he asks, voice gentle.
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Instead, the issue at hand is the guilt he feels. The sort of guilt that makes a man repulsed with himself. It's a bit better now that the Institute has been dealt with, but there are still secrets that he keeps, even from Danse, and these weigh on him heavily when he's alone.
He answers Danse's question far too fast for it to be honest,."The street lights kept reflecting off of it. Right into my eyes." Of course, Deacon's sleeping mask is literally within view, making it a poor lie at that.
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Usually. This explanation does nothing at all to assuage Danse's concern, because he's never heard a lie this uncharacteristically clumsy from Deacon, and something has to be distracting him to cause it. He won't point out the logical flaws in the lie. They can both see that it is one. His hands squeeze gently where they rest on Deacon's thighs, and he reaches one over to take Deacon's hand, fingers lacing gently through his.
"Well," he says, after a moment. "That isn't a problem right now, so why don't I take the sheet off it?" His eyes are intent, searching the rest of Deacon's face behind the impassable glasses.
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Maybe he'll tell him tomorrow. He keeps thinking this, because tomorrow never comes, and because it's far from the only secret he's kept from Danse, even when they started fooling around together.
At Danse's recommendation, Deacon shrugs, trying not to seem too bothered by the idea. "Sure," he replies, because he has something much nicer to look at right now, anyway, "Why not."
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Easing up off his knees, and leaning down for a brief kiss, he pulls the sheet from the mirror with a quick no-nonsense movement and tosses it over onto the bed. They can wrap themselves up in it for warmth when they're done, but it's extraneous for now. He joins Deacon on the bed now, sitting beside him rather than kneeling in front of him, and looks over at him, gauging his reaction from the side--able to see something of his eyes behind the glasses at this angle--and what he can see in the mirror, out of the corner of his own eye.
"You know, I always thought you should see yourself when we do this," he ventures. "The way I get to."
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"Why's that?" he asks, because it's not an outright no; if anything, he's actually intrigued by why Danse may want such a thing. He thinks he understands, because he is given a front-seat view of Danse's big, beautiful eyes and all their expressiveness, a sight so precious he almost feels guilty keeping to himself. Almost.
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"Because you're stunning," he says, able to manage that much without thought or hesitation. It isn't about looks; he knows that's not what Deacon needs reassurance about, even if Danse enjoys being poetic about those too for the hell of it. "You're never holding anything back when I have you like this. You don't hide the things you think you should. Everything you show me in bed is the truth, and it's beautiful for that." A pause, because he doesn't mean for this next to sound teasing or moralizing, even if it could serve for either. There's nothing but sincerity in it.
"It suits you."
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"It's not, though," he starts, trepidation in his voice, "I mean, I get what you're saying, but I've never been honest with you about who I am. About who I used to be." Deacon pauses, looking down at his own hands. "The truth is, I don't think you'll be able to look at me at all again if you knew it all, let alone still think of me as 'stunning'. I can barely look at myself."
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However they might have clashed before about the diametrically-opposed philosophies of the organizations they'd given their lives to, there had been no really sharp teeth to it. Not when Deacon had been willing to concede that Lyons' Brotherhood had done respectable work, and Danse had grudgingly come to accept that he would have been nowhere himself without the Railroad's help, and hardly any of it mattered anymore once the Institute was a smoldering crater.
"I don't understand," he says. "What is it you've done that you think I don't already know about? I mean...nothing you've done for the Railroad would shock me so much as to make a difference. It can stay in the past and I won't judge you for it." They are still dangerous anarchists to Danse's mind, not exactly the shining-armor good guys, regardless of what he owes them. "How much worse could you have been before?"
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"You won't judge me out loud maybe, but you'll think I'm a hypocrite. Because as much as I've mouthed-off about the Brotherhood, I was worse." He starts, his voice low, "...A bigot. A violent one at that. Without all the military glory."
It's a along story, but Deacon decides it best to kill the damn mood and recite it. All of it. Of the Claws, of Barbara, of what drew the Railroad's attention. Danse deserves to know, deserves to be angry, disappointed, or any other emotion these tales may summon. Deacon hasn't been vulnerable with him like this ever, but that doesn't mean he's owed forgiveness.
"I don't deserve half the praise you give me. I don't deserve a pass on judgement. Hell, I don't deserve you." And he means it. He can't even look at Danse as he says it.
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But it is jarring, unsettling, hard to wrap his mind around the thought of Deacon being so hands-on in his violence, so sadistically gratuitous. The thought of Deacon being cruel is where his mind stalls with refusal to accept it. Danse has known countless aimless troublemaking youth in need of redirection, recruited enough of them over the course of his career to crew the whole Prydwen, but he wouldn't have touched ones like this gang. And yet whenever he fights alongside Deacon, it never is alongside him, because Danse is the one drawing fire and mowing the distracted enemy down with near-feral bloodlust while Deacon picks them off quickly and painlessly from the shadows.
The rest of it would leave him reeling gently were he not already numb from the beginning--the new knowledge that Deacon was married once, the horror of what happened to the poor woman, the strange coincidence that Danse isn't the first synth to fall for Deacon, the further evidence of how chillingly lethal he's capable of being--but the refrain about the past being left in the past still keeps trying to surface in his mind.
"How much material good have you done for people since then?" he asks. Even were he not obligated now to leave behind the Brotherhood's standards of 'material good,' knowing that his own freedom isn't included in them, he's heard Deacon talk with unfalsifiable passion about making the Commonwealth a better place for everyone. He's watched Deacon work for it.
"At what point can you weigh the decades you've spent fighting for the greater good against the years you spent fighting against it, and admit that the former is who you are now? I praise the actions I see, Deacon. You give me reason to do it. They aren't canceled out of the record now because of what you did in your youth."
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But perhaps Danse is uniquely positioned to understand, both of them having been lonely and isolated, then indoctrinated by a bigoted group that made them feel like family, only for that group to betray them in the end. It's part of the reason why Deacon has always sympathetized with Danse after all, and been far more patient with him than others have been. Maybe it's not so unheard of that Danse can stomach this too.
His stomach is in knots, and then Danse says something that feels so accepting of him that he melts just a little, eyebrows pinched above his glasses. "You're seriously okay with this?" he asks, still kind of disbelieving.
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But he knows now, too, what the power of someone else's belief can do to ease the weight. He's been lucky enough to benefit from grace and patience he hasn't even fully earned, from Deacon's faith in him while he comes to understand just how many apologies he owes to the people around him. And he believes in turn, with every fiber in his heart, that Deacon is a good man.
"Come here," he whispers, reaching out to lay a hand alongside Deacon's face, thumb tracing softly over his cheek. "I know nothing erases it. Nothing erases anything that anyone does. It doesn't have to be erased for the world to be better now with you in it."
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His hands find Danse's waist, arms curling around it. The self-proclaimed 'not a hugger' can be rather cuddly these days, but only when the two of them have privacy, and there's a comfort that Deacon can't verbalize in the way Danse holds him that he seeks out more than he thought he ever would.
"I lnow you believe that," he mutters against Danse's chest, trying to lighten the mood, "Because you're a terrible liar. You'd think I'd have rubbed off on you by now, and yet..."
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He kisses Deacon's forehead as he's held tight, and tilts his face up to press one to his lips, too. "This," he murmurs, "is exactly why I want you to look in that mirror and see what I see when I make love to you." He turns Deacon's face gently toward the mirror again, his lips winding a path of soft warm kisses down the side of his neck. "I'm not stopping until you believe it too, Deacon."
His other hand slips down to skim over Deacon's stomach and rest on the fly of his jeans, a silent request for permission before undressing him.
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"You have your work cut out for you," he taunts slightly, his own hands pushing beneath Danse's clothes with renewed desire.
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"Eyes on the mirror," he commands, lips brushing over the juncture between hip and thigh as he pushes Deacon's legs further apart, his breath warm and soft against Deacon's cock. "I'm trusting you, you know. If I catch you looking at me, I might just find myself needing to get up and take a walk."
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"You can't really expect me to look away from this--" he huffs, "And there's your first mistake. You can't trust everyone."
He's being snarky of course, because he does want Danse to trust him, and that little ultimatum does inspire Deacon's to pry his eyes from the beautiful image between his thighs, but not without a groan of displeasure.
The sight of himself in the mirror is a distracting one. It feels torturous not to watch Danse, moreso than it is to be sentenced to watching himself. Deacon takes a deep breath, exhaling loudly. His eyes focus anywhere but his own face, eventually locking onto the ugly scarring left by his fellow Deathclaws when he tried to break free of them. He's changed his face at least a dozen times, but the scar is a constant reminder of who he'd once been.
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