[ Danse is not a great reader of other people, not by Brotherhood standards or normal-human-being standards or even really by synthetic-human-being standards. Certainly not the way Len is, which is why the job of doing so always falls to Len while Danse picks up the slack elsewhere. But even he can tell there's a difference between the smooth and casual flair with which Len has told him other stories before, and the way he so visibly has to steel himself for this one. Not even the tale of being shot in the head and left for dead and everything that had followed from it had elicited a response like that. Len had volunteered that one, not sat and stared into his drink with a noise as if watching someone else get stabbed.
He's almost about to take the question back, to try and change the subject, possibly even apologize for asking it at all, when the answer comes, ominous in its simplicity. And in the name of the tech in question, nothing the Brotherhood's ever documented. ]
No, I haven't. Our medic back at the Citadel was a repurposed Mr. Gutsy for a while, but I don't think that's the kind of thing you're talking about.
[ From anyone else, this might be a joke to try and lighten the mood. Even from Danse, under slightly different circumstances, it would probably be a joke. It's not, and doesn't have the cadence of one. It's just his usual habit of lapsing back into literal-minded seriousness whenever he's distracted or concerned about something. ]
Pre-war specialized bullshit. Can do just about any surgery, organ transplants, amputation. It's like a Mr. Gutsy, if a Mr. Gutsy could think for itself.
[ He'd gotten the impression, then, that most Auto-Docs didn't have a personality module, so he'd just gotten lucky. Though it's difficult to consider himself as such when the preponderance of compliments came after a battery of experimental surgeries and were along the lines of You are, without a doubt, the healthiest son of a bitch I've ever seen wandering the Big MT! Len takes another healthy swig of his drink, spinning the glass idly, slowly, on the table. ]
There was a place back home called The Big Empty. Or people thought it was, on account of nobody ever finding it. Or if they did, they never came back. 'Cept it wasn't actually empty, it was a pre-war research and development facility.
I was followin' the source of an old satellite signal at a drive-in theatre. Got too close. Everything got all fuzzy and blue, and I woke up on an operating table.
[ Twice. The first time he gained consciousness halfway through the procedure, dragging awake at the sensation of something hot and wet pouring down his sides as he lay prone. His fingers crept up to feel the open edges of him, the inside of him, and he started with a jerk. The light was blinding and the steady beeping in the background - some pinging on a machine - increased rapidly and erratically as he shifted, panicked, tried to move before the Auto-Doc tutted and upped the anesthesia. The second time included a formal greeting. Less blood. No beeping. Something about having a truly revolutionary cerebellum due to some sort of trauma.
Of anyone else out here he knows, he knows that Danse is familiar with the sensation of waking up and not recognizing himself. ]
Place was crawling with all these creatures, these people that the Auto-Doc was supposed to lobotomize. They didn't have brains anymore, they got some kinda mechanical system it installed to keep them patrolling the place. Protecting it. S'why nobody ever came back from there.
I think it was supposed to do the same thing to me, but it said my brain was different. Probably thanks to this shit. [ With his other hand he gestures at the scar left behind on his temple. ] Didn't stop it replacing my heart and my spine, though. It's what it did to the lobotomites, made them stronger.
[ Danse usually makes a good audience for stories, particularly Len's stories, because he listens with rapt attention and keeps quiet at the good parts and reacts candidly as and when appropriate. It's a give-and-take even when his role involves keeping his mouth shut, because there's more to it than that, and he understands that. Even the more somber story about how Len got his gunshot scar had been told in that manner, the kind of thing meant to be shared over moonshine as much for entertainment as for information.
This is different, no matter how Len is trying to downplay it. Danse isn't attuned to the degree to which he's doing so, but even the bare, factual details are sickening enough on their own merits to loose a quiet, unformed little sound of horror from his throat at a moment where he'd otherwise have been silent. He might have framed it weeks ago in terms of Brotherhood philosophy, the ne plus ultra of proof that technology run amok is the greatest threat to humankind, but it isn't about that right now. It's about the fact that he's picturing his friend being vivisected by robots, seeing the blood and viscera in his mind's eye--and realizing, yes, with that icy gut-punch, that Len also knows what it is to feel like your body is no longer yours but a foreign thing crafted by enemies on an assembly line, whether it still functions as it should or not.
There's something that feels deeply but indescribably worse about the thought of Len as one of those lobotomites, too, than about simply imagining what would have happened had the deathclaw been able to reach him through that gap, or had the bullet found its mark after all. Maybe it's because it's the same thing that'll happen to Danse if they ever meet someone who knows his recall code, but he doesn't think that's really the reason he wants to frantically shut his mind against the image of Len wandering an eternal mindless security patrol around that mountain.
(He knows what it feels like to look into a friend's eyes and realize that nothing of him is left to save. He doesn't want to take that association any further.)
He realizes he's been silent too long, another departure from the usual call-and-response of the storytelling. He doesn't know what to say, and even when he usually solves that problem by simply admitting that he doesn't know what to say, it's not what comes out of his mouth of its own accord now. ]
[ Danse doesn't have an incredible poker face, and he's far more empathetic than Len thinks the Brotherhood probably gave him credit for. To some extent he feels a little bad, watching those expressions reflected back at him. Concern and horror, likely envisioning the scene in great detail. Nothing will ever be as crisp and terrifying as experiencing it firsthand, but neither does he assume Danse is making any more of an association than that of a man who has learned he isn't actually human.
He felt similarly, after waking up for the first time and being told what they'd done and why. ]
It's-
[ Len waves a hand. Not dismissive, exactly, but not equating their circumstances either. It isn't fine, and saying so would be a gross exaggeration of where he is with it. Having made his peace and taken the steps he needed to to distance himself from Big MT, acceptance is the next best thing. ]
...It is what it is.
[ Danse's candor does have an unfortunate way of disarming him when it comes to conversations like this, and the subject is made easier knowing that neither of them would ever be in a position to disclose the other's synthetic or cybernetic traits. Len begins unfastening the remaining buttons on his shirt, shrugging the thing off and onto the back of his chair. The less advanced synths have seams running the lengths of their joints, different plates covering different areas of their build. His scars don't appear all that dissimilar: a clear, well-healed Y-incision carves beneath his collarbone and down his chest, another straight line down the stretch of his spine. He's aware it gives the impression of a walking corpse. ]
Think they incinerated the originals after they replaced 'em. Scientists there were pre-war too, little...floating brains in jars they called "think tanks." Once they got to my head, they, uh- [ Len feels over his hair, lifting some of the curls to show Danse another thin line of scar tissue that wraps around most of his head. ] They took it. I was still connected to my brain 'cause of something they put up here, but one of the doctors basically held it hostage. Most of the time I spent there was just trying to get the damn thing back.
[ He's seen enough corpses after Cade's autopsied them--barely-familiar new recruits sometimes, other times comrades he'd known well. One gets used to it in all but exceptional kick-to-the-gut circumstances. Seeing those scars down Len's chest and back and envisioning him cold and gray in the Citadel morgue, Danse knows that would be one of those exceptions.
But it's easier to remind himself that it's a hypothetical, when the scars are healed over in ways he's never seen an ugly Y-incision get the chance to heal, and when Len still has nearly all of his usual warmth and life about him even if the subject has him a bit subdued. Absorbed as Danse is in the continuation of the awful story, his hand raises unthinkingly as if to reach out and touch the scar once fully bared--but he remembers himself quickly and wonders what the hell had even gotten into him just then. The impulse, maybe, had been to feel that odd contrast of autopsy scar and blood-warmed skin, but it would have been a startling lack of self-discipline no matter how badly he usually finds himself wanting to touch Len for less innocent reasons.
This would be self-evidently Not The Time for that train of thought regardless, but it flies out the window completely once Len demonstrates the other scar around his head. And maybe Danse should be more open to accepting this part of the story, considering that he's processing all of this with a brain that's at least twenty percent silicon by volume and designed to interface with about eight different kinds of machinery himself, but it still prompts an immediate that can't possibly be true that he'd even say out loud if Len had been any less serious about the rest of this so far.
Of course it can be true. The one constant Danse has ever found in the wasteland is that technology is always more fucked-up and dangerous than you think it is. ]
At this point, I think we just need to admit that science was a goddamned mistake.
[ This is...surprisingly facetious for him, under the circumstances, because he's really trying, but the effort melts away within a few seconds and gives way to seething genuine outrage. ]
How fucking dare they?
[ Len has succeeded, over the course of their travels, in loosening some of the bolts of Danse's usual reserve about profanity beyond "hell" and "damn," but this is the first time he's ever been spurred to go that far. ]
[ Science was a goddamned mistake sparks an unsuspecting chuckle from Len, both because he knows it's not an accurate statement that either of them believe, and because Danse himself is the product of scientific endeavor - whatever the motivation. Len is even prepared for the conversation to be left with that sentiment, opening his mouth to agree with no small amount of humor when Danse quickly follows up with a vehement addendum.
It swiftly sucks the laugh out of his lungs. Passionate and angry - righteously angry - on his behalf, and Len doesn't maintain much of an effective poker face himself as he stares at Danse with a confusion he normally reserves for the village idiots that sometimes cross their path out in the wastes.
What does he say to that? There's a level of acceptance he's come to rest on, albeit uncomfortably, about the whole thing because he hasn't really had the choice to do otherwise. Arcade ran a battery of tests on him for weeks and the only conclusion they came to was that he seemed healthier than ever, but with no replacement parts available, if something went wrong he would most certainly die. The new norm was just...what it was. ]
They ain't gonna do it to anyone else, if it makes you feel better. Made sure of that.
[ In fairness, the fact that Danse is the result of science does not remotely preclude him from thinking it's a bad idea to leave scientists to their own devices, like, ever. If anything, he thinks his existence only proves that all the more conclusively. But Len has broken him of the impulse to say things that self-loathing out loud anymore, and in a mind-over-matter kind of way, not saying it takes the edge off of feeling it, too.
He finds himself flushing slightly under that baffled gaze, eyes shifting aside and down. ]
Good. I wouldn't have expected otherwise, knowing you, but...good.
[ It's almost an absent expression of satisfaction, as if his mind is elsewhere, when that should be his chief concern. Hearing that should be the end of it, the entire point of his upset about it. He doesn't know why it isn't.
There's some frustrated protective impulse, a half-formed if we'd known each other then or if I'd been there to help, the kind of useless what-if that he doesn't ordinarily let himself indulge in. It's stupid, and it is indulgent. It's all ridiculous. Danse wants to lean across the table and kiss him. ]
...I think I should slow down on the tequila.
[ A non-sequitur, maybe, but he can at least let it explain the vehemence. He rubs his eyes and gets up from the chair, not unsteady on his feet but still careful. ]
I'm gonna go see if the plumbing works or if we need to break into the water rations.
[ Danse wrestles with something Len can't outright identify, flashes of familiarity crossing his face even if the fuller picture isn't clear. Angry, and sad. Powerless to solve a situation that's already happened and personally invested in a way that Len isn't accustomed to. They've come to find each other's company as a constant, to watch each other's backs with ease. It's instinctual now. Normal.
Less normal is Len's obvious flirtation but neither has Danse outright dissuaded him from it, and so it goes. The fervor in his eyes, the tension in his broad shoulders is foreign to Len. They're not lovers, but sometimes he wonders whether that wouldn't be easier when there are blurred lines in interactions like this one. ]
...Sure. Yeah.
[ He leans back in his chair again, watching Danse for a moment before emptying his own glass and reaching for his discarded shirt. The room is still warm, muggy, but he pulls it back on regardless. The physical exposure he can handle, but the emotional disquiet sets him on edge again. ]
Danse? [ Len calls after the retreating figure, buttoning up the front of his placket. ] I appreciate your candor.
[ It's exactly as obvious to Danse when Len flirts with him as it is when Len flirts with everyone else, and Danse does not flatter himself enough to think it means anything more or different when it's him. There's no reason to dissuade it when it's just a quirk of Len's personality, as much as Danse's propensity toward bluntness.
It's the worst possible moment to realize that his desire for it to mean more is playing into his distress at the tale. There shouldn't be any blurring of lines right now, of all times, because what kind of a person hears a story like that from a friend and tries to spin it into something romantic? His feelings may be smacking him across the face with ill-timed understanding of their nature, but he doesn't have to say anything about them.
It lends some irony to that call, though, which makes Danse pause with only a nod before continuing into the bathroom with his own empty glass. It feels rude, in the way he would ordinarily scold someone else for, to let it go without immediate acknowledgment, but he doesn't know exactly what to say to it, and he doesn't trust himself to say much of anything at the moment without some water to temper the booze. Fortunately, the facilities are maintained well enough for the taps to spit out something vaguely drinkable. He splashes it on his face, refills his cup a few times, stands there rubbing his eyes for a long moment. ]
You didn't have to tell me that story, you know.
[ This as he leans on the bathroom doorjamb, voice quiet, still looser-limbed than usual but clearer-headed than he was a few minutes ago. ]
You'd have been well within your rights to ask me to leave it alone, and you know I would have. But you trusted me with it anyway. I appreciate that, too.
[ More than he wants to say, and so he leaves it, for once, at that. He comes back into the room and offers the water-filled glass if Len wants some. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
He's almost about to take the question back, to try and change the subject, possibly even apologize for asking it at all, when the answer comes, ominous in its simplicity. And in the name of the tech in question, nothing the Brotherhood's ever documented. ]
No, I haven't. Our medic back at the Citadel was a repurposed Mr. Gutsy for a while, but I don't think that's the kind of thing you're talking about.
[ From anyone else, this might be a joke to try and lighten the mood. Even from Danse, under slightly different circumstances, it would probably be a joke. It's not, and doesn't have the cadence of one. It's just his usual habit of lapsing back into literal-minded seriousness whenever he's distracted or concerned about something. ]
no subject
[ He'd gotten the impression, then, that most Auto-Docs didn't have a personality module, so he'd just gotten lucky. Though it's difficult to consider himself as such when the preponderance of compliments came after a battery of experimental surgeries and were along the lines of You are, without a doubt, the healthiest son of a bitch I've ever seen wandering the Big MT! Len takes another healthy swig of his drink, spinning the glass idly, slowly, on the table. ]
There was a place back home called The Big Empty. Or people thought it was, on account of nobody ever finding it. Or if they did, they never came back. 'Cept it wasn't actually empty, it was a pre-war research and development facility.
I was followin' the source of an old satellite signal at a drive-in theatre. Got too close. Everything got all fuzzy and blue, and I woke up on an operating table.
[ Twice. The first time he gained consciousness halfway through the procedure, dragging awake at the sensation of something hot and wet pouring down his sides as he lay prone. His fingers crept up to feel the open edges of him, the inside of him, and he started with a jerk. The light was blinding and the steady beeping in the background - some pinging on a machine - increased rapidly and erratically as he shifted, panicked, tried to move before the Auto-Doc tutted and upped the anesthesia. The second time included a formal greeting. Less blood. No beeping. Something about having a truly revolutionary cerebellum due to some sort of trauma.
Of anyone else out here he knows, he knows that Danse is familiar with the sensation of waking up and not recognizing himself. ]
Place was crawling with all these creatures, these people that the Auto-Doc was supposed to lobotomize. They didn't have brains anymore, they got some kinda mechanical system it installed to keep them patrolling the place. Protecting it. S'why nobody ever came back from there.
I think it was supposed to do the same thing to me, but it said my brain was different. Probably thanks to this shit. [ With his other hand he gestures at the scar left behind on his temple. ] Didn't stop it replacing my heart and my spine, though. It's what it did to the lobotomites, made them stronger.
no subject
This is different, no matter how Len is trying to downplay it. Danse isn't attuned to the degree to which he's doing so, but even the bare, factual details are sickening enough on their own merits to loose a quiet, unformed little sound of horror from his throat at a moment where he'd otherwise have been silent. He might have framed it weeks ago in terms of Brotherhood philosophy, the ne plus ultra of proof that technology run amok is the greatest threat to humankind, but it isn't about that right now. It's about the fact that he's picturing his friend being vivisected by robots, seeing the blood and viscera in his mind's eye--and realizing, yes, with that icy gut-punch, that Len also knows what it is to feel like your body is no longer yours but a foreign thing crafted by enemies on an assembly line, whether it still functions as it should or not.
There's something that feels deeply but indescribably worse about the thought of Len as one of those lobotomites, too, than about simply imagining what would have happened had the deathclaw been able to reach him through that gap, or had the bullet found its mark after all. Maybe it's because it's the same thing that'll happen to Danse if they ever meet someone who knows his recall code, but he doesn't think that's really the reason he wants to frantically shut his mind against the image of Len wandering an eternal mindless security patrol around that mountain.
(He knows what it feels like to look into a friend's eyes and realize that nothing of him is left to save. He doesn't want to take that association any further.)
He realizes he's been silent too long, another departure from the usual call-and-response of the storytelling. He doesn't know what to say, and even when he usually solves that problem by simply admitting that he doesn't know what to say, it's not what comes out of his mouth of its own accord now. ]
God. I'm so sorry.
no subject
He felt similarly, after waking up for the first time and being told what they'd done and why. ]
It's-
[ Len waves a hand. Not dismissive, exactly, but not equating their circumstances either. It isn't fine, and saying so would be a gross exaggeration of where he is with it. Having made his peace and taken the steps he needed to to distance himself from Big MT, acceptance is the next best thing. ]
...It is what it is.
[ Danse's candor does have an unfortunate way of disarming him when it comes to conversations like this, and the subject is made easier knowing that neither of them would ever be in a position to disclose the other's synthetic or cybernetic traits. Len begins unfastening the remaining buttons on his shirt, shrugging the thing off and onto the back of his chair. The less advanced synths have seams running the lengths of their joints, different plates covering different areas of their build. His scars don't appear all that dissimilar: a clear, well-healed Y-incision carves beneath his collarbone and down his chest, another straight line down the stretch of his spine. He's aware it gives the impression of a walking corpse. ]
Think they incinerated the originals after they replaced 'em. Scientists there were pre-war too, little...floating brains in jars they called "think tanks." Once they got to my head, they, uh- [ Len feels over his hair, lifting some of the curls to show Danse another thin line of scar tissue that wraps around most of his head. ] They took it. I was still connected to my brain 'cause of something they put up here, but one of the doctors basically held it hostage. Most of the time I spent there was just trying to get the damn thing back.
no subject
But it's easier to remind himself that it's a hypothetical, when the scars are healed over in ways he's never seen an ugly Y-incision get the chance to heal, and when Len still has nearly all of his usual warmth and life about him even if the subject has him a bit subdued. Absorbed as Danse is in the continuation of the awful story, his hand raises unthinkingly as if to reach out and touch the scar once fully bared--but he remembers himself quickly and wonders what the hell had even gotten into him just then. The impulse, maybe, had been to feel that odd contrast of autopsy scar and blood-warmed skin, but it would have been a startling lack of self-discipline no matter how badly he usually finds himself wanting to touch Len for less innocent reasons.
This would be self-evidently Not The Time for that train of thought regardless, but it flies out the window completely once Len demonstrates the other scar around his head. And maybe Danse should be more open to accepting this part of the story, considering that he's processing all of this with a brain that's at least twenty percent silicon by volume and designed to interface with about eight different kinds of machinery himself, but it still prompts an immediate that can't possibly be true that he'd even say out loud if Len had been any less serious about the rest of this so far.
Of course it can be true. The one constant Danse has ever found in the wasteland is that technology is always more fucked-up and dangerous than you think it is. ]
At this point, I think we just need to admit that science was a goddamned mistake.
[ This is...surprisingly facetious for him, under the circumstances, because he's really trying, but the effort melts away within a few seconds and gives way to seething genuine outrage. ]
How fucking dare they?
[ Len has succeeded, over the course of their travels, in loosening some of the bolts of Danse's usual reserve about profanity beyond "hell" and "damn," but this is the first time he's ever been spurred to go that far. ]
no subject
It swiftly sucks the laugh out of his lungs. Passionate and angry - righteously angry - on his behalf, and Len doesn't maintain much of an effective poker face himself as he stares at Danse with a confusion he normally reserves for the village idiots that sometimes cross their path out in the wastes.
What does he say to that? There's a level of acceptance he's come to rest on, albeit uncomfortably, about the whole thing because he hasn't really had the choice to do otherwise. Arcade ran a battery of tests on him for weeks and the only conclusion they came to was that he seemed healthier than ever, but with no replacement parts available, if something went wrong he would most certainly die. The new norm was just...what it was. ]
They ain't gonna do it to anyone else, if it makes you feel better. Made sure of that.
no subject
He finds himself flushing slightly under that baffled gaze, eyes shifting aside and down. ]
Good. I wouldn't have expected otherwise, knowing you, but...good.
[ It's almost an absent expression of satisfaction, as if his mind is elsewhere, when that should be his chief concern. Hearing that should be the end of it, the entire point of his upset about it. He doesn't know why it isn't.
There's some frustrated protective impulse, a half-formed if we'd known each other then or if I'd been there to help, the kind of useless what-if that he doesn't ordinarily let himself indulge in. It's stupid, and it is indulgent. It's all ridiculous. Danse wants to lean across the table and kiss him. ]
...I think I should slow down on the tequila.
[ A non-sequitur, maybe, but he can at least let it explain the vehemence. He rubs his eyes and gets up from the chair, not unsteady on his feet but still careful. ]
I'm gonna go see if the plumbing works or if we need to break into the water rations.
no subject
Less normal is Len's obvious flirtation but neither has Danse outright dissuaded him from it, and so it goes. The fervor in his eyes, the tension in his broad shoulders is foreign to Len. They're not lovers, but sometimes he wonders whether that wouldn't be easier when there are blurred lines in interactions like this one. ]
...Sure. Yeah.
[ He leans back in his chair again, watching Danse for a moment before emptying his own glass and reaching for his discarded shirt. The room is still warm, muggy, but he pulls it back on regardless. The physical exposure he can handle, but the emotional disquiet sets him on edge again. ]
Danse? [ Len calls after the retreating figure, buttoning up the front of his placket. ] I appreciate your candor.
no subject
It's the worst possible moment to realize that his desire for it to mean more is playing into his distress at the tale. There shouldn't be any blurring of lines right now, of all times, because what kind of a person hears a story like that from a friend and tries to spin it into something romantic? His feelings may be smacking him across the face with ill-timed understanding of their nature, but he doesn't have to say anything about them.
It lends some irony to that call, though, which makes Danse pause with only a nod before continuing into the bathroom with his own empty glass. It feels rude, in the way he would ordinarily scold someone else for, to let it go without immediate acknowledgment, but he doesn't know exactly what to say to it, and he doesn't trust himself to say much of anything at the moment without some water to temper the booze. Fortunately, the facilities are maintained well enough for the taps to spit out something vaguely drinkable. He splashes it on his face, refills his cup a few times, stands there rubbing his eyes for a long moment. ]
You didn't have to tell me that story, you know.
[ This as he leans on the bathroom doorjamb, voice quiet, still looser-limbed than usual but clearer-headed than he was a few minutes ago. ]
You'd have been well within your rights to ask me to leave it alone, and you know I would have. But you trusted me with it anyway. I appreciate that, too.
[ More than he wants to say, and so he leaves it, for once, at that. He comes back into the room and offers the water-filled glass if Len wants some. ]