Sacrifices

Chapter 6: Let The Human In

When the words weigh heavy on the heart

I am lost and led only by the stars

Cage me like an animal
A crown with gems and gold
Eat me like a cannibal
Chase the neon throne

Breathe in, breathe out
Let the human in

-Human, Of Monsters and Men-

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It was the same four walls and it wasn't the bunker but it might as well have been. Dull and crumbling beneath the weight of the world's end. A holding ground for grief and loneliness. The tomb where one came to rot away from insecurities and contradictions. Unable to understand, to comprehend that which gives, and takes away.

Life. How does one define it? Create it? Control it? End it.

What does it means to live, to be alive, to feel things that were never meant to be felt? Encased in the skeletal remains of stone walls, he had simply traded one prison for another.

Here he would remain, caught somewhere in between, because he had been damned from the day he was created. Marked to wander the wastes with emptiness in his heart. A soulless beast roaming without direction, without purpose because his life had no meaning. It had been stolen from him and what he perceived as his life had ended.

Everything he ever cared about and all that he had lived for… Gone. And he was a shell, a shadow, a mere facsimile of a man. He, himself was worthless. Created in the image of a lie, he came from nothing and would end up as nothing.

But then, when all seemed lost, a woman with mismatched eyes and fire branded in her soul had taken his hand and pulled him through the darkness. Convinced him that he was more than a machine and that there might be something else worth living for. She was beauty and light and made him feel so overwhelming human that the thought of living even a single day without the promise of her grace made his chest tighten up and drove him to irrationality.

He had told her he would burn down the Commonwealth for her and he had meant every word because she had burrowed her way into his heart. Her fingerprints of determination and kindness laid claim deep within the fabrication of his being. She had nested under his skin and settled in his bones with no way to cleanse himself of her, not that he wanted to.

They were kindred spirits, bound together by the trials of fire and their shared journey through the circles of hell. Clawing their way through the grit and the gore to the other side, hand in hand, burned and bruised but still breathing. Woven together through the test of time. Inseparable. Unbroken.

As much as Jackie affirmed to needing him, Danse needed her so much more than she would ever know. Until she had come crashing into his life, armed with a shotgun and a crooked smile, he had never truly understood how alone he really was. She was the part of him that he didn't realize he was missing.

After the bunker, when he was finally able to comprehend the gravity of what she had done for him, he allowed himself to come to terms with his own feelings for her. Pushed passed the road blocks and fail-safes put in place to prevent him from getting too close, he allowed himself to admit that he had fallen in love with this woman. The intensity of such realization both frightened him and calmed his warring soul. Silently he vowed that he would ensure, by all means necessary, that no harm would come to her. He would protect her with his own life just as she had done for him.