[this is going to be so funny when mathis stabs him before he goes out to kill people.
He can't deny that it's true - that he doesn't know with certainty that this Mathis is the same Mathis he knows, which is a startling realization. He'll come to know later when he gets another peek into a memory he's in that he doesn't recall, and he'll know this to be true, then - that he would protect Mathis even knowing this isn't "his" Mathis.
It's so, so difficult for him to imagine the same applying to Scien, though. To think that some distant version of himself he knows nothing about, who had walked a similar and yet divergent path from him, had freely given himself to a being that he struggles to see as anything but the worst demon...
(But if Scien Brofiise is the worst demon, what does that make him?)
Finally, the unsettled feeling that's been growing and overtaking his pulses of violence and kneejerk anger reaches a point that makes it hard to ignore. He eases back another step, the aggression of his posture replaced by something more defensive and self-protective, which is very funny considering he is by far the bigger threat.
Quietly, after a long pause in which he fails to really digest any of this:]
...I will rely on you and work with you here, given the very obvious discrepancy in ability and access between the two of us, but... I don't want your protection. [YOU FOOL.] I recognize you won't care. You've told me you don't care before, over other, similar things, and I don't expect you to change. If Mathis were to say the same to me should he come to learn more, I would still protect him as well. I understand that.
[But he's still going to verbally swat at the hand of god.]
no subject
He can't deny that it's true - that he doesn't know with certainty that this Mathis is the same Mathis he knows, which is a startling realization. He'll come to know later when he gets another peek into a memory he's in that he doesn't recall, and he'll know this to be true, then - that he would protect Mathis even knowing this isn't "his" Mathis.
It's so, so difficult for him to imagine the same applying to Scien, though. To think that some distant version of himself he knows nothing about, who had walked a similar and yet divergent path from him, had freely given himself to a being that he struggles to see as anything but the worst demon...
(But if Scien Brofiise is the worst demon, what does that make him?)
Finally, the unsettled feeling that's been growing and overtaking his pulses of violence and kneejerk anger reaches a point that makes it hard to ignore. He eases back another step, the aggression of his posture replaced by something more defensive and self-protective, which is very funny considering he is by far the bigger threat.
Quietly, after a long pause in which he fails to really digest any of this:]
...I will rely on you and work with you here, given the very obvious discrepancy in ability and access between the two of us, but... I don't want your protection. [YOU FOOL.] I recognize you won't care. You've told me you don't care before, over other, similar things, and I don't expect you to change. If Mathis were to say the same to me should he come to learn more, I would still protect him as well. I understand that.
[But he's still going to verbally swat at the hand of god.]