Dante couldn't help it. When Peregrine said that he was not so different from his birth pack, he let out a laugh, but stifled it almost immediately. "I'm sorry. I just... this place is nothing like there." They were different as night and day. "If it was, no offense, but I'd have steered clear. True, you protect your own. That was probably the one thing I still respect about them. We were a unit. But it wasn't an unconditional membership. I do not think that you would condemn Blue for caring for the sick or injured. Nor would you condemn the old for no longer having the strength to prevail in battle. There though... if you were injured or sick or old, you were weak, and weakness was not to be tolerated." If they weren't killed on the spot they were chased out, and even that was likened to a death sentence.
"Besides that, you fight to protect your own borders. We had none. We fought to prove ourselves stronger, and any who chose not to join us chose death." He shook his head. "Thank you, don't think I don't appreciate your acceptance. But you don't lower yourself. You are so much better than they are." Here they were a pack, but a proper one, tied together with compassion and love rather than fear and violent sadism.
"I still hold true to some of them. As I said, the idea of the pack being first... that is an ideal I will hold until the day I die. Borders were made to be protected and those who are not pack are not to be trusted. However, I no longer hold with the idea that in order to prove our strength we must destroy all who cross our path." Honestly he didn't understand how he had ever held with that idea. When one was young, though, their parents were everything. And with that youth came the impressionable urge to do anything to impress them, no matter the cost.
He hoped that Peregrine didn't think he was mocking him or making light of his own views. He really respected him, more than anyone else he had met so far. He just couldn't even begin to compare this family-oriented pack with his own cold heritage. Atrix would never have lowered himself to treating his pups with an ounce of the kindess and love that Peregrine showed his own.
