bigapplesauce | Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine? [closed]

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Current Music: July 25th, late afternoon (backdated)

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Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine? [closed]

Navigating his way to Seth's building without assistance makes Daniel prouder than he has any right to be, but it's just nice to know he's able to adapt and learn his way around. It gives him a sense of accomplishment to contrast with the drifting downward trajectory it feels like his life's taken as of late.

The optimism lasts about as long as it takes for Daniel to find the apartment door. Then he briefly loses his nerve and has to take a minute (or two, or three, certainly no more than four and no, he has absolutely not been counting) to collect all his thoughts into one place and automatically begin assembling a preamble before scrapping the idea almost immediately.

He is not going to start with a formal introduction. That would be ridiculous.

And he's not nervous. Just a shade agitated, maybe. Well within reason. It's just the issue of he and Seth spending a disproportionate amount of time walking around in each others' heads, something that definitely warrants a conversation of some sort. Possibly involving alcohol, and Daniel isn't typically one to make that suggestion lightly.

He's done hesitating. Daniel takes a quick breath and knocks before he can change his mind.

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Daniel observes Seth's minimally wobbly pathway with his head to one side. They're both starting to feel it now, he's quite certain.

"Uh, I mean I can try." Oh, good, the caffeine just kicked in to push back the mildly soporific effects of intoxication. Daniel's rate of speech ramps up significantly. "Apparently I can do a passable German if I'm actually um, sober, or at least I'm assuming it was passable because at the time it was part of an attempt to get back into the correct time stream - uh, long story, long long story - but I'm better with the technicalities of linguistics, you know, the written, not as much the aural, um."

He thinks that made sense. Did that make sense? He can't remember the specifics of what he just said so he assumes yes.

Seth doesn't even slightly have the current focus to ask about the whole being in the wrong time stream thing, which is probably for the best.

"No but see, with all the Irish in you now, you should be able to do an Irish accent," he says, worried he didn't make his joke clear, bringing back their filled water glasses and setting them on the table. "Oooh, no, wait, hold on. Can you do my accent?" he asks, grinning expectantly.

"That - that's not typically how one processes new lexicon in the strictest teleological sense," Daniel answers faintly, now undergoing a bit of struggle to keep his word and thought flows from diverting from one another. "Especially when one considers linguistic transfer in the broader general context, it's usually an absorption, sensory flooding of overall culture, not just systematic imbibing of vaguely related alcoholic beverages in order to, to..."

He abruptly runs out of steam.

"I'll try," he concedes wearily, fully anticipating a spectacular crash-and-burn as he lapses into an extremely mediocre imitation of Seth's Mancunian dialect. "I'm onl' agrae'n t'this 'cos I am not soba' and therefore take no responsbili'y abao' it."

This time it's Seth's turn to snort and dissolve into what can only be described as giggles.

Not because it was actually that terrible - keeping in mind that Daniel is very drunk at this point, it was probably a lot better than is to be expected - but because it is completely ridiculous to hear it come out of Daniel's mouth. Just... wrong, really.

He has to stop and lean on the kitchen table just to give himself a minute to... remember how to breathe properly again.

For a while Daniel can only sit there, completely bereft of dignity with his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline at an alarming rate because Seth is giggling

Seth is giggling.

Seth.

Yes, Daniel concludes in the part of his brain that is still somewhat rational, they are both drunk. Most assuredly.

He snorts a little and ducks his head, shoulders jumping to his ears, partially in embarrassment because good god that accent was awful and partially out of involuntary laughter-induced muscle contraction.

"I told you," he says pseudo-mournfully once he's recovered enough of his lung capacity to speak again. "Accents are not my area."

If Daniel ever tells someone he made Seth giggle, Seth will obviously flatly deny it. Seth does not giggle. He laughs and chuckles and probably snickers, but he most assuredly does not giggle. And he definitely doesn't cackle - he's far too subdued for that. Even his definitely-not-giggles are a little strangled.

"No, I," he starts, as he finally comes up for air again. "Just... Is that what you think I sound like?" He shakes his head a bit, blinking away the tears that seem to have spring up from his laughter.

"I said I wasn't good at accents," Daniel protests. "You were the one who wanted me to reproduce your accent even after I told you it wouldn't be accurate."

Seth definitely giggles, assuming one provides the correct impetus. Daniel considers his obtaining of this new information to be a bit of a personal achievement. Seth is even crying a little too, which just makes it doubly so.

"Well," he says, taking a deep breath and starting to regain his composure. "Suppose I can't judge. Couldn't do your accent for shit, I'm pretty sure," he says, heading over to his stereo to put on some music. He looks at what's already in the player, decides that's good enough and puts it on, before heading back to the couch. He doesn't bother walking around the table, just carefully steps over Daniel's legs. Then promptly trips a little bit. Right, bad idea. So much for composure.

Daniel huffs a little at that because did he even hear that accent Daniel couldn't even get the glottal reinforcements right but is spared the effort of thinking of an answer when Seth trips over his legs and ends up sprawled gracelessly across Daniel's lap, parallel to the length of the couch. Daniel's hands reflexively jump upwards and level with his head in shock.

"Um," says Daniel.

Surely Seth can't be that drunk.

Can he?

Well, there was the thing with the hard whiskey.

"You okay there?" he asks carefully. He finds to his horror that he has to bite back the laugh threatening to bubble over.

Edited 2014-10-30 01:56 (UTC)

It's more or less impossible for Seth to stop himself from falling without brutally kicking Daniel, which he very much tries to avoid, so instead he just has to try to catch himself as best he can. Thankfully he managed to land on the couch, without knocking over their glasses of water, and the only thing really damaged is his pride.

"...Yep," he answers, pretending like he didn't just fall over Daniel. His ears are burning a bit, but that may just be the alcohol. The laughter in Daniel's voice does not help matters.

"Just..." He slowly manages to maneuver himself around and off of Daniel, pulling his legs up before getting himself upright and planting his feet on the floor. He realises belatedly that this has put him very close to Daniel, so he shuffles a bit to the side, clearing his throat. "Sorry."

"No worries," Daniel says lightly, still putting a herculean effort into keeping his voice level and not at all amused because Seth is very obviously embarrassed by the whole maneuver. "You're a bit, um, you know. Motor coordination's one of the first things to go."

Hence why Daniel has been so stationary. Seth seems intent on righting himself without actually touching Daniel, oddly enough, but he won't question it. He just keeps himself relatively still so Seth can rearrange himself in a more vertical position. And doesn't laugh. Which he manages, miraculously.

"I'm just going to go ahead and blame you for having too long legs," he decides. One advantage to being drunk is that embarrassing yourself so spectacularly isn't quite as mortifying as it would be otherwise, and it's quicker to become distracted. And there's the glass of water, which he needs to be drinking, how convenient, he can do that instead of talking.

"My legs aren't that -"

He takes a moment to inspect them.

"All right, so maybe they are a bit. I happen to be tall."

Seth looks to have recovered from his stumble, at least, in both the literal and figurative sense.

"You seem to know your craft in hangover prevention," Daniel comments, watching Seth and his glass of water with his eyebrows raised. "Not that I'm complaining." He really, really isn't. The lower tolerance makes for much harder-hitting hangovers which, no thank you.

Obviously anything taller than Seth is something he can justifiably call too tall, even if Daniel is only a few inches taller than him.

"Well, you know, years of experience," he answers, mildly breathless from downing half the glass in one go. He leans forward and picks up Daniel's glass and hands it to him in a silent request to do the same. Hangover prevention can be boring and easy to forget, but it's so much more preferable to hangover recovery.

Daniel takes the pointed hint. A good portion of the water vanishes in his first gulp and the rest disappears in the second. He's in no awful rush to get hit with a pounding headache in the morning.

"Wish I could say the same," he says, setting down the glass. "But, you know me. I've pretty much always been a caffeine guy. Not exclusively just, you know, mostly."

Which would be putting it mildly. Daniel doesn't actually know if he can exist without the stuff.

Seth gets momentarily distracted watching Daniel's throat as he drinks, and then how wet his lips are afterwards, and has to make himself look down at his glass. He tries to tell himself there's nothing strange about having trouble shaking that mental image. The brain does all sorts of weird things when you're drunk.

"Yeah, uh, I had kind of picked up on that," he answers with a nod. "So do you mostly go for coffee, or is it any kind of caffeine? Tea? Energy drinks?" He's not entirely sure why he's asking this. Knowing how to stock up, maybe. Then again, he always has tea and coffee anyway.

"Coffee. Usually. Sometimes tea if I want to be less, you know." He makes a wiggly, noncommittal hand gesture that is exactly the opposite of informative because he realized too late that he didn't actually know where the sentence was headed when he began. "Back home people really got on my case about it. Which I guess makes sense when you make a habit of hitting the forty-eight-hour mark without sleep on a regular basis and don't actually notice until someone points it out." Yeah, oops. "Though in my defense, they should've known better than to put a coffeemaker that close to my office. They realized that pretty quickly though. Put a stop to it. Unfortunately."

He frowns a little to himself at the memory. The coffeemaker had to be promptly transplanted back to the commissary and never again placed in such proximity to the office of one caffeine-dependent insomniac archaeologist. ~~He still resents that command decision.~~

Yet despite the amount of coffee he's had so far, Daniel supposes the alcohol-to-coffee ratio must be skewed in favor of the former because he's starting to slur his words a bit, even if they're still tumbling out at just as breakneck a pace as ever.

He's going to assume that wiggly hand gesture means energetic. Or possibly fast-talking. He raises his eyebrows at the whole 48-hour wakefulness thing. That sounds more than a little exhausting. Not that Seth hasn't had his share of sleep deprivation at times, but it wasn't thanks to coffee or choice.

"Inconsiderate of them," he answers with mild amusement. He wonders how Daniel is coping here, with a coffee maker right in the same room he stays at, and coffee shops practically on every street corner. Perhaps not as badly without work to focus on. Well, judging by the fact Daniel keeps appearing in dreams, anyway.

He finally empties his own glass of water, leaning forward with a small groan to put it down, then flopping back against the pillows.

"You know... I seem to recall something about me being promised Russian," he comments. At least Seth won't laugh at him for that, seeing as Seth doesn't know any Russian. He'd just like to see how Daniel will handle it when they're this drunk.

"Ah, I did not promise Russian." Daniel raises an indignant finger for clarification. "I merely implied. Vast, vast important difference between the two."

Then he smirks and mutters, "Много разногласий," with semi-decent diction. No, actually, if he's honest with himself those consonants are really terrible, but he is drunk and overcaffeinated, and that is his excuse. Seth did want to hear it after all.

Seth is about to argue to get him to relent, but then Daniel does say something in Russian, and wow that's ...interesting. And while smirking, no less, and Seth just blinks at him for a few moments, slowly getting a lazy grin.

"What'd you say?" he asks, because that was really just a strange jumble of consonants for him. Though it sounded suitably impressive.

"Uh, I said there were a lot of differences. Or at least I think that's what I said. You might want to consult a dictionary on that. Now's really not the best time for, um, demonstration. Seeing as I am drunk. Probably. I'm going to say that to make myself feel better about that atrocious elocution."

"Drunk" might be stretching it. He's at least well on his way. It's starting to feel like that, though he could just be tired. It's getting increasingly difficult to tell.

"Well, unfortunately I don' have a Russian dictionary jus' at the mo'," he answers, as if he were ever likely to own one. "Also I'm pretty sure I couldn' even spell it." His elocution seems to be taking a turn for the worse as well. He usually makes a point of enunciating much more properly than he would back home, since anything else mostly led to blank stares, but the drunker and/or more tired he gets, the more obvious it becomes. It's like his t-sounds are slowly fading out of existence, only making occasional appearances.

He grins widely as Seth's accent gets notably stronger. He likes the accent, even more so as it becomes less filtered, and the natural thing sounds infinitely better than Daniel's own poor attempt at recreating it.

"Neither could I at the moment," he replies airily. Daniel doesn't think he could actually muster the energy to stand up or move at all, hypothetically. "Motor skills are probably a bit impaired at this point."

By which he means this couch is really just enormously comfortable, and Daniel is going to keep lying here.

"Well, you saw wha 'appened when I tried to move," Seth answers, leaning his head back against the couch and looking at Daniel sideways. He's moved past embarrassment and into amusement at his stumble now. Perhaps because Daniel is too nice to laugh at him.

"I 'ope you don' need more water, cause I don' think I could fetch it," he adds. Or, well, he could probably manage it. But he doesn't want to. They're both so comfortable slumped here. It's going to be a problem when he needs to go to the bathroom, though. Which... might be soon, considering how much he's drunk.

"I'm good." Yep, he is just fine like this. And Seth's articulation is noticeably becoming much less pronounced so Daniel doesn't think standing and moving around are currently in his docket. Besides, he's perfectly comfortable like this, what with the two of them reclining on Seth's couch in bizarre symmetry.

"Mostly I'm just," out of habit he tries to demonstrate his meaning with his hands but finds he lacks the energy so all he manages is an incomplete shrug, "tired."

Pleasantly so, he doesn't add. He should think that'd be obvious.

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