bigapplesauce | It's been the worst day since yesterday [closed]

Current Location: Hell's Kitchen
Current Music: August 1st, noon (backdated)

Entry tags:

It's been the worst day since yesterday [closed]

The knotted mass of guilt in Daniel's chest hasn't gone away by the time he's on his way to Seth's apartment building, again, hands clenching and unclenching and wandering and ducking into his pockets and back out again a minute later.

Daniel feels like an idiot.

He feels like an idiot, because what good could an ordinary library in Manhattan possibly be for this kind of thing? Yesterday had passed in sporadic bursts of anxiety, horror over what the hell might be happening, creeping dread that this might not be reversible and then finally today Daniel's traitorous phone had buzzed to deliver several texts in rapid succession. Texts he should have received a full day ago. Short bursts of words and questions that should read as neutral and impersonal like any other text but don't because Seth had clearly, clearly not been in a good place by the time he'd faded from Daniel's range of vision and he must not have heard or processed any of the prior warnings because the texts all make it bleakly obvious he'd had no idea what was happening. Seth must have assumed the worse.

That would not be atypical for Seth to have assumed the worse.

The idea that Daniel had most assuredly been the cause of that makes him faintly, mildly nauseous.

He has to halt outside the building for a tight minute, his lungs a paradoxical mess of relief and jittering apprehension and no small amount of the always-persistent guilt until at last he makes an unerring line for the figure in front. The visible figure. Daniel's eyes don't slide right past and he doesn't need to constantly refocus and the gradually mounting panic tentatively starts to give way.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yesterday had been rough. Probably one of the roughest days in a long, long time. Even once he had finally started to realise what had really happened, thought back to how Daniel had actually been acting, how he clearly wasn't ignoring Seth at all, he just couldn't see him... Well, even then, it still wasn't fun to deal with.

He's had to constantly reassure himself that it's just the Rift messing with them, that someone will figure it out and everything will be fine, and Daniel isn't actually angry at him. He almost went to go see Daniel again, but then he figured it would just put salt in the wound to not be able to talk to him, and probably be a little creepy, and even if he had gotten over those two things, well, Daniel went out and Seth doesn't actually know where he went.

Probably stealing a reptile and getting high isn't the best way to cope with all that, but it did the trick. Even allowed him to sleep a little, but then of course he woke up feeling just as anxious as ever, because still nothing was fixed, and there was still no reply from Daniel.

And then finally, finally, blissfully, word had reached him about how to reverse it. And since then he'd been sitting outside, or walking outside, looking up at the sky and waiting for the rain to start. And then it did, and he let himself be soaked, and then he'd approached a random person and they had seen him and probably thought he was crazy, but that didn't actually matter.

He exists again, properly.

And then he just stayed out in the rain, not wanting to go inside, not wanting to risk if somehow drying off made it happen again or something. By now it's not even raining anymore, and Seth is just sitting on the steps for no real reason, still drenched, kind of chilly despite the mild weather, and not particularly caring, because people keep giving him strange looks at they pass, and it's great.

And then. Daniel.

Seth spots him approaching and immediately gets to his feet, and his anxiety is suddenly amped up to eleven, except no, Daniel is looking at him, Daniel is seeing him, and relief just floods through him.

It's such an intense relief to be able to see him, properly and without any gaps in Daniel's perception, that he's frankly a little terrified of looking away again. And honestly, Daniel just wants to guarantee Seth's solidity, grab his shoulders or hug him or something equally ridiculous, but the memory of how guardedly Seth had reacted to the last physical contact has kept itself obstinately seared into the most active parts of his brain. Daniel jerks to a stop right in front of him, one hand fluttering up and then down again in a relieved, abortive motion. So he tries for a smile but it's just as feeble and stuttering as it twists itself out between the contradictory surges of reassurance, fear, racing guilt.

His hands have forgotten how to stay still though it's doubtful they ever knew in the first place, but he won't touch Seth without some indication that it's all right, not again, so Daniel just smiles weakly and tries to work out something that adequately communicates the tangle of anxious desperation he's been for the last day and or so.

"Good to see you," he says finally, the words spoken with the characteristic steadiness that he doesn't feel, the dual meaning implicit.

Seth manages a much wider grin than Daniel does, even if it's a little wavering with all the emotions still flying about. Relief if definitely winning out though, because it's pretty obvious that among the different feelings fighting to make themselves known on Daniel's face and posture, anger is clearly not one of them. Actually, he looks guilty, which is just like him, isn't it? As if it's Daniel's fault Seth suddenly disappeared and there was nothing either of them could do about it until now.

"Good to be seen," he answers with a nervous smile. Daniel still seems worried, or guilty, and not sure exactly what to do with himself, making Seth kind of feel bad for him. "It's okay, I'm here, I'm solid," he says, reaching out to Daniel's shoulder to show that yes, he does still exist.

It feels a bit like Daniel might buckle under the touch for a minute but he reaches up and grasps the hand at his shoulder to reaffirm its presence and finally he feels it's safe enough to close his eyes and exhale, slow and shaking.

"God, I'm so sorry." Those words bubble out in a breathless rush, his hand constantly shifts its grip on Seth's hand to make sure it's there, it isn't fading or slipping out of his periphery or any of it. "I don't know what happened, I looked everywhere to figure it out but there was nothing, where, wherever I looked I - if I'd known you were - if I'd known, I - god. I'm sorry, I really - sorry."

He bites his lip, no idea how to follow that broken apology up with anything, and he realizes he might be gripping Seth's hand a little tightly so he automatically relaxes the pressure but can't allow himself to release it entirely. All of those bundled nerves are having trouble unraveling again after spending so long jangling with concern and dread.

God, he's really upset, isn't he? Seth bites his lip with worry at Daniel's apology, his rambling and how he keeps gripping Seth's hand. Seth's had time to adjust, to digest, and Daniel has just been stuck in this limbo where he had no idea what was going on, and now finally Seth has reappeared.

It hits Seth really hard, to see how upset his disappearance has made Daniel, how guilty he's been feeling, how much he cares that Seth suddenly disappeared.

He's reached out and pulled Daniel into a hug before he could even have time to think about it. Just to let him know that he's really there, and it's alright, it's really okay. And because he's not sure how else to comfort him, because words don't seem enough right now, and after yesterday, perhaps he just wants to be close to him and be able to make sure Daniel is there too, that Daniel does care.

Seth's hug is supremely unexpected considering his general subdued nature but it meets no resistance whatsoever. Daniel returns the favor immediately even with the full knowledge that now there won't be any hiding of how hard he is shaking.

"I'm sorry." The apologies are instinctive and endless, it feels like. Daniel's been doing an okay job of keeping his voice from shaking as hard as his hands, but Seth can probably hear the specter of exhausted worry pinned behind each word. "I'm sorry, I should've - I should've known. I should have. I mean, I - I've been there. I know how it can feel, when you just slide away, how - shit, I'm sorry."

But it had never happened mid-conversation. There'd been an Event, capital letters and bright flashing lights, and resources were devoted to figuring out what happened. This gradual, slow fade-out must have been agonizing, as Seth steadily slipped out from conscious thought between blinks and pauses and backwards glances until he'd might as well be invisible, even the person he'd just been talking to.

Here's hoping Daniel doesn't mind how Seth is still kind of soaking. Their slight height different means Seth has to turn his head to avoid burying his face, and for a moment he just closes his eyes and rests his head against Daniel and just holds onto him, just trying to calm him and stop him shaking, because that is just a whole different kind of upsetting. God, he sounds like he hasn't slept at all.

Seth doesn't respond to his apologies right away, not until he pulls back to look at him. "Hey. It's okay," he says, looking up into his eyes and making sure Daniel understands that Seth isn't just saying this. It really is fine now. Well, a whole of a lot better, anyway. Seth's still holding onto Daniel's arms a bit, to give him that physicality that Seth knows all too well what it's like to need.

Daniel still sags a little when Seth pulls back but he's shaking a little less, although he's just now caught onto the fact that Seth is completely soaked. And after the hug, Daniel himself is well on his way.

He doesn't care.

"I've been there," he repeats, quiet and furious with himself, with far more control of his vocal cords than he really feels he has. "Not the exact - but the fading out, people not being able to see or hear you - I've been there. I should've picked up on it. I should've remembered to do something." Instead of researching without much point, looking for books that he knew wouldn't have any answers, obsessively checking a phone that wouldn't spit out any texts or signs of where Seth had gone because technology had been just as susceptible to the perception displacement as Daniel.

He clips off to scrub at his eyes wearily with one hand. If it sounds like he hasn't slept at all, it's because he hasn't - Daniel's been running on nothing but the toxic combination of caffeine and feverish determination since yesterday afternoon.

"Thought you'd gone," he mumbles to the ground, frowning sharply. "I dunno, the longer it went on the more I thought maybe the Rift just -" He jerks his head vaguely to one side, and doesn't complete the sentence.

Edited 2014-11-20 07:42 (UTC)

Daniel's words feels a little like someone has just grabbed hold of Seth's internal organs and twisted. It's almost impossible to fathom that Daniel should care so much about the possibility of Seth being gone. That he'd care as much as Seth would.

He kind of wants to just hug him again, and he's suddenly glad that he's still pretty wet, because if he gets choked up again it won't be as noticeable.

The topic of Seth maybe having actually disappeared through the Rift is pretty insurmountable for him at this point, so he focuses instead of reassuring Daniel about what he should or shouldn't have done. "Yeah, but I wasn't the only one," he says, gripping onto Daniel's arm a little tighter without meaning to.

"I mean, I didn't even realise until I went to find you at your apartment and - for a while I thought you were just ignoring me or something, but then the same thing had been happening to this girl, no one could see her either." He kind of rushes right past the mention of the excruciating experience of trying to talk to Daniel, because that is not something he wants to focus on right now. "And I realised, ya know, if it was happening to lots of other people, it must be a Rift thing, which means there's be people working on reversing it. So I know it'd be fixed eventually."

"Well see, when you put it that way it makes perfect logical sense," Daniel replies with what's meant to be a laugh. It comes out stumbled and forced. "Which is, of course, why it never occurred to me."

Up until now Daniel had spent most of his time migrating from library to library, pausing only when sleep started to encroach on his thought flow in order to halt at one of Manhattan's innumerable coffee shops, waiting for one of his ill-timed, caffeine-saturated hypoxic epiphanies. He'd been entirely focused on the individualist perspective, assuming the effects were specific to Seth rather than some sort of city-wide epidemic.

And at least it's - resolved. Physically, anyway. Daniel wishes he could have done something at least marginally useful. Maybe if he hadn't been so single-mindedly intent on getting to a library he could have concentrated hard enough to find Seth again, but instead he -

Seth thought he'd been ignoring him.

"For future reference," Daniel says tiredly, his expression pained, "I'm pretty much incapable of ignoring anyone, and you're, I mean - that wouldn't happen in, in any other - not unless there was something seriously not right."

Somewhere along the way the humor pretty much got choked out of what was intended to be a statement of levity.

"Noted," Seth answers with a smile, or at least a brave attempt at a smile. He should've realised, anyhow, that Daniel couldn't have been able to ignore him that intensely. But he hadn't exactly been thinking clearly at the time. Whenever his stay at the base gets brought him, whether directly or just something reminding Seth of it, it becomes a bit harder to actually sort out what's going on rather than just getting stuck in his own thoughts.

"It it helps, perfect logical sense isn't my strong suit either. Certainly wasn't at that point," he adds. It was only when Dana had started talking to him that it had even occurred to Seth that everyone was having trouble paying attention to him, or didn't even realise he existed at all.

"It was the rain, by the way," he says after a moment, because Daniel's probably curious about what caused it. He should probably let go of Daniel's arm, but he's still pretty focused on making sure Daniel is alright. "People who got rained on two days ago. A second shower brings you back. Hence." He tugs a little at his wet shirt, which is sticking to him a bit.

"Well, that explains the weather." The slight unsteadiness to the words betrays how shaken he still is. Daniel's own (horribly frequent) run-ins with intangibility, with person-specific perception filters, haven't left him with the best outlook on the topic. He's choosing to blame the subtle trembling on those memories, though both thankfully seem to have mostly subsided.

And it's over now and they've cleared up their misunderstandings, so Daniel tells himself he can start shoving all those low points in his life back into their mental lockbox of well-adjusted intuition.

Daniel's now becoming much more aware of how Seth is soaking wet and has probably been soaking wet for quite a while. A - sort of an unconscious role reversal from the dream that Daniel immediately shuffles into its own neural vault because he does not need that in his life right now, it is extremely distracting and also contributing to some conflicting personal feelings that he doesn't know how to address without being exceptionally awkward.

"You, you should probably, uh." He indicates Seth's drenched wardrobe with a vague hand gesture that lacks its usual startling high energy. "You know."

Edited 2014-11-20 17:17 (UTC)

"Yeah, probably," he agrees. Now that Daniel is here, can see him and touch him and know what's going on, Seth feels a little more calm about actually drying off. Even if it makes him fade away again, Daniel knows what's going on now. And Seth's not in the middle of a panic attack, and Daniel would hopefully know to stay put, or go ask Gabe for help, so overall they would handle it a lot better than the first time around. Besides, the effects of the first rain hadn't even started until long after he'd dried, so it seems likely that the same should hold true of the reversal. It's just the irrational fear that's had him hold it off this long.

"And you look like you either need caffeine, or a long nap," he adds, and the smile comes a little more easily now. "Come on." He moves his hand from Daniel's arm to the back of his shoulder to lead him into the building and up the stairs. He only lets go to pull out his keys and open the door for them.

Daniel doesn't even bother with a token protest. Now that the frenzied need to fix the issue is irrelevant, he plans to alleviate the weariness with a nap or caffeine or both so he follows Seth inside gratefully. This level of physical contact is new - some unconscious, unworded apology for how Seth had reacted to Daniel's unwarranted seizure of his shoulder before he faded away? He can't see what Seth would have to apologize for. It was Daniel who'd reacted poorly, practically charging at a man who'd never demonstrated a fondness for touch, and without any prior warning.

At this point Daniel realizes he's just taking his brain through pointless mental loops, exercises in guilt and questions as to what he could have done better, all of which he's already worried enough about at length.

"Were you still able to get in and out when you were, you know?" he asks once they're inside, partly out of curiosity and partly for the sake of conversation and partly because he's having trouble moving the discussion elsewhere.

"Of here?" he asks, confused for a moment why he wouldn't be able to. "Yeah, it was only people who weren't able to notice what I said or did. I was, yanno, intangible. Besides, even if it were the case that I couldn't, um, do stuff to the world, I can actually walk through walls on a regular day, so." Getting in and out of places isn't usually a problem.

Seth thankfully isn't really dripping anymore, so he peels off his wet jacket and his shoes, leaving them in the bathroom. Both his jeans and his thin white shirt are clinging uncomfortably to him, so it'll be nice to change into something dry, and he heads over to his dresser to find something, glancing at the tank for his new lodger. Unsurprisingly, she seems to be hiding in her little house, probably still a bit wary after being kidnapped yesterday.

"Well, coffee's there, the bed's here. Pick one and make yourself at home," he says, picking through shirts. "I wouldn't mind you napping, really, you look done in." Now that the crisis is over and Seth's anxiety seems to have settled, he doesn't desperately need conversation or anything, it's just nice to have some company, and he doubts Daniel could actually provide the best conversation at the moment. Seth would rather he took a nap and stayed longer as a result of it.

Right, of course. Daniel doesn't know why that struck him as some sort of obstacle but he'll gladly blame that failure in reasoning on sleep deprivation. He rubs at his face with both hands again, heavily considering dosing himself up with more caffeine despite the temptation of simply knocking out. Either way Seth wouldn't really be getting company that's fully conscious which is, frustratingly enough, exactly what Daniel thinks he might need most right now.

He drops his hands, blinking rapidly to clear away the faint shadowed colors that followed the pressure of palms against eyelids, then squints at the darker line that's clearly visible through the soaked white fabric of Seth's shirt.

The darker line of - numbers?

No.

That had been the dream. Hadn't it been the dream? It had been the dream. The dream.

"Seth?" Daniel asks, the word high and strange and edged with panic. "Um - is that - on your back, is that, um, a tattoo?"

A chill settles between the vertebrae of his neck. It had been the dream. Hadn't it? It had been the dream. The dream that - had nothing to do with reality, because that wouldn't make sense because it had been a dream.

Seth tenses at the question, which is probably pretty noticable given how visible his back muscles are, if Daniel can actually see his tattoo through his shirt. He doesn't turn around, even if he momentarily stops his search for a new shirt.

Yeah, let's talk about his stay at the rebel base, that's just what his nerves need right now. He had remarkably, finally started to relax again. Maybe sometime he wouldn't mind discussing it with Daniel, but they are both too tired and too emotionally drained right now to actually have any kind of productive conversation, and Daniel really should know that. Seth doesn't know why Daniel brought it up, unless he had figured the tattoo was something the dream just made up.

"You've seen it before, haven't you?" he asks, his voice tense and restrained, and he snaps the drawer of the dresser shut a bit more roughly than necessary.

"In a dream," Daniel says, pulling the words out, stretching their consonants, closing the sentence with a grinding, darkened emphasis. "I didn't think the circumstantial elements were -"

The rationality dies before its conclusion.

Daniel wishes he were someone who could shrug things away. He wishes he were someone who had the ability to wait for the issue to emerge naturally instead of confronting it, brazen and exposed, dragging it out and addressing with a directness he knows people find unsettling.

But he is so obviously not that sort of person, not the way he stands now with his shoulders a controlled rigidity and his jaw an aching, tightened rivet.

"Seth," he says, hating that he's already starting to know the answer, hating that he has to ask, "how much of that dream was real?"

God, he didn't know?

Seth thought that when Daniel had gotten upset about the things in the clipboard, he had been upset about.. everything that had happened. Finding out all those things had been real, that Seth really had been locked up for so long, he'd thought that was the issue at hand. Not just.. some tidbits about his childhood, or about his mental state or something. Granted, his deeply messed up mental state...

He desperately doesn't want to be having this conversation right now, but he feels like he owes Daniel an answer, especially since at this point he's likely to reach the same conclusions even without Seth, unless Seth very specifically denies it was real. And the only reason he can see for doing that is to spare Daniel the worry, but he does deserve to know, doesn't he? It's not like Seth's really been keeping it a big secret anyway. He just... is not inclined to talk about it.

For several moments he just stands still, not doing or something anything. Just gripping very tightly onto the shirt in his hand.

"All of it," he answers finally, his voice tight, and then he quickly pulls off his wet shirt, back still towards Daniel, clearly revealing the tattoo for the moment, before he pulls on the dry shirt, not caring that it will no longer be completely dry after he puts it on. Good enough.

"'cept for the bits with you in them," he adds, though he probably doesn't need to. "Broke out almost five months ago. On me own." Except for Gabe's help, but that had not so much been the breaking out as it had been the place to flee to, a place to hide, to make the rebels lose their trail.

He doesn't want to turn around and see how Daniel's taking this.

All of it.

Daniel can see a design. It's stitching itself together from all the parts of Seth he's been granted understanding of, and they're all curled into one place to form a construct he doesn't want to look at.

Seth isn't fond of touch. Of course he isn't, of course he wouldn't be after all that. Of course he isn't.

Seth mentioned not being on the best of terms with the rebels. That had been the profound understatement of the year.

Seth was suicidal at the darkest points of his life because he'd been trapped and subdued and sealed in a tiny room where he'd had no agency, forced to carry out an agenda he didn't agree with and it must have felt like the only way out.

Seth learned how to use the powers he held. Not out of casual experimentation, not from curiosity, but because he was desperate. He needed a way out.

None of it is something Daniel wants to imagine Seth actually undergoing here, in the real world. Seeing it in a dreamscape had been bad enough but he'd assumed the setting had been some representation of Seth's subconscious at the time, something damaged and torn and scared and angry and obstinate.

Seeing the tattoo is worse. Seeing it makes it real. It's real. All of it.

Daniel pulls off his glasses, rubs at his eyes, his hands tremoring because he is afraid, he is stricken, he is furious, he is lost, and he doesn't know how to fix this. He - fuck, he never knows how to fix anything, just eases the gaps between suffering and conscious thought with whatever words he can give.

Look at how good at fixing everyone's problems Daniel is. Witness the scintillating interpersonal aptitude. He couldn't even make Seth visible again, he couldn't even make him understand what was happening before he faded. And now Daniel's here, in a place he's clearly not wanted or needed, making things worse. Daniel Jackson, who's razed civilizations and destroyed planets but is always forgiven too easily because he always had the best intentions in mind, doing the one thing he's good at - unburying the traumas best left buried and digging his invasive questions into the raw psychological nerves to see if they still bleed.

His head is light, his lungs are dyspneic, his hands are still shaking, his legs are shaking, there's something faintly vertiginous about the way he's standing, he's paresthesiac, he has not slept in something like twenty-four hours, so Daniel navigates his way to the couch and sits, breathing, trying to breathe, trying to think of something adequate to say in response to that. At this point I'm sorry just seems laughable.

"I'm sorry," he says anyway, because what else is there?

Edited 2014-11-21 04:30 (UTC)

Daniel doesn't say anything for quite a while, so Seth eventually has to turn around and see how he's taking it.

Not great, it looks like.

He's very obviously distressed by this news, very clearly physically shaken. Seth wants to walk over and give him another hug, reassure him that it's okay, Seth's fine now. That version of him in the dream may have been him once, but he's not like that anymore.

Except that's a lie, isn't it?

Seth is functioning, he is coping, he is managing, but he is not entirely sure he's recovering. A week hasn't gone by without a nightmare that didn't hold at least some of the elements of his stay there, or some other past traumatic experience. And sure, it's been five months, and he's a lot more stable and secure than he was when he broke out, but that's not really saying much. There's no denying that he hasn't been profoundly changed by his imprisonment, if not that much in personality or values, then certainly in how he deals with things, how he can't deal with some things anymore because it brings it all back.

One of the things he can't deal with, at least just now, is going over there and comforting Daniel, listening to Daniel talk about how horrible it all must have been, while Seth tries to downplay his experiences. Neither does he want to pity parade. He just wants things to be better. And he does realise that to achieve that any time soon, he's probably going to have to actually work through it more than he has so far, but he's not sure how much he can take of Daniel's initial reaction.

So he just nods curtly at Daniel's apology, at his sympathy.

"I'm getting changed," he says, grabbing the jeans and underwear he's pulled out, and heads to the bathroom to do so. He doesn't close the door, not entirely, because he's not really trying to shut Daniel out and he doesn't want him to think so. He just needs a little space, and Daniel needs a little time.

When the room is empty, Daniel exhales and puts his face in his hands. He breathes the scents of paper and coffee still lingering there, two of the most reassuring smells in the world, several worlds, and waits for his heart to slow. Daniel is not always rational but he tries to make things connect in ways that make sense, bridging out his own wild intuitive leaps until he can parse out a line of reason and relay it, give it the essence of rationality and illusion of being an argument well-constructed.

The mental visuals are unnervingly stark - the hard shadows scored under Seth's eyes and the subtle darkened spots of bruising had stood out so sharply beneath the irradiating glare of fluorescent lights. It's far, far too easy to recall how tired Seth had been, tired of what he'd been made to do, tired of scraping out the hollow defiance to glare at his captors, tired of existing between sharp corners and gray walls and mirrors from which his jailers stared, unseen.

For months.

With altogether too much effort, he drags his hands away from his face to stare at the door through which Seth vanished without seeing it.

He's intruding.

He's resurrecting memories Seth doesn't need. In a matter of a few words he managed to breach a deeply personal space so he could lay bare all of the skeletons in Seth's proverbial closet, seize them and spread them out so he could inspect them all at once with no regard for who they belonged to. Because he's Daniel and he always knows what's best, doesn't he, he's the pinnacle of moral fucking autocracy, righteously self-righteous and bristling with that surefooted arrogance that borders on hubristic.

In a snap of precise economical motion Daniel rises and makes for the door out and gets one hand on the knob before he catches himself in his own indecision. His forehead drops against the door, both hands wrap around the knob because they need something to cling to, clearly.

He's intruding. He's making a mess. A completely unnecessary mess.

Edited 2014-11-21 06:49 (UTC)

Seth peels off his wet jeans and the rest with something resembling grim determination, then grabs a towel and actually dries himself off a little bit before putting on the dry clothes. He quickly dries his hair a little too, drops the towel over the edge of the bathtub then leans on the sink, head hanging.

Just breathes for a second. Gathering as much calm as he can.

Then he straightens and steels himself for going back in there, giving Daniel his coffee and then probably dealing with his thoughtful questions and intense sympathy. He wants Daniel to know all this shit about him, he wants Daniel to understand him, it just takes a lot of effort to get through it.

He pulls the bathroom door open again, and sees Daniel standing there with his hand on the door handle.

There is a very intense surge of emotion going through him at that sight. The fear that Daniel would simply have had enough, that it's too much for him to try to cope with, that he considers Seth far more trouble than he's worth, just now seeing how fucked up he is... It becomes instantly, painfully real for him.

He swallows thickly.

It makes sense, of course, and he'd been expecting it, but somehow that doesn't mean it doesn't still come as a surprise. A painful, gut-wrenching, sickening, chest-clenching disappointment, betrayal even. He's having to try really hard not to overreact, to not assume the worst, and assuming the worst is something he is oh so good at by now.

"Thought you weren't just going to leave," he says, breaking at the last syllable as he recalls the last time they discussed this. It's impossible to keep the accusation out of his voice.

For an instant he's furtively grateful when Seth says something because it makes up his mind for him and means the window to simply leave has closed. But the fractured indictment that cracks out of the last word immediately causes the ruptured guilt to intensify exponentially, and Daniel clenches his hands around the doorknob hard enough for his knuckles to hurt.

"That's not -" Daniel pulls his forehead away from the door, gathers himself, releases the thing, turns around, faces Seth directly. He knows this is how Seth operates, how if left to make his own conclusions the man will slide into his tendency for self-blame, assume he is the root of the problem and fold ever deeper into himself.

Daniel shakes his head, expression locked.

"No, I'm making it worse." The words are muttered, almost an undertone. He needs to make it clear to Seth that this is a resolution Daniel reached independently, that the potential decision to leave for the time being was entirely (selfishly) oriented around how he could help - and in light of the day's earlier misunderstanding, this had been such a poor choice in reasoning. The justifications boil out in turbid, disordered bursts of rapid self-judgment. "I'm - these are things that, that should be your choice to discuss, not mine, not - and not out of some, some single-minded selfish altruism to fix things that aren't fixable, not by their nature and not by my choice because that - isn't my choice and I shouldn't have assumed it was."

He stops to breathe because - because breathing is important, and Daniel seems to have forgotten that in the midst of his scalding, frustrated self-assessment. One hand creeps back to the door, but only for support's sake. The effort of explicating that diatribe has compounded itself with the weight of prolonged wakefulness, and the faint lightness in his head has returned.

Edited 2014-11-21 08:25 (UTC)

Seth's frown deepens, but now it's out of confusion.

It doesn't sound like he's leaving because he can't be bothered to deal with it all, but because he really believes leaving is the best thing for both of them.

He can't blame Daniel for wanting to fix things. Because despite what he might think of himself, every time something heavy like this has come up, Daniel may have asked some intrusive questions, but then he has rectified himself, he's asserted that it is Seth's choice whether or not to talk about it, and... Seth somehow knows, or at least he believes, that whatever he might ask, especially if he's insistent enough, Daniel would do it.

The intense self-criticism definitely feels familiar to Seth, except it's ridiculous, because Daniel's got a fuck lot less to criticise himself for than Seth does.

"You're not making it worse, you twat," he says, stepping into the kitchen. He really needs to call Daniel names right now, because he is acting like a moron. Even if it's self-directed twattiness. And he probably is scared to deal with all of Seth's mess, because who wouldn't be, but if Daniel wants to leave, then he's damn well going to do it for the right and honest reasons, not because he fools himself into thinking it's the right thing to do.

"It's always been this bad. And if I don't want to talk about it, then I don't talk about it," he continues, pulling out two mugs and setting them on the kitchen top, pouring coffee into both of them. It's not fresh, it's the pot he made earlier this morning, but it's strong and it's hot, which is the important part. Then he carries them both over to the living room table, and sets Daniel's cup pointedly down on it.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

tw: suicide mention, self-loathing, discussion of trauma, mild panic THIS TAG IS HEAVY

everything is terrible

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject