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

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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.

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"God, can't even manage to dredge up Oasis," Seth responds with a sigh, shaking his head in playful disappointment, then pushes himself to his feet, heading towards his desk. "Then again, what do I know, maybe the sixteen hundreds had proper kickin' music." As he rifles through the drawer, he mutters, "If it ain't baroque, don't fix it." He's pretty sure he's quoting something, but he doesn't remember what.

"Anyway, here," he says, returning to the couch and tossing his mp3 player into Daniel's lap and sitting down again. "Educate yourself." He's pretty sure he doesn't have anything embarrassing on there.

"Bach to the basics, I'm assuming?" Daniel replies innocently. He starts studying the device Seth handed him immediately, running fingers over buttons. "Hm. This is a bit more advanced than what we had in 2005, I'm pretty sure."

If it's one thing Daniel enjoys, it's poking at things until they start yielding answers. He might not be technologically brilliant but if he can handle alien technology without triggering a global catastrophe (well, usually), then he can figure out how to work - this. In due time, that is.

Edited 2014-11-22 02:24 (UTC)

Seth is going to outright ignore the pun that Daniel gave him in return. The only indication he even heard it is him momentarily closing his eyes.

"Well, unless you drop it in bog or something, you probably won't break it," he reassures him. Can't even delete files off it without a computer. And if he does manage to do so, that's not really a disaster either. "You wanna answer the same question? Childhood, family, and so forth?"

Daniel carefully sets the object down before answering the question. Both hands go back to the mug for solace as he nods to himself, flicks his eyes up to Seth and then down again.

"Well, you already know a bit about that," he says, progressing evenly, patiently. "Parents were both archaeologists so we moved around a lot. But they, uh, died when I was eight so I don't remember much about them."

He leans back, the edge of one thumbnail digging itself around the mug's rim again, an involuntary anxious motion. His steady tone doesn't change. "No siblings. One grandfather, but we fell out when he refused to take me in. Got shuffled around a few foster homes until I was, uh, sixteen, I think? After that it was - college, distance, get my degrees and move forward, same as my parents."

Edited 2014-11-22 02:54 (UTC)

Seth frowns sympathetically at the news that Daniel was orphaned at such an early age, and then as his only remaining relative didn't want to help. That's pretty harsh. And since they moved around so much, they probably didn't have any close family friends that could help. Seth wonders vaguely if his dad had taken him in if his mother died. Maybe grudgingly.

"Sorry," he replies quietly, a word that is kind of overused by them, but so often the only thing that can be said. Seems like Daniel had to grow up even earlier than Seth did. He wonders if he had been onto something in his dream, where Daniel had been homeless. Not unthinkable, without any family support to back him up.

"Can I ask what happened?" he asks softly, hoping Daniel understands that it goes both ways, that he has no obligation to actually answer if he doesn't want to talk about it.

Daniel swallows, shuts his eyes.

"Museum in New York." Crisp, flat enunciation, inflecting nothing. "My parents were helping put up an exhibit. One of the exhibit coverstones came loose, and they were under it." When he opens his eyes he meets Seth's gaze steadily. "I saw the suspension failing, but there wasn't anything anyone could've done."

His composure slips for an instant as he carefully, hurriedly sips at his coffee.

"Hence," he says with a mild twist to one side of his mouth, an expression not easily defined, "my general avoidance of New York."

That is... Seth barely knows how to react to that.

Losing someone is terrible enough. Seth is plenty familiar with that. But losing your only family, so quickly, so brutally, and to see it happen, at the age of eight... He can't even imagine.

Seth reaches over and puts his hand on Daniel's arm, an attempt at a comforting gesture, because he's not sure what else to do. Daniel's been more welcoming of physical contact than Seth's felt natural giving so far, so he hopes it's all right, because he needs to do something. It's just painful, seeing Daniel have to work so hard to keep it together.

"When, uhh..." he begins awkwardly, after several long seconds of silence, and clears his throat a bit. "When I was twelve, the IRA set off this bomb in the middle of Manchester. Biggest bomb in the UK during peacetime, actually. As it turns out, no one was killed, but... It was a Saturday, so mam had gone off to do some early shopping, so I knew she'd be there, at Arndale."

Seth shakes his head a little, thinking back. "And I was terrified, listening to the news, yanno? I mean, we didn't have mobile phones back in those days, I didn't know she'd been evacuated. She could've been blown to bits for all I knew." He swallows a bit.

"What I'm trying to say is..." He pauses for a second, biting his lips, unsure if he's getting his point across right. "I only had to deal with the possibility of that reality for a few hours, and it still felt like my world was going to end. So I can't even imagine what it must've been like to live it, and... I dunno, I'm just sorry you had to go through that." He gives him a small smile, hoping it's at least a little bit comforting.

Edited 2014-11-22 09:35 (UTC)

Daniel prefers to give counsel rather than receive it; there's a certain release to be found when someone chooses to confide in him and divulge some small and buried piece of themselves. The SGC Psych unit would have called it cathartic.

Daniel hasn't talked to psych in years. He doesn't talk to them as a general policy.

He has always been better at offering comfort and understanding to others than he has to himself.

Seth's attempt at diverting and then reinventing the structure of the conversation, the clumsy but nonetheless welcome attempt at physical reassurance, allows Daniel that subdued flare of altruistic closure. The faint answering smile dissolves in the same instant it forms.

"Loss is shaped by context," he replies, insufferably vague, obliquely reshaping their dialogic vector. "I've achieved a distance from it, and, and an understanding of the event itself. Grief is one of the foundations that separates human from - not." Daniel makes a leveling, horizontal gesture, one hand that sweeps across an invisible plane. The 'not.' Poorly enumerated in speech, even sloppier in summarizing situational function. Trust Daniel to try and twist all this into something pseudo-profound.

"Having been a member of both camps and vastly preferring the former," Daniel continues, dropping the demonstrative hand wearily, "I'll take grief if that's the reminder. Every day."

Seth nods a little, not altogether surprised when Daniel goes academic about it. A habit he seems to have, not just as a natural expression of his curiosity and knowledge, but also it would seem a coping mechanism when things get a bit too personal or difficult to discuss. Seth takes it as a sign that he's not overly keen on talking about it any more.

"Well, I'm still sorry," he says, because just because his reactions to it makes him human doesn't mean it's something he should've had to go through.

"Anyway, remind me to ask some more about 'not' later," he adds with another small smile. He knows some things about this Ascension, whatever it means, and Daniel's multiple deaths, little bits and pieces he's gathered from Daniel mentioning it, but it still confuses him. "I think it's your turn to ask, ignoring how we're not taking turns."

Daniel's locked-down air softens into something a little more approachable and he nods, dropping the even line of his shoulders.

"It's not something I frequently discuss," he explains quietly with a tight, apologetic smile. "I'm, I'm not so used to, ah. I know I can get - yeah, it's - there's a lot there. Sorry." Well, that sentence died a lonely and undignified death. He's aware of his tendencies for conversational derailment, burying his own ability to cope in plateauing statements of ambiguous insight.

He debates internally for a moment, searches out a follow-up that would be - appropriate he supposes is the word, thought what would be appropriate after Daniel went on like that is a bit confusing.

"You did technically answer a question I never asked," Daniel points out finally. "Which - what was that like? I, I don't know a great deal of Manchester's history or what kind of civil unrest was there but - god, you were just a kid." He thinks he owes the conversation a little directional reshaping after his impromptu broadening of its subject matter.

Seth frowns, considering the question, how to explain the context of it all, and how it was relevant to him.

"I... dunno if I wanna call it civil unrest. The bombing weren't, or at least not local unrest," he begins, fixing a point of the opposite wall with a thoughtful stare for a moment, before looking at Daniel to try and explain. "I mean - alright, so the IRA was basically this terrorist group that wanted Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland rather than the United Kingdom, right? So the specific targeting of Manchester was pretty random. It wasn't.. you know, a constant thing, it wasn't a big part of my childhood or anything."

He drains the last of his coffee and leans forward for a moment to set the cup down. "But... I can't really say it was a great place to grow up, especially if you were poor. Middle of a recession, crazy amounts of unemployment. Gangs, drugs... Everyone and their bloody mam seemed to own a gun 'round where I lived." Slight exaggeration maybe, but it did feel like that sometimes. He shrugs, and looks down at his hands, anxiously fiddling a little. "Believe it or not, being a drug dealer wasn't exactly a childhood dream of mine, but at this point it's the only thing I know how to do."

The history lesson is appreciated, if only for context's sake, and now some of Seth's predispositions take a more understandable structure in Daniel's eyes. He stays silent through the explanation, punctuating every other fact with a wordless, thoughtful nod.

The last statement generates a somewhat less subdued reaction.

"That's a matter of conflicting perspective." Both eyebrows lift, an even visualization of his skepticism. "For years I had no reason to believe I was any good at anything, even my chosen field. Especially my chosen field, in fact. I was notable in the archaeological community in one respect, and that was my profound ability to generate unpopular crack theories."

The hardened doubtfulness falls back into sympathy, even a smile that hopefully comes across as less forced. "My point is - I think you deserve a little credit here, I mean, you're less restricted in career choice than you think. I know there's a broader spectrum to your capability." Daniel breaks off to gesture at Seth's music collection, as if that fully encapsulates his point. "Your interests demonstrate as much."

"Yeah?" Seth asks, not bothering to hide his own skepticism. "How exactly is listening to music a career choice? Cause the only careers I can think of that involves that require skills I definitely don't have."

Critic, manager, agent, producer, sound designer... They all involve a lot more know-how than he has, not to mention resources and connections. It's not like the thought's never occurred to him. Part of it might be growing up seeing just how limited choices were - even if his circumstances have changed quite a bit since then, his belief in his abilities hasn't. It's ingrained at this point.

Then there's the fact he's having enough trouble functioning decently as it is, not just with regards to the psychological factor, but with managing his income and his morphine dependency. Which only seems to be getting more difficult. A career change just isn't on the menu for the foreseeable future. But it's hard to really explain to Daniel why.

"Think of as an expansion of a skillset rooted in an interest that's already there." Daniel honestly wishes he could be more specific but his knowledge of music doesn't go past its early history, unfortunately. "I won't - I'm not gonna push you into a conversation you don't wanna have, at least not right now."

Yeah, they've covered quite a few heavy topics already, and Seth's bitter pronouncement leads Daniel to believe that this isn't the best subject for light conversational fare either.

"But I don't think you're as limited as you think you are. And I definitely don't think you'd be to blame if you were."

Edited 2014-11-23 17:10 (UTC)

"Well. In any case, it's my turn," he says with a smile that's only partially forced, adopting the turn system when it suits him. Like when he doesn't want to discuss something further. It just kind of difficult to have a proper conversation on it when Daniel doesn't have all the facts, and Seth very specifically does not want to tell him the facts. Daniel's already been burdened with far too much of Seth's mess, no need to ramp it up.

Still, he doesn't know immediately what to ask, so he gets to his feet, going to the kitchen to fetch the rest of the coffee. He fills up his mug and offers a refill to Daniel, before flopping back onto the couch. He sort of does know what to ask, he's been thinking about it for a while now, he's just not been entirely sure how to.

"Significant others?" he asks, leaving the question fairly open, trying not to feel nervous about it. It doesn't necessarily cover what he does want to know - if he's asked the same question for example, his answer wouldn't either. But it is a step closer.

Edited 2014-11-23 18:04 (UTC)

Daniel accepts the refill, not quite willing to begin the process of sleep-deprived crashing yet. He plans on staying up for a while after the fact anyway, and it's not like it will be a vast deviation from his usual caffeine intake.

The question prompts a prolonged pause. That is - not a topic he typically brings up of his own volition. Granted, a lot of these aren't. This wouldn't even come up if he hadn't given Seth permission to ask whatever he wanted and he's tempted to evade the question under their thus-far-ignored option to politely decline. But they're springing for honesty here, allegedly, and it just makes sense. Daniel knows more about Seth than the other man does about him, an imbalance in knowledge that really should be corrected.

Briefly, Daniel wonders if there's something wrong with him. He can drop casual references to his zigzagging mortality rate but won't even mention significant others unless specifically asked.

"Two in my life," he says, raising two fingers. "Er - legitimately. There were a few planets where, um, marriage was a thing and we might not have been totally aware of the fact but we, we smoothed those over. We made sure of that." Yeah, he's really not going to get into the embarrassing number of times he or one of the others have accidentally found themselves married to an offworlder without their knowledge (or consent, Jack would point out acidly), or to one of the members of the team, or to all the members of the team on one notable occasion.

The humor is a forestalling attempt that Daniel soon drops.

"But yeah, two. But, well. Not for a, um. Not for a while. Few years." He doesn't know what else to do in reply to that so he sips his coffee hurriedly, and redirects the question before he's asked to elaborate. "What about you?"

Well, that answered very little, except for how Daniel has had significant others. It would surprise Seth if he hadn't, really, but it's also not something he seems very keen on discussing, definitely not in any detail.

"Also two," he answers, nodding a little, wrapping his hands around his again warm mug. "I've mentioned Kelly, and um, there was Shannon before that. But she, she died a couple years ago." She also died less than a year ago, for the second time, but that's definitely not something he wants to get into at the moment. If zombies ever become relevant, or refusal to accept the morality of loved ones, maybe.

Eager not to leave it on such a dark note though, he adds, "Nothing since then, unless you count Gabe's many attempts to get in my pants." He smiles jokingly, but it's not quite as light and natural as he wants it to be. Still, at least he's managed to bring up same-sex relationships as a possibility, without it being horrendously awkward or revealing.

"Not what I would expect when I think of 'Archangel Gabriel'," Daniel admits with a faint, crooked grin. "But I think I prefer this version to the ones I've read about."

The prior material is significantly more sobering.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. "That kind of loss is, is hard. And you had to undergo it twice over and that -"

He doesn't want to say what should come next. Empathy. Connect. Progression.

"That's hard. And I'm sorry, I, I know how -" The words are too thick for his tongue, the edges of their diction strained. Breathe and - continue. "My wife was - well. If I'm honest with myself I lost her long before I actually did."

And there's something Daniel had to more or less force himself to say. He keeps it confined solely to his own internal structure, it and the wealth of associated guilt and weary frustration. That conceptualization is not inanimate; he simply chooses not to verbally address it. It takes a considerable amount of steeling himself for Daniel to address it now, and the effort alone makes his stomach drop and his pulse accelerate incrementally.

Well, shit.

Seth has no idea how to react to that. There's a lot of information all at once - well, not really, just... two very big bits of information. First of all that Daniel had a wife, and not of the accidental variety he was referring to earlier. It's... It shouldn't be that much of a surprise, really. Daniel is several years older, and doesn't exactly seem to have commitment issues. There's just something about it that jars a little, but Seth can't put his finger on it.

Aside, of course, from the fact that Daniel lost her. That is most definitely jarring, for much more obvious reasons. As Daniel says, it's hard, even if it's a massive understatement.

"I'm sorry," Seth says, quiet but sincere, looking at Daniel with a mix of pained sympathy and subdued horror. Because, well, what else can he say?

He wonders how it happened. With Shannon it had been so sudden, and with Kelly too, but at least he knows she is still alive out there. With Daniel, it sounds like it had been more drawn out. Illness, perhaps? Or... Or maybe losing her is related to something entirely different, something about their relationship, before she died. And Seth assumed she died, based on Daniel talking about 'that kind of loss.'

"Can I, uh," he starts, unsure how to phrase things. "I mean... What happened?" He pauses, swallowing, not sure if he should actually have asked that question, but. "If... I mean, you don't have to, just..." He trails off awkwardly again, hoping his meaning comes across somewhere in there.

"Well, it's - there's a lot there," he begins awkwardly, unconsciously tightening his hold around his coffee mug. "A lot of, um, context, a lot of confusing pieces that I'm still not entirely sure of how they fit together. I mean, for one, we weren't even from the same planet. We couldn't speak each others' language at first, for god's sake."

One side of his mouth ticks upward in a faint smile, involuntary and transient and pained. It fades in the same moment he shuts his eyes, pushing against the resisting, resurgent mire of long-buried memory.

"I lived on her world for a year," Daniel says carefully, each word dropped with automatic dullness. He shakes his head minutely at the next few words. The substernal pressure of the emotional weight slows their declivity, but the explanation still has to drag its way out after being left so long unspoken. "There was a conflict, an um, an invading enemy we didn't know about. She got taken in the struggle, so I rejoined the, um, my planet - well, Earth's exploratory program to find her."

He directs a muted frown at his mug, contents forgotten.

"I did find her, but it was - I was - too late at that point."

That vague summary hardly covers any of it. But truthfully, Daniel doesn't know how one would. He can't possibly accurately verbalize the entire, horribly prolonged process - how long he looked, how desperate he'd gotten, how he'd nearly doomed entire galaxies for a chance to save someone who was stars and worlds away and wouldn't even hear him. He is a linguist; he recognizes too well and too bitterly the confining nature of words, the invertebrate structure of language, and the way each word mechanically corresponds to a direct, tangible concept. There is nothing so infuriating as the thought of human speech that, in all its ingenuity, simultaneously allows articulation and self-restricts the essence of intended meaning.

Daniel needs to breathe to relieve the tension piling into his chest cavity. There's a reason, after all, that he doesn't often talk about this, and it's in part because he often feels physically unable to.

But Seth asked.

"It wasn't my fault." Yes it was. "But it still feels like it. Death tends to - have that effect on the living. It only strikes its intended victim once." He himself happens to be an abnormal case. "It's the collateral damage that -"

His throat betrays him finally, and tightens beyond the capability of speech before he can finish.

Seth listens quietly, pained at hearing Daniel had to go through this. And... so long, trying to find his way back to her, unsure if he ever would get her back, and then only to realise he'd failed.

It definitely hits close to home.

He gives a bitter, twisted smirk, without any trace of humour, at the comment about death only striking once. Not true in the case Seth is thinking of, and from what he's heard, not true in Daniel's case either. But it's usually, perhaps. And the collateral damage from the first time had been pretty heavy.

He remains silent for a while, giving Daniel a moment to regain a little of his equilibrium. Letting what Daniel said process properly. Suddenly the whole 'explorer and earth's diplomat' thing becomes.. a bit more complex. He had assumed previously that it had mainly been motivated by Daniel's curiosity. Surely part of it too, but now suddenly not the main driving force behind it.

He swallows thickly again.

"It was my fault with Shannon," he says eventually. Not really sure if he wants to bring it up, but doing it anyway.

The period of silence is stabilizing. Gradually he's able to breathe through his shuddering discomfort and banish those faded, distorted remnants of grief and leave his head clear.

When Seth speaks again, his own profession of tragedy immediately elicits a pang of sympathy. Daniel looks at him, patient and searching.

"I'm sorry," he says, painfully aware that those words mean so little when refracted through loss. "You don't have to - if you want to talk about it you can, but, well. I'd understand if you don't."

He drops one hand onto Seth's shoulder in unspoken solidarity. Here's to loving and losing, right?

Seth smiles a little, albeit weakly, at the gesture.

He stays quiet, mulling it over. Part of him feels like he should return the favour, share the details of his own experience with losing a loved one, but... He sort of feels like they've been through enough of an emotional grinder, and he doesn't need to burden Daniel with more pain.

And he's not sure he's quite ready to talk about what happened at the community centre. He's sure Daniel would pity him rather than blame him, but... there's just no way around that what had happened had been his fault, a direct result of his actions, even if he didn't intend for it to happen. It's hard to face up to that guilt. A guilt which he never really properly coped with, just buried and pretended it didn't exist, because it was just easier. Unlike the first time, when he had been left to wallow in it.

"Maybe later," he answers finally, and means it. Perhaps some other time. Right now he feels a bit like a wet rag that's been wrung one too many times.

"Anyway, I kind of feel like I'm keeping you up, here. The offer of my bed still stands," he adds.

And then immediately thinks how wrong that sounds, and barely manages to stop himself from clarifying that of course he won't be in it at the same time. Of course he wouldn't be. And then he feels guilty and like a terrible person for thinking about that right after Daniel opened up about his past traumatic relationship. Seth's just going to sit here mentally scolding himself for a while.

Daniel nods his understanding in silent agreement. He's starting to feel the emotional fatigue of having to dust off the old personal traumas and bring them into the light after...aggressively not talking about many of them for so long. That intermingled with the sleep debt is having a truly lethal effect on his neurophysiology. Caffeine can only stave off the weariness for so long, it seems.

He studies the dregs of his coffee and swirls them around with a shrug.

"Ehh, I've stayed up much longer over way less. Pretty sure my circadian rhythms have always been a wreck." The shrug turns into a fortifying roll of one shoulder partway through, testing the soreness of perpetual vigilance. "Won't mind taking you up on that, though. Ah, if it's not, not too much trouble."

"Go ahead," he answers with a gesture towards the bed. "I won't be using it for several hours, at least. Knocked myself out with sleeping medication last night, so I've actually had some sleep." Only a white lie, really. It was medication (at least of a sort) and it did help him sleep.

"Just at least take your shoes off this time," he adds with a small smile, referring back to the dream they were discussing earlier. "I'll order us some food when you wake up."

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peacefulexplorer - 2014-12-04 02:57 (UTC) - Expand

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