bigapplesauce | [closed] After painting the ceiling red

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[closed] After painting the ceiling red

[Warning: Lots of focus on suicide, with a side of drug and alcohol use, plenty of traumatic subjects.]

Seth should start keeping a tally of number of times Daniel gets to watch him die in a dream. Only two so far, but that's in less than three weeks of knowing him, so who knows what it will be over time? He's long since given up on keeping track of when he dies in a dream in general, since that's not a terribly unusual occurrence, but it's rarer for it to happen in shared ones.

He had given up on sleep more or less immediately after waking up. The fear he had felt, the hopelessness, it was all a bit too real, too familiar, and easily stuck with him. So he had gone out to cope with it in the only way he felt capable of - getting blissfully high.

A few hours later, once morning had properly arrived, and the buzz was wearing off, he returned home. Not ready to deal with being sober however, he had replaced the morphine with alcohol, namely whiskey. The rest of the morning had passed in only somewhat comforting intoxication and anxiety, and then Daniel had texted him, and Seth didn't feel able to answer. It took two hours before he could actually face the idea of seeing him after that ordeal. Not just because of the things he had seen Daniel do, but the things Daniel had seen him do. There's no small amount of shame and self-loathing involved.

But at last he had answered, and now he's waiting for Daniel to get there, anxiously picking at his sleeves and staring at the wall. He's not as drunk as he would like, but he's definitely not sober. It's not going to be a fun conversation.

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The twist of guilt is marred by the faint thrill of alarm. From the way Seth had reacted, Daniel wouldn't imagine he'd had to fire on someone before. But there'd been a lot of additional factors, he recalls - the shock, the confusion, the hail of explosions, the fact that Daniel had regressed to some past version of himself.

Some past version himself who was no less of a hypocrite, no less of a man he doesn't want to look at, than the person he is now.

"It's not judgement, it's -" He loses the thread he hadn't meant to pick up and his hands still as he inhales deeply, breathes out to regain some sensation of control. It doesn't work, but the illusion is nice for the two seconds it holds. "I don't know. It's - difficult to realize. That not having to do that at, at some point in your life - it's a luxury."

Daniel reacts less than Seth would've expected him to. But after that particular experience, they're probably both pretty drained.

"It's how Shannon died," he says, not sure why he's continuing to share. Evening the scores? Confession? Perhaps now Daniel is no longer as innocent as he seemed, Seth feels safer in letting him know about all his fucked-up baggage. Might as well get it out of the way, right? Make sure he knows what he's getting into.

Well. That might be the wrong way to put it. It's not like they're really getting into anything.

He looks up, expression crumpling somewhere between inquisition and sympathy.

He doesn't want to think about those implications.

But they're four-worded and blinding, and he can't not stare back at them in their ambiguity and compacted horror.

"How do you mean?" he asks slowly then, eyes flicking to the bottle and back again, he shakes his head. "Seth, you're not exactly - I mean, you're pretty, uh - I just think you might regret bringing this up now rather than, you know, later."

"Hmm," Seth answers with a smile, bitter and humourless. It's going to be painful either way. Drunken confessions are marginally easier. Maybe it's just because it's been a long time since he's felt as hopeless as he did this morning. It makes the difficult memories harder to ignore. Perhaps if he shares them, at least Daniel will have some insight. Not that he doesn't already have about a truck-load of insight.

"Well, it's a little complicated," he says, ignoring the warnings and focusing on the question. "But, um, drugs overdose. She ODed on gear I gave her. After which, well, I was a mess..." he begins explaining, reaching up to rub at his face again.

"Oh, god."

Thoughtlessly, he leans forward to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder before the dream and all its associations come splitting back to the forefront. He wavers, uncertain, then slowly lifts the hand to hook around the back of his neck.

"God, I'm sorry," he murmurs. "That can't have - god."

And he can see it, too, Daniel can envision in crisp, well-defined lines the kind of backwards decline Seth's entire everything must have taken after that, reduced to a victim of loss, left to crumble in the toxicity of his own frustration and guilt and self-blame.

"I'm so sorry," he says again, uselessly. The words sound hackneyed in comparison to the grief they're somehow meant to penetrate.

Seth nods a little, acknowledging the sympathy. Somehow it's easier to talk about this than the dream. At least it's something he's gotten a little distance from. Something he's actually had the time and support to work through and recover from, more or less.

"Well, um," he continues awkwardly. He hasn't gotten to the killing yet - not really. Sure, he'd blamed himself for her death, and he's still not convinced he wasn't at fault. But that time it hadn't been intentionally.

"Took me.. a very long time, but eventually I found someone with the power to bring people back from the dead. So. I brought her back."

He leans forward and picks up his half-full glass of whiskey, draining it as he lets that minor bombshell settle.

Oh.

Daniel takes off his glasses to scrub a hand over his eyes, shoulders hunching. Stories that embark from the point of resurrection so rarely end well unless they originate from the New Testament. This story already has a deeply, viscerally unfortunate ending, and he doesn't need to watch Seth chasing that reveal with whiskey to know it.

He waits, eyebrows drawn down in sympathy, for Seth to reach a point of relative stillness.

"What happened?" he asks quietly.

"Turns out, when you bring people back, they turn into zombies," he answers, in a light voice that does nothing to mask the guilt and grief behind it. He turns the glass over in his hands, staring down at it.

"Long story short, nine people ended up dead because of me, several of which I had to kill myself. And two pets, including my iguana," he continues evenly, morose but calm. He's mostly including the detail about the animals to get across the point of what a completely surreal situation it was. Ridiculous, and would've been funny if it weren't also so tragic. "And, well, let's not forget I single-handedly almost caused the zombie apocalypse."

He sighs heavily, looking up at the ceiling, pausing for a moment. "Got Shannon with a shovel." He reaches up to touch his cheekbone, indicating where he'd hit her, then falls silent.

He tenses, glances sharply sideways and back again. What was undoubtedly a tragic, emotionally draining experience also must have been a singularly horrifying one and, true to his nature, Seth's decided the entire thing must have been his fault. And he's really the last person who needs this kind of guilt weighing on his conscience.

For a moment Daniel wrestles with the correct response to something like that before realizing that there really isn't one. He either wishes Seth were sober or that he were more drunk; he can't decide which.

"That's not your fault," he says evenly. "You couldn't have known. Accidentally catalyzing a situation doesn't make you responsible for it."

He needs to make him understand it. Seth's lived with enough self-blame.

"No, I could've known," Seth answers immediately, not accepting any excuses Daniel decides to make for him. "I didn' even test it, I was so wrapped up in makin' things right, I didn' even try to make sure I knew wha' would 'appen."

His grip tightens around his empty glass in frustration, and he sets it down, the clink of glass on glass ringing sharply through the room. "And then all I did was cause her more pain. And Kelly, too."

Perhaps some things Daniel can help him forgive himself for, but the truth is he had acted rashly, out of nothing but self-involvement, and it had had catastrophic results. If it weren't for his friends willing to do the hard thing, it would've been even worse.

Edited 2014-12-09 03:42 (UTC)

"Seth," says Daniel firmly, focused, "raising people from the dead is not an exact science. There is no way you could have predicted that."

He concentrates on the dull ring of the glass striking the table, the fade of the pitch into the blended room tone. He needs some way to inject reason into this, detachment. "If you got that power from someone else, then they must've known they had it in the first place. And to know they even had it, they must have tried it and it must not have resulted in anything like that, or people would have noticed. You couldn't have known. You couldn't."

Seth seems to be spending a lot of time shaking his head today.

"Well, there's not really any way for me to know, because I never asked him, or gave 'im much of a chance to talk. One of... four times I've willingly taken someone's power by force. And given it 'appened both times we used the power, I'm going to assume it was the same for 'im," Seth argues.

As much as the support is appreciated, Seth won't accept undeserved excuses. He's not really in the mood to let his failings and mistakes slide, even if they're old ones.

"God, Seth, will you just -"

He pushes his glasses back on in a gesture that is entirely useless; he just stares at Seth over the tops of them anyway.

"You are not to blame for that. It was an accident. And I know, I know that saying that doesn't magically make you believe it, but that's how it is. I mean, you," He makes a frustrated, abortive hand gesture, words crystallizing into furious resolve. "You've been in my head, you've seen what I've done. You saw it first hand, and that was one planet out of dozens I've seen destroyed, one world out of the many I've had a hand in destroying. I don't forget those things, not ever, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't forgive myself for those mistakes."

Mildly alarmed at his own abrupt outburst of partially self-directed frustration, Daniel lets his weight sink him back into the couch. He hadn't meant for that to get quite so vehement. He needs a stabilizing breath. Or several.

Instead he continues. "They were mistakes. And that," he points at Seth, softening the edges to the unintentionally hardened tone, "was a mistake. You made a mistake and it happens. That doesn't mean you don't forgive yourself."

Seth falls quiet at Daniel's aggressively supportive rant, and he softens a little bit, leaning back in his chair. Some of it seems to make its way into his head. Though Daniel is very right in that it doesn't magically make him believe it, but it is a small step forward, at least.

"I'm sorry..." he says, suddenly a lot more quiet. Though he's not entirely sure what he's apologising for, it just feels like he should. Perhaps by making it seem like if he has trouble forgiving himself, he'd have trouble forgiving Daniel.

"Just... This morning, feeling so hopeless, it..." He fiddles with his sleeves, feeling awkward and uncomfortably vulnerable. "Guess it made me focus on, um, all the things that make me think things would be better if I just..." He trails off, starting to think maybe Daniel was right in that this was a bad time to discuss this.

And that brings them full circle. The gun goes off in Daniel's head again with its spattered red exclamation point, and Seth's body goes thudding against the floor.

The mental image won't clear itself from his head. He knows it'll inevitably join the ever-expanding gallery of things he can't shake and won't ever let himself shake. It may have been a dream but it had been Daniel's dream, in a trauma of his own make and a scenario of his own construction.

"Yeah, well," he says to the floor quietly. "That wasn't fair for you, having to get dragged through my head like that."

The tiny black lettering informing him of suicidal tendencies blazes out behind eyelids in the heartbeat his eyes blink shut. Daniel's head snaps up sharply.

"You'd tell me, wouldn't you? If, if you ever got the, you know, the...?" He raises one hand partway but doesn't complete the gesture, throat dry. "You'd tell me. If you, if you needed anything."

It takes a few seconds for him to respond, but then he nods, just a little. He wants to reassure Daniel that that's not something he'd do, that it was far more situational than just how he felt. A good certain amount of logic had gone into his decision in the dream, and back at the base. At the base especially, it had been about robbing them of a resource they had no right to, stopping them from doing further damage.

And as long as he's free, he has choices, he has options, no matter how hopeless things seem. The only other time he had seriously considered it was when Shannon had died (the first time), and even then he never got near to trying it. But he just couldn't let himself give up like that. Or do that to his mam. And here, well, he has his friends. At least one of whom has been suicidal himself, still quite recently, and Seth wonders how much that would surprise Daniel to find out about the archangel Gabriel. Not that Seth has any intention of sharing that.

"If I need anything," he confirms instead of sharing any of the things going through his head. "Thanks," he adds. Because despite everything, he does feel a little better than before Daniel arrived. Perhaps it's just the reminder of how caring Daniel can be and usually is.

The tension in Daniel's shoulders eases a little when he hears it. He didn't think it would be an issue but especially in light of last night, it's start to come up a worrying number of times.

Suicidal tendencies.

A small shiver runs the length of one arm.

"Good," he says with a fractional nod. "Good. I just need you to, you know. In case."

"Well, unless someone decides to use me as a lab rat again, it probably won't be an issue," he answers, and kind of regrets it immediately. He probably shouldn't be so flippant about it, even if it's true.

Though with the number of times Daniel's subtly or not so subtly let him know that he'd be there for him, that Seth could turn for him support or help about anything, well, Seth is slowly starting to believe it. There's still of course the not wanting to burden him, but at least he's becoming reasonably sure Daniel won't bail out so easily if Seth does burden him. Well, he believes it for the time being anyway, until his insecurities convince him otherwise.

"That'll never happen." He snaps out the words immediately, instinctively, dead weight drops of certitude. He means them. There isn't the remotest chance he'd let it.

And then he looks away, skewering Seth's wall with an uncomfortable, penetrating frown as he rubs at his arm with one hand in abrupt self-consciousness. He doesn't want to have overstepped some unstated boundary. Even after witnessing Seth's perception of his, as he said, 'lab rat' experience, Daniel knows he can't fully understand the depth of that experience. He can only conceptualize, and that's hard enough to process.

Seth has to smile a little at the vicious defensiveness and the conviction with which he says that. Daniel has already shown in a dream how much he'd go through to get Daniel out, and they didn't even know each other that well at that point. They don't know each other that well now. Though perhaps it depends on the point of view - they may not have known each other long, but they've still delved pretty deep into the traumas and insecurities. Or at least Seth's.

"I suppose with an archangel and a guy who can't seem to stay dead both in my corner, the likelihood is significantly lower than last time," he answers, in something almost resembling lightheartedness. The fact he can walk through walls also helps, of course. But Romac managed to lock up Gabe for a time, so you can never be too careful.

That gets a short, amused exhalation which considering the context of this conversation, counts well enough as laugh.

"I'd say it is, yeah." He tries his best to smile, but the little strained pull of one corner of his mouth gets wasted on the opposite wall. At least he knows that should it come to it, the years of learning to handle firearms and becoming at least reasonably adept at hand-to-hand can have a use. Not that he needs the reminder due to already helpfully getting a rather hefty reminder the night previously, and in high-definition surround-sound no less.

He takes in again the clothes strewn half-on and half-off the bed, recalls their damaged and torn state in the dream, and shuts his eyes to the memory of the gunshot. Again.

Seth runs down the corridor and shoots through his head and howls his frustration, and the second time he shoots he makes sure he doesn't have the power to avoid it.

Daniel wonders how many better ways that scenario could have played out.

The loop resets and Seth doesn't even flinch when security fires on him, just forces away his power and puts the barrel to his chin.

There were probably plenty of worse ways it could have played out too.

He opens his eyes and closes his eyes and the gunshot goes off.

"You gonna be all right?" he asks, knowing full well the long-term answer to that likely lands between I have no idea and no, probably not, but he doesn't know what else to ask.

"Yeah," he answers softly, giving a little nod. Admittedly, he's going by a pretty broken standard of 'all right'. He's going to survive, and he's going to cope, and maybe one day he's going to properly recover. Because the alternative option isn't acceptable. He's too defiant and stubborn for that. When he was in there, it was 'I won't let them use me,' but out here it's 'I won't let them break me.' Very different results. Although it is of course sometimes harder to remember that than other times.

Daniel is not looking so great either, though. Seth's not sure how much talking through what happened would help at this point. So he reaches forward and picks up the whiskey bottle, offering it out to Daniel.

"Sure you won't have some? I can mix it in your coffee, if you want." Seth either needs to sober up, or Daniel needs to get drunk, because them staying like this probably isn't going to help.

"Tempting, but no," he answers a little regretfully. It's only noon, which today is far too early for Daniel to start drinking anything alcoholic. "I'll take the coffee offer solo if that's on the table."

The exhausting nature of the conversation has already begun to bleed into the downward slope of his shoulders and the rub of a hand over eyes for the umpteenth time. He'll take the flimsy excuse for a subject change since Seth seems to have reached his limit on how much of that he's willing to discuss. Daniel can't blame him.

Seth nods and heavily gets to his feet, bringing the whiskey bottle back to the kitchen and leaving it there, in an attempt to stop himself from drinking further. He hasn't even made coffee yet this time, despite knowing Daniel was coming, so he starts a fresh pot. Maybe it will have a sobering effect on him as well.

"Sorry you had to watch that," he says a bit quietly, focusing on the coffee rather than looking at Daniel. Knowing Seth's own tendency to get stuck on dreams or events and have them playing through his head, he has a feeling Daniel might be doing the same. And well, the sheer brutality of it, coupled with what Jack had called his saviour complex, probably made it very upsetting for Daniel that he couldn't help Seth. Again. Even if it was just a dream. Again.

Daniel had already braced himself to rise and make the stuff himself but Seth goes and gets up before he can. And based on the way he devotes far too much careful attention to the mechanical process, Daniel thinks he needs it, the stabilizing form and function of repetition.

"If it means anything," he answers dully, "sorry my brain put you through it. That's not, not exactly, what I, uh." He huffs bitterly. Like anything he's about to say is any consolation. "That wouldn't have happened. That wouldn't - that's not how people in our care are typically treated. And I'm sorry."

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tw: repeated suicide mentions

That goes for this entire conversation

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