Seth's anxious spike is painful and inevitable, the slow build to that escalation of nerves, and Daniel knows he couldn't halt its trajectory even if he tried. The guilt stabs at him regardless, for dredging this up at a time where Seth is clearly at an emotional low. He can't blame him for that, really.

"Okay, well punching Nick might not've been the best idea, for starters," he says lightly. He hadn't meant to derive what he had from Nick's head, but when he'd been swirling and bereft on a plane apart he'd had nothing, no points of reference and no means for understanding himself. That mind had been the only one that had pinged as recognizable to him, and so he'd latched onto it. And from there, well, whoops.

"It's difficult to explain." What he is now, what kind of things he's seeing, constantly, sorting through, constantly. How does anyone put that into words, make it comprehensible to someone on another plane? How the hell. "What I mean is - I'm energy. I'm - I see things, understand them, in a way that I just - couldn't, before." He pauses, frustrated. "There's not - I don't think Nick could explain it. I can't explain it. I'm on another plane and it's - "

His projection's voice fades. He can see atoms. He can see the way things come together. He can see the arrangement of this little slice of a foreign universe, all the phases of the matter it's comprised of.

"It's different," he finishes softly.