[for daniel] time makes you bolder

[fallen_ancient]

The ending with Cameron had been quiet, deceptively so. Behind his resignation lay a capacity for self-destructiveness that worried her with the hurt he had taken. He had accepted her decision, because he had no choice. Fait accompli. Although she would have listened to his arguments had he chosen to make them, she did what she knew best for both

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[theunascended]

The knock startled him more because of who it was knocking than that someone wanted to see him. He did, occasionally, have visitors. Okay, so usually it was Vala barging in without knocking, but that counted, at least. Didn't it? But this wasn't Vala and it wasn't Mitchell and it wasn't any number of people he could have expected.

It was Morgan.

"Come on in," he called. "I'm in the library." Of course, it wasn't much of one, but there was enough room for two people on the couch. He stood up when she entered and gestured at the other end of the couch. "What's up?"

[fallen_ancient]

At his words, Morgan suppressed the small pang of loss she felt over the room she had designed and cherished that would now belong to Cameron. It would have been uncharitable and unkind to ask him to move out, as well as imprudent, since she had need of being away from New Atlantis. It was uncharitable to miss the room when she had moments ago said goodbye to her lover.

Uncharitable, but terribly human.

She pushed the door open and stepped inside, pausing to allow her eyes to adjust to the light. Hands folded at her waist, she approached Daniel, then opened her hands to gesture to the couch. "May I sit? I believe we should talk. It's about Cameron and me."

[theunascended]

"Yes, of course." He gestured at the couch again and frowned. "What's wrong?" He glanced behind her quickly, half expecting Mitchell to be behind her somewhere. He wasn't, of course, and that made him worry a little more. Just what was going on?

Had Mitchell finally come to his senses?

No. That was ridiculous.

Morgan, then?

[fallen_ancient]

Morgan sat neatly, gracefully, almost as though she had not moved at all, but that was as much illusion as her relationship with Cameron had been, and all the more illusion she wished to muster that day.

"I don't believe it would be accurate to say anything is wrong," she began, taking uncharacteristic refuge in pedantry. "After our conversation last week, and upon several others I have had recently... in addition to considerable meditation on the subject, I decided it would be best for both of us to end the romantic aspects of our relationship now."

How dry that seemed, and how much more emotional she felt in telling Daniel than she had in relaying the same to Cameron. That meant something, she felt certain, but in this moment, she could not be certain what.

[theunascended]

So Morgan had done the right thing. Daniel thought a little better of her for it, although he'd already started coming to terms with the fact that she just didn't think in the same terms as the rest of them did. Unfortunately for Mitchell, he might have said he knew the difference, but he never quite did see it.

Daniel debated over what to say next. He knew what he would have said two, even a single week ago, but something in him told him not to go with that.

So, instead of asking how Mitchell was dealing with things, he asked, "How are you holding up?"

[fallen_ancient]

After so many months of Daniel's near-antagonism, Morgan expected his first thought, or his first spoken thought, to be for Cameron. To have him asking after her touched her in a way she had not thought possible.

She watched as her hands smoothed once, and again, over her thighs, then lifted her gaze to meet his. "I am well enough, and certain of the decision. I had not imagined it would be so painful." One shoulder lifting in a quiet shrug, she smiled sadly. "I had become so frustrated with him that it obscured my feelings."

[theunascended]

"You're not the only--" Daniel hesitated and shook his head, breath leaving him in a huff of almost sad laughter. "The only one who's been frustrated with him. He can be stubborn and pig-headed and that's what I like about him. But this goes beyond anything I've seen from him before."

"And of course it's painful. You care about him. If you didn't, you wouldn't be leaving him." Which was kind of contrary to how it was supposed to work, but not in Daniel's mind.

[fallen_ancient]

Morgan released a soft sigh, nodding slightly. Daniel understood what she had done and why. Perhaps it was not the normal way of things, but it was her way. "There is hope, and there is blindness. Cameron has chosen the latter path. He believes that any accommodation to making a life on the island marks a failure of hope. And yet..."

The irony of it never ceased to stun her. "And yet I must change. I have no options. He believes that I should simply accept being human and be not only as human as he is, but in the same manner that he is." She glanced up at Daniel, expression soft almost to the point of pleading. "You, of all people, must understand why that cannot be."

[theunascended]

"He doesn't understand," Daniel said, shaking his head. "He keeps expecting to go home. He keeps expecting rescue. I've told him that if he wants to go, he just has to be patient. That it'll come in time. He doesn't seem to care." What he didn't mention was that he often debated with himself about whether he wanted to go home at all.

"You're not human," he said simply. "Or at least not in the way we are. Second evolution of the species and all that. And you haven't even been that in how many hundreds of years?"

[fallen_ancient]

"Thousands," she corrected quietly. "More than ten by Earth accounting. But there is more than that. My mind has not changed. I am Ascended and human."

She glanced down at her hands again, calm and quiet, if not precisely serene. "Cameron has never met a problem that could not be conquered by believing it would be. I admire his faith, yet in the absence of evidence, we must abide as though this is the life we will have while still learning what we can about our prison."

Sighing, she sought Daniel's gaze and spoke with more honesty than she had intended. "I never intended to live beyond the sacrifice I made. If I leave here, I will no longer be conscious of my existence, although I battle on. Or so I believe. There are days, Daniel, I would tear my skin off to get out of it. But there are others when I think...I might not want to leave at all."

[theunascended]

"I always had the impression that you were on Earth during the time of the King Arthur legends," Daniel explained. He let out a sharp breath when she mentioned not wanting to go and, for a moment, couldn't look at her. It was too close to what he thought, to what he struggled with now that he had team on the island.

"You weren't here when I was with Ianto." The words came slowly because he still felt a pang when he thought of those days. It wasn't as hard, not since Owen, but it was still there. "But there were weeks, even months at a time when I didn't want to go back. I was happy here. I still am, even with everything that's changed."

He shrugged. "I tried to explain it to Mitchell and Vala, how you couldn't choose to go home or be rescued, that you had to wait, but they didn't want to hear it. Most days, I still don't want to go back, and that's something I'll never tell them."

[fallen_ancient]

"You are correct that I was with Merlin in the era the legends were spawned, but I did not take human form as he did. When I needed to, I shifted energy to matter to create corporeality, but it was willful and temporary. Merlin chose to become human. He could not re-Ascend without repeating the process." As always, teaching provided an emotional refuge, the disbursal of information itself both comfort and pleasure. Illusion, but it seemed to relieve some of the pressure of knowledge in her mind.

Unlike her, Daniel could return to the life he had possessed, and yet, perhaps he would not return. Perhaps he would simply cease. She nodded once, quietly. "I can no longer read your mind, so I do not know the reasons. I could speculate, but I will not. For Vala, at least, in time the balance may change. She may find she has more here worth living for than she does at home. Cameron, I fear, will always romanticize home."

[theunascended]

Now wasn't that interesting? "You must have walked the line back then over the whole 'interference' issue." The one that he thought was ridiculous. In a fight versus other Ascended beings, didn't it make sense for the Ascended beings of this galaxy to take part? "Although I'm assuming that once you learned to Ascend, the next time might have been a little easier." One step ahead of the game, so to speak.

"Cameron always romanticizes everything," Daniel said. His tone was a little too sharp for his tastes and he took a breath to try to tone it down. "That's why I never left the SGC. I was going to Atlantis. Circumstances conspired to get us back together again." In some ways he was grateful, but things weren't ever quite the same after that.

[fallen_ancient]

Eyes closing, Morgan simply nodded in response to his inquiry about Merlin. What had been comforting trembled at the edge of the disagreements subsisting between them and she did not trust her temper now. "If you wish to speak further about this, I am willing, but I find... I find I don't want to engage in intellectual disagreement just now

[theunascended]

Daniel shook his head because Morgan was right. Now wasn't the time really to dredge up the past. At least not that particular past. "He thinks a lot of things that aren't true. Most especially now that he's here. I think the fact that I had a boyfriend came as a bit of a shock to him, although he tried not to show it."

His lips curled up a little and he shrugged.

"I appreciate you telling me in person. Somehow I wonder whether I'd hear it from him at all." They hadn't really talked in a while. Just skirted around subjects.

[fallen_ancient]

At Daniel's observation, Morgan merely tipped her head in his direction, serenity restored at their accord and lips quirking at the corners. "Another case of Cameron seeing what he wishes to see." By which she meant that she had not been surprised, nor would she have been even without the more intimate knowledge of his mind that she had had when they were both Ascended.

"I don't know whether he would have chosen to tell you, but since he will no longer speak to me of things that bother him - he may not speak to me at all - it seemed both prudent and kind to be certain someone knew to look after him." She collected Daniel's gaze and shrugged minutely, a tiny lift of her shoulders and ducking of her head. "I suppose I also wished to tell you myself so that I would not be taken unawares by your reaction."