Who: Daniel and Ella (!) What: A rescue, sort of. Where: The stairway between floors nine and ten. When: A while after the argument with Shane. Not too long. Warnings: None, Daniel might swear but it won't be bad. Warning for a lot of pathetic!Daniel?
The longer he was outside of the walls of R1, the more nervous Daniel became. In his youth (God, could it have been so soon as three or four years ago, to call it such a thing) he had played on the edge of a crowd, enjoyed talking up people who were unaccustomed to attention, and spent a great deal of money simply for the sake of having it gone. This made him a popular personage to have almost anywhere, and when that grew boring, he always made a scene to entertain himself, like the one that got him ejected from Rome. Asked six months before, he would have said he wanted nothing more than to go where he liked, as long as it was somewhere that wasn't that apartment. Yet now, only free of the elevator doors not ten yards away, he felt exposed, vulnerable, without shelter. It was cold in the halls, misty tongues of ice cold, since there was no moderated temperature as there was inside the apartment. Every door had an eye watching him, and as he assumed they must see him as he saw himself, he simultaneously wanted to hide and refused to do so. He wanted to go home, and he was too caught up in the warring needs for familiarity, security, rest and a goddamn drink too be truly ashamed of it, as he knew he would be when he had at least one of those things. Worse, he was getting tired.
He knew he couldn't walk up the stairs all the way to R1. The elevator had been cooperative when it took him to the lobby, but on the way up it would stall repeatedly on the ninth floor. He could make it go down to the lobby, or it stopped at nine. It would go no further, nor did he want it to stop in between. So, on the third ride, he had stepped out into the unfamiliar hallway with the vague idea that he would climb as many stairs as he could and then see if the elevator would climb higher from another level. It seemed absurdly long, but that was, perhaps, because he was in it.
He got up one flight of stairs before his breath came in gasps and the stitches began to throb. When had he gotten so weak? It didn't seem so much, since at home all he had to do was move from room to room, and that had stopped being an effort some days ago. On the stairs, it was different. They curved up and on forever, and they were just as cold as the hallway. He decided to rest--pretended it was a decision--and sat down where he was, sliding one shoulder down the wall and sitting on the carpet, one bare heel bracing most of his weight. He felt no surge of energy, just overwhelming relief that he was no longer struggling upward. Hopelessly, he glanced over his shoulder. No way forward, and no way back. Now what?