Who: Daniel Morgan and Tai Clayworth When: A few hours after Daniel's post, late evening Camelot time Where: Daniel's quarters What: Time to talk about elephants Rating: PGish for themes?
Tai hadn't exactly been avoiding Daniel, not really. Daniel was an incredibly busy man when things were calm and after last week things had definitely not been calm. They'd talked the day they returned to their proper reality, but mostly it had been to sort of process the big picture. What had happened and how. They'd talked about Daniel's feelings that he was no longer fit to lead and Tai's guilt over what he'd done and the fact that he still had that knowledge and that he was fairly sure it was accurate in this world. They'd discussed what to do about that and some safeguards to ensure that some of the knowledge gained didn't become public again.
There had been a bit of needed laughter, much teasing and their traditional sarcasm, but both of them had steadfastly ignored some of the small picture things. Like Tai giving his life to save Daniel's. They hadn't exactly been close in that AU world, but Tai had still done so. In that world, his admiration for Daniel had still been existent, but there had been a far more open infatuation with him. Not that that Tai would have ever said anything, not to that Daniel anyway. Which, sort of brought him to the issue he was having at the moment.
First of all, he hated having anything with Daniel that they could't discuss and every time he saw them he sort of felt that unacknowledged stuff hanging there over their heads. But, at the same time, he was rather terrified of actually admitting even to himself that he had feelings for Daniel that were perhaps something more than friendly. He'd lost friends to that before and had hoped he'd gotten a bit older and a bit wiser and wasn't going to let that kind of thing happen again, but here he was. The truth was, his friendship with Daniel was one of the better things in his personal life. Okay..maybe the only thing in his personal life at the moment other then the other people from Merlin, but still that just made it harder for him to really admit anything that might jeopardize that.
He had the hope that maybe, when it came up, not if because he knew they couldn't leave it unresolved for that long, that he could pass it off as something unique to that Tai. Maybe Daniel would believe that. And maybe Montserrat would take the world cup.
The hangover from that first talk had taken most of the next day to go away, so Tai was in no hurry to have a repeat. That hand't stopped him from bringing a couple of bottles of really good lager. With the beer in hand, he knocked on Daniel's door and gave him a brief smile when it opened.