"Maybe it was," Julian agrees quietly. "Or perhaps it wasn't. I imagine that you didn't get much choice in the end about most of any of it." Which to Julian is the worst part, to not have control over something this important. Perhaps Daniel would have kept the knowledge, or preferred to stay ascended, or to stay dead. Or simply to stay alive in the first place. "I've been trapped in my mind before, had my body used against my friends, against the safety of the people around me. Sometimes I wonder if I had been given a choice, if I would have kept the memories of the things I did or not. Sometimes I'm not even sure there's a right answer to that."

Julian is quiet for a few moments, aware of Daniel's presence nearby, still little more than a shape in the darkness, and of Agamede's more tugging presence in his lap. He can hear in Daniel's voice that unnamed emotion when someone speaks about something that is too much a reality for them.

"I'm sorry," he says, realizing he's said this before, but he does mean it. "I can't imagine this is something you like to rehash over and over again. I do that sometimes, and it's not the best of habits. When I can't understand something or why something had to happen, I take it apart from the inside out, even if it might be the worst possible thing for me to do. I do it to myself," he adds with a humorless chuckle. "There's always that question of why, though. What could I have done to save this person? What equipment could I have had that might have helped me find a cure for this population before I was too late? What could I have done that would have made me less of a target for this attack?" How many research projects did Julian have still active, projects that didn't even mean anything anymore, research for people that couldn't be saved anymore? More than was probably healthy. But there were also the times he'd had to make decisions about those who didn't want to be saved.

((I lost this post about six hundred times. It's a mess. Arg.))