prompt phil can't swim but he's to scared to tell dan so when they go on vacation he almost drowns and the fluffy fluff maybe smut later that's up to the author but pLEAS
i really want dan and phil experimenting with "feminine" clothing now like??? non-binary dan and phil??? experimenting with presentation dan and phil??? genderfluid dan and phil??? basically more fics about gender please thank
Title: Five In The Morning
Author: philanddanfiction
Inspiration: I started it while listening to 27 by Fall Out Boy, it's changed a lot
Warnings: swearing, smoking, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, mentions of suicide, existentialism/existential crisis, heavy angst, it's sad and angry and probs inaccurate
A/N: Let me know what you think!! I've been writing this for days...
Words: 2374
Dan’s starting to come home at five in the morning again, often glassy-eyed and always with the scent of smoke and the reek of alcohol clinging to his clothes, his skin, his hair. The smell permeates the flat almost constantly now, and Phil’s got so used to it being there that it no longer sticks in his throat and chokes him. That’s one less thing for Dan to get angry over, since he used to shout about how Phil’s muffled coughing kept him awake. And God knows Phil would rather the younger were asleep. Asleep, he can’t get into trouble.
Five in the morning is beyond a joke, Phil thinks to himself. Ideally he’d want his boyfriend home before one. Two he can deal with, three and four is getting ridiculous. Five is no longer night, and for most people five is birdsong and blissful oblivion in the form of sleep. For Phil, five in the morning becomes slurred shouting and shattered glass and china and more often than not now, screaming.
Dan doesn’t see the problem with five in the morning. Time in the grand scheme of things is irrelevant, minutes and hours and days are just made up ways of measuring how quickly sand slips through the hourglass, how quickly a person slips through life. You can’t control sand once it’s flowing, and you can’t control life once it’s started to be lived. Dan doesn’t believe in forcing yourself to go faster or slower to comply with what someone else wants. Time is relative and he can’t relate, and life’s just how long you spend breathing when you come down to it. He says it’s up to you personally what you choose to do while you’re breathing, because that’s something you can’t really stop doing until it’s time to stop living (Dan doesn’t believe in suicide; he believes that the right to take life belongs to some higher power, and he reasons that whatever comes afterwards is going to be better than this so long as he fights it out and lives with what he’s got for now).
Phil chooses to learn languages and history and useless facts. He burns incense and candles in the flat, and though he’d never admit to it Dan thinks the candles are nice. They’ve got pretty names to match their pretty smells, and Phil’s favourite bright blue ones are almost the same colour as his eyes and they smell like flowers and the sea and the washing powder that they use to wash their sheets and clothes. Dan sometimes borrows one of Phil’s candles and lights it in his room, watching the flame flicker and using the soft smell to calm himself, usually when he’s had a bad night and needs some small comfort but Phil’s angry and won’t be in the same room as him.
Dan lets Phil get on with his reading and writing and scented products and almost religious TV-watching. Those are the choices Phil makes. He can’t understand why Phil won’t let him get on with choices of his own.
In a perfect world, Dan would choose cigarettes over incense. He knows that they’re not good in the long run, but the way they make him feel sort of outweighs that. They give him something to focus on - the exchange of smoke from his lungs to his lips and then to the air - and there’s something about the nicotine combined with the focus that helps even his breaths, and if his heartbeat’s racing then a quick smoke usually makes him feel a little more normal.
He likes them, in the way he likes boys and beers and bodies pressed close together in dark clubs and strangers’ houses. It’s just the way things go; he loves everything illicit, everything poisonous, everything dangerous.
And they’re exactly the things that Phil tries to drag him away from. No matter how much Dan talks about choice and about the irrelevancy of one small life in a world of seven billion, and that’s only counting the living and not the ones who’ve come before or the ones who’ll come after. When Dan comes home drunk or dazed or with his shirt half-off, Phil always tells him that what he’s doing is wrong.
Wrong is a concept Dan doesn’t like. To be incorrect is to assume that there’s one course of action that everyone should be following in order to do something good and live in a way that’s acceptable. Dan doesn’t believe that. Everyone’s an individual and what’s wrong for one person could be the perfect solution for another. And Dan’s solution to his problems consists of cigarettes to remember and shots to forget and inhaling white lines two at a time with a tenner rolled into a tube if he’s got one to hand because he remembers being told that you get a better hit with cash than plain old paper, and the cheap crack he buys since it’s all he can afford could do with any help it can get.
Even cheap, it’s enough. With coke running with the oxygen through his veins he opens doors, finds the most profound things to say to stun people into so much of a silence that they stop noticing his red-rimmed eyes and waxy, translucent skin and instead they listen to him.
Phil doesn’t listen. Phil turns on all the lights when he gets home at five in the morning, despite Dan’s weak protests that it hurts, it hurts his eyes and makes his head ache worse than before. Phil makes him stand in the kitchen even though all he wants to do is sleep, and forces him to talk. And if Dan doesn’t want to talk and explain where he’s been and who he’s with, Phil only gets angry. Shouts and scolds and completely loses it, so much that Dan’s glass of water slips from his shaking hands and smashes into tiny shards on the floor.
With fingers that won’t cooperate and vision too blurred to see much, Dan scrabbles around uselessly on the floor, cutting his fingers and palms on sharp edges, drops of blood blossoming into grotesque crimson flowers as they blur into the pools of water on the white tiles. He doesn’t ever really feel it; he’s too numb and too focused on not making Phil any angrier. But Phil just tells him no, stop, I’ll do it. Sort yourself out and get to bed. He even guides Dan to the bathroom and sits him on the edge of the bath, saying please, get clean. Dan doesn’t know if he means it in the sense of get clean now, wash your hands of your own blood. He could mean the other way. Get clean for good. Clean of everything.
Watching himself in the mirror, Dan can’t hear Phil cleaning up the mess in the kitchen. He doesn’t register the rushing sound of the taps or the scraping of glass being swept up or the fact that Phil is actually mopping up not just the spilt water but also Dan’s blood. He just sees himself, and finally it’s for who he really is. Still too young and stupid and inexperienced for the broken adult’s body he inhabits now. The clueless teenager he was when he first met Phil hasn’t gone away, and in the reflection Dan sees a version of himself shattered like the glass he broke moments ago. The pale but healthy skin is gone, and now he just looks sort of whitish-grey, his teeth yellowed by nicotine, his bloodshot eyes surrounded by dark bruise-like circles that don't go away because he doesn't sleep these days. He's lost too much weight, and he shakes just standing there looking at himself. Seeing everything like it's in full high definition for the first time, and he hates what he sees.
He's wrong, he thinks, and he says it out loud. I'm wrong. I've been wrong. And the words, in his voice ringing in his ears, are simultaneously a relief and a stab to the heart. Because he's beginning to realise. There are things that are wrong for everyone, and they don't take into account what you believe in. Thinking you're different can't protect you from the chemicals in cigarettes that cause your cells to mutate and multiply into tumours in your lungs. It doesn't stop alcohol fogging your brain and making it hard to think. It won't stop white powders turning you into the worst version of yourself.
And all along, Phil knew what he was doing. He tried his hardest to stop things before they got this bad, and Dan had pushed him away, realising what Phil was doing but not understanding why until now. Now, Dan sees that Phil was trying to save him. Trying to show that, despite how irrelevant one life may be in the midst of seven billion others plus countless numbers of people who are dead or yet to be born, in terms of what's nearby and what's important, Phil cares and always has done. He cares about a stupid little boy who makes mistakes and doesn't know how to fix them, because whereas Dan sees the world as a whole Phil focuses on his own world, the small circle of people he knows and people he loves within the bright blue marble of the earth. And Dan's slowly coming to realise that he's a big part of that world. He's a bigger part of Phil's world than Phil is of his, and that's the worst realisation of them all.
The world will never be perfect. If it were, Dan wouldn't be addicted to this lifestyle, to shots and sex and smoky back rooms. And when Phil finally comes to the bathroom, and Dan's washed his face with cold water while trying not to look in the mirror, if the world were perfect they'd be able to tell each other they love each other. But as it happens, nothing like that works out. Dan's head aches and his heart races now for all the wrong reasons because he's on the comedown from the high and this is the worst part. Doing this alone is the worst. He wouldn't wish this on anyone.
But this time, he's not alone. And Phil's with him, arms wrapping gently round his waist before he even realises that he's going to be sick. He gags helplessly a few times, spits into the sink, and slumps against Phil the second he's done.
Phil smells like the blue candles, and his jumper's soft and feels comforting against Dan's cheek as he rests it on the elder's shoulder. It's not going to be a good night, but now Dan has the candle scent and he has his Phil after all, holding him close and gently leading him out of the room, away from the cold white tiles and the mirror and the overhanging thick feeling of regret in the air all around them and into somewhere warm, with carpet underfoot.
A bedroom. And not just any bedroom, but one where green-checked covers are wrapped round his shoulders when he sits on the bed. Phil's room, Phil's clean warm duvet, Phil's lips on his cheek.
It's all about choices. And Dan's big on choices and decisions and making your own future, and he decides right there and then as Phil murmurs sweet nothings into his ear and gently pushes him to lay down properly that he's not going to die like this at twenty-two, an empty shell of what he used to be, of what he knows he can be again if only Phil will stay and be with him and hold him until he can hold himself up.
When they wake up, long limbs all tangled together, messy hair and morning breath, Dan remembers why five in the morning is a problem. He can't remember the last time he slept this late or this well, because usually getting home at five doesn't mean properly going to bed that day. He makes a soft, contented sound, and snuggles into Phil, and whispers that today's the day.
Phil sleepily asks what day, blinking.
Dan replies that it's the day he starts getting clean.
It's harder than it sounds. Dan's never kept drugs in the flat, so he doesn't have any little bags of white powder or paraphernalia to get rid of, which is a relief. Phil helps him pour away the remnants of the vodka bottle he's been hiding under his bed, and kisses him when it's done and he's got tears in his eyes because this is going to be so, so fucking difficult, but he's going to do it. Clean out his body and his soul and his mind and learn to love Phil again.
Their days become less about shattered things and shouting, and turn into times when they couldn't care less about the time and how long it takes them to do things, because it no longer really matters. And sometimes, Phil still catches Dan with the window open as wide as it'll go, smoking a cigarette clutched tight between two fingers or held between his lips, his elbows resting on the window ledge and his eyes screwed tight shut like he may or may not be crying. But Phil doesn't get angry any more. He'll go over and wrap his arms round Dan's waist and just wait until he's finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the broken mug that they leave there on the ledge to be used in times like this, then he'll shut out the cold and go to make warmth in the form of steaming cups of tea, sips punctuated by kisses and little smiles and I love yous.
Dan stops coming home at five in the morning. He doesn't come home at five in the evening, either. Five, he's decided, is his unlucky number. So he and Phil avoid it at all costs, and if they happen to hear church or clock bells chiming five times they kiss for the duration of the ringing until it's over. Nothing bad can happen to Dan, not when his lips are on Phil's.
THIRD TIME LUCKY IS THIS ON THE RIGHT BLOG NOW alright I suck and I’ve changed my mind about the mute/deaf fic and it’s gone midnight so prompt me stuff
Haha I think phanfic hate me oops... news time! I've started my first ever chaptered fic, it doesn't have a title just yet but it involves a mute Dan as a successful silent film actor in the 1930s, so fun times ahead...
Title: Yours Forever
Words: 460
Prompt: phanfic's weekly challenge prompt - wedding
Warnings: None
Note: This is a fluffy mess and I couldn't care less. Feedback appreciated!
We decided in the end that we didn't want a big, white wedding. That just wasn't, well... It wasn't us, it wasn't what felt right.
Of course, that decision came after we'd spent weeks deliberating and making no decisions at all. I wanted red roses, but you said you wanted blue flowers. Blue to match my eyes, even though I told you how cheesy that was from the start. And you've always said I was the cheesy romantic one.
We couldn't agree on anything. Location... I wanted the park, under the blossom trees when they were in bloom, like they were when we first kissed in the late afternoon slants of sunlight. You wanted somewhere abroad, hot and maybe a white-sand beach.
And the guest list... well, that was a nightmare. You wanted half of YouTube, I said just family and friends for the actual wedding, maybe more for the reception if you were really hung up on inviting so many people.
We had so many arguments, didn't we?
So in the end we gave it up.
I'm writing this in the back room of a registry office. In less than five minutes, someone will be knocking hard on the door, telling me "it's time".
Time for everything we have together to be cemented once and for all. We're combining our last names and I am marrying you.
One by one, we've watched the people we know and have come to love find their happily-ever-after endings. It's our turn, Dan. I just hope I can always be the first one to see your eyes light up in the mornings as I kiss your sleep-sweetened lips.
I hope I get to stay as the one who makes you tea just the way you like it when you're up late editing, and I hope you'll fall asleep at my side when you're finally giving up for the night and coming to bed with me.
I hope you stay happy, and that when you're sad I'll be able to pick up your left hand and remind you that there's not just one ring there, but two, and both of them are memories of us. The diamond I slipped into your wine glass on the last night of that drunken but perfect holiday in the tiny beach house, and the gold band inscribed with the date we met that I'll be slipping onto your finger in the ceremony that starts in approximately... forty-five seconds.
And above all, Dan Howell, I just hope you can live with being the one and only thing that matters to me.
We picked purple flowers in the end. Our families are here, but nobody else. We can have our friends later. This is about us.
aaah I can't believe you were so worried that fic was incredible omg that was the best thing I've read in a while (especially from a new writer) no but seriously be proud of that xxx
Wow wait is this a different anon?? AWH THANK YOU BABY <333 the best thing you've read in a while I am crying wow you little angel I love you a lot xx
NO I MEAN LIKE W O W FOR A FIRST PHANFIC? IT WAS SO COMFORTABLE WITH THE CHARACTERS LIKE MY FIRST FIC WAS SO AWKWARD MAN YOU'RE REALLY GOOD LIKE I WOULD COLLAB W U IF I HAD THE TIME YO
DUUUUUUUUUUUUDE STOOOOP
I'm shrieking awhhhh you're the nicest person ever COME OFF ANON BBY PLEASE <33 also omfg no I'm definitely not worth a collab like w o w but thank you ugh ugh ugh you don't understand how much you've made my night
also I RP on omegle a lot which might be why I'm comfortable with the characters?? but yeah never wrote on my own <333
Title: Merry Christmas, I Could Care Less
Word Count: 1010
Warnings: Slight angst? boyxboy if you don't like that
Summary: It's late on Christmas Eve, Phil's gone and Dan can't do this alone any more.
Note: Yeah, I know it isn't Christmas and it is in fact February, but hey, I need to post something. I've also discovered that editing to get rid of line spaces in this tiny box is annoying as hell.
“don't come home for Christmas
you're the last thing I wanna see
underneath the tree
merry Christmas, I could care less”
-Yule Shoot Your Eye Out, Fall Out Boy.
It snows, and it snows, and he's running home to get out of it, ducking through crowds of late-night shoppers and hordes of drunken festive revellers singing Christmas songs out of tune. And he pulls his hat down over his ears and turns the music playing through his headphones up a little louder, because combined with the wintry weather and the empty feeling in his right hand and in his heart, one of the voices reminds him of someone he doesn't quite want to remember.
And in the flat they used to share, he waits. For what, he's not quite sure, because God knows Phil's not coming home. Phil doesn't want to call this place home any more, and it's definitely not a home without him. It's dark, because the Christmas lights and the real tree they went out and bought together were torn down only hours ago, and cold, because Dan doesn't bother turning the heating on now he's alone. It wouldn't be enough to warm him, because the cold he feels comes from the inside out. Like his heart's stopped beating since Phil left.
He doesn't understand why. He told Phil to go, after they argued. He said to Phil that he never wanted to see him again. And he shouted after him, merry fucking Christmas, don't come back, you're the last thing I want to see.
Thinking about the words stings Dan's skin like tiny knives and his eyes like drops of ice, but he wipes roughly at his face because he's not crying, he won't cry over Phil, he does not need to cry over the fact that he's lost someone... Someone he loves, just in time for Christmas, because somehow it's got to the point where it's gone eleven at night on the twenty-fourth night of the twelfth night of the year and Dan's alone at home and he's crying. Of course he's crying. Phil's gone without so much as a goodbye and all Dan wants to say is...
“I love you.”
He whispers the words to the empty room, and just wishes there was someone there to reply.
But there's nobody there and no sound except the distant one of the tap in the kitchen dripping, the tap that Phil had said that morning he'd fix and now he wasn't going to. The tap'll stay broken, and so will Dan's heart since thinking about Phil and seeing his face every time he closes his eyes or even blinks causes him physical pain.“Come home, Phil. Come home.”
More words whispered to emptiness, in a shaky voice that sounds like it's given up on everything.
“This is still home. Even though I told you not to come back here any more. It's half yours, we bought this place together. Remember that? Back when we were young and stupid and so crazily ridiculously in love that we couldn't see straight past each other...”
Dan sighs heavily, but his voice gets a little bit louder.
“I hope you remember, Phil. Both of us, with long hair, laughing longer than we ever do now. I hope you remember every little part of it, e-even the first night when I got scared of sleeping on my own in a new room that I wasn't used to with boxes everywhere. Because you let me sleep in your bed with you that night, and you were warm round me and you didn't care that I was afraid...”
He's afraid now, because he's alone again. And everything seems strange and different and unfamiliar without Phil's smile and his soft voice whispering reassuring words in Dan's ear.
“I need you now. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry I sent you away swearing at you and saying I never wanted to see you again. I was lying, Phil, the worst lie I've ever told because it was a lie that hurt you and all I want now is to see you again. Even if it's just for one last Christmas Day.”
Outside, the snow turns to rain, hammering on the glass panes of the windows, and Dan curls into himself like he's actually out there in the storm. Without Phil, nothing seems real. It's like Phil was his reassurance that he was in real life, not in a dream or a nightmare, but now the borders between the dreams and nightmares have blurred and he doesn't know where he is any more.
He wants to scream.
But before any sound can escape his parted lips, there's a tapping sound.
Like a gentle hand on wood.
And the click-click-creak of a door handle being turned and said door being pushed open.
“Dan?”
His heart leaps, then judders almost to a halt. He knows that voice. Why is the owner of that voice here.
“Dan. Dan, look, I'll only be here a minute, I just came back to get my...” Phil stops dead. “Oh God. Dan.”
Dan doesn't know what to say, so he stays quiet and tries to hold back the sobs. But they come out anyway when he feels Phil's hand on his shoulder, and then a gentle presence beside him and a hug tight round his waist.
“I'm so sorry,” Dan chokes. “I'm so sorry... Stay, don't ever go away.”
Phil's voice is as calm and comforting as ever. “I won't. I'm here. I'm sorry too... I love you.”
Outside, far away, a clock strikes somewhere.
Dan counts. “One. Two. Three. Four.”
“Five, six, seven, eight,” Phil continues softly.
They count together.
“Nine.”
“Ten.”
“Eleven.”
“Twelve.”
“Midnight,” Phil murmurs.
Dan nods. “Back to zero. Back to the beginning.”
“A new start?”
“A new start.”
“Merry Christmas, Dan. I love you.”
“I love you too, Phil. You coming back to me is the only present I need.”
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