Imagine Living Like a King Someday
prompt: Southview Boarding School isn’t a castle and Phil Lester isn’t royalty, but he has everything. His father owns the school, he’s popular, has the best room, gets all the best treatment – there are very few things that aren’t handed to him on a platter. Dan is a cleaner/Phil’s personal maid there, and he isn’t as lucky. Everyone seems to take an aversion to the outsider, including Phil (at first).
[CHAPTER MASTERPOST]
me thinkin i’d cleared this fic up w the last chapter til i re-read a bunch of it and HOOOOO BOI why was i so obsessed with plot twists without the fkin plot
I am determined to make this all add up and work together but it may take a few chapters also I still have no idea how this is going to end LOL
[ao3 link]
Southview owns a lot of land.
It spreads out in blanketed acres of green, field upon forest upon meadow; miles of emerald patchwork. The building itself, founded somewhere in the fourteenth century apparently, makes up only a fraction of the private greenery Phil has been calling home for the past decade.
Habitatually speaking, it’s impressive. To be able to call such rich halls, such polished corridors and winding mahogany stairs, ever spiraling further and further below his house, his own dwelling; is something he struggles to grasp. He supposes every other student currently residing here may find some relation to a certain degree – but to look at a winding cobbled path and every single brick completing every wall, to name the clock tower chiming every high-clouded noon into existence anything remotely of an heirloom – isn’t anything his soul will allow him to process. He doesn’t see it changing anytime soon.
He stares at the wall-to-wall bookshelves lining every corridor brimming with ancient knowledge, medieval tales and just about every participle of the literary canon. There are strict rules against removing any books from their respective shelves with dire consequences if unobliged (absolutely ridiculous, Phil thinks – who in their right mind would consider reading a punishable offence? They’re there to be read.) He and Dan had taken it upon themselves to create a discreet enough rule-breaking method; choosing the dead of night to tiptoe through long, hallowed corridors devoid of light and sound and people and life, all whispers and giggles and cold interlocked fingers, sleepy eyes scanning fraying ladders of spines, whispered-yet-echoey assessments over which would be least missed for however many hours.
The candles up above, though only illuminated during the seasonal months, drip hardened wax onto the stone walls covering every inch of interior; something he otherwise never would have seen anywhere else in this time, let alone place. The beams hang dark and gnarled, curving across every roof with chapel-like grace.
He’s lucky, and he knows it.
Why, then, does he feel like a bird in a cage? Why can he sense the wings, feathered promises of freedom, hit against iron bars whenever he outstretches? This place is becoming too small, he decides. Seven years walking the same grounds, with the same windows and the same views no matter how creative he gets with his detours. The same faces, same conversations with all the same values; with only sporadic weeks of the outside world in between.
He wonders what he would have done had Dan not entered the scene. Wherever the place in his mind, he knows madness would reside. He only feels a breath away from it now.
He blames it on his surroundings, pushing down the rise of unease that jumps through his stomach. It’s got to be that.
::
It doesn’t subside.
“Are you okay?” he hears a voice soften beside him.
He can’t lie. Not to Dan.
He shuts his eyes and realizes he’s been staring at that Oscar Wilde painting for way too long. The afterimage burns his retina in every shade of negative. His hair deep black on canvas now chalk white behind the eyelids. His eyes look like caves.
“I don’t know,” is the closest to the truth he can get. “I feel weird.”
Dan’s entire stance changes. Concern floods his eyes and he’s suddenly upright
“Why? What’s up?”
“I don’t-…” he shakes his head in defeat. “I really don’t know. That’s why I’m so-…” his racing mind interrupts him. So what? So comfortable, yet so ill at ease? It makes no sense.
This should be bliss. Curled up on a beanbag with his favourite person somewhere on the third floor of the library behind a wooden disguise of bookshelves and tall tables. Their ‘spot’ lies in a convenient nook no other soul seems to have yet discovered – a definite perk of being the son of the owner is having premium, extensive knowledge of every single crack and avenue this place has to offer; surveillance included.
That’s how the undercroft became a meeting point in the first place, Phil suddenly remembers as his stomach falls through three stone library floors.
It was him.
He had come up with the idea. He had planned the safest night-time route, locating every surveillance camera and possible risky window. And he, funnily enough, was the one who had spent an hour talking the three of them into it to begin with – if he strains his mind far back enough he can recall even Liam having doubts. Many of them, actually.
“Come on,” a harsher, younger and definitely more obnoxious version of himself had urged.
“No way,” Liam was the first to say. Freddie and Violet hadn’t been overly keen, but it was Liam who was adamant.
He feels sicker.
“What’s bothering you?” Dan closes the book they were giggling at no longer than forty seconds ago and turns his attention completely to him.
His heart is thudding now. He hasn’t given any of that any thought whatsoever since it happened; all anxiety surrounding the situation having been newly dissipated by evenings of laughter and love and-
Had it been dissipated? Or merely masked? Ignorance by will or by proxy?
“Phil?”
Had he spent all these passing months pointing fingers, dodging the blame, deflecting everything like a house of mirrors when this whole thing, this entire time, had actually been his fault?
He snaps out of himself and realizes it’s Emily Dickinson now burning behind the eyelids.
It’s too much. Even the oil portraits, beautiful as they are (and original too, allegedly), are all the same faces. It’s all the fucking same.
“We need to get out of here.”
Dan frowns. “Huh?”
“We need to get out of here,” he repeats, and stands up immediately. The book that was on his lap catapults to the floor, landing outstretched in a papery mess.
“Wait-“ Dan scrabbles around behind him, rescuing the book and smoothing out the newly crumpled pages. His own expression creases a little with the paper.
Phil doesn’t. He can’t. His vision is a tunnel and it’s only blind panic propelling him forward, past shelves and students and voices he can only barely decipher. Every cell in his body, every single drop of blood and beat of his heart is drilling the same message into his mind.
Get out.
It’s only until he feels the slap of winter air against his damp forehead he realizes he’s outside. He stops sweating and starts shivering, clutching the corner of the stone wall as if gravity be seconds away from disappearing and flinging him into the night sky.
His chest feels like lead. Each breath comes heavy, deep; never quite enough despite each gasp filling up his lungs like he’s drowning on air alone. His stomach feels like someone has clawed it out with blunt, bare fingers.
The huge door flaps open and a tiny figure runs out.
He can barely see. His vision still exists in blobs and grains, like someone turned up the contrast too much but also turned it right down completely. What’s happening to him?
“I’m sorr-“ he gasps, but Dan hushes him.
“Focus on your breath,” his voice is calm but firm. He’s unaware of the soft grip on either shoulder until he sees two arms outstretched in front of him.
Phil tries to, but each gasp gets stuck in his throat.
“In through the nose, out through the mouth,” Dan guides him, demonstrating. Each breath seems so smooth, so calculated. Phil doesn’t want to think how often he’s had to do this.
His heart is still hammering, but he manages to comply.
“Imagine you’re blowing on a candle,” Dan continues. “But don’t blow it out.”
It’s a challenge to focus when his mind is running one million mines a minute, but Phil shuts his eyes and eventually the swirling grain begins to subside. He’s still breathing way too hard and it’s probably enough to blow out a ninety-seventh birthday cake, but Dan’s encouragement doesn’t waver.
“You’re getting there,” he says, giving his shoulders a gentle squeeze before dropping his grip completely. “Are you okay with that, by the way?” he gestures toward his hands. “Fuck, sorry- I should have asked- but when I’m having a panic attack it usually helps to keep me like-… centred.”
“No, it’s-…” Phil releases a shaky breath. “It helps. Thank you,” his eyes flutter shut when he feels two warm hands on his shoulder. He’s already feeling a fraction calmer.
“No need to thank me,” Dan says, his voice like velvet.
His eyes fly open. “Panic attack?”
Dan’s own are soft. “I think that’s what you’re having.”
His heart is still thudding, but at a marginally dropped pace. He’s never experienced anything like that before. Shit, is that what it’s like?
His vision has almost completely cleared; certainly enough to make out Dan’s silhouetted form in the amber glow of the lamp post.
“Is this really what you go through?” his voice is reedy, hoarse. All he can focus on is the boy inches away from his face.
Dan nods quietly. “Can be up to five times a day. Once it was twenty.”
He feels like crying. However much adrenaline there had been ripping through his veins had melted away; albeit only slightly, but the thought alone of this being a daily endeavor makes him want to physically remove his central nervous system himself. The thought of enduring such pain not only on a daily basis but multiple, only to emerge with a smile and with enough capacity to help others with the same issue-
Dan is an angel.
He doesn’t deserve him, his mind cries. He really doesn’t. He doesn’t.
“Deep breaths,” he reminds him, and it’s only then he realizes he’s hyperventilating again.
“Fuck,” he curses, slowing his chest down. He remembers the candle and closes his eyes again.
“You’re doing great,” Dan whispers when his breathing softens. “You’ve only blown out about seven this time. You’re on your eighth.”
He huffs out a shaky laugh, his heart melting into a puddle. As if he’d been counting.
“Ah,” Dan grins. “Maybe ninth, now.”
“Thank you,” he sighs, still trembling. He can’t tell if it’s temperature or panic-related anymore, but he doesn’t think he cares. He doesn’t have the capacity to right now.
“Come on,” Dan pulls him into a hug, arms wound tight around the waist as if there be no intention, no need to let go. “You’re okay.”
“How can you deal with that?” he says, not bothering to mask the crack in his voice.
“I have my ways,” he says as smoothly as his voice can allow, but Phil feels him gulp. Feels the quick jump of his throat against his shoulder.
The nausea returns.
::
“Ow, fuck-“ Dan snaps his fingers up from the drawer. “Bastard thing.”
“It wants your fingers more than I do,” Phil mumbles, then coughs on a mouthful of Mountain Dew.
Droplets fly everywhere.
"Phil!” Dan’s jaw drops when a few darken his trousers. He’s more than used to the other boy’s frequent laughter at his own jokes, but that one wasn’t even funny. “For fuck’s sake. So not only am I in pain, I’m wet too?”
“In pain and wet?” A voice pops up from around the corner, sending a jolt through the pair of them. “Phil, you naughty bastard, what have you been doing to the poor guy?”
“Oh, you f-“ Phil clutches his chest, his heart hammering. “Are you ever going to stop doing that? I had my first panic attack today. I don’t want another.”
“You’re saying that like it isn’t my plan,” Noah raises an eyebrow and slides past.
“Come in,” Phil gestures sarcastically.
“Leave your door open,’ he retaliates with equal sarcasm, blowing him a kiss. He plops himself down on the revolving chair and takes a token spin. He’s frowning on the other end of the 360 degrees, the other half of the sentence only just registering. “Shit, are you okay? What brought it on?”
“I am now,” Phil’s eyes flicker to the other company, mopping his trousers with a clump of tissue. “Dan got me through.”
He doesn’t deliberately avoid the latter question, but it’s certainly no accident.
“Candle trick works wonders, I’m telling you,” Dan says without turning around, still dabbing at the stain.
“It does,” Noah agrees, picking up Phil’s empty pen holder. He usually lasts a record of ten whole seconds in his room before finding something nearby to fiddle with. “It got me through the Death of a Salesman production, that’s for sure. Christ, I was a mess,” he shudders. “The four-seven-eight trick is good, too,” he adds.
“Four seconds in, hold for seven, exhale for eight,” the other boy echoes. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. You press your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth, too.”
“Really?” Phil’s eyes dart between the pair of them. Is this something he’s going to have to get used to?
“It’s meant to recalibrate the nervous system. Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio uses it,” Noah adds.
“Wonder if it would have helped on the Titanic,” Phil raises an eyebrow.
“The fucking boat would have sank anyway,” Noah cackles. “The four-seven-eight is good, but it can’t demolish icebergs, babe.”
“It has its limits,” Dan adds, plopping the tissue in the bin and heading for the bed. A quick "you okay now?" is mouthed as soon as Noah takes another spin on the chair.
Phil nods and gives his hand a little squeeze, praying he hasn’t noticed the sweat.
“So,” Noah spins again, eyes to the ceiling, before muttering a “fuck that” and leaping up off the chair. He stumbles around for a handful of seconds, clutching the desk. “What have you boys been up to, then?”
“What, since this afternoon?” Phil says. He’d only seen him about five hours ago.
“Yeah. Anything could have happened,” Noah replies, dizzily plonking himself down on the bed next to Dan with such force the shorter boy bobs upward. Phil splutters.
“That was- oh my god, that was adorable,” he gasps delightedly. “Do it again.”
Dan glares at him, fighting a smirk. “Shut up. No, don’t do it again.”
“Do what again?” Noah glances between them. “I don’t even know what I did.”
“Did you not see that?” Phil widens his eyes. “Oh my god. When you bounce down like that,“ he giggles, ignoring Dan’s “no, shall we not” – “Dan’s like a feather, so he literally defies gravity.”
“Hah,” Noah springs upward and launches himself down with about three times the force as before. Dan catapults up, starfished in the air for about a second before hurtling down on the mattress.
Noah and Phil hoot with laughter. Dan’s doubled over in stitches, clutching his abdomen. He can feel tears of laughter brimming at his eyelashes and he probably looks in pain right now but really he’s anything but.
He’s so happy it hurts.
“Shit, he really does!” Noah shrieks. “Oh my god, that’s quality. You okay?”
Dan manages to breathe out an ‘I’m fine’, still clutching his stomach. “Holy shit,” he sighs when he gathers enough composure to speak. “’Memory foam’ my arse. The springs under that thing are giant.”
“Or you’re just tiny,” Phil gushes affectionately, combing a hand through Dan’s hair. The feeling of silky waves between every finger are enough to chase away any remaining claws of anxiety, any pegs to his stomach, if just for a moment.
Maybe it is okay. Maybe it is just a product of an overactive mind. He’s been so wound up recently, what with looming examinations and deadlines and just about everything he could really do without so close to Christmas, that maybe it’s manifesting itself oddly.
Maybe.
He doesn’t want to think about it right now. He swallows the feeling down with another mouthful of beer, the bubbles foaming up like lather in his mouth.
“Shut up,” Dan glares at him, rearranging his fringe. “I’m not that short.”
“He’s mini,” Phil jumps back into conversation, as if Noah he can’t see for himself
“Short people deserve compensation for the amount of shit they go through,” Dan mutters, feigning grumpiness, but the shine in his eyes tell Phil it’s difficult to feel anything other than utter bliss.
“Ah, so you admit it!” Phil’s eyes match the light. “You are short.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Dan blushes, realizing what he’d insinuated.
“Don’t worry, Dan,” Noah chips in. “Phil’s been the same height since he was about twelve. I remember him in year seven,” he glances at the other boy. “You were terrifyingly tall. But then everyone else caught up.”
Phil rolls his eyes. “Yeah, there I was thinking I was some sort of superhuman. Twelve years of age and almost as tall as my dad. They used to call me Slenderman.”
“He looked like Mike TeeVee at the end of the film,” a giggle ripples through Noah.
“I can’t even imagine what he-” Dan frowns. “Mike who?”
Two jaws drop. Silence.
“You’ve never seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?!” Noah spits as if it be as outrageous an exclamation as never visiting Sainsbury’s.
Dan’s eyes dart to Phil, blue eyes wide.
“Not even the original?”
“No, I-…” his eyes flick between the two mirroring expressions. He huffs out a chuckle. “Is this really a big thing? Okay, well I’ve never seen Shrek, while we’re at it.”
A collective groan echoes through the walls.
“You’ve got to be fucking-“
“But it’s a-“
“Please tell me you’ve seen Star-“
“Not Wars, or Trek,” Dan cuts him off. “I don’t even know the difference between the two.”
“Dan, I-…” Noah cuts himself off with a sigh, staring at Phil. “What are we gonna do with him?”
“This is a crime,” Phil shakes his head. “This is actually outrageous.”
“If the most offensive thing I’ve done since arriving here has been not sitting through three hours of an ogre’s life, I’ll definitely take that.”
“Oh don’t you worry,” Noah leaps up off the mattress, grabbing his laptop from the revolving chair. “It’s about six hour’s worth in total.”
“Seven-and-a-half if we count the spin-off,” Phil chips in.
“Do we have to?” Dan whines. “I’m sure I’ll love it, but with all due respect I can’t even sit through films I like sometimes.”
“Are you implying you’ll dislike this?” Phil puts a hand on his chest in mock-offence.
“I said I’m sure I’ll lov-“
“Could watch Star Trek,” a voice pipes up from under the bed. Noah’s folded over to one side, the rustling of a carrier bag apparent. He adds, “not Wars, I can’t stand- Phil stop giving me evils you shit, it’s just not as good.”
Phil’s glare toward his turned back turns into a grin. He knows him too well.
He re-emerges clutching a six-pack of bottled beer, tearing one out of the cardboard and dropping it into Phil’s lap.
“He’s talking shit,” Phil mutters.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Dan smirks. “Star Trek is just Shrek with extra letters.”
“We’re gonna have to culture you up, Dan,” Noah shakes his head, thrusting a bag of popcorn almost the size of his torso in his general direction.
“God, you came prepared,” Phil notes. “It’s almost as if you knew we were both here.”
“I could hear you both from down the corridor,” Noah fires back, before adding “Plus you two are inseparable anyway. If I needed to find you, I’ll find you,” he points at Dan, then at Phil. “And vice-versa.”
Phil and Dan exchange glances. Do they really spend that much time together?
It’s difficult to calculate. They spend time apart, obviously. It’s not as if he’s sat in Maths with Dan pirouetting all over the place with a feather duster, but once are done and the final document has been closed; once the day’s duties are behind him, he can’t say he wouldn’t be found tearing from East wing to West; desperate to drop his workload and swap computer chairs for soft mattresses and lamplight.
They’re melting into each-other, and he can feel it.
Noah smirks, and only says, “We’re performing Alice in Wonderland next week,” his eyes flicker to Dan. “Have you seen that?”
-
Feedback is always appreciated literally HOW IS THIS pls let me know i haven't posted anything in years i love u all for reading thank u so much
i spent a good 15 minutes attempting to calculate the total running time of the shrek franchise im crying the things i DO i hope its accurate