summary: they’ve been together for over a decade. love isn’t the photogenic illusion the movies advertise, at this point.
or: love in its realest form, presented in ten acts.
word count: 4.5k
notes: sometimes i make myself emotional over how long dan and phil have loved each other. and sometimes i think of sunlit mornings and soft kisses, but other times, i feel like celebrating the candid moments of love that aren’t usually displayed in media. you’re welcome.
also: phil spends all of his forever searching for dan, finding him, losing him again. dan spends his forever in fragments, forgetting Phil in every life only to learn him anew in the next.
excerpt: Dan's fingertips are now stained with ink more often than not. He commits to watching the news every evening, scribbles down notes on the good days and throws Haribo gummies at the television on the bad.
Phil complains about the shows they haven't finished and Dan hushes him, distracted, ends the night ranting for fifteen minutes about Trump's scandal of the week.
word count: 3.3k
notes: during the wave of dan's la trip theories, i've grown attached to the idea of dan writing for television. here is a future path, as presented by me. mostly, i just really want dan howell to be ludicrously happy.
summary: phil packs his things and leaves. in the journey that follows, he might only be hoping to find answers that would point him back.
notes: in which phil travels backwards through his memories in order to find what he’s lost. alternatively titled; so bitch you thought you saw the last of me; or, three years, what three years?; or rather, another fic that talks about not talking, only this time it’s during hitaus! so. also read on ao3
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In the tail-end of August, Phil sits on the edge of the bed, leaves fingernail crescents on his palms and tear stains on Dan’s heart, says, “It isn’t you,” with a suitcase and two bags at his feet.
In the tail-end of August, Dan draws his shoulders almost to his cheeks and doesn’t let Phil see his eyes as he says, “You know that’s not true,” and his fingers are cold as he draws them away from within Phil’s reach.
Phil doesn’t know that it’s not true, but Phil is losing all of his words in the back of his throat and has nothing left to say. His hand hovers over Dan’s back for a moment too long before he pulls away, and the dragging sound the wheels of his suitcase make on the tiled floor leaves haunted echoes vibrating in his spine.
Dan tells him, “Leave the keys,” doesn’t turn to face him, and his voice is so low they’re both trembling. Phil’s keychain jiggles in his hand and Dan says, as if an afterthought, “You don’t need them anymore,” and the only thing Phil knows is that that’s not true.
But Phil’s not quite sure of the truth anymore, not quite sure of anything. He pauses, inhales; he takes the keys. The front door clicks shut behind him and his legs carry him away even as he leaves his unsteady breath on the doormat for Dan’s safekeeping.
.
PJ opens his door with uneasiness that’s evident in his tense shoulders and in his clenched hands but not on his face, not in his eyes. He gestures Phil inside and says, I’m glad you’re here, lets him stay in the spare bedroom for too long without asking any questions. Phil knows PJ knows, but he doesn’t mention it and Phil doesn’t tell him and in the silence that stretches across the rooms, there is more than the naked skeletons.
PJ doesn’t ask if he’s okay. PJ guards himself outside of Phil’s walls, doesn’t get close. Maybe PJ knows more than he lets on, but the truth remains that PJ sits in front of his work in silence for hours, and Phil drags ghostly feet across the house and doesn’t know what he’s searching for, doesn’t know why.
“You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need,” PJ says, and Phil knows he’s not lying. But as he wakes the room feels all wrong and as he walks the city’s all wrong and when PJ showers he doesn’t sing, and Phil misses home and misses Dan and knows he can’t come back, and so he lingers. PJ makes coffees in the mornings and pretends he doesn’t know, doesn’t know, knows nothing of the silence.
On Tuesday, it rains. Phil takes his shoes and his hoodie and his aching lungs and walks across the pier of Brighton in the downpour, and there’s something of a nightmare about damp woods and rusting fairground rides. Phil wonders where amusement parks are buried when they die, stops thinking long enough to breathe.
When he gets back, the soles of his shoes are squeaking soaking wet and his hair’s plastered to his forehead and Dan’s standing in PJ’s kitchen with a wineglass in his left hand. PJ says, skittish, “Phil, I’m sorry, I didn’t –“ and Dan says, quiet, “Oh. This is where you’re staying,” and as Phil’s heart fractures on the kitchen floor, the wineglass in Dan’s hand doesn’t shatter.
Dan looks at him like he’s staring right through Phil’s paper-thin transparent skin and at the wall behind his back, and PJ says he didn’t know too many times, and Phil’s heart’s turned around and around and around in his chest, chipped-off parts tearing through pulsing veins, lodged into his breastbones.
Dan looks at him, but the wineglass doesn’t shatter. His hand’s steady and nothing in Phil is steady and the wineglass doesn’t shatter.
By the time Phil gets out of the shower Dan’s already gone. PJ says I didn’t know, and Phil says, it’s okay. It’s not, but as Phil packs his things and leaves, it doesn’t really matter.
.
When his mum calls he’s standing in Brighton railway station, his bags at his feet and Google Maps open in his hands. He tells her, “I’ve got five minutes until the train,” and she tells him, “Come stay with me.”
In PJ’s kitchen, Dan didn’t shatter the wineglass. In Phil’s head Dan looked at him like he’d wrecked everything and his eyes were less blank and his hands more shaking. In Phil’s head, the wineglass shattered on the floor and stained every tile and there was a reason to scream.
His mum tells him, “Come home, Phil,” and he breathes into the phone and says, “Not yet.”
.
Phil remembers Manchester cold, always cold, the sky grey and his skin prickling and Dan’s hand tugging at his own.
Manchester, in the dawn of summer, is warm. Phil gets off the train and walks the streets carrying too many bags, his coat thrown over his shoulder, and the air is not humid, not really, but he still feels like he’s suffocating. The streets aren’t as crowded as in London and it’s not raining and he feels a stranger in his own skin, a tourist in a place that was once his.
The Manchester in Phil’s head is this: cheap sweatshirts and Pokemon wallets and clouds and Dan, sometimes smiling, sometimes angry, always there. The Manchester of reality is too polished, too monochromed; the Manchester Eye is gone, and so is Gracie’s flower shop, the Starbucks remains but Phil doesn’t go in, keeps walking, doesn’t really know what he’s looking for but is driven forward by a sense of direction that is perhaps more nostalgia than anything else.
Minutes or hours or days later on the doorstep of their old building, looking thirteen floors up, Phil’s joints bristle and his chest tightens and he stares and stares and can’t bring himself to turn back.
A family of four walks through the door, a father ushering his children inside. Phil doesn’t remember them, they weren’t there years ago. He wonders which apartment they live in, wonders if what was before his and Dan’s first kitchen and room and balcony are now a family’s. He wonders if someone re-painted the walls that once contained all he had in the world, wonders if they reshaped the form of his life.
.
Phil still doesn’t quite know where he’s going, lets his feet lead the way. He leaves his belongings with an old friend and takes the bus, stays quiet, isn’t stopped by too many people.
Phil doesn't feel like himself, and he thinks, maybe people recognize him less for it. His smiles come less honest, his mind’s toppling over itself, and there's a space by his side that never seemed to be empty before. He walks off the bus with his hands twisted in his pockets and finds that he unconsciously only carries bags on one side, swallows around the heart that soars to his throat.
The University of Manchester is all tall buildings and old bricks and vines clinging to dear life, it’s full to the brim with people. Phil wanders the halls as if he's chasing something, maybe the trail of old memories or something to keep him grounded. Instead, he finds a lot of things that remind him of a Dan that isn't the one he left behind.
On a corner of a hall he's not quite sure he's ever been to before, Phil leans against the wall, tucks his chin into his chest, listens. The students bustle by him, paying no attention, and down the stairs stumbles a phantom of young Dan, a ghost bleeding out of Phil's memory, wild eyes and heavy shoulders and footsteps that drag on forever. Phil follows him with his eyes and remembers once, a long time ago, a mirror of the same mirage that sat on the ceramics of his old kitchen and banged its head into the cupboards, again and again.
“If I quit uni, I've nothing,” Dan said then, utter conviction and thinned pale mouth and his jeans fisted between his hands, and Phil looks at him from the corner of the hall through the decade that's passed in the same way he looked at him that day, as Dan corrected spitefully, “I am nothing.”
And Phil -- well, he slid down to the floor and looked at the ceiling and said, in the only way he ever knew how, “If you don't quit, there will be nothing of you left,” and didn't ever say, you have me.
The words burn on Phil's tongue, after. Dan's always been the talker out of the two of them, Phil's thoughts coming to him in clusters of nonsense, and so his feelings are mute more often than not. He learns to push the words behind his molars and grind on them when the nights get too silent, and the aftertaste of them rise to his mouth now, in a hall of Manchester University.
.
Before he leaves Manchester, he goes to that flat one more time. Walks around the neighborhood, uploads a picture of a squirrel to Instagram, goes up the stairway slowly, like he could fool someone he belongs there.
The door stands heavy before him, and he's rooted in his place. It's strange how even places that were his alone were never quite so, his memories stained with Dan, his years coloured by Dan's appearances. This was his place, first -- but it was theirs second, alarms ringing for morning classes and video games cases laid on the table and two toothbrushes by the sink, far more frequently than only one.
He said I love you here sparingly, his mind reminds him -- let himself loose around it like he had nothing to prove, like saying it was no different than not at all, an act of maturity. He remembers the few times he did, catching Dan's eyes in the steamed bathroom mirror or laughing himself silly over an unedited video or, only once, whispering it above Dan's Law textbooks.
“Okay,” Dan said then, twisting around in Phil's swivel chair and looking at him questionably, like he wasn't sure why Phil was saying it at all. The camera equipment in the corner of the room was blocking Dan's left eye from sight and Phil hunched his shoulders, fiddled with the laptop in his hands.
“No reason,” he answered Dan's unasked questions, didn't know how to address the silence; only knew Dan's frame was shaking under the weight of his worries and knew then, for the first time, that Dan was flawed. I love you, he said, and left out, I can now see all your faults and my feelings are the same.
Phil thinks of his first moments back in this city, stepping off the train and feeling like nothing has changed and yet nothing has remained the same. He looks at the heavy front door and knows he remembers Manchester differently than it is, but only then does he realize he remembers Manchester like home.
His friend lets him stay on the sofa. The next morning he’s gone.
.
Seven miles off Reading, Phil stands with his hands behind his back by the gate of a house he used to know, and the tips of his shoes toe the line of the front path but he doesn’t move. Inside the house, Dan’s mum shouts about dinner and the windows rattle in tune with the memories inside Phil’s head, every stair and every wall and every story he's heard long ago.
Phil doesn’t walk in. The grass is shaped like Dan’s childhood feet and the walls are painted with the colour of his handprints and the silence is the ghost of his laughter. Phil fists his hands together and goes into town instead, drags his footsteps behind him.
In Costa, he orders mocha and sits by the window, doesn’t draw in the condensation on the glass. This is Dan’s, the seat and the coffee and the town, and Phil doesn’t know what he’s doing here and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for but knows he’s looking for something, knows his heavy feet brought him here. His heart isn’t any less heavy, his lungs ache with need. The coffee is bitter more than it is sweet and it stings his tongue and it doesn’t offer answers, but maybe it’s because Phil is too tired to ask.
A hand taps on his shoulder. He turns around to a familiar face it takes him a moment too long to name, but by then she’s hugging him hello, her curls bouncing in his face.
The last time he saw her comes to him in bits, in pieces: London street-lamps and leaning on Dan too heavy and the taste of alcohol, the howl of laughter. She might’ve been a Youtuber then, or might’ve been Dan’s friend, Phil wouldn’t know -- he only remembers the train-ride there and holding Dan’s hand under tables and looking at him, eyes and straight nose and hints of jawline lit by the lamp above, and feeling the strings of emotion balling in his windpipe.
“Not here,” Dan said then, hurriedly, bright eyes darting to the group surrounding them, self-deprecating smile more of a sullen apology for his attentiveness than a sign of joy. Phil stopped then, jerked his head, said, “What, I was gonna say your hair looks like Ghirahim’s,” the lie burning his mouth like hot pepper.
Dan flicked his bangs out of his face, stuck his hands in his pockets. He shrugged one shoulder and joined a few friends to buy beers, and Phil was left with a burning mouth and the shrapnel of the first time he’s ever been unable to tell Dan he loved him because of someone else, the first time his feelings meant something to people who aren’t Dan and himself.
In costa of the distant future, the girl purses her mouth, her coffee threatening to spill from the cup, and Phil stumbles over his parting and belts out of the door, can’t escape the feeling that a single night in London seeped into his bones for many years after, left him with a burning mouth that never healed.
.
The temperatures have dropped by the time Phil's back in the city. Martyn's wearing a bright green raincoat as he waits for Phil outside the station, and he shoulders one of Phil's bags when they meet, doesn't ask for permission.
“The place's a mess,” he warns when they first walk in, as if Phil hasn't shared a house with him for nearly twenty years, doesn't know the genetic tendency they have for acquiring more things than they have room for. Cornelia greets him with a hug, barefoot and smiling and offering tea, and Phil chews on his tongue and doesn't tell either of them stop being polite to me, stop. They don't seem to know what to do with their limbs, their space, their guest, so Phil takes his belongings and drops it on his makeshift bed, closes the door.
Staying with Martyn is harder than with PJ, harder than wandering. Martyn knows him better, and it's not the things he says as much as the way his eyes follow Phil constantly; they're heavy on him, one look piling on top of the other until Phil's feet feel as if they're carrying thirty added pounds of shame and loneliness and uncertainty.
Some days the three of them eat dinner together. Some days they watch reruns just past noon, and Cornelia falls asleep to the murmur of the screen. Often, they do neither, the house is empty, and Phil's left to find Martyn's stare reflecting at him from every mirrored surface even when he’s gone, only the stare is harsher, less softened by Martyn's worried edges.
Phil misses Dan, the city enclosing him both achingly small and too large. The nights are the worst part, and his sheets are always too cold, and his waking's always to thundering silence.
.
Martyn and Cornelia move around each other, unthinking. Phil spends most mornings on the bottom stairs overlooking the kitchen, earbuds in, music muted. He watches two opposite magnets as they balance each other: he goes left, she goes right; he reaches up, she crouches down. It's habit more than it is anything but the synchrony is scraping against Phil’s ribcage, a determined sharp-nailed animal angry in his chest.
"You're shit at drying," Martyn huffs from the kitchen, titles a plate to let water drip to the floor. Cornelia swats at him with a blue-striped towel, impatiently, and he swallows down a snort as he kisses her temple.
"Love you anyway," he notes offhandedly, wipes down the damp plate. Cornelia rolls her eyes, says, "Pal, you're washing the rest of it alone with all that commentary."
Martyn, aged twenty six and forward, started telling Phil he loved him. He handed it over with Christmas gifts and cheered it with weekend brunch beers and tucked it inside finished merch products. "I love you, brother," he would say sincerely, jokingly, unheedingly, and Phil, who once lived with an older brother who'd throw shoes at him when he dared change the television station, blinked.
Later, Martyn answers, "I'm just not fifteen anymore," easy, as the two of them change the cover of the duvet into winter-heavy sheets. "I love people, I tell them sometimes. It's not a big deal."
Phil's breath is solid in his throat, he's choking on it. He nods, slow, and changes the pillowcase instead of answering.
.
.
On a frozen day in early October, Martyn takes him to the woods. He shoves a camera into his bag and throws a wool hat into Phil's hands and doesn't offer many explanations. The world in Dan's absence, Phil exhausts to himself during the drive, is awfully quiet, and his ears are ringing in longing for Dan's constant babble.
The leaves crunch under their boots as they walk. Martyn's car keys jangle in his hand but he doesn't pocket them, flips them around and around on his finger. They pass large stumps and step around puddles, Phil climbs behind Martyn's sure stride on damp rocks woven through the forest until Martyn stops, suddenly, bends to look at a mushroom.
“You should do a video here,” he says, still not looking at Phil, “like the vlogbrothers or something. That's a thing, right?”
The muted ginger of his hair looks almost orange amidst the mud and wood and weeds, and Phil can't recall the last time he's been so silent around his brother, usually his mouth runs and runs until he can't catch up with it and it ends up miles from where his mind is.
“I can't,” he answers, as honestly as he manages. And it's true, nothing but the truth: he's done one video, maybe two since he left. But it's been a month now, more, and other than the odd tweet he's been unable to do anything at all; the camera looks at him angry and demanding and he faces it wordless, he has no more truths to tell.
“You have to,” Martyn says, simply, and Phil knows the words he's really saying, you have to move on, also knows he's right. The wood chirps around them, careless. The drive back is just as quiet as the one before it, and Phil lets his elbow rest on the windowsill of the car, breathes.
.
He takes all the bags he never bothered to unpack and leaves Martyn's flat the following week. Martyn may be right, but Phil's running from his truths even faster than he used to run his mouth and he has no place in his runaway load for those who'd rather give him the facts over the benefit of the doubt.
.
The spare keys to his parents' house is in the ceramic turtle by the door, Phil could find it blind; but he still knocks, a lone drum beating at his temple ceaselessly, a rhythm that wants him far away.
This is home, he tells the drum, tells his heart, tells himself, but he doesn't bend for the keys because his mind is not convinced, and the drum keeps beating on and on.
His mum opens the door with mud stains on her blouse and a smile curved from ear to ear, bigger than the rest of her, almost swallowing him whole. She wraps herself around him immediately, chatters in his ear, but everything's a dull sound and the suitcase slips from his grasp to the floor.
"It's a good thing you're home," she tells him later, sure, shoving his rumpled clothes into the washing machine. She tells him of his cousin and of her petunias and of the pie she burnt for supper, doesn't ask about him, doesn't ask about Dan. Phil looks at her pouring the detergent in and wonders at the last time he's heard Dan's name spoken out loud.
He settles in the guest room by the stairs, the clean white of the walls giving him a headache. This is not the house he grew up in, this is not his room; it’s a space free of memories, free of childhood belongings, free of Phil. It’s a room that has no ghosts and Phil forces himself to sink into it, forces the quiet into a good thing.
A house is not a home. Phil’s mum talks to her sister on the phone downstairs, his primary school picture is hung on the wall by the fireplace; a house is not a home and this house is filled with family, so it should be home, should be familiarity.
Phil resolutely ignores the all the ways it’s really not.
.
When it rains, Phil goes down to the kitchen to press his forehead to the foggy windows and listen. The weeks pass him by cold, unchanging, and he submerges into a routine of nothing, nothing, nothing. Some days his dad asks for help in the garage, and some days he takes the dog for a walk, but most days he stays in bed until the morning’s no longer so and pretends he’s slept late, doesn’t let know he’s barely sleeping at all.
In the kitchen, half past eleven at night, his mum’s huddled by the corner wall with the phone clutched to her ear. She’s in her night robe and she doesn’t see Phil, Phil doesn’t tell her he’s there, he just wants the white noise of the storm and the wind shaking the trees to drown him, create something new of his remains.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” his mum says, gentle, her face hidden in the dark. “He’s yet to say anything, I don’t know if he will.”
Phil’s heart beats, his world stops momentarily. He has been unaware that his world was turning all this time, the sudden attention to everything spinning around him and skidding to a halt making him dizzy, but here it is, here is his life unfolding before him: his mum, the phone, and Dan on the other side. Phil would know Dan with no voice, no face, no existence, would know Dan anywhere.
His mum hushes, “I know, I know,” and Phil, his lungs not big enough for breathing, shrunken and dead in the pit of his stomach, imagines a world different than his own -- where he rounds the kitchen table and takes the phone in his hand and tells Dan a million times, I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m sorry.
He doesn’t. His mum whispers, “It will be okay,” and Phil runs, runs, runs.
.
Martyn comes to stay with them on Thursday, rings the bell and smiles hello and pretends he’s not worried. He joins dinner with hands full of creased excuses, Cornelia’s away and the house got too silent and I just felt like coming home for a while. Phil’s mum serves the casserole and no one at the table says Martyn’s there to check up on Phil, but they’re all thinking it.
Underneath the table, Phil’s knees knock into the table legs and his limbs are too long for the seat and the broccoli tastes like plastic. Martyn doesn’t say I’m worried but he looks at Phil every time he makes a joke, and Phil laughs along because he’s tired of being treated like he’s broken.
At midnight, Martyn knocks on the door of Phil’s guestroom and leans against the doorframe in the dark, asks, “Are you alright?”, in the tone he never dared use when Phil was staying at his. Phil turns to face the wall, becomes nothing but a sharp figure in the dark, says, “I am,” because the truth is even if he’s not, he has nothing to say.
Martyn sighs and closes the door and his footsteps carry through the hallway. Phil tugs the sheets over his head and wishes it all away.
.
I love him, Phil tells Martyn, eventually, as they’re mowing the lawn in the afternoon. I love him, he tells his grandma over the phone, tells a uni friend he runs into in the street, tells the cashier in the grocery shop when she asks about the sadness wrinkled at his face. I love him, I love him, I love him.
I love him, Phil tells him mum at half past midnight from across the dinner table, and she warms her palms around her mug of tea and looks at him like she understands. He says this when she asks about Dan for the first time, hushed voice and her eyes downturned, and when she looks up at him again she says, you’re telling the wrong people, hun, and the thing is, knowing she’s right doesn’t make it easier.
He tells them all I love him, and they shake their heads and ask, then why did you leave, and don’t understand. Phil closes his mouth and clenches his hands and doesn’t say why he had to leave, says I love him instead, because they don’t understand. they’ll never understand, but the thing is Dan doesn’t understand, either, and it’s not fair to tell them when Dan doesn’t know.
In the kitchen in the middle of the night, Phil’s mum puts her mug in the sink silently and doesn’t turn to face him when she says, “I just need to know you know why you left, Phil,” and he tangles his fingers so tightly together it hurts, answers, “Yeah,” exhales when she doesn’t ask him to explain.
(And the bottom line is, he does -- knows why he left, knew all along. The bottom line is, he was choking on the I love you’s he’d never gotten to say, the ones he’d gotten to say and said all wrong, the ones he’d never wanted to say to begin with. And they were filling the spaces between his bones and his lungs and were scaling up his throat, and he couldn’t breathe so now he’s saying them to strangers instead, strangers and friends and everyone, anyone who isn’t Dan.
On a bus to the city nearing the end of October, Phil thumbs down his timeline and stares at Dan’s latest tweet about Lorde, almost tweets him back. He wants to say a joke about Lorde of the Rings, wants to say living in ruins of a palace, wants to say I love you, doesn’t. Only pockets his phone and stares out the window and ignores the way his splintered chest is tearing through his shirt, his heart gushing out of it.)
.
In the living room, his dad falls asleep with the dog on his chest. His mum reads, her glasses sliding to the tip of her nose. And Phil, he exists, and drags his way through each day, and carries the terrible burden of knowing sometimes your misery is your own damn fault.
.
Because the truth, the heartbreaking truth is:
Phil is losing who they are, is drowning in everything they say they are but aren’t, in everything they don’t say and are. Phil doesn’t know who he is without Dan but is starting to think he doesn’t know with him, either.
Phil says I love you and knows it’s true, knows it vividly enough that it’s all he knows some days. But Phil says I love you and at some point realizes he doesn’t know what it means anymore, and then stops saying it because he doesn’t know how.
.
An elderly couple lives in his parents’ old house now, the yard full of toys belonging to their grandchildren, and Phil drives around a few times, observing from afar. Still -- the hole in the fence is where it always was, where Phil used to duck and crawl and scrape his knees and look for animals to befriend, and one day he goes through it, leans against an old tree and watches the house from where he knows he won't be seen.
Maybe a decade, maybe a century, maybe a millennium; forever ago there was only Dan's gloved hands on the back of his neck in this very yard and smiles through computer screens and too much hair for their young faces. Forever ago Phil had a lifetime of short moments in this house, primary school and a dozen winters and growing up, one long spinal vertebra after the other. Forever ago this house was all Phil's ever known.
Now, this is someone else's, and the house is too small for everyone's memories, Phil only gets to save a few. A cold wind chills him, he pulls the scarf around his neck.
I love him, he whispers, maybe to himself, tosses that around in his palms until it's nothing but syllables, nothing but his voice in the wind. I love him, he says, and doesn't know what it means, can hear his voice cracking around it like china.
Phil has loved Dan for so long, he doesn't remember what it's like not loving him. Phil has loved Dan since this house, since boney bodies and muddy futures, since before there was them, since he didn't know loving someone felt widespread and tangible in his core. Phil has loved Dan since long before he knew he did, and he remembers saying it from miles and miles away, remembers mumbling it up close with his nose pressed to Dan's cheek, remembers shouting it from rooftops just because.
He remembers -- saying it because it slipped off his tongue, and later because it was the only way to describe the bubble expanding in his chest. He remembers saying it when all it was made of had been the restlessness in him that whispered I feel like this is forever even while I'm terrified it won't last; when it felt a little like an addiction, tasting sweeter and better on his tongue, words that were pure-hearted and stupid and baseless, because -- because.
Because they didn't know what love was, didn't have a meaning for the words whispered in the dark, but it sat right in his mouth and between his teeth and when he gave it a voice.
And he never stopped knowing it was true; but as Phil pulls a splintered shred of his heart out of his chest, flips it between his hands, he doesn't know when he started looking for meaning.
.
His mum walks him to the door, the two of them lingering as Phil's dad loads the bags into the cab. She looks at him then, crosses her arms over her chest, titles her head to one side, and he realizes that his mum's never been much of a talker, either, and yet he's never noticed the absence. Her feelings were clear to him, always; in warm hands holding his own and humour she gifted him and a specific slant to her eyes, a nonverbal language.
"You look better," she tells him, curls one arm around his shoulder lightly. He thinks it might be her way of telling him he's right about leaving, her way of saying she understands what he hasn't tried to say. He thinks maybe she knows what he doesn't yet, always and forevermore.
"I'm close to figuring some stuff out," he acknowledges, means it. The heavy feelings he's been carrying is twisting and turning, wrenching at his organs incessantly.
His mun hums, pulls both ends of her cardigan closer together. That slant to her eyes tells him you are, tells him it'll work out, tells him go. "And where will you be headed from here?"
He shifts his weight between his feet. His dad closes the boot of the car with finality. The dog barks inside, a farewell. "Don't know yet."
He kisses her goodbye, doesn't tell her of the train tickets his heart's purchased without his permission, and he leaves with his pocket weighing him down into the earth.
.
Piccadilly is crowded and cold and busy. Phil stands. He tugs his hat lower on his ears and his fingers shake around the handle of his suitcase and he stares, stares, doesn’t know at what.
Phil thinks of Brighton, thinks of Manchester, thinks of the train ticket to London in his pocket. He thinks of home, thinks of Dan.
A train stops at the station and a couple embraces. Phil’s heart’s beating and he remembers the cold and the rush and his fingers closing around Dan’s wrist a moment before they hugged for the first time. Phil remembers this: that first year and the one after that, the third one, the fifth, the tenth. He remembers this: cold feet pressing against his ankles at night and the dent of a dimple and too-early coffees before meetings. He remembers: his chest feeling too small for the emotion he’s carrying, his cheeks hurting from laughter, his bones aching with the heavy knowledge of loving someone as much as you can love anything at all. He remembers saying words that meant the thing you went back to at night was more a person than a place.
Phil remembers home, and for once it grounds him, doesn’t slip between his fingers. He tightens his grip, gets on the train.
.
In November, Phil comes back.
Dan’s sitting on the sofa with a cold mug of tea when Phil reaches the top of the stairs, carrying a suitcase and two bags and his beating heart in his clammy hand. He says, “Manchester’s too cold.” What he means is, I missed you.
Dan puts the mug on the coffee table and walks to Phil, stands in front of him three centuries older in a sweater that isn’t his and with heartbreak painted over his mouth in a curved line. He takes the suitcase and the bags and Phil’s heart, tucks it into his back pocket. He says, “I’ve got the heating on, c’mon.” What he means is, I’ll forgive you.
Later, Dan sits in the corner of the room while Phil sinks into a bath of water fifteen degrees too hot, thumbs through a book he’s not really reading. They don’t talk, but when Phil drains the water and steps out with burning red skin, Dan hands him a towel and wipes the steam off Phil’s glasses, sighs audibly.
Under the sheets, they press knobby knees together and Dan bites his mouth raw and Phil doesn’t say he’s sorry. He does say I liked your last video, and my parents’ dog says hi, and train rides aren’t the same without you. Dan’s only response is pressing his frozen knuckles to Phil’s pulse point and breathing.
Dan says okay, again and again. At three in the morning Phil’s head is pounding and he says, “I’m out of train tickets,” and what he means is this isn’t temporary, and Dan says, “Okay.” Phil takes the frozen knuckles with frozen fingers and puts them against his cheek. Dan says okay and means I’ll forgive you. Phil whispers, “I’ll wait,” and means just that.
(excerpt: phil meets two hundred and forty eight versions of himself by the time he’s twenty-three, and they never leave, trailing after him with phantom smiles and paper-thin skins that hold their stories inside.)
notes: a 2012 christmastime fic. because apparently i’ve started an unhappy christmas fics tradition, and this has been sitting in my folders for too long.
a quirky, strange, angsty little thing that started as me toying with realistic sci-fi and turned into some kind of elaborate metaphor for 2012!phil. warning that this fic mentions/deals with the vday vid, because i figured, you know. if i go mia might as well look taboos in the eye. also read on ao3.
-
In one world, Phil’s uncle takes him hunting as a child. This Phil becomes a vet, and he sits at the foot of the bed with running red hands and leaves marks on the duvet, blood and guilt and apathy. He isn’t fond of houseplants, and his cold eyes are unchanging as he glances over Phil’s shoulder at pictures of cats online.
Dan turns off the torch and says, “Ghosts don’t really exist, Phil,” the way he says everything to Phil nowadays. Phil spreads his legs eagle on the ground and leaves his torch on, watches the trail of light on the carpet that makes his insides feel weightless, somehow, something to focus on rather than the frost cut of Dan’s voice.
“They do too,” Phil says, even though Dan’s not listening. In the background the camera’s still rolling and Phil’s ghosts are swarming around it, loitering, but it won’t catch anything except the slope of Phil’s shoulders and the downturn curve of his mouth, and Phil’s stopped trying a long time ago.
In late July they move to London. They spend two days within bare walls and bare floors and bare skins, leave teeth marks behind, don’t talk after. Phil follows the beads of sweat on the back of Dan’s neck as they carry the boxes up the stairs and trips over a ghost’s legs in the hallway, almost bites his tongue off.
His skin’s made of rug-burns and angry red, cracked right open. On Tuesday the lorry brings their beds and Phil spends the night trapped between piling ghosts, and in the morning Dan’s bedroom door is still closed, and Phil misses it, misses it, misses it so bad he can hardly breathe.
Ghosts linger. Ghosts linger at his side and linger in his room and leave lingering traces of translucent on his walls, his house, his hands. They never leave and he never asks – and so they stay. He doesn’t know another way of living.
Dan folds sharp-edged limbs into the corners of the table with a plastic bowl of cereal, says, “The new update of Skyrim is coming soon,” ignores the way he’s not said a word to Phil in days. Phil wraps jittery fingers around his coffee and shoves his jittery heart down his throat, says, “We should buy it with Bryony,” in a cardboard-flat tone, emotions bitten so far back his teeth are sore.
In one world, Year Nine Phil finds someone emptying their lunch into the school toilet, their back shaking under his shell-shocked hands. This Phil learns Psychology in uni, instead, and now he leans against the wall with rough cheeks and ink-stains on his white buttoned shirt, pushes his glasses back and chews on empty words, of the way Dan’s tightly-applied mask of a face doesn’t erase days of silence.
This Phil’s touch is terror-cold against the small of Phil’s back, and his empty words secure around Phil’s throat like a leech. Phil clinks the teaspoon inside his coffee just so there’d be something to fill the silence and pulls away from that Phil’s touch, retreats slowly to his room.
In one universe, Phil falls when he rides his bike for the first time. In another, he’s allergic to pepper. There’s one in which he doesn’t get accepted to York and one in which he decided never to dye his hair, there’s one in which he ordered cappuccino rather than peppermint mocha in Starbucks that first week of September, when it started snowing last year.
In another universe: he can’t see ghosts. Phil knows this. He knows this because every road he crosses safely and every risk he doesn’t take is a world where he doesn’t, a world where he does, a world where he ends up here or ends up there or ends up being not at all. There’s a world for everything different and Phil can see them all, collects them like folded origami birds, pressed and delicate and safe in his pockets.
Late October, someone finds the video. Late October, nothing real breaks and nothing real fractures but everything does, and Phil’s cursor hovers over his tumblr inbox, doesn’t click it open. The hands of the ghosts running through his body are cold, cold, ice through his bloodstream, but he calls a counsel and emails YouTube and sits with Dan on the floor of the hallway until it’s five in the morning, and the laptop screen’s bleeding text, he stopped feeling his legs maybe an hour ago.
There’s a foot between them, and there’s been a foot for a while only Phil didn’t know it could get worse. At five Dan goes to sleep, and he doesn’t extend an offer.
Dan screams, and all of Phil’s ghosts stop and listen.
Phil covers his bleeding ears with metaphorical hands and widens his mouth into a smile long enough to make all the voices go away.
In the shop, he runs into a girl who wants his autograph and thinks even his avocado is interesting and asks him if they’re cooking a romantic dinner without missing a beat, shifts weight between both feet and steps over his ghosts without knowing.
Phil says, we’ll be fine, and Dan says, it’s not good enough, it’s not fucking good enough, throws his frustration against the walls. It’s not that Phil doesn’t care, it’s that the words coat the insides of his mouth sour and he doesn’t want to talk – and it’s not going away, he tells Dan, so stop bringing it up.
Dan can’t stop bringing it up. Dan talks to walls and Dan talks to himself and Dan talks to the internet, doesn’t realize that the difference in this is the internet talking back. Phil can’t stand Dan talking about this and can’t stand talking about it long enough to tell him to stop, so he shuts himself away with the ghosts inside his room and stares at his books until the letters are a smear of black.
Phil thinks maybe in one universe, this doesn’t happen. He thinks of this and thinks of maybes and realizes that perhaps this doesn’t happen in more than just one universe, and can’t fill his lungs with air, they’re too occupied with jealousy.
Not all days are bad. Some days Phil isn’t as afraid, and his mind is quiet as he wakes up and shoves the limbs of his ghosts away with his feet, bends and turns and folds them into the cavity underneath the bed. Some days he kisses Dan good morning and Dan doesn’t mention the voices of the people crawling on the walls of their flat and the walls of their heads, and everything is easy, for a moment, when Dan allows him to just pretend.
Not all days are bad. Some days Phil lets himself love Dan without thinking and Dan lets himself take things as they are without demanding answers. These days aren’t few and aren’t far in-between but they’re silent, somehow, between the echoes of the days that divide them.
Dan brings his hat to bed and lies on his back next to Phil, touching elbows creating mismatched triangles. Phil walks his tired fingers over patterns in the sheets and doesn’t look at Dan, at the loose strings of his hat and the loose strain in his eyes.
These days, Dan looks at Phil like it’s painful. Phil still remembers when Dan looked at him like he was everything good, so he’d rather look away, claws his nails into the old memory like it’d make this one go away.
In fifty-six out of two hundred and thirteen universes, they break up. Phil sits in the corner of his room and shapes the numbers into his knees with pale fingers and breathes in sync with the ghosts around him. Across the hall Dan slams his door shut and doesn’t call for Phil, and all of Phil’s ghosts blink in and out of view around him, waiting.
Phil doesn’t get up from the corner. He draws in his knees and clenches his eyes and can’t unsee the ghosts that surround him, crowding his room, crowding his mind. In one world he grew up in Birmingham, in another he lost his sight. In some of them he ends up here and in some of them he doesn’t but it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all. He’s there and he’s here and they won’t leave him alone and Phil can’t forget their stories but he wishes he could, because they’re not his stories and the what if’s are leaving scars behind on his petal-tender chest.
(There is a problem, maybe, and maybe it won’t go away if they won’t make it, but –
Phil says, okay, kisses Dan in the dark. It isn’t okay. Dan kisses back.)
In fifty-six worlds they break up. In November Dan tells him good morning but eats dinner in his room, and Phil sleeps with his bedroom door locked and his toes pressed against the feet of withering ghosts. Sometimes they kiss on the sofa in the office, sometimes the infrasound of the ghosts and the people and the audience keeps echoing in Phil’s head at three in the morning, and he never leaves his room, never unlocks the door.
The ghosts never shut up and Dan’s feet never stop dragging and Phil doesn’t know if this is the fifty-seventh universe, doesn’t know if they have anything left between them to break at all.
“You won’t fucking talk to me,” Dan says, and he isn’t shouting, doesn’t shout, but Phil thinks it might be better if he would.
Phil doesn’t hate his ghosts. He accepts them the only way he knows how, avoids their shoulders in the hall and steps over their outstretched legs when he leaves his room.
He doesn’t hate his ghosts, he only hates one. In one world, he tumbles down his house’s stairs and breaks his camera in late January of 2010, and for Valentine’s he sends Dan a teddy bear to India and nothing else. This Phil never learns of despair and paranoia, instead leaves discoloured patches on the walls when he moves with lighter steps, lesser worry. He’s not smarter and he’s not better but he’s easier, and the Phil who watched his step and never did fall down leaves that Phil in the darkest corners of his own room, avoids. He hates that Phil’s transparent eyes and transparent skin, hates the veins under his wrists, hates the static of his lungs, the way he holds himself straight. Not all days are bad but some of them are, and when Phil can’t bring himself to look Dan in the eye the Phil of that universe passes by Dan with outturned palms and lined spine, thinks of it nothing, and Phil exhales exhaustion and hates that Phil, hates him, hates him, hates him more.
They film the radio Christmas show again and again and again. Dan’s unhappy with his sweater and unhappy with the tree and unhappy with their elves jokes, maybe we should rewrite that, while Phil leans back against the shelves and says, “Santa won’t approve of your imperious character, Dan,” makes vague animal noises into his mic, pretends it’s on.
“Fuck Santa,” Dan says absently, settles back next to Phil with the new script in hand, and his knee jabs into Phil’s rib hard enough to make Phil feel his throbbing heartbeat but he doesn’t notice, tries hard not to, Phil knows the rigid jut to his jaw like he knows the shape of Dan’s lips on his.
Their regular show isn’t due until next year but Dan’s worried, worried, worried all the time. Phil doesn’t know how to be worried for so long without slipping so he isn’t, tries hard not to be, makes an innuendo he knows won’t make it in.
“You can’t say that on the radio,” Dan says, stony, and Phil doesn’t remember the last time he’s heard Dan laugh at his joke on camera, doesn’t vividly remember the last time he really heard Dan laugh at all. Phil can’t handle that, can’t breathe, instead turns away to put antlers on and mutters, “Again, we need another cut.”
Phil meets two hundred and forty eight versions of himself by the time he’s twenty-three, and they never leave, trailing after him with phantom smiles and paper-thin skins that hold their stories inside. He counts them every day before he goes to sleep, numbers the new ones, names the worlds he’ll never get to see.
Phil meets two hundred and forty eight versions of himself by the time he’s twenty-three, and in fifty-six of those Dan and he break up. In a hundred and eighty nine of those they stay together, in ninety-seven there’s never anything to begin with for Phil to find.
Phil meets two hundred and forty eight versions of himself by the time he’s twenty-three, but he only ever meets one where he’s never met Dan. Phil doesn’t know what this means, doesn’t know how to wrap his mind around Dan being a fixated constituent in his life. Phil only knows there’s a world for every twist and bend in the fabric of the universe and Dan’s in all of them, Dan’s a part of the fabric of Phil’s universe. Phil only knows loving Dan isn’t something he can unlearn.
“If I went to Mars I’d take you,” Phil tells Dan earnestly at PJ’s Christmas party, drunk off alcohol and music and fairy-lights. Everyone who’s there knows but Dan’s hand never touches his and the mistletoe’s left forgotten, and they don’t kiss there and don’t kiss at home and Phil never says I love you anymore, not quite.
“I’d take you over anything,” he clarifies, finishes his drink, leaves that sentence hanging off a cliff and doesn’t talk about how the bottom is even though it’s tough. Dan hides his eyes away and says, “You’re so fucking weird, Phil, you and your space obsession,” like he doesn’t know this is Phil’s I love you, like maybe it’s not enough.
Phil’s drunk and Phil’s tired and Phil’s not sure if this is enough. Dan’s hand never touches his but their shadows on PJ’s carpet are one, and Phil thinks this must be enough, because how can love not be.
On December 31st, 2012, the clock chimes midnight and Phil raises his glass with Dan’s, holds his gaze, smiles. Later that night they’ll fuck frantically against walls in dark corners and in the morning they’ll wake aching and hungover and sad, and the twist of Dan’s mouth will pull at Phil’s heart, the way he’ll draw his hands away. Now, the clock chimes midnight and they smile, and Phil’s ghosts hover at his shoulders, linger. One day he’ll stop wanting to lock the door and will start kissing the frown off of Dan’s December mouth instead, and the ghosts won’t be there when he walks into his room, not anymore.
Two, three, four years from now. It’s not now but it’s not never. They’ll be gone and he might miss them, might not, but Dan doesn’t leave traces on the walls and his fingers are long, cold, enough.
excerpt: dan studies the shape of phil’s bones, mimics his accent, masters his gait. dan looks at phil like he’s the spokesman of all of humanity, and phil straightens his spine and always watches his tongue and does his best to be good, better, best.
notes: an outer-space fic, with phil as an astronaut and dan as something entirely different, in a non-linear narrative. also read on ao3.
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“I guess I always thought the villain in an interspecies tragic love-affair won’t be humanity,” Phil says into Dan’s translucent collar-bones one night, on the spaceship bunk-bed that doesn’t really have room for them both. “I guess, maybe, I wanted to believe we can be good, out of our own planet.”
“You are good,” argues Dan, with the certainty and naivety of someone who’s never studied blood and wars in history, who’s never argued over chores as he ate breakfast, death and crime on the news in the lounge, a constant background noise. “You have a conscience. Ethics. You insist on equalizing your chest-organ to your morality and emotions for some reason, which was really fucking strange for me in universal life-forms studies, by the way, but you have it. You’re good.”
.
Phil circles suns and orbits asteroids and passes galaxies, Phil learns space, Phil knows the curve and bend and breaking point of the stars in the sky. Phil lands on a planet no one’s ever seen and no one’s ever named after days and weeks and years, and he finally meets them, meets the others.
The others don’t look like humans and they don’t look like animals and they don’t look like anything at all, don’t look like anything fixed. Phil leaves his spaceship and the others morph from undefined shapes into forms that resemble him, in some ways, look nothing like him in others. They take him with them and he exhales onto the inside of his helmet and curls his fingers around his gloves and doesn’t remember to maybe be afraid.
.
In the second laboratory, Dan helps him graph the content of the planet’s air on the four-dimensional screens, says, “These elements create a fucking inorganic compound, see?”, for no real reason. Phil laughs sharply and exclaims, “Stop,” can’t help but smile with the corners of his mouth, never tells Dan he’s using the word wrong, never does anything except chide him in a feeble attempt at civility.
There’s something about curse words Dan takes a fondness to. “They don’t mean anything,” he says, messes with Phil’s nanoelectronics while Phil heats up freeze-dried powders for dinner. “Your people invented words that are utterly meaningless just to make your sentences sound angrier, and now you don’t even use it when you’re angry, you use it justbecause. They are words that are pointless and the way you’re so against them is simply hilarious to me.”
Phil shoves a fork into a tube and shakes his head, doesn’t tell Dan he’s right, doesn’t tell Dan he’s wrong. He offers Dan a forkful of his tube and laughs when he refuses, laughs when he wrinkles his nose, laughs when he kisses him until the thermometers in his suit are buzzing non-stop.
.
They have him talking for hours. About nothing, about everything, sat in a curved seat in a sterile laboratory, just to hear him talk. The scientists in the room move the mouths they created for themselves along with his, imitating his words as he talks about the prime minister and the pharmacy across the street back home and ghosts riding the tube. In an hour, they can speak basic English. In two, they’re on a par with adults.
When his throat goes dry they offer him a glass of artificially-made water, with hands they didn’t have half an hour before. The laboratory contains breathable air that still makes his head spin for the first few moments, and they watch him and he watches them and this isn’t what Phil expected, except maybe it is.
He drinks their water and breathes their air and teaches them words he doesn’t quite hear, and his fingers are tight around the helmet in his lap but he isn’t afraid, isn’t afraid, doesn’t know why. Eventually, they clear the room and clean his seat, and send him over to someone named Dan.
.
In the fourth room on the third floor Dan’s people keep records of every planet they’ve mapped so far, of every energy-source, of every sign of life. Phil discovers they knew of humans far longer than humans knew of anything other than themselves, and he isn’t surprised, not even when maybe he should be.
“There are four-hundred and twenty-six populated planets we know of so far,” Dan tells him casually, waves his hand in front of the scanner to make all four-hundred and twenty-six holograms appear in the air. “We study them as part of our education. We all share a universe, you know.”
Phil knows. He knows, even though he doesn’t, because he certainly didn’t know of these populated planets, because he’s the first human to encounter another life-form in all of humanity’s history. He doesn’t tell Dan this – not because he’s ashamed or worried, but because he doesn’t have to, but because the file carrying the title Earth has everything and anything about them, names and cartography and details Phil’s known and Phil hasn’t, details that describe everything there is to know.
.
He’s not a scientist, Dan introduces himself in the second laboratory, as Phil’s lowered into another seat and Dan slowly grows himself a pair of legs and hair that resembles Phil’s. He’s not a scientist but rather a researcher, because he wanted to know everything and he’s learned everything they could teach him until they could teach him no more, and then he started teaching himself.
Dan would be Phil’s guide, they tell him. He’d make sure Phil’s provided with everything he needs and learns everything he wants and sees everything he’s interested in. He’d escort him, they tell him, and Dan smiles at him with a dimple he’s just created and his too-large hands on his sharp hips and Phil smiles back because he doesn’t know what else to do, because Dan tries to shake his hand and can’t quite control his limbs yet, bursts out laughing when he fails.
.
Dan studies the shape of Phil’s bones, mimics his accent, masters his gait. Dan looks at Phil like he’s the spokesman of all of humanity, and Phil straightens his spine and always watches his tongue and does his best to be good, better, best.
The three moons above them spin faster, blue and gray, and the beetle-shaped being in the transparent case on Dan’s desk watches Phil with twenty careful eyes. Dan looks up from the being, smiles at Phil, looks back down. Phil watches the slant of Dan’s profile and his heart doesn’t skip and his cheeks don’t blush and his palms don’t sweat. He breathes, slow and steady, presses his mouth to Dan’s shoulder, just because.
“There’s nothing to it except loving you,” he tells Dan later, simply, beneath purple-coloured skies. Dan grins and throws one of the spaceship’s radiation-shields at Phil’s head, and he’s not human, not human, not at all, but there’s so much of him that is and Phil’s getting lost in it.
.
Dan doesn’t know what to call his own people when Phil asks. “There’s no word for it in the English language,” he frowns, thumbs through another population register in the filesystem on the screen before them. “We don’t call ourselves anything, not the way you do. There’s no separation between species, no humans or animals or plants. We’re all just – we’re beings.”
Back home, in a tiny London flat Phil hasn’t seen in days and weeks and years, he had a collection of a few dozen houseplants. He loved them and he took care of them and his friends raised eyebrows, flicked the leaves, told him, they’re just plants, Phil, not pets.
They weren’t pets and weren’t humans but he loved them nonetheless, because it didn’t matter. Dan calls everything capable of a cycle on his planet beings, and Phil stares at the population register on the screen without seeing and feels his heart beat steadily in his chest, a beat then a second and a third.
.
His commanders call him, twice a month via video, once a week via text. They ask how he’s doing and he gives them detailed reports of biology and botany and geology, sends them photos of enlarged cells, talks and talks and explains, doesn’t say that he’s fallen in love with someone from outer space.
.
And the truth is, well. They never really ask.
.
Dan kisses him one afternoon, with a floating plant in his hands and soil beneath his fingernails. Kisses him with eyes wide open and Phil’s jaw in his palm, pulls away, presses their lips again fleetingly, closes his eyes then goes back to explaining the plant’s energy circulation.
Phil’s toes are numb in his boots and his mouth is red and shiny but Dan doesn’t say anything, doesn’t act like anything’s wrong. The plant is resisting Dan’s hold and Phil touches its stem with hesitant fingers, listens closely, remembers to breathe.
(Later: Dan lets go of the plant and it floats up to the ceiling, and they watch it go until Phil pulls Dan close and leaves muddy fingerprints on his neck as he kisses his mouth dry.)
.
Science-fiction taught him that aliens would be different. That they’d have additional pairs of limbs and antennae growing from their foreheads and they’d be more evolved technologically, maybe, but always less evolved socially. Science-fiction taught him humans are one of a kind because their humanity is what makes them so.
Phil doesn’t call Dan an alien, because he’s not one. He doesn’t call Dan an alien and he doesn’t call Dan’s friends aliens and he doesn’t call the scientists who check up on him every three weeks aliens, because they’re nothing like what science-fiction always taught him, nothing like that at all. Dan’s people are compassionate and curious and friendly, they take care of their own, they take care of others. Dan’s people have technology and they have culture and they don’t have words to describe themselves because they aren’t constantly obsessed with separating themselves from others, aren’t obsessed with creating the boundaries between what is and what isn’t.
On Dan’s planet, Phil learns that humanity isn’t what makes humans so. On Dan’s planet, in Dan’s laboratory and Dan’s house and Dan’s colonies, Phil learns that what makes humans so are themselves, because humans called themselves humans and they called animals and plants and still-life something else, created the borders between themselves and others, sectioned their planet into separated parts and provoked wars between them.
Science-fiction taught him aliens would be lesser than humans. Dan’s planet teaches him that he doesn’t want to go back.
.
It’s not really that Phil falls in love with Dan. It’s not really anything, not really at all. It’s more that Dan shows him molecules humans never knew of and Dan gets excited about every pop-culture fact Phil tells him and Dan’s laughter reverberates between Phil’s ribs and it isn’t really that Phil falls in love with Dan, but rather that suddenly he’s been in love with him all along.
.
An old law on planet Earth Phil’s long since forgotten says, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. He studies rocks and sediment and bacteria on a planet that isn’t his and fucks a man that isn’t human and doesn’t remember to be afraid, even though he should.
But anything that can go wrong will go wrong and eventually, they find out.
.
Long after, on planet Earth: he tells them of Dan and they tell him he’s wrong and his fingers are tight around the helmet he no longer has in his lap but he isn’t afraid, isn’t afraid, doesn’t know why.
summary: some things change and some things don’t. they go to phil’s school reunion and the ways in which things have remained the same start chiming louder and louder.
notes: anonymous said: i feel like the highschool reunion + existential crisis the day before might make a good fic. for context, the 29th of august timeline: this tweet, a pic i can’t seem to retrieve of a fan and their mom who met dan and phil at a restaurant where they were with phil’s school friends, this tweet, this one, and these two tweets.
a semi-fic about how change is as terrifying as the lack of, and about how just because you don’t want to define something within structured lines doesn’t mean it won’t be defined for you. also read on ao3
there is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. (nelson mandela)
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I.
The invitation sits in his inbox for three days, four, seventeen. It’s untouched but he marks it with a star so he won’t lose it, even though he tells Dan he doesn’t want to go when Dan asks.
Eighteen, nineteen, thirty-three. On Wednesday he opens the reply and doesn’t thumb through his yearbook to search for the face of the name that signed the email. He types, I’ll be there, doesn’t add a smiley. Dan eats lunch on the sofa and says nothing.
-
II.
“I don’t have to come,” Dan says. He works his jaw around the words like they mean something, like it isn’t the hundredth time he’s said so. He draws his shoulders close and seems less broad than a moment before, tucks his elbows in, says, “You don’t have to take me,” again.
Phil drops his eyes to his laptop screen, says, “You should come,” doesn’t fake a smile. He doesn’t like falsely curving his face into that, doesn’t like feeling like a liar. Dan shifts closer to the faraway corner of the sofa, drawn-shoulders and tucked-in elbows and a pressed mouth that holds words he doesn’t want to say. They don’t talk about how Dan coming means something. They don’t talk about anything at all.
-
III.
Dan knows Phil wants to take him, also knows why he’s uncertain. He says neither of the two because neither of those matters, in the long run, because neither of those would change a thing. He spreads his warm fingers over Phil’s shoulder and breathes onto the nape of his neck. Phil throws socks into the bag and drains all the air out of his lungs until they’re shrivelled and wrinkled and small.
-
IV.
“Last chance, okay? You really don’t have to take m---“
“Dan. Stop.”
-
V.
He wants Dan there, he wants Dan there, he wants Dan there. He curls into his side of the bed and tells the dents in the walls he wants Dan there, and they believe him because he’s telling the truth. He doesn’t smile, because he’s not a liar. He wants Dan everywhere and the thing is, that’s the problem.
-
VI.
He almost misses the train and he gets on it with the wrong bag and his phone uncharged and sweat dripping down his forehead, his chin, the back of his neck. Dan tips his head into his seat and offers him a bottle of Fanta in silence, his features twisting, offering him a smile. They share the armrest between their seats, share the three-hour train ride, share the daily crossword in the newspaper they find on the next seat. Dan maps his finger over the paper and says, one's wrong to eat no protein is myosin, presses his gentle smiles to the crook of Phil’s angles without touching.
Twenty minutes past the first hour mark, Dan falls asleep on Phil’s shoulder and Phil thinks of Japan. The train ride to Manchester isn’t Tokyo and it isn’t private and the man across the aisle watches them, intrigued, but Phil doesn’t shrug Dan off. He folds the newspaper in half and tells the torn stitches in the filling of the empty seat across of him that he wants Dan there, quirks the corners of his mouth into a smile, doesn’t feel like too much of a liar.
-
VII.
The train station in Manchester looks the same as when they left, five suitcases between them and pockets full of nothing except groundless faith. Off the train, they order a taxi in clothes that cost more than they used to spend on a week’s food and a subscribers count that’s tripled itself twice, and yet the floors are muddy in the same places, the glass-windows tinting the same way. Manchester hasn’t changed but they have and Phil’s chest clenches once, twice, stops. Dan finds a taxi and the motions carry on.
-
VIII.
“—I work in accountancy now, actually, but it’s only temporary because –“
“—had two kids, Oli and Meghan, little monsters but they’re me babies –“
“—getting married next summer, you know, right after I quit this job –“
Phil drinks four glasses of wine, listens to a round of people sat at this restaurant table talk about their lives, people who wear the faces of his old friends like they’re still them even though they’re not. The tips of Dan’s fingers under the table touch his knee and his skin is burning, burning, burnt. The round stop on Phil and he shrugs one shoulder and says, “Not much, I guess,” turns his knee away. They laugh. He doesn’t.
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IX.
He smiles and feels like a liar. A girl and her mum approach the table and ask for a picture with red cheeks and wet smiles, and the table is silent while they take it, hungry eyes revealing nothing. The girl thanks them and walks away and someone restarts the conversation again. Under the table, Phil grabs Dan’s hand and squeezes it hard. Dan curls his fingers around his wrist and holds.
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X.
The bottom line isn’t the man on the train that saw them, isn’t the risk of someone knowing. The bottom line is they walk into the restaurant and Helen shakes Dan’s hand and says, “Oh, you’re the plus one,” and no one questions it. The bottom line is what plus one means. The bottom line is stability.
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XI.
The 2006 class reunion hall is a larger-scale restaurant table, bigger words and bigger eyes and bigger faces. Phil drinks wine from bigger glasses and answers bigger questions with a bigger smile, feels like a bigger liar. Dan stands by his side with one shoulder pressed against his, holds on tighter. Nobody asks but everyone’s asking and the absence is ringing in Phil’s ears.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” says a guy from Phil’s psychology class ten years back, who stretches his smiles and doesn’t really ask if Phil’s happy. Phil is happy, though, so he widens his own and thanks the guy whose name he doesn’t know, doesn’t say that happiness isn’t something you can make assumptions about, instead turns away.
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XII.
Dan presses his cheek to the mirror in the small restroom and says, “I can’t do this, I can’t,” leaves condensation on the glass from his breath. Outside the door the masses are bustling and Phil can’t handle it either, leans over the sink and sighs.
An hour later, Dan’s phone buzzes with retweets, and his face is tight enough for Phil to see the mask that’s underneath. Phil hands him his twelfth glass and calls him captain crisis quietly, just to watch his smile. Dan wasn’t joking but the people around them are circling and there’s not a moment of peace, not a moment of silence, and now isn’t the time.
“I’m fine,” Dan tells someone who happens to be following him on Twitter. Phil nods over his shoulder and fine tastes the same as I want you there on his tongue.
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XIII.
Right at the middle between causal relationships and long-lasting marriages there’s a chalk-drawn line, and some things, sometimes, have the same effect of dragging a bare feet across the chalk that’s on the pavement, blurring the lines between what is stable and what is not.
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XIV.
Reunions are a showcase, button-downs and jewellery and your personal arsenal, here are the things I’ve accomplished, here is who I now am. It’s a war won with six-digit salaries and golden watches, won with penthouse apartments and heeled wives.
Phil smooths a hand down his patterned shirt and wins with a radio job and a two-million people following, wins with a humble smile and colourful shoes. He introduces Dan with a pointed smile and bitten words and doesn’t say he’s part of the arsenal, but people tip their wineglasses and smile at him like he is.
The bottom line isn’t that you bring your best to the table and make do. The bottom line is that out of everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you’ve ever dated, you only bring one to a reunion. The bottom line is that brining a plus one to a reunion isn’t a date but a statement, and Phil bites chattering teeth around what this statement means.
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XV.
Phil’s mum shakes her head at adopting a pet, says, might as well get married. In a reunion hall, Phil stands with a crowd of people who used to shape the background of his life with Dan talking by his side, a constant presence. Phil fists his fear inside trembling hands and wonders what his mum will have to say about that.
