Chapter Text
Phil keeps busy. It’s the only thing that keeps him going, really.
He starts filming videos again – there’s people surprised that he’s blonde and people badly acting surprised that he is, and he laughs at both their reactions, feeling light about it, happy. He thinks about Dan asking him about telling people, he remembers the crooked smile on his face when he said it’s likely already leaking and feels dizzy from it.
Never in his life has the thought of someone finding out filled him with joy instead of dread. That sinking feeling isn’t there, that black hole threatening to throw them both into free fall stays firmly closed, there’s just that heavy, almost sluggish pain of missing Dan.
That part is still hard. They talk sometimes, when their timezones overlap. But it’s not the same, seeing Dan over Facetime. Phil has spent so much time watching Dan on a screen by now, that it still feels unreal. Like he’s not really there, just another copy of him, another recording he’s watching at 5am on a Wednesday with junk food and tears in his eyes because he misses him.
He’s there, but not really. There’s warm brown eyes, but they don’t hold the same glow when they’re slightly pixelated and behind glass. His hair is a mess most of the time, and Phil wants to touch it, wants to run his hands through it. Dan calls him from the tour bus or a hotel room, or the back of the stage after his show, he calls him when he’s nervous, he calls him when he’s freaking out, he calls him when he’s so happy that his entire face is lit up and Phil smiles and calms and soothes, and then, when he hangs up, he sits alone in their house, feeling tears run down his face because it hurts. It just hurts to not be there with Dan, to share these moments with him.
He wants to watch him come off stage and hug and kiss him and tell him he did amazing. He wants to applaud him with the rest of the audience, and he wants Dan’s eyes on him when he does. He wants to get to be a part of this, because he should be a part of Dan’s life, and he doesn’t feel like he is right now, he still just doesn’t.
So he keeps busy. He lets his viewers help him pick new outfits to go with his new hair. He makes silly advice videos. He makes live streams and quizzes and little life updates that usually contain a bunch of sweet nothings, because nothing worth mentioning happens to him without Dan around. It feels a lot like his early AmazingPhil days, except Dan isn’t here, and Phil doesn’t feel like he can be AmazingPhil without him, even if he used to be, once upon a time.
And yet, Phil waits. He waits patiently. He doesn’t mention any of it to Dan. He knows he needs to do this. He knows Dan promised him he’d be home a thousand times, and he believes him, he does, but the wait makes it feel so far away that it’s become a distant, impossible dream.
He wonders if this was what it’s like for Dan, before they ever met. Little Dan Howell, sitting in his family home, watching his videos on screen, and waiting for a chance to talk to Phil.
The thought makes him smile.
Maybe he just needs to do another tarot reading video.
Phil would like to believe that he holds it together reasonably well, but the truth is that the day Dan uploads a bunch of pictures and videos of himself as a slutty nun on his Instagram, he falls apart.
It’s not even that he looks hot – though, what the hell – it’s everything else, all the surrounding circumstances. It’s that he’s not there, but his crew is. They’re laughing and joking and out, enjoying Halloween, while Dan is strutting through American streets having fun without him. It’s that they get to see him like this and Phil only has the same clips and photos everyone else got. It’s that Phil has never seen him this confident before, almost as if with his habit, he put on another personality, like he’s glowing in this outfit.
… And that Phil knows for a fact that there’s currently people in Nashville who have seen more of his bare ass than they ever wanted to see, and Phil thinks it’s really freaking unfair, when he’s been missing that ass for many months now.
When Dan calls him that night (the morning for him) Phil is grumpy, and sulking, and his eyes are red.
“Phil, you won’t believe–”
“I saw.”
Dan pauses, likely hearing the tone of his voice, and raises an eyebrow slightly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Phil–”
“No, really, it’s a great time for you to discover that you’d look really hot as a nun. How good for you and everyone who was with you. Who wasn’t me, by the way.”
He can see Dan’s lips twitch even with the poor quality of the video, fighting a smile.
“Right,” he says. “Miss me, Lester?”
“Of fucking course I miss you,” he hisses and Dan chuckles softly.
“Yeah. Me too.” Dan rolls onto his back, taking the phone with him, and then he’s lying there, camera so close to his face that it’s filling Phil’s entire screen, and he can see the soft flush of his cheeks, the little moles on his face, the dimples as he smiles. “Wanna see?”
“See what?” Phil asks, and he’s still sulking a little, but it’s hard to stay mad at Dan while his heart is doing loops.
“The costume? I’ve got it in my room, I can show you.”
Phil does. He really does. He doesn’t say, but he doesn’t have to. Dan rolls off the bed again, propping the phone up against the pillows, and starts getting undressed in front of Phil, who feels his entire throat drying up at the sight.
God, it’s been too long. He just wants Dan, he wants him in their bed, he wants him in their home, he wants to get to touch him and laugh with him and spend his mornings and days and nights with him. He’s so tired of the screen separating them, he’s so tired of missing him.
But it is a lovely sight, comforting in its familiarity. Dan’s body, the dip of his hips, the slope of his shoulders, the curve of his ass, the long toned legs. He gives Phil a wiggle of his eyebrows and a crooked grin, knowing full well the effect he has on him, and Phil feels confused from the weird mix of turned on and ache battling inside of him.
And then Dan starts slipping into fishnets, and every single conscious thought starts fading from Phil’s mind, leaving nothing but burning hot, white want.
“I’ll show you something Instagram hasn’t seen,” Dan grins.
Phil isn’t sure what does it. Maybe it’s the way he gets to watch Dan’s brows furrow as he tries to slip the habit on right. The way his little curls spill out of it. The way he tugs at the bottom of the skirt to cover his ass, then remembers that’s not really the point and pulls it up again, laughing his gollum cackle as he does, eyes flitting to the phone where Phil is watching.
Maybe it’s a mix of all of it. Maybe it’s months and months of pining crashing down.
But when Dan crawls back onto the bed, fishnets dragging over the sheets as he kneels in front of the camera with a cheeky smile on his face, asking Phil what he wants, Phil breaks out into tears.
“Phi–”
“You,” he sobs out.
And that’s that. Any sexy mood Dan has been trying to conjure up is utterly ruined and Phil is sitting in the ruins of it, unable to stop crying.
“Phil, hey, hey it’s okay. Phil. I’m right here. I’m–”
“But you’re not,” Phil manages out between sobs.
He feels bad, he does, because Dan looks like he’s heartbroken when he watches him, unable to do anything but sit there and try to comfort him with words Phil doesn’t want to hear, more empty promises of some time in the future that isn’t now.
“Sorry,” Phil says. “I’m sorry, I’m– I’ll be fine, I just need some sleep. It’s really late here.”
“Phil.”
“It’s alright, really.”
“No, it’s not,” Dan says softly. “I’m really sorry. I wish I could be there, you know that–”
“I know.” The smile he musters up is small, and not at all genuine. “I know. It’s okay. I just– I need some sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
He hangs up before Dan can reply – it doesn’t make a difference, not really. If anything, Phil feels that with every single hollow word, the cleft his heart has fallen into becomes a little bigger.
Phil slams his laptop shut, curls up on the bed, and misses Dan just as much as he missed him when they were talking five minutes ago. He reaches for the pillow he’s not sleeping on and it smells of nothing. He tries to imagine Dan in bed with him and comes up empty.
God, he’s so fucking tired of feeling empty.
Dan feels like genuine fucking crap the moment he lands in Heathrow. You’d think that after months of being on tour, he’d by now gotten used to the constant travelling, constant being on the road, constant jetlag and disorientation and lack of sleep, but it really never gets easier.
All he wants is to curl up in his bed and sleep for a week or something. It’s the middle of the night in London, which doesn’t help.
Still.
No sleep for the wicked.
Instead he sits in his overpriced Uber and watches the familiar landscapes of England pass him by, a weird, aching feeling blooming in his chest.
He hates this, he really does. The tour is good for him. It always puts him in a much better headspace to see the people behind the accounts, behind the judgmental eyes inside his head, to remind himself that they are, indeed, so supportive and loving and not judgemental at all.
This is what he’s doing all this shit for. The book, the tour, the videos, everything, that swooping, beautiful feeling he gets when he looks at them and sees the joy on their faces, all for him, all because of him, it’s the fucking best.
We’re All Doomed in particular is something so close to his heart, something so personal, and he’s never felt freer, happier, than when he returns to his hotel room packed with flowers and praise from his fans.
But.
Well.
He’s been uprooted for so long now, long before the tour even started. Every bone in his body, every fibre of his being, just wants to be home with Phil. Curled up with him on a sofa, eating cereal and watching Anime in the mornings. Hearing his gentle snoring in bed, knowing all he has to do is reach out to touch him, to hold him, to comfort him. He wants to be able to rest his head on his shoulder and just be like that, for as long as he wants to.
He wants to open the door, and see his smile and make him laugh and make him happy, for the rest of his life, not for a day before his next flight that he absolutely has to take, unless he wants to disappoint a bunch of fans.
This short trip home is already, as Chloe has informed him not once, not twice, but five separate times, quite a risky and unnecessarily strenuous endeavor.
Yeah, no shit.
Several long hours in the air, several airports and several car rides later, Dan still very much thinks it’s worth it, though. Because none of that shit is even half as hard as watching Phil cry like he did that night on call with him, and Dan being unable to do anything about it.
So fuck it all. It might just be for half a night and a day, but he’s doing this.
Which was all very nice and doubtlessly a grand romantic gesture in his mind, but now that he stands here, in front of the house he’s left such a long time ago, staring at the familiar entrance door, he freezes.
Because it’s scary, coming back home, it’s scary to be here, knowing you’re inviting yourself back into a life you’ve abandoned. Like a father who left for cigarettes and never came home. Phil has half a mind to kick him out the moment he dares to step back into the house.
But he won’t, will he. He gave Dan his key, he gave him his trust, his endless patience and understanding, and then he cried and shut himself away and Dan can in turn be brave and have the courage to go home for that one day, because he has to. He just has to.
He takes a deep breath, walks up to the door and finally, finally returns home.
Phil is asleep.
Everything’s dark, and Dan fumbles around because his hands don’t automatically find the light switch anymore the way they used to. When the lamp flickers on, Dan feels his entire throat close off, because everything looks so familiar, yet so estranged. He can’t believe he’s back, and at the same time he cannot believe he’s been gone this long.
He walks up to their living room, drops his bag and slips out of his shoes, and looks around. Not much has changed – the yearning he feels is visceral and brutal, like a punch to the throat. There’s a mismatched pair of socks in the corner of their sofa. There’s a crease in the pillow where Phil must’ve sat before going to bed. There’s a half-finished glass of Ribena standing around, and the remote lying on the seat.
Dan heads for their kitchen, and the door knob feels strange in his hand that’s so used to other shapes now. He finds all the cupboards open and tears shoot into his eyes, his lower lip trembling from the force with which he suddenly has to hold them back.
He’s thought about waiting up for a while, setting up a nice breakfast for Phil, surprising him in bed, but fuck all of it, fuck it so much. He’s exhausted, and he’s lonely, and he’s missing something he should’ve been here for for so long now. He leaves the kitchen without another glance, heading straight for Phil’s– for their bedroom.
Dan opens the door just a crack, just enough to stick his head in without letting too much light into the room. He doesn’t actually want to wake Phil.
Except, the moment the light hits the bed and he sees the shape of him lying there, so familiar that it makes every bone on his body ache with want, it’s really all he wants. Phil’s lips are half open, there’s gentle little snores coming from his pillow, where his hair lies panned out around his head, messy blonde and beautiful.
Dan doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t have it in him. He slips out of his jeans, slips into the sheets, and then wraps himself around Phil like a backpack, trembling hands gripping his waist as tightly as they can without actively squeezing him awake.
But Phil’s always been a lighter sleeper than Dan. He stirs beneath him, a questioning, sleepy little noise escaping him. Dan presses his lips to his cheek, right beneath his ear, marvelling at the fact that he gets to. Phil’s warmth, the smell of his soap, the feeling of holding him like this, it all comes back to him like the words to his old favorite song, so easy now that he’s here, so hard to let go of.
“‘s okay,” he mumbles. “It’s just me, go back to sleep.”
“Dan?”
Phil’s eyes are blurry when they find Dan, unfocused. He blinks as if he expects either Dan or the sleep in his eyes to disappear, and when none of it happens, he blinks again. Dan kisses his lips softly.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he says. “I’ll still be here tomorrow. Let’s sleep, yeah?”
Phil blinks again, frowns, and it looks so adorable on his sleep-muddled expression. He leans in for another kiss, almost hesitant, and Dan is more than happy to give him one. Then Phil’s head falls back onto the pillow, and like someone pressed a lightswitch, he’s out again.
Dan lets him sleep. He scoops him up in his arms again, rests his chin on Phil’s shoulders and follows him into whatever dreamland is waiting for them both.
It’s the best he’s slept in so, so long.
Phil wakes up sweating and held. There’s arms wrapped around his waist from behind so tightly, he’d think someone is scared Phil will run away if he doesn’t single-handedly hold him in place. There’s legs intertwined with his, a foot curled around him like a rope. There’s hot, wet breath on the back of his neck, and curls tickling his ears.
Even if Phil didn’t foggily remember a really nice “dream” of waking up to Dan kissing him in bed, the form behind him would be so unmistakably Dan, that he doesn’t get worried for a moment.
He just lies there, keeps his eyes closed, and doesn’t move. If he doesn’t move, it doesn’t go away. If he doesn’t move, he gets to keep lying here, with every bit of his body wrapped up in Dan like the happiest early Christmas present in the world.
Then he thinks that maybe that’s just stupid, because they could be having sex right now, and he does a single, well-aimed kick of his free foot against Dan’s shin.
“Ow,” he grunts, and immediately that wet mouth is gone from Phil’s neck and that’s a bit of a relief, actually, because he swears Dan drooled on him. Ew.
“Whoops, sorry,” Phil smiles and turns around. “Must’ve kicked you in my sleep.”
Even barely awake, Dan somehow manages to give him the most deadpan expression possible, seeing as Phil is very clearly not asleep whatsoever.
“That’s what I get for trying to be romantic,” Dan grumbles, but his lips are twitching into a smile.
Phil is on top of him within a second.
“You came home,” he says, hearing the wonder creep into his own voice and Dan is smiling up at him, with a smile that actually reaches his eyes, brown and warm and looking only at Phil.
“Just for today,” he says, and his voice is unusually thin. “I have to fly out tonight again so I make it to my next show. But– you were upset and I really missed you. So.”
“You’re insane,” Phil is kissing him before he can respond, properly, not the gentle pecks he foggily remembers from last night. He kisses Dan like he’s trying to squeeze sixteen months into the kiss, and maybe he is.
It only hits him fully right then – Dan is in their bed, in their sheets, in his reach, beneath him, touching him, holding him, his grip loose around Phil’s waist now but there, real, tangible.
“I love you.” He says it without thinking, and beneath him, Dan looks like he might cry.
“I love you too, you idiot.”
It’s so easy like this, to forget for a couple hours, to just get lost in Dan and pretend like he’s not going anywhere after, like he’s really Phil’s again, like the world isn’t going to take him away.
For a long time, all he feels is Dan’s skin on his, Dan inside of him, Dan all around him, Dan’s soft little noises all he hears, Dan’s laughter, Dan’s curses, rumbled with a low voice into the crook of his neck like they’re words of affection, because they are.
Phil feels a tiny little icicle in his heart melt away, breathing a little easier than he did before, as he lies there, holding Dan, being held, and wishes the day could last forever.
It doesn’t.
“You said coming home would make it harder,” he says. “Last time.”
Dan groans into the pillow. They haven’t left bed for longer than they needed. Some trips to the bathroom, some trips to the front door to get takeout, and that’s the height of it.
They’re lying here with their pizza and their laptops, putting on some mindless anime for background noise that they’re both not paying attention to, some part of their bodies always touching. Their legs, their toes, their shoulders, their lips, their dicks. What the hell does it matter, as long as it’s Dan and Phil.
“Yeah,” he finally says and his voice is heavy, covered in something heavy. “Yeah, it is.”
It’s weird, because Phil had firmly believed Dan when he’d told him, but it’s still only now sinking in. In the aching reluctance in his eyes, the way he presses his lips together, the way his grip around Phil tightens in a way he’s probably not even aware of doing.
That Dan misses him too.
And that’s another icicle melting away, one that had dug into his heart rather sharply before.
“When can you come back?” he asks gently.
Dan throws his head back, sighing.
“I took some time off during Christmas,” he says. “Other than that – well, it’ll be over by March.”
“That’s not too bad.” Phil nudges him gently with his shoulder, tries to force a smile. “We can make that work, right?”
Dan stares at him for a long time, something on his face that would be unreadable for everyone but Phil, who thinks he can identify it as Dan trying to be strong instead of self-depricatingly, painfully blunt.
“We can make everything work,” he finally mumbles. “I just hate that we have to.”
“I don’t hate it,” says Phil, going for a cheerful tone, nudging Dan a little as he’s sitting rested against his side, and then catches him raising an eyebrow at him. “Okay,” he adds. “I kind of do hate it. But– I don’t hate what you’re out there doing, you know? I’m really proud of you and I want you to get to enjoy it.”
“I do enjoy it. I’d enjoy it more if you were there.”
Phil lets out a heavy sigh. He leans back against their headboard. He–
Hold on a minute.
“I mean,” he says. “I could just… do that.”
Dan, who is busy gloomily staring at the laptop screen without seeing anything, takes a moment to process his words. When he does, he looks up with a furrow between his brows.
“Huh?”
“Obviously it’s your show but I mean– we travelled together before.”
Dan opens his mouth. Closes it again.
“And people kinda know we’re together anyway, so it’s not like–”
“Phil Lester,” Dan says and Phil feels his heart beating faster at the sight of the grin slowly spreading on his face, familiar, achingly so, and so so needed. “You are a genius!”
Chloe isn’t thrilled when Dan calls her, not because she’s not happy to have Phil back with them on tour, but because she suddenly has to adjust a lot of plans. They assure her he won’t take up extra space on the tour bus, which is of course not fully true because – well, he’s quite tall, isn’t he? But he’ll share Dan’s tiny bed with him, and it’ll be a squeeze, but he’s still incredibly happy about it.
She has to rebook hotels, and she has to put him on guest lists and VIP lists and whatnot. She has to book him extra flights. He’ll spend the majority of them sitting rows apart from the rest of the crew or even has to take entirely different flights from them, but Phil doesn’t care.
He gets to be with Dan.
In hindsight, it’s crazy neither of them thought of it sooner. But Phil hadn’t even fully considered it, with his life going on here that he had to get back to after abandoning it for so long, nothing but a zombie in the wake of Dan leaving, and now it just seems so silly. He’s self-employed, there’s nothing he can’t put on hold for a few months, they’ve done it before for their tours together. The plants might die – big deal. He loves his plants, but he doesn’t have it in him to care right now, and let’s be real… they’d probably die with him at home, anyway.
Maybe they have a better chance at thriving if he just asks Martyn to water them, honestly.
Phil doesn’t fly out with Dan right that night – he has some things to get in order before he leaves the country for several months, but they make plans to follow him for his LA show next week.
It’s so much easier now to follow Dan outside to wait for his Uber – though he still looks torn about it, chewing on his lower lip until it bleeds.
“Dan, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing I just– I told you it won’t be easy.”
“I’ll be there next week.”
Dan smiles at him and it reaches his eyes, warms up his entire face, warms up the ice inside of Phil until it melts, melts, melts. He hadn't even noticed how cold he was until today.
Here, in the chilly London evening air, standing outside with nothing but Dan’s hoodie (tour merch he’s mercilessly stolen, but he’s paid with a hoodie of his own, so he thinks that’s fair), it’s the warmest he’s felt in over a year.
“I know that. I just– I miss home.” Dan’s voice cracks and that– that does things to Phil. He never wants to see this man unhappy, but right now it’s harder than ever. “I’ve been on the road for so long. And before that– just– away for so long. I just miss it, you know?”
Phil nods.
“We’ll have a nice time on the road,” Phil promises him. “It’ll basically fly by. And then we’ll go back home. Together.”
Dan leans against him, and Phil wraps him into a hug from behind, sighing. He likes this better than last time – Dan’s not guilt-ridden. It’s not something he’s inflicted upon them anymore, something that eats him up from the inside, it’s something they’re back to handling together, as a unit, as a team. Not a problem for Dan to solve, but for them to overcome.
Something has healed, and will continue to heal, and Phil doesn’t think it’s going to leave a scar.
Dan stays calmly in his hold as the Uber drives up. Waits until the wheels stop rolling completely, gives the guy a nod, and then turns to kiss Phil firmly on the lips.
“One week,” he says.
“One week,” Phil promises.
“Fuck. I’m so tired of saying goodbye to you.”
Never again, Phil thinks. Never again like this.
“Okay well. See ya later, alligator.”
And Dan can pretend to hate the stupid joke all he wants, but he’s still grinning when he’s sitting in the Uber, his eyes never leaving Phil until they roll out of sight.
Phil goes back in, grabs some of the leftover pizza, curls up in bed and thinks that it feels a little less empty today than it did two days ago.
The world feels right again, brighter again. Phil had no idea how dark everything had gotten, how desaturated, until he struts through the house, throwing whatever clothes he comes across first into a large suitcase.
He wonders if this is what it had been like for Dan every day. He understands the desperation behind it a little better now. To do anything, no matter how terrifying, just to get a tiny little bit of colour back. It scares Phil, how easy it is to fall into, how familiar the descriptions of it sounded when he read through Dan’s book again.
It’s all brighter now. That’s what matters.
Dan though – when they meet up at the airport, he’s like a million little fireworks exploding, colours washing the entire place aglow. Even visibly exhausted, a little stressed, dressed in black, a cap on unwashed hair, dark rings under his eyes, he’s just everything Phil needs to make everything feel lighter.
He hopes he gets to be that for Dan. He thinks that he is. He’s fairly sure, even, from the way his tired face lights up when he spots Phil in the crowd, from the way his steps speed up frantically.
Here, in the middle of the airport, surrounded by crowds of people too busy to even pay attention to them, he pulls Phil into a tight hug, face buried in his neck, and mumbles something unintelligible that Phil is pretty sure he understands without understanding a single, solitary word.
“Missed you too,” he grins, kissing the top of his We’re All Doomed cap.
Dan snorts out a laugh, and Phil catches it in his embrace as his shoulders rise and fall from the force of it.
“God, fuck,” Dan said. “I really did. How has it only been a week, when it feels like a year?”
There’s people everywhere, but no one is really paying attention to them, and Dan has kissed him in front of Uber drivers, and in front of their fans, and Phil simply doesn’t have it in him anymore to care. So much caring about what other people might think, what they might see, what they might say, and all it ever brought them was the misery they were in now, the yearning and the pining and the waiting and the ice that only has just started to melt inside of Phil.
So he kisses Dan quiet. He doesn’t want to hear about years or weeks or even days of being apart anymore, it’s over now. It’s over.
Dan lets deft fingers dance across his waist, up his ribs, holding his chin, both thumbs stroking over Phil’s cheeks as he pulls him in hard and fast, kissing him like he’s trying to prolong his last breath with Phil’s oxygen.
Phil grins when they pull apart.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” Dan looks at him, laughs, looks away like they’re teenagers again, and he just met his favorite YouTuber for the first time, like he’s still sheepish and shy around Phil, excited like a kid that just bought his first long-distance train tickets.
Phil takes his hand, interlocks their fingers, and grins. “So, big show tonight?” he asks, and Dan nods.
“Yeah, actually, Chloe is gonna murder me if we’re not heading to the venue in the next five minutes. I’ve got shit to set up, soundchecks, and all that.” He yawns. “I just want to sleep for a week, I swear– it’s so exhausting, all this.”
Phil thinks about it. Having Dan on a tour bus with him, in a hotel with him, exhausted, but still buzzing from the stage. Getting to be the one who relaxes him, gives him a piece of home away from home.
He feels light as a feather.
“Can I watch?”
“You’ll get tired of the show so soon.”
“Probably. I’m not tired of it yet. Only seen it once. Let me watch.”
“‘Course you can watch, you freak. You’re on every single backstage list. Just–”
“I won’t let anyone see,” Phil promises. “I’m not stealing your show.”
Dan huffs out a laugh, tired but genuine.
“I was gonna ask you to surprise the fans for a pre-show or two, actually.”
“Oh.”
“Nothing big, just a fun little– I mean, there’s so many questions I get about you that I usually ignore, but I think it’d be funny if we just– you know, I read it, I’m like, ‘I don’t know, you’d have to ask Phil’, and they’re all disappointed and then I’m like ‘Hey Phil–’.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, you don’t have to, obviously, it was just an idea I had. I think they’d be excited, and it’s been so long since we’ve done anything together and–”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, you’ve already said yes.” Dan interrupts himself, looking a little like a fish out of water, which is funny.
“Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how much I missed being a silly comedy duo with you?” Phil smiled. “I just– didn’t want to make your big show about me, that’s all.”
“It is about you,” Dan says softly. “Almost all of it. You’re the skeleton in the room.”
“What?” asks Phil. “The skeleton?”
“I’ll explain it to you on the bus.” Dan is giggling. “Come on.”
Phil has watched Dan perform his show before, but this is different. This is not him on a seat, third to last row, with heads in front of him, laughing along with the rest of their fans, this is him at the side of the stage, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed and a large smile on his face, watching Dan make a fool of himself in front of their lovely audience. Every so often, he catches Dan’s eyes searching for him, alight like the grin on his face.
He’ll make a joke and give Phil a wink. He’ll talk about days in his life that he has felt truly happy, and gives Phil a long, meaningful stare.
Around halfway into the show, people pick up on it – Phil actually watches some of them sneak to the side of the room to try and catch a glimpse of Phil. He could be sitting in the back, watching over the monitor, he just doesn’t want to, and Dan looks like he’s suppressing a giggle at the sight of them, so Phil just gives a cheerful little wave in their direction.
If it spreads on Twitter that night – and let’s be real, it probably did – neither of them check. They sit together on a tiny bus with their tiny crew, laughing, chatting, having a drink (they gave their poor driver the non-alcoholic version and he daggered them with his eyes. Phil is definitely going to buy him a round at the next hotel bar once they’re off the road).
“I’m glad you managed to join us,” Chloe tells Phil with a smile as she refills his tiny wine glass.
“Are you really?” Phil snorts. “I thought I added a lot of unnecessary trouble and workload to your thorough organising.”
“Well, yes,” she sighs, and Phil supposes she deserves to. “But he’s not smiled like this since the tour started, so I’m still counting it as a win.”
Everyone’s head turns to Dan, who’s actually looking sheepish, slight rose blush running up his neck. Phil pokes him in the face, just because he can, and Dan hisses, and he rolls his eyes, but he still squeezes Phil’s knee under the table.
Phil feels alive. He sits on a tiny sofa squeezed against Dan, shoulder to shoulder, laughing with everyone else, and he feels like he’s Dan and Phil again, not just a lonely creature wading through unknown waters on his own.
It’s funny. That night, when he climbs into bed with Dan, having to lie half on top of him because otherwise it’ll literally not fit the two of them, the gentle sway of the bus taking them to another town in the middle of America, he feels more at home crammed in this tiny little moving space in the wilderness with Dan, than he’s felt alone in their house.
“Don’t take it personally,” Dan mumbles from his position on the hotel bed, where he’s spread out like a starfish, face pressed into the pillow, unmoving. “But I’m so glad to finally have space between us.”
Phil snorts out a laugh.
“Right, because I totally love spending every night pressed against you like we’re living in a sardine tin.”
Dan lazily opens one eye, watches Phil rummage around his bag, looking for something clean to wear after his shower.
“It probably says something about us that we chose this faith for ourselves, huh?”
Even with his head mostly buried in his bag, Dan catches Phil’s little smirk.
“Whatever. So I prefer a sardine tin over being alone at home.”
Dan, reluctantly and complaining about it with a low groan, rolls himself into a sitting position.
“Are you doing better then?”
“‘Course I am, no need to miss you anymore, is there?”
“Not just that–” Dan hesitates. “Your whole… thing.”
Phil finally looks up from his bag, staring.
“My… thing?”
Dan gives him a look. “Well, I’m not saying you weren’t quite yourself in a way I recognised from myself and really didn’t enjoy seeing on you, but–”
Phil drops whatever he’s been holding – it looks suspiciously green – and rolls onto the bed, forcing Dan to shift to the side a little to make space for him.
“We’ve barely even seen each other, how have you–”
“Aw, come on. I know you.”
“Gross.” But Phil’s smiling at him, and he looks soft and touched and Dan loves him so much, it makes his heart beat in his chest as if he’s a teenager looking at his first crush again. “But I’m better, yeah.”
“Good,” Dan kisses him softly. “Go take that damn shower then, I’ve got a surprise for you that’ll make you so much better than better.”
The conversation isn't over, just parked. Dan isn't going to let Phil drown. Phil isn't going to let Dan run again. And that's more than enough right now.
“What surprise?” Phil yawns. “We’ve spent every waking minute together since I’ve joined you.”
Dan just grins.
He waits until he hears the water running until he rolls off the bed, reaches for his own suitcase, and drags out his carefully folded nun costume.
Let’s try that again, but properly this time.
Dan would kill a guy if it brought out this particular expression to Phil’s face, the mix of awe and lust and need that only Dan gets to see.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to – turning himself into a sexy nun is more than enough for Phil, and isn’t that just a thrill of its own?
4 months later
“Phiw!”
“What?” They’ve just returned home five minutes ago. Phil doesn’t have it in him to find out what upset Dan so much that he’s yelling at him from their bathroom. He drops his suitcase in the corridor next to Dan’s bigger one, heads straight for their sofa, and lets himself fall onto it with a groan that would have the neighbours worried if they had any.
(Well, they did have some, but they were far enough not to hear them. All they did, really, was walk around naked in their own home. A lot. So they really couldn’t complain about them, could they now?)
Dan doesn’t walk, he slithers into their living room on his socks, cradled in his arms two large pots. Phil would call them plant pots, except… well.
“They're all dead! Didn’t you ask anyone to water them while we were gone? Look at them!”
Dan crunches a completely dried up, brown leaf between frantic fingers.
“Uh,” says Phil.
Oops? Hadn’t he asked Martyn to…? Phil thinks back to the day he left for the airport. Almost missing his Uber, the mess of trying to find his charger to pack, the passport almost ending up left behind on a dresser. The most distracted he’d ever been before a trip, really, because all he’d thought about was… well. Dan.
It must’ve somehow slipped his mind.
“Phil! Did you at least get someone to take care of the…”
Dan runs out into the hallway, Phil on his heels, and opens the entrance door again.
They’ve been tired when they came home from the airport, the last couple months of the tour stuck in their bones, so they hadn’t paid much attention, but now that Dan was checking, Phil saw their mailbox looked about ready to burst, with large piles of uncollected papers plastered on top of it.
“I mean, how important could it be,” Phil shrugs. “If it’s urgent, they’d call. Or send an email or something.”
Dan turns to him with the expression of the world’s most tired serial killer.
“Have you ever heard of bills?” he asks. “I swear to God, if I try to have a shower later and we don’t have any fucking hot water… Isn’t it bad enough I couldn’t shower in the damn bus because of you?”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“You said that it could kill us!”
“It’s just something I heard!”
“And I was fine showering before I heard it from you!”
“Well, I mean. That might just have been luck.”
“Luck?” Dan spits. “Luck? If I was actually lucky, the shower would’ve made the whole thing blow up so I wouldn’t have to be here with you!”
“Now you’re just being dramatic,” Phil giggles. “If you didn’t want to be with me so badly, you would’ve never heard about the shower.”
“I take it back!” Dan hisses.
“No take-backsies, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for life.”
“A refund at least?” Dan tries to go for a whiny voice, but it loses a bit of its impact with Phil in his space, taking some of the papers off his hands and pressing a kiss to the corners of his lips instead.
“Go have that shower,” he suggests. “I’ll make you some coffee. We can ignore the post for one more day.”
Dan looks at the overflowing mailbox and back to Phil.
“Can we?” he asks.
“Sure, what’s one more day? Come on, we just arrived ten minutes ago.”
“The plants…” Dan mumbles as Phil drags him back inside, suddenly forced to yet again face the pots littered all over the corridor floor where he dropped them.
“We can get new plants,” Phil says cheerfully. “I could only get one Dan, though.”
“Did you check the store properly? They might have better options.” He grabs Phil by the lapels. “Set me free!”
He’s not convincing anyone, not with the way brown eyes immediately flicker down to Phil’s lips as he leans into his space, shaking him slightly, then pulling him in for the kiss.
Phil wraps himself around him, just for a moment. Holds them in the middle of their hallway, in their house, surrounded by their dead plants, and he thinks if this is the only thing he somehow, against all odds, managed to keep alive, then that’s good enough for him.
.... He doesn’t mention that he’s pretty sure he forgot to clean out the fridge before leaving.
He’d like for Dan to keep him alive, too.