Work Text:
Dan looks in the mirror and near giggles with exhilaration. He's almost unrecognizable, in grey gym shorts and a hideously bright tie-dye t-shirt, hair slicked up and back with extremely liberal amounts of hair gel and glitter. He's wearing a ridiculous pair of sunglasses that cover almost all of his face and a smile so big it threatens to meet at the corners.
“Phil?” he calls, not bothering to turn his face away from the smudged glass of the motel bathroom mirror. Even in the dingy lighting, the glitter is visible in his hair, and he tilts his head admiringly.
“Yes?” Phil says, sticking his head though the doorway. He’s dressed just as garishly as Dan, colours and glitter everywhere, and like Dan, he has a huge pair of sunglasses pushed into his hair, which he’s left loose to fall over his forehead in a slightly shorter, messier replica of his old fringe. He, too, looks almost nothing like himself.
'Do my face?' Dan murmurs, holding out the face paint crayons he’d bought on impulse the day before. They hadn’t planned on going at all, but Dan had seen the cheap packet of face paints sitting forlornly alone on a supermarket shelf and suddenly he’d needed to.
Phil grins. “Of course.”
He takes the red crayon from the packet in Dan’s hand, uncapping it carefully and lifting it to Dan’s cheek, one gentle hand on Dan’s chin to steady him. His tongue is sticking out in concentration.
“Are you okay? You’ve been pacing around a lot.” Phil mutters, handing Dan back the red crayon and picking the next from the packet in Dan’s hand.
“I guess,” Dan frowns, fidgeting with the plastic. Phil knows he’s nervous because they’ve had this conversation a million times since yesterday, talking about the fans and their image and what might happen if Dan and Phil are spotted marching at Pride.
But he doesn’t want to go as Dan and Phil, so instead he shrugs and says, “Never been before.”
“It’ll be fun,” Phil says, and moves his hand to squeeze Dan’s reassuringly. Then, after leaving the blue crayon he was holding on the sink in exchange for a purple one, he says more quietly, “We can still back out if you want. We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
Dan shakes his head and steps back to examine Phil’s handiwork in the mirror. It’s a rainbow flag, small and slightly shakier than Dan probably could have done himself, vibrant, messy colours standing out against his pale skin, stretching when he smiles - a reminder that he and Phil are doing this the way they do everything else. Together.
“I love it,” he says, surprised by the sincerity in his voice. “Thank you.” He doesn’t only mean the face paint, but Phil just smiles and leans in to press a kiss to Dan’s cheek, right under the flag.
“Ready?” Phil asks, pulling away to grab their shared backpack from the bed.
Dan takes his time checking his reflection again, running a hand over his hair, fixing his sunglasses over his eyes. He knows they can't be seen and he doesn't want to be seen, but here, in a roadstop city on a rare day off, it's so much easier to imagine it doesn't matter. He barely feels his nerves as he turns off the bathroom light.
“Yeah.”