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“What do snowflakes taste like?”
Dan turns to look at Phil. The older boy is looking up at the sky, which is a dullish grey color now that Dan finds beautiful in a sad kind of way. “Piss if they’re yellow.”
“What peed on them if they’re still falling from the sky?”
“Birds,” says Dan. “Winter seagulls.”
“Penguins?”
He giggles. “Penguins can’t fly, you idiot.”
Phil grins. “Seagulls don’t come out at winter!”
“Winter seagulls do.”
Phil nods seriously. “Oh, okay.”
Dan doesn’t really know how to respond. Phil is sticking his tongue out to – Dan assumes – catch snowflakes. “You’ve never had one?”
Phil sticks his tongue back in. “One what?”
“Snowflake.”
“I have, I just don’t remember what they taste like,” Phil says, and then he looks right at Dan and Dan feels his heart do a weird squeezy speed-up thingy. He opens his mouth, but Phil has seemingly taken all the words away from Dan’s vocabulary so now he’s left there staring at Phil slack-jawed like a moron, and now his face and neck feel warm despite the cold.
Consciousness finally returns to Dan after an embarrassingly long amount of time and he quickly realizes how stupid he probably looks, so he snaps his mouth shut and looks down at his feet, which is probably even worse. And now Phil probably thinks he’s ridiculous and pathetic and hates him now.
Phil would be right, though, and it’s only a matter of time until he does realize how pathetic Dan is beyond the brunette fringe and edgy humor and leaves him. That’s what Dan deserves after all, isn’t it?
Phil doesn’t deserve to be burdened with someone like Dan, someone who’s so broken he’s irreparable, who’ll only ever drain Phil and drag him down until he’s at his level right with him in the pit, and then all the effort Phil puts into their relationship will be for naught, because he’ll either get tired of Dan’s bullshit and leave or Dan will inevitably kill himself, and it’s not fair to Phil either way, and he should leave now before it’s too late.
“Dan...?”
Dan shoots up and looks at Phil. Phil looks upset, what the fuck? How did Dan manage to fuck him up already? He didn’t even do anything.
“Dan, you’re crying,” says Phil.
Dan presses a finger to his cheek and realizes it comes off wet. His vision is blurry and his chin is wet. He needs to die. He needs to fucking die. Oh god. His nose is backed up and his breathing is uneven and his face feels all scrunched up and his shoulders are shaking and he’s crying, how stupid, why the fuck is he crying? How fucking pathetic is he, this has to be a whole nother level of pathetic, Jesus Christ.
“Sorry,” he chokes out, and he needs to die, he needs to go home and kill himself. Would Phil let him kill himself? Was the self-sacrifice bit in that dumb interactive adventure too on the nose? Phil probably already knows his brain is messed up by now, that first trip here back in October probably laid the groundwork for how fucked up Dan is. All he did was cry. Phil probably regretted the whole thing, even though he told Dan a million times he didn’t.
And then suddenly Phil is hugging him, really tight like he did when they saw each other the first time, and when Dan left back to Reading, and when he came back, and when he left again, and when he came back this time, and a million times in between those when Dan was crying and begging to go home for “Phil’s sake.” And just like all those times, Dan is swept up by a wave of a feeling he only feels with Phil and no one else, what he assumes is feeling safe, like no one can hurt him as long as he’s in Phil’s arms, not even his brain. And just like all those times, Dan’s chest opens and his ribs make way to let all his blood fall right out of his body and he collapses into the embrace and wails.
Phil doesn’t deserve this, Dan’s brain says, but Dan is just so fucking selfish that he listens to Phil telling him he loves him over and over and over again instead. He finds it tempting to believe it. After all, would Phil be holding Dan like this if he was lying?
He keeps holding him for however long it takes for Dan’s crying to ebb into sniffles and hiccups, and he keeps holding him after. And maybe he doesn’t deserve this, but Dan trusts Phil to make that decision himself.
They finally pull apart when Dan does first, not too far so that they’re still hugging, but enough so that they can see each others’ faces. Maybe the neighbors can see them. Maybe they can see how wrong it is, how disgusting this boy is that he’s this intimate with another. It isn’t logical in Dan’s head, that it’s perfectly fine for anyone else to be romantic with someone of the same gender, despite whatever the world says, but not Dan specifically, and he doesn’t understand it. Why won’t his brain let him be? Can’t it see what he and Phil have is perfect? He loves this boy to death. Why would he think something so perfect is so wrong? Is it because he hates himself so much? Is it because of those dumb boys from school?
“Do you wanna talk about it?” asks Phil.
“I feel like you’re gonna leave me or something,” Dan mumbles. “And you should. So I feel selfish for wishing you won’t ever. And that makes me a bad person. And you shouldn’t be with a bad person.”
“You’re not a bad person,” says Phil. “No matter what your brain tells you, I promise. You’re a very good person and I love you a lot and I’d never leave you and I have no reason to.”
“I’ll drain you,” says Dan. “You’ll get exhausted of trying to fix me.”
“I’m not trying to ‘fix you,’ silly.” Phil’s smile is so cute. Dan wants to kill himself. “There’s nothing to be fixed.”
Dan should kill himself. Dan should go home and kill himself. He should die. He should genuinely fucking die.
Phil pokes him on the nose. “I wanna help you learn to feel better.”
“That’s not your responsibility.”
“It’s not,” Phil agrees. “But I still wanna. And it looks like you need the help.”
Phil is such an angel, Dan thinks, and he should die. He should say sorry and goodbye and go home and kill himself. But instead he says, “Don’t leave me.”
And Phil says, “Never.”
“Thank you for having me,” Dan says as politely and nicely as he can muster. “I’m sorry you had to put up with me so long.”
“Oh, it was a delight, love,” says Kath in the specific way mothers do that Dan only recognized over these past few days with the Lesters, and then pulls Dan in for a hug that catches him off-guard. She hugs just as tight than Phil. Dan wonders if that’s a family thing. “You’re always welcome. Have a wonderful Christmas.”
She sends Dan off with a baggie full of chocolates and Phil to escort him to the station. They talk about the editing for the Christmas adventure and Sonic and Buffy on the ride there.
At the station, they watch the snow fall. The sky is just as grey as it was when Dan came, and it’ll be grey when he leaves.
“Mum’s gonna miss you,” says Phil. “I could tell. You’re like a second son to her.”
Dan makes a grossed out face. “Do not say that. You are not my brother.” And then they both errupt in laughter.
The snow is beautiful and white. Dan takes what looks to be the cleanest bit of it all and scoops it into his gloved hands and puts it up in Phil’s face. “You wanted to know what snow tastes like.”
Phil makes a weird face but licks the top anyway, and then scrunches his nose and pulls away. “Train oil,” he says.
Dan giggles. “Then get some from the sky.”
Phil walks out past the podium and sticks his tongue out. Dan watches him from the distance, and then watches him run back.
“It tastes like cold water,” says Phil.
“Well, yeah.”
“Are you gonna have snow back in Reading?”
“Probably.”
Phil looks up at the sky. Dan follows. Grey and cloudy and full of snow. Dan still thinks it’s beautiful.
“Even when you go home, we’re still gonna share the same sky,” says Phil. “So we’re never gonna be too far from each other, y’know?”
Dan smiles as he starts to hear the train arrive. “Yeah.”