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Phil, like many precocious Northern boys in the 90s, grew up watching whatever his mother wanted to put on TV. Ever the eccentric, Kath had a preference for British soaps and old sitcoms. Really old, like 1950s, which were already considered old when Phil was a kid and are now functionally ancient. She also loved, still loves, romantic old movies. The kind that either start or end with some handsome, chivalrous gentleman carrying his wife bridal style over the threshold of their new house, a visual symbol representing the start of a new chapter, a new life.
Dan is huffing and puffing his way into the house, carrying one cardboard box under each arm. He walks past the foyer, where Phil is waiting, unburdened, and disappears into the house. Phil was helping, he swears that he was, but he has a bit of a headache. It’s not that bad, and he’s told Dan as much, but that didn’t stop Dan from ordering him to sit down and look pretty to avoid it getting worse.
Phil can do that. Sitting still and looking pretty are two things that he tends to be very good at.
Besides, they’ve both come to the conclusion that Phil tends not to be much help in the manual labor department, anyway.
At the moment, Phil is sitting on the side table in their entryway. It’s probably not built to support the weight of a fully grown – some would say overgrown – man, but that’s exactly what it’s doing. And it’s high enough that he can kick his feet in the air, which is pretty rare for him.
He can see through the open doorway from the entryway to the house itself pretty clearly. Dan’s been leaving the door open so that he can move seamlessly back and forth with the boxes. Despite his already clear view, Phil leans forward, clutching the edge of the high table. A normal person could probably be trusted to keep their balance, but Phil is Phil, and he knows that when Dan comes back, he’s going to scold Phil for risking a tumble to the ground.
Phil will take his chances. He wants to lean forward so far that his head is in the house, hitting fast forward on all the moving and the building until they’re nice and settled, finally. Finally. Phil follows the details of their forever home. The trim that traces the space between the wall and the ceiling. The closet full of snacks that Phil had filled before he called it a day. The green-blue feature wall. The sunlight streaming through the corridor from the giant windows in the kitchen. The tasteful way that they’ve organized their plants under the lights beneath the stairs, and Phil can actually make himself believe, as unrealistic as it is, that this time, they’ll survive. And if they don’t, that’s okay, too. There will be new plants, and they’ll try again and again and again. It will be good.
Seeing isn’t enough. He’s ready to live it. Before today, it was already a beautiful house, but now, it’s a paradise, because it belongs to them.
Dan, who is beautifully predictable, pushes Phil back by an inch or two on his way back into the house. He puts his hands on his hips, huffing.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he says, out of breath, “But I think that was the last of it. Jesus fucking Christ, I feel like Sisyphus.”
“Sisyphussy,” Phil says absent-mindedly.
Dan pulls the main door to the house shut behind them, so that it’s just Dan and Phil, alone in the entrance of their forever home. But Dan is red in the face and sweaty. He looks frustrated, and not in the least bit sentimental.
Phil just can’t have that. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Dan frowns and immediately starts yapping. “I sure fucking hope not,” he says, “The car is empty, and I double checked that the truck was empty yesterday, so if anything is left, it’s at the apartment, and I’m not going back there until tomorrow. I’m hungry and tired and – oh.”
He cuts himself off. He must have finally noticed Phil’s big blue eyes, eyelashes batting up at him.
“Philllllll,” he whines, with that perfect blend of fondness and exasperation that he should get trademarked, “You’re not serious.” A few more seconds of eyelash batting pass. “Oh my god, you are serious.”
“Come on, Danny,” says Phil, “It’ll be romantic! What, do you expect me to just walk into the house? Our house?”
“Yeah, I kinda did, actually.”
Dan sounds serious, but his dimples are threatening to show themselves, which means he’s going to give Phil exactly what he wants. Except that there’s a small detail that Phil is missing in his haze of victory. Mixed in with the I love you and I would do anything for you look is Dan’s mischievous look.
He’s every inch the person who showed up at Phil’s parents’ house for the first time and took all the batteries out of their clocks. So Phil shouldn’t really be surprised when Dan positions himself between Phil’s bony knees, kisses him lightly on one cheekbone, and then scoops him up like one last heavy piece of luggage.
“Come on, Phil! On to forever with you!”
Phil yelps, squirms, kicks, and protests, until it finally sinks in for him that Dan dropping him on the ground would be significantly worse than Dan holding on. At that point, he accepts his fate, wraps his legs around Dan’s waist. and holds on for dear life.
Under different circumstances, he would probably be a little flustered at how easily Dan is carrying him into the house, how he’s carrying Phil like he weighs nothing. A few steps into the house, Dan even lurches into a squat and back up again, leaving Phil to be lifted and lowered with little say in the matter. Phil knows that Dan has been working out, has seen it, has benefited from it, but he never could have imagined being man-handled like this. Which is part of why he’s bracing himself for the moment that Dan accidentally lets him fall to the floor.
It would be embarrassingly consistent, concluding the grand opening of their home with a trip to A&E. What’s more consistent is when Dan drops Phil maybe half a foot onto their couch, eliciting a surprised little squeak but no damage, and starts to pepper his face with kisses. Phil still squirms and protests half-heartedly, more for the bit than anything. He doesn’t think he ever wants this to stop.
But Dan does stop eventually, biting his lip in contemplation as he looks down at Phil. He’s fighting against a smile. Really, he’s not fighting very hard. Despite the fact that he just carried Phil across the lounge, he can’t pretend like the blush in his cheeks is due to exertion.
“You know,” he says softly, sweetly, “If you really want me to do the whole bridal carrying you across the threshold thing, I will. I think it’s cheesy, but I’ll do it.”
“What do you mean?” says Phil, “You just did.”
He searches for even a hint of dissatisfaction within himself and finds only a homey kind of bliss.
They’re Dan and Phil. Nothing is quite so sentimental to either of them as something that’s profoundly silly. Phil feels like 2009 all over again, so in love that he could cry. Instead of crying, he tangles one hand into Dan’s free curls and pulls him in for another kiss.
And if they stay on that couch for longer than planned, that’s nobody’s business. It is, after all, their house.