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They sit down and talk it all over in late 2014.
“So, 2015. You realize that we’re basically signing on for like…four different careers?” Dan says, leaning against Phil’s bed and watching Phil fold his clean laundry. “It’s going to be like running a marathon—except the marathon isn’t four hours or however long it takes exercise-y people to run a marathon. It’s a year, and millions of people are following you the entire time you’re running and asking you where your next video is and if you’ll sign a book for them and actually, it’s not a marathon at all: you’re just in hell and everything is on fire because you hate running, ever since that time in 6th form when Petey Harris—”
“Okay, tone down the metaphor,” Phil says, throwing a hoodie at Dan’s head. “I get it. Lots of work, lots of pressure from the fans to maintain status quo while doing lots of work. But imagine how much we’d regret it one day if we didn’t do it?”
It’s the exact right button to push, because if there’s one thing Dan fears more than moths and trees, it’s the existential ambiguity of the future and the possibility of lost opportunities.
“You know we’re not exactly the marathon-ing kind of people?” Dan says as he pulls the hoodie that Phil had thrown over his head. Phil wants to tell him to take it off, but he then recalls that Dan had actually bought the hoodie originally, years and years ago, and Phil had stolen it from him at some point along the way. “I’ve never even run a 5K.”
Phil wonders when ‘what Phil wants to do with his future’ had become ‘what we want to do with our future’. He wonders when their lives had become so intertwined that he doesn’t even know whose clothes are whose anymore.
“We marathoned nine seasons of X-Files in one long weekend,” Phil points out with a shrug, because they’d decided to view that particular weekend as an accomplishment, and not as a sad reflection of their social life.
“True,” Dan says, and that’s that.
January
Getting started is the hardest part.
“Okay,” Dan says on the morning of January 1st. “It’s 2015, and we promised we’d officially start the book today. As of today, we’re authors.” He stares at his laptop for a minute and then slumps even further into his sofa crease than normal. “Oh my god, can you get me a glass of water and some aspirin? I think I’m going to throw up if I try to stand or walk right now.”
Phil doesn’t feel much better himself, to be honest. His head is pounding and their flat is still in total disarray from the New Year’s Eve party they’d hosted the previous night. He’d made a weak attempt to clean some of it this morning, but he suspects it’ll be at least a few more days before he works up the willpower or energy to take down the elaborate ‘Weakest Link’ game that he’d taped to the lounge door.
“I’ll get up and get your water and aspirin if you let me film you right now for the making-of-the-book vlog,” Phil says, because he really doesn’t want to get up.
“God, you’re an asshole,” Dan groans, pushing himself to his feet, motions slow and tentative, face stretched in a grimace. He miserably shuffles away, and Phil turns to face the blank word document sitting in front of him.
He is still just staring at the blank screen five minutes later when Dan reemerges, clinging to the aspirin bottle for dear life as he collapses back onto the sofa.
“This is overwhelming,” Phil says. He is suddenly reminded of the year he spent doing his Master’s— locked in the tiny lab in the basement of the lecture hall, playing the same three clips over and over again until his eyes blurred and he swore he’d never listen to generic, copyright-free vlogging music ever again. (Life is cruelly ironic, however, because the aggressive catchiness of the iMovie theme songs has seeped into his life to the point where, 7 years later, he has literally no choice but to jauntily hum them as he washes the dishes and takes out the trash. He almost…enjoys it, even. He’d once unironically asked Dan to teach him how to play the iMovie song ‘Newborn’ on the piano, and he’s pretty sure that’s the closest Dan has ever come to genuinely ending their friendship and moving out.)
“Okay, here’s what we do,” Dan says determinedly. Phil wonders if he should tell Dan that his t-shirt is on inside-out, but ultimately decides against it. “We each make a list of pages that we really, really want to make sure end up in the book. Then we cross-reference lists and go from there.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Phil shrugs, because he certainly doesn’t have any better ideas. He pulls out his planning notebook and carefully studies the selection of gel pens that he'd bought specifically for book-writing purposes (also because they looked nice in his pencil cup).
And for the most part, making the list is easy:
-origin story
-hamster breeding *** very important!!!
-what happened in Vegas? (How are we going to write this?)
-how to get started on YouTube
-personality quiz?? ***
(Note to self: slip in ‘Phil and Dan’ instead of ‘Dan and Phil’ whenever possible)
He looks over at Dan after ten minutes, eager to share his ideas.
And Dan, the traitor, is sound asleep—comfortably snuggled under a fleece throw, laptop set to the side, mouth wide open and neck bent at a questionable angle. His word document is completely blank, and Phil wonders if he’d even bothered to pretend to work for a few minutes, or if he’d just gone straight to sleep the second Phil had zoned in on his notebook.
He looks so pathetic that Phil just rolls his eyes and leaves him be. This way he can eat Dan’s cereal as a writing snack without judgment, anyway, so who is the real winner here? (Dan, actually. It’s definitely Dan.)
That leaves him with a mostly blank page and no clue how to proceed. But it’s only been ten minutes and one of them is going to have to be the taskmaster if they’re ever going to actually complete this project.
He googles “how to start writing a book.” The main result he gets is along the lines of “just free write and see what happens.”
“What unhelpful advice,” he complains to Dan, who snores in response. “Just write the book…by sitting down and writing the book.” He shakes his head, but flips back to his notebook.
Okay, Phil, he tells himself. You are going to free write for the next half an hour, and then you can take a snack break.
He absentmindedly observes Dan’s sleeping profile for a moment. The blinds are closed for the sake of warding off hangover-induced headaches, and a sliver of Dan’s face is illuminated by a thin strip of sunlight. The red patch that sometimes appears on Dan’s cheek has currently receded, but it had been there last night, when Dan’s face had been flushed with laughter and alcohol.
He looks back at his notebook. His fingers, seemingly of their own volition, have written the word ‘Dan’ at the top of the page. Just ‘Dan’, in purple ink.
Neither of them had kissed anyone at midnight last night. He’d been talking to Dan when the countdown had begun, and both of them had stood together in slight awkwardness as their friends all kissed each other at 12:00. Phil had stared at Dan’s red patch to avoid staring at his mouth.
Just free write and see what happens.
He looks back at Dan.
I wish I had kissed him at midnight, he writes. A confession; letter by painstaking letter.
“Get it together, Phil,” he mutters to himself, shaking his head. “This is a lighthearted scrapbook, not a John Green novel.”
Dan startles awake next to him. “What? Did you say something to me?” He mumbles, rubbing his eyes and trying to look alert.
Phil rolls his eyes. “Yes, I said that if you want any of the profit from this book, you have to actually write half of it.”
“Well, let’s see what you’ve written then,” Dan says with a yawn.
Phil slams his notebook shut. This is one of those times where it’d be easier to pull up a porn tab on his laptop and explain that, rather than explain what he’d actually been writing in his notebook.
“I didn’t write anything yet,” he lies. He waits until Dan shrugs and turns to his own laptop screen to begin working, and then he opens the notebook back up and rips out the incriminating free-write. When Dan leaves to refill his water, Phil shoves the crumpled-up paper behind the couch.
Getting started is the hardest part.
February
So, here’s the thing that Phil learns by February of 2015: running multiple YouTube channels, hosting a radio show, writing a book, and planning and executing a tour all at once is exhausting, to say the least.
He mostly deals with it by Skyping his mum when he feels overwhelmed and starting a re-watch of the entire Buffy series for the nine hundredth time on the nights that he can’t sleep.
Dan mostly deals with it by allowing his creativity and perfectionism to consume him until he can see nothing but the task in front of him—whether it be writing the book or editing a video—and then eventually just passing out somewhere when he physically can’t stay awake any longer.
(As far as coping systems go, it’s not the greatest that Phil has ever seen.)
He’s fairly certain that he’s going to find Dan lying facedown and weeping into the upholstery of the couch at some point in the next month or two, à la The Great Uni Breakdown of 2011, but for now it’s mostly just funny finding Dan sleeping in various strange places, such as on top of the pile of dirty laundry on his bedroom floor (“Sorting whites and darks is wearying and unnecessary, Phil.”), the dingy couch in the lobby of their apartment building (“It’s no wonder I was too tired to carry the groceries upstairs,” Dan had muttered irritably when Phil found him and poked him awake. “Why do you need so many varieties of yogurt? Dairy products are heavy.”), and, as time goes on, actual public places.
“Um…is he okay?” Mary the Editor asks one day when they’re both in her office building, writing in a spare conference room for a change of scenery. Or. Well, Phil is writing. Dan has been passed out on top of his laptop keyboard for nearly half an hour now.
“Oh, yeah, he’s fine. He was up til 5 in the morning taking hi-res pictures of our houseplants,” Phil says, waving off her concern. “I know, because when I rolled over at 4:30, he was standing on top of the other side of my bed trying to get an artsy downward angle on the fern that I keep in the corner. Very startling.”
“I can only imagine,” Mary says in a tone that strongly implies that Dan Howell standing on top of the other side of her bed and taking hi-res pictures at 4:30 in the morning is the very last thing she wants to imagine. “Has he gotten anything done?”
“I don’t know—he said he was going to start writing about the time we met One Direction,” Phil says, leaning over to check Dan’s screen. Dan’s slack face is smashed against the keyboard, and he’d fallen asleep with his finger still on the ‘y’ key. All that his word document says is:
Zayn Malik is veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy….
The string of ‘y’s continues on for seven pages.
Which, to be fair—Dan’s not wrong. That’s it—that’s basically a summary of One Direction. Zayn Malik is very.
“Oh, yeah, wow—Dan’s got seven pages here. Single-spaced and everything,” Phil says.
“Great,” Mary smiles. “Tell him to email me those pages before you guys leave the office tonight so I can take a look at them, okay?”
“Will do,” Phil says brightly, waiting til Mary has turned and left to wince. He reaches over and pokes Dan awake.
“Wha’s goin’ on?” Dan mumbles, blearily lifting his head. His left cheek has a crystal clear imprint of the spacebar key.
“I might have accidentally promised Mary you’d email her seven completed pages of writing before we leave for the night.”
Dan looks at his word document, and then at Phil. “I hate you,” he says. “I’m not talking to you right now.” Then he puts his earbuds in and defiantly blasts some soothing Ludovico Einaudi piano pieces (because Dan is hardcore like that).
He lasts all of fifteen minutes before he pulls the headphones out. “Phil,” he says, and he’s using the tone of voice that always makes an appearance when he doesn’t want to edit a gaming channel video, even though it’s his turn to do it. “You know what would be really good right now as I slave over this chapter of the book that you didn’t want to write but that I have very graciously agreed to write? A Ribena.”
“Wow, Dan, you’re right. That would be really good,” Phil comments neutrally, staring fixedly at his own screen.
Five minutes later, Dan starts kicking his ankle.
“I thought we weren’t communicating right now,” Phil says, kicking back.
“I said we weren’t talking. Kicking isn’t talking. Well—okay, technically I’m talking right now, but it’s just to clarify the parameters of us not talking.”
“That makes no sense,” Phil says. (He takes a break to track down the Ribena anyway—but it’s just because he wants one himself. Dan has nothing to do with it.)
Dan has an imprint of the spacebar on his cheek for the entire rest of the day.
Writing a book isn’t all bad.
March
Phil doesn’t even notice Dan until he’s literally climbing into Phil’s bed.
It’s a dreary March evening and he’d been trying to edit a video, but he stops when he feels the mattress on the left side of his bed dip; slowly pulls out his headphones as he takes in the sight of Dan curled on his side, all 75 inches of him huddled and oddly diminutive against the bright blues and greens of Phil’s duvet. He’s rolled so that his back faces Phil, but Phil doesn’t need to see Dan’s face to be able to tell that he’s been crying. The quiet sniffling gives it away. He'd known that this was coming—he doesn't think Dan has had a proper night's sleep in the three months they've been writing—but now, in the sudden face of Dan's tears, the whole thing doesn't seem very funny anymore.
Phil carefully sets his laptop aside and contemplates his next move. Dan is wearing an old pair of sweatpants and his iconic black eclipse t-shirt, and Phil notes dimly that the cotton stretches across the broad expanse of Dan’s shoulders and back much differently than it had even a year or two ago.
Phil is a born comforter—if this were any other one of his friends, he’d already be hugging them. He’s not as good with words as Dan is, but he knows how to soothe with touch and gestures; he always has. But Dan isn’t just any other friend, and somewhere amidst all the speculation and the overanalysis; all the pictures and giffed moments on tumblr, they’ve forgotten how friends touch each other.
I wish I could hold you until you forgot to be sad anymore, he thinks. Then he thinks about how that’s not a very platonic, friendly thing to think.
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Dan asks, his voice small and slightly hoarse.
And Phil doesn’t need any further explanation, because he already knows exactly what this is all about. Because he perfectly remembers the excited focus on Dan’s face as he’d stood in that empty house and directed the TABINOF book reveal trailer. Can perfectly recall the way Dan had nearly cried of happiness watching the final version; the way he’d been vibrating with hope and pride as they’d finally uploaded it to YouTube and tweeted the news of their book; their book that they’d labored and agonized over for months and months; that they’d grown and nurtured together in secrecy.
And he knows all about the tweets and tumblr posts that had come next, calling them sell-outs; accusing them of being money-hungry; cashing in on their young audience. It hadn’t been everyone—hadn’t even been a large percentage of people. But he’d known, the second he saw the first negative tweet, what this was going to do to Dan.
He’s not completely unaffected by it all either—there’s a reason he’d disconnected his laptop from the wifi and lost himself to the familiar distraction of video editing. But he’s never cared much about what other people think, at the end of the day.
“I don’t know,” he finally answers Dan, because he really doesn’t know. He wonders if it disappoints Dan; the fact that Phil is four years older and has no real answers.
“We’re not sell-outs,” Dan says, sounding determined. The effect is somewhat diminished by the way that he wipes at his eyes and cheeks.
“We’re not,” Phil agrees easily, because they’ve poured their hearts into this book; thought every word and page through in its entirety. He thinks that the disillusioned fans will come around eventually once they actually hold the book in their hands. He thinks that he wants to kiss the back of Dan’s neck.
“What do we do?” Dan asks.
“What we always do,” Phil shrugs. It’s dark outside, and he wonders when the day had slipped away. “Just keep going.”
“For the record,” Dan says after a long moment. “I know that I don’t say this enough, and that there was a time when I never would’ve said it at all. But I’m glad we’re doing this together.”
“Me too,” Phil says, and he wonders if they will ever have this conversation while actually looking at each other. There’s silence between them for a long minute, and then Dan gives one final sniff, swipes at his face, and sits up.
“I’m going to go start dinner,” he says as he stands. “You hungry?”
Phil looks at the Dan-shaped indent left in his covers. “No thanks,” he says.
Dan makes too much pasta, so Phil ends up eating some anyway. They sit at the table quietly. The night feels thin, tenuous. A holiday to Japan waits for them in just a few weeks. Dan’s eyes are still red when he pokes his head in Phil’s room hours later to mutter a soft ‘goodnight’.
April
“Humans are so weird,” Dan says, shaking his can of Fuji air with a delighted grin for at least the fifth time in the past ten minutes.
“Says the man who just dropped 800 yen on a can of oxygen.”
“Yeah, but I bought it ironically. There are people who are out here seriously choosing to spend money on this stuff, Phil,” Dan says as they stand on the deck of the Japanese tour boat, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Fuji. So far, only clouds. “The terrifying hilarity of capitalism.” His voice seems louder in Japan than in London or Manchester—it had taken Phil a few days into the trip to put a finger on it; the fact that Dan is the happiest and least self-conscious that Phil has ever seen him before.
“Okay, but you realize that everyone on this boat watching you with your can of air doesn’t think you bought it ironically? For all they know, you’re unironically loving that 800-yen air,” Phil counters.
Duncan and Mimei have wandered to the other side of the boat deck, and he can see them leaning slightly against each other, taking in the view, off in their own little world for a moment.
“I’d like to think that my aesthetic makes it clear that everything I do is ironic,” Dan says thoughtfully, as though he’s considered the matter at great length before. He probably has.
“Aaand we’re back to where this discussion started—humans are weird. You’re weird,” Phil says, but his own tongue has been dyed an alarming shade of black for the past two hours on account of the black ice cream he’d eaten earlier, so he supposes he can’t really talk.
“You literally bought a toy wood louse and three years’ supply of Pokémon Kleenex the other day, so I think you lose the ‘who’s weirder?’ contest,” Dan retorts, which—valid point.
Before Phil can muster up a comeback, a young woman tentatively taps Dan on the shoulder.
Phil has the sudden, fervent wish: please don’t be a fan. He wants Dan’s voice to stay loud. He wants him to keep laughing un-self-consciously. Please.
“Sorry—I just overheard you speaking in English,” The woman says, holding out a camera with a friendly smile. Her accent is either American or Canadian; Phil can’t really tell the difference. “Would you mind taking a picture of my husband and I?” She motions to a tall blond man standing behind her.
Oh. “Yeah, sure, of course,” Dan says, expertly fiddling with the lens and snapping a few shots of the two of them. Dan and the husband crowd together to check the pictures on the viewfinder, and the woman turns to Phil with a friendly grin.
“Thanks,” she says. “I’m so glad we decided on Tokyo for our honeymoon, but it’s been really hard to get around not knowing any Japanese.”
“We’re in the same boat,” Phil commiserates, because they’d be utterly lost without Duncan and Mimei.
The husband must overhear the word ‘honeymoon’ and ‘same boat’, because his face lights up. “Oh, are you two on your honeymoon as well? Here, give me your camera and I’ll take a picture of you two. Return the favor.”
“Oh,” Phil says. Really, after nearly seven years of millions of people assuming things about his relationship with Dan, you’d think he’d be better at responding when these situations arose. “We’re just—” he starts, but then he realizes he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Two roommates on a dream vacation together? Two bros platonically admiring Fuji’s majestic views?
So they take the picture; Dan smirking at him the entire time. Once they’ve all peered at Dan’s phone screen and approved of the shot; him and Dan looking tall and slightly awkward against a backdrop of clouds and waves, they bid each other farewell, and the couple retreats below-deck.
“Well,” Dan says, closing the camera app on his phone with a grin. He didn’t delete the picture, Phil dimly notes. “How exactly did we go from English-speaking photo-takers to fellow honeymooners?”
And Phil knows Dan is just teasing him about the conversation Phil and the husband had had. But he’s suddenly very, very tired. Maybe it’s the jetlag. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s less than two years from thirty. “Because that’s what the rest of the world sees when they look at the two of us together,” he says. “You’re the only person who doesn’t see it, Dan.”
Dan’s eyes go wide and startled at these words, as though he’s been slapped across the face. Phil barely notes the expression, however, because there is a sudden flurry of motion on the boat; everyone dashing over to one side of the observatory deck as the clouds clear and the entirety of Mount Fuji is finally revealed.
“I’m going to go try and get a good picture,” Phil says. “You coming?”
“No,” Dan says, and his face is strange, as though he’s in the midst of having some terrible epiphany. “You go ahead. I’ll just look from here.”
“You okay? You don’t usually get boat-sick, right?” Phil asks, because Dan is looking alarmingly pale all of a sudden.
“No, no, I’m fine. You go ahead,” Dan says.
His voice is the quietest it’s been all week.
May
Some people fall in love so easily and gradually that there is no huge realization; no big declaration; no dramatic moment. Just two lives growing together, converging inevitably on some infinite point off in the distance.
Must be nice. Phil wouldn’t know, though, because falling in love with a romantic partner is different than accidentally falling in love with your best friend. Because for Phil, there had been a moment; an instant where he’d looked at Dan and just thought: well, fuck.
(It had been back in 2012, and they’d been bickering about something. Not arguing, really. They never argue—arguments require being honest and open about your anger, and he and Dan have never been good at that.
“Hey,” he’d said one stifling August afternoon. “I’m filming a video today—do you want to be in it?”
And Dan had glanced up from Guild Wars and shrugged, not quite looking at Phil. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “I’ve been on your channel a lot lately, haven’t I? I just want—”
“—to be separate people, I know,” Phil had sighed, allowing a little bit of his frustration to seep into his voice.
“It’s not because of you, Phil,” Dan had said, his voice impatient. “I just want to be recognized for my own merit. And you deserve to be recognized for yours. Not for our—for ‘phan’, or whatever,” he’d ended in a mumble.
What happened to the boy who wouldn’t post his first YouTube video until I spent days promising him that it was good enough; that he was good enough? Phil had thought. Where’s the boy who texted me 17 smiley faces when I agreed to collab for the first time?
“Even if we’re separate people on YouTube, we’re still best friends,” Dan had said then, and it had sounded like a question. “Right?” He’d practically whispered, and his fingers had nervously tangled themselves in the cord of his headphones, and the neckline of his t-shirt had dipped a little bit to reveal the indent of his collarbone. And Phil had thought: oh god, I’m in love with you.)
It still catches him off guard sometimes, three years later, like the feeling of missing a step on the stairs, or the childhood memory of when he’d dived too deep in the pool and barely made it back to the surface without running out of air.
Phil has always been a good compartmentalizer, though, and for the most part, he doesn’t dwell. Phil is Phil and Dan is Dan, and they’re still best friends. That’s what’s important in the end; that Dan is still next to him in his life. He can be content with that.
But then there are months like May; months that are quiet and easy. The book is mostly written. The YouTube conventions of the summer have yet to begin, and it’s as though they are both just waiting for something to happen.
“Seriously?” Dan says one morning as he enters the kitchen; voice creaky with sleep, hair mussed in a way that he’d never allow anyone else to see. Phil wonders when that had happened; when Dan had stopped caring about saving face in front of Phil; when Phil had stopped caring about eating cereal that wasn’t his.
Phil startles and nearly knocks over his coffee in his attempts to shield a pilfered cereal box from view. “You were meant to still be asleep.”
“We said we’d film a Sims video this morning, remember? Actually, wait; you said we’d film a Sims video this morning, so I woke up early,” Dan says, before pointing at Phil’s bowl. “You’re not even ashamed anymore, are you?”
“No, not really,” Phil says sedately, taking another bite of Shreddies.
“You are too much,” Dan sighs, collapsing into the chair opposite Phil. He says it in the same tone of voice he uses whenever he turns to the camera in videos and says: “This guy. This guy,” while pointing at Phil in some strange sort of exasperated disbelief.
And Phil doesn’t mind, actually. He likes the idea of being too much—this guy, too much. After a lifetime of tailing after Martyn, after bullies in school, after failing miserably at sports, after being never enough, never enough, he likes the idea that he has the ability to consume space; to make the world feel a little smaller and safer; to have the potential to fill up someone’s life until there is no room for emptiness.
Dan has bags under his eyes and Phil vaguely recalls hearing the sound of him pacing around at five in the morning. Something has been bothering him ever since they’d returned from Japan, but he never says anything about it. If you’d let me, I’d fill the gaps in; find a way to be whatever it is that you’re missing, Phil thinks, passing Dan the box of cereal.
Dan knocks his ankle against Phil’s under the table in wordless thanks, sleep-rumpled and soft-eyed in the morning sunlight. And Phil's chest lurches and he thinks, it’s been three years and this isn’t going away.
“Sims?” Dan says.
“Sims,” Phil says, knocking his ankle back against Dan’s, quiet and easy. May is that kind of month.
June
“Whose idea was this, again?” Dan scowls at him through the darkness.
“Uh…yours, actually?” Phil replies distractedly, sending off another text to Martyn: Are you awake? Come let Dan and I in the house!
“No, I said we should go for a walk on the beach. I never said I wanted to get locked out of the house and be stranded outside in the middle of the night.”
Phil rolls his eyes. “Funny, I don’t remember saying that I wanted that either. Look, it’s barely midnight—Martyn will check his phone before he goes to bed, realize that Mum accidentally locked us out, and he’ll let us back in.”
“What if he’s already asleep?” Dan grumps, but he’s already sitting down and making himself comfortable on the beach, kicking off his shoes and burying his toes in the cool sand without much protest.
Phil joins him, but he leaves his shoes on. He’s never liked the feeling of sand against his bare skin. “Then it’ll make a really good anecdote for a video,” he grins, because it’s true. He can just envision it now: that time Dan and I went to Isle of Man for Father’s Day and accidentally got stranded on the beach the whole night through. The viewers would love it—it’s the kind of bizarre thing that would only happen to the two of them.
“This is why we shouldn’t go outside, Phil,” Dan sighs, but it sounds more like a laugh than real annoyance. It’s June, and even though the night air of the beach is cool, it’s not uncomfortably cold. Maybe sleeping out here wouldn’t be the worst thing—Phil can’t deny that they’re both creatures of comfort and habit, but there’s something about the sound of the meadow grass rustling and the waves lapping not fifty yards away that makes him decide to lay back and close his eyes, head pillowed on the hood of his sweatshirt.
“Wow,” Dan says after a long moment. Phil cracks his eyes open and sees that Dan has lain back too, staring up at the sky. “The view almost makes up for the shit wifi.” The breeze had made short work of both of their fringes as they’d walked, and Dan looks carefree and windswept, newly twenty-four years old, eyes luminous in the darkness as they trace the Milky Way.
Phil follows Dan’s gaze. “I’m surprised this doesn’t make you feel all…existential crisis-y,” he remarks, because this view of the night sky—unclouded by the lights of Manchester or London—even gets to Phil a little bit, and he’s been coming to the Isle of Man his entire life.
“Honestly, it probably would, but I’ve been distracting myself with constellations. Which I know fuck-all about, of course. But see, look—that looks almost like Professor Oak over there,” Dan says, pointing to a smattering of stars to the east. Phil thinks it’s the east, anyway. The geography of the island has him a little turned around, and he was never very good at astronomy either.
“I see a whisk right there,” he says, pointing upwards in an arbitrary direction.
“I will dump sand in your mouth,” Dan threatens, but he jostles his shoulder against Phil’s jokingly. Phil distractedly wonders when Dan had scooted so close. (Are they stargazing together?)
“Look, a pineapple,” Dan says, apparently oblivious to the fact that his bare foot is touching Phil’s shoe.
“There?” Phil asks, pointing and squinting.
“No, here,” Dan says, his fingers suddenly encircling Phil’s wrist, gently redirecting him.
Phil has to squint a minute longer to see what Dan is talking about, and when he finally sees it and turns to Dan, Dan is already looking at him. It’s a look that Phil had never seen before these past few months, and he doesn’t know what it means; the fact that Dan has suddenly taken to staring at Phil like he’s never quite seen him before when he thinks Phil isn’t looking. The fact that he willingly tags along on Phil’s Father’s Day plans to the Isle of Man.
“I didn’t know Caspar Lee had his own constellation,” Phil says, deadpan serious.
Dan bursts out laughing, full and genuine, dropping Phil’s wrist. His entire body curves towards Phil’s as he laughs, and there is an instant where Phil wonders what would happen if he were to lean in to meet Dan; if Dan would kiss him back if he kissed him right here and now, both of their eyes full of stars.
“Ursa Major,” he says instead, pointing up at the only constellation he can confidently recognize.
“The great bear,” Dan translates.
“I’d like to know how the hell the ancient Greeks looked up at that jumble of glowing dots and thought ‘yeah, that’s definitely a bear’.”
He expects at least a small huff of laughter from Dan, but when he looks over, Dan is staring at him again. “You don’t ever call me ‘Bear’ anymore,” Dan remarks after a moment. “You used to, back when we first met.”
Back before they’d fallen into being Phan™, the brand. Back when Dan had literally scraped together every last penny to buy train tickets to come see him.
“I could call you it again if you wanted me to,” Phil offers.
“No, that’s—that’s not what I meant,” Dan says, and he sounds frustrated, like even he doesn’t know exactly what his point is. “I don’t know. Never mind.”
Phil wants to push a little more, but then his phone is buzzing in his pocket. “Martyn,” He explains, pushing himself to sit up, accepting the call.
Martyn lets them into the house five minutes later, shaking his head at the bedraggled, windblown pair they make. Even when they return to their flat in London the next day, it feels like they are still picking sand out of everything for weeks and weeks afterwards. Phil doesn’t really mind.
July
This doesn’t usually happen to Phil.
“—yeah, it was crazy; we almost missed the flight in the end,” he finishes saying, and Cal laughs, even though Phil hasn’t said anything funny; just told the story of how he and Dan almost didn’t make it to VidCon because of airport security.
“You’re a really good storyteller,” Cal says, his smile revealing straight, white teeth. “You want another drink?”
“Uh…sure,” Phil says, still feeling a little blindsided. Dan is normally the one who gets hit on, not him. He certainly hadn’t expected for it to happen at VidCon, which he mainly attends to hang out with his American friends and to meet American fans. Not for random hook-ups.
Not that Cal isn’t attractive—Phil isn’t blind. He knows when someone is interested in him, and Cal definitely is. They’d bumped into each other over by the wall of YouTuber baby photos earlier, and Cal had sloshed some of his violently orange margarita on Phil’s shirt.
“Oh god,” he’d said when he’d looked up and seen that it was Phil. “I’m a huge fan—I mean—sorry, oh god, I ruined your shirt. I ruined AmazingPhil’s shirt. They’re never going to invite me to VidCon again.”
“That’s okay,” Phil had shrugged. “Now my shirt matches my hair in my baby photo.”
“Can I buy you a new shirt or something? Oh no, is that a really expensive shirt? Can I get you a drink?”
He’d seemed so genuinely distraught that Phil hadn’t had the heart to make a quick getaway. “The shirt was fifteen pounds on Amazon,” Phil had said, waving off Cal’s panic. He’d looked around and found Dan occupied with Joey Graceffa. “A drink would be nice, I guess.”
Two drinks later, and they’re still sitting together at the bar and chatting. Cal is a few years younger, and he’s an up-and-coming gamer—mainly sports games, however, which explains why Phil has never heard of him before. It’s his first VidCon, and he keeps looking over at Phil through long lashes, as though he can’t quite believe Phil is actually sitting with him.
“Hey,” Cal says, laying his hand on Phil’s arm when they finish their third drink, tone lined with suggestion. “You want to get out of here, maybe?”
And the thing is—part of Phil does. It’s been so long since he’s slept with someone—he can’t even remember the last time. Definitely not in 2015; he’s been far too busy for anything like that. It would be so easy—neither of them are looking for a deep emotional connection, and Phil misses the warmth of another body; craves the feeling of being wanted by someone.
And Cal wants him.
He is still debating when Dan appears from the throng of people, his gait purposeful and his jaw set in a scowl.
“Hey, Dan,” Phil says. “This is Cal.”
Dan gives only the tiniest of nods in Cal’s direction; not bothering to look at his face. His gaze drifts to where Cal’s hand is still resting on Phil’s arm, and it looks like his jaw will crack if he grits his teeth any harder.
“Can I talk to you about something for a minute?” Dan asks flatly, still not bothering to look at Cal.
“Sure,” Phil shrugs, turning to Cal as he stands. “Sorry, one second.”
He follows Dan to the other side of the bar, growing increasingly impatient as Dan stands without speaking, moodily picking at a thread on the hem of his shirt.
“So, good talk,” Phil says when it becomes clear that Dan isn’t going to speak.
“What’s the deal with that guy?” Dan asks, and his voice is probably supposed to sound conversational, but instead it’s horribly, horribly un-casual.
“Since when is that any of your business?” Phil’s tone is light enough, but he means it, because he’s never going to get over Dan until he starts looking at other people. In fact, he thinks it would be something of a victory if he slept with Cal tonight; if only to prove to himself that he can feel things for people other than Dan, even if it’s just the most basic level of physical attraction.
“Have you ever even heard of him before tonight? How do you know he’s not just cozying up to you because you’re more popular than him?” Dan asks.
Phil feels like he’s been slapped a little bit. “Yes, because the only reason that someone could possibly be attracted to me is my subscriber count, obviously,” he says coldly, turning to head back to where Cal is sitting.
Dan grabs his arm. “Phil. I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Look, do you have a legitimate reason why I shouldn’t trust Cal? Has anybody told you anything negative about him?”
“Well, no, but—”
“I’m 28, Dan. I can make my own judgments about who I want to sleep with.” He means for it to sound assertive and strong, but his voice has softened by the end, because Dan looks as though Phil has punched the air out of his lungs.
“You’re right,” Dan nods. He clears his throat. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just going to call it a night; I’m not feeling very well.”
He hurriedly turns away and is already ducking his way through the crowd before Phil can even begin to wrap his mind around the conversation they’d just had.
He can’t do it, in the end.
Maybe it’s the very recent memory of the fact that Dan had gotten up on a stage earlier that same day and proclaimed himself to be ‘Phil Trash Number 1.’ Maybe it’s the sudden realization that Cal actually sort of looks like a flimsy replacement of Dan—the same slender build; dark hair; bright, open features.
Because when Cal leans in and kisses him in the stairwell of the hotel, he is too focused on the memory of how Dan’s face had crumpled at the end of their conversation—too busy wondering what that had meant—to pay attention to the way Cal’s lips move against his own.
“Sorry,” he says, breaking away and shaking his head. “I don’t think I can do this. I’m trying to get over someone, and I thought this would help. But I just—don’t think I’m ready.”
Cal looks put out, but not surprised. “I guess I kind of figured it was over the moment Dan Howell showed up with that look on his face,” he sighs.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cal laughs, and then he seems to realize that Phil is serious. “Oh. You actually meant that question. Um—look, I don’t really know either of you, so I’m just not going to comment or get involved. It was nice to meet you, though.”
He leaves Phil in the stairwell with an orange-stained shirt and a head of jumbled thoughts.
He wants to still be annoyed with Dan when he goes back to their hotel room, but all the fight has left him. It seems silly, almost, in the bright lights of the hotel hallway; his thought to hook up with Cal. Phil Lester doesn’t really do random hook-ups. Instead he does quiet nights watching crappy American TV in a hotel room with his roommate.
Dan’s face does some complicated things that Phil isn’t even going to begin to try to decipher when Phil steps in the room. He’s wearing pajamas and watching Maury in his bed.
Neither of them say anything as Phil takes a seat on his own bed, opposite Dan’s.
“Is he the father?” Phil asks after a few minutes, motioning to the chaos happening on the TV.
“No, they think the father is his twin brother,” Dan explains.
And suddenly they are both laughing, because at least that isn’t their lives; fighting a custody battle on scripted reality TV.
“Are you feeling better?” Phil asks.
“Yeah, it was nothing,” Dan murmurs. “I’m just jetlagged. Or homesick. Or something.”
I’m not homesick, Phil thinks as he studies the line of Dan’s profile, softly illuminated by the bedside lamp. He suddenly wants to cry, a little bit, but he doesn’t know if it’s from the events of the night or this thought: I’m not homesick, because you’re here with me.
Instead of vocalizing any of that, he just says: “Pass the remote? I was looking at the TV guide earlier and there’s two full hours of Judge Judy on later.”
August
“So this is my, uh….”
“Dan,” Dan supplies hastily to cover the silence that Phil has left hanging. “You’d think he’d remember my name after four years of living together.”
It isn’t a very good joke, but people laugh anyway. They’re up in Manchester for an informal reunion with Phil’s high school friends, and most of them have already met Dan at one time or another over the years, anyway. Phil isn’t sure why he’d been so worried about figuring out how to introduce Dan’s presence at his side.
“You want a beer, Phil?” His old best friend, Jack, says, slapping him on the back and handing him a bottle without waiting to hear an answer.
It’s been a really weird day, though, so Phil doesn’t protest. He’d lost his glasses, forgotten his contacts, been photographed running to the train station, and trended on Twitter as a result.
This is Jack’s flat, and it’s weird that Jack—bespectacled, freckled Jack from high school—owns a sleek high-rise in Manchester now. Phil falls into trying to hug everyone and catch up with what each individual person has been doing with his or her life, and he doesn’t even notice when Dan slips away from his side and disappears.
A few hours later, he’s standing with Jack by the snack table when his phone buzzes with a tweet notification.
Everything is blurry up close, so Phil hands Jack the phone. “Can you read this?”
“Sure,” Jack says. He goes quiet for a minute. “I think your, uh…Dan needs you,” He says, as though he’s not quite sure how to refer to Dan either.
He hands Phil back the phone, having taken a screenshot and zoomed in on the text so that it’s easier for Phil to see. Two tweets from Dan about existential crises. Phil puts down his drink.
“Have you seen him recently?” He asks, squinting. “Wait, never mind—he’s out on the balcony.” Even across a crowded room without his contacts, he can still find Dan in a matter of seconds. Could probably find him in a pitch-black cave or in the middle of a blizzard; recognize that dark head of hair at the bottom of the ocean or on top of a mountain.
“Good luck,” Jack says, completely nonjudgmental, and Phil wonders why they haven’t stayed in closer contact over the years.
The air is thick and humid outside; heavy in a way that it only is during the dying nights of summer. Dan is standing perfectly still, staring at the street below, his body one long line of tension.
Phil steps next to Dan; looks at the same tree that Dan is looking at; tries to imagine what Dan might be thinking about for a minute.
“You want to talk about it?” He asks. Sometimes when Dan gets like this, Phil wonders if he is missing out on some fundamental part of the human experience. Dan feels everything so deeply, and it’s not that Phil doesn’t feel things, but he’s never been moved to tears by classical music, or contemplated death thoroughly enough to make himself need to lie facedown on the carpet.
Other times, he’s just glad to be relatively even-keeled. Saves a lot of daily emotional turbulence and stress.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” Dan shrugs.
Phil figures that this is probably a combination of a lot of different things—the book release; less than six weeks away. The train ride earlier today—traveling always puts Dan in a contemplative mood. Being at a reunion of people he doesn’t know well. Whatever it is that’s been hanging over his head since Japan.
“Are you ever going to tell me what’s been bothering you the past few months?” He asks casually, and Dan’s eyes flicker over to him for the first time since Phil had stepped outside, widening with surprise.
“I don’t—”
“You know you can tell me anything, right?” Phil says.
“Not this. This is different,” Dan says, shaking his head. It might just be the moonlight, but his eyes look a little watery.
Phil wants to lay a hand on Dan’s shoulder; wants to leech some of the tension from his frame. Wants to push with his words until Dan just tells him; til he stops burying his feelings so deeply that they hurt him. Instead he just says, “When you want to talk, I’ll listen.”
It’s a vague platitude. They are quiet for a moment longer. “Sorry—we came all this way to see your friends and now you’re stuck out here with me while I’m being pathetic,” Dan says.
“That’s okay,” Phil shrugs. “It’s nice to see everyone, but people keep trying to show me pictures of their babies and I can’t keep any of the names straight or tell the difference from one baby to the next. Probably couldn’t even if I did have my contacts in.”
He turns and looks back inside the flat, where everyone is gathered around a computer, Facebook-stalking their old classmates. As much as he cares about these people, this isn’t his life anymore.
He turns back to Dan, and they stand together in the dark. The stars are slightly blurry without his glasses, but he can still find Ursa Major.
September
Phil is drunk.
Not like, going-to-eat-an-entire-pizza-and-then-puke drunk, but just…loose-limbed. Loose-tongued. Screaming the words to ‘Unchained Melody’ with all his cousins on the dance floor. Completely ignoring the fact that he is about to go on a nation-wide tour and release a book in a matter of weeks. That kind of drunk.
He doesn’t allow himself to be like this very often, because he likes being very in control of his image—all the big YouTubers who do drinking challenges and tipsy vlogs on their channels have invited him and Dan to collab, but Phil has never said yes. He drinks socially, sure, but never more than two or three drinks out in public—especially at YouTuber events.
But here at his aunt’s wedding, where there’s no risk of hidden vlog cameras; where he’s surrounded by all the people he’s grown up with and is closest to; where Martyn presses a new drink into his hand every time he finishes one…is another story.
His eyes automatically seek out Dan, and his heart does something funny in his chest when he finds him on the other side of the room, dancing with Lucy, the five-year-old flower girl. He is bending over to be closer to her level, holding her small hand as she spins out and then back in. When he says something that makes her giggle, Phil has to look away, because all he can think is someday, someday, someday.
The next time his eyes find Dan, Dan is making his way back from the bar, distributing fresh beers to everyone in the circle of twenty-somethings that has formed on the dance floor. Martyn claps Dan on the back and says something to him that makes him laugh, head thrown back, teeth flashing with unadulterated mirth, and god, it does something to Phil to see the easy way that his family loves Dan. He hadn’t even had to ask Dan to tag along to the wedding—his aunt had invited him herself when they’d all been on the Isle of Man for Father’s Day.
“Hey,” Dan shouts in his ear over the music, pressing his entire body into Phil’s side, so much closer to Phil than he would normally allow himself to be in front of other people. The music swells and changes into ‘Stand By Me’, and everyone cheers and starts singing along, even Phil, who doesn’t actually remember ever listening to the song and learning the words, but still knows them all the same.
And Phil’s chest is suddenly filled with so much perfect happiness that it almost aches, shouting about the mountains crumbling into the sea and swaying against Dan.
“You are so drunk,” Dan laughs, lips almost grazing Phil’s cheek as he leans in to speak over the music. He’s smiling his crinkly-eyed smile—one of the crinkliest Phil has seen—and Phil knows that Dan feels it too—the way the music and comfort of being surrounded by loved ones on a happy day seems to be a cosmic reminder that everything is really going to be okay in the end.
“Also, I’ve figured out where your dancing abilities come from,” Dan continues, motioning to Phil’s aunt, the bride, who is currently passionately shimmying around her new husband.
“You shimmy, I’ll dip?” He asks, grabbing Dan’s waist and dramatically attempting to dip him.
Dan goes down and almost wipes out completely, but he’s laughing, the kind of way he only laughs off-camera.
“Remind me to steal Martyn’s phone and delete the picture he just took of me eating shit,” Dan says as Phil pulls him up from the ground.
Across the dance floor, Lucy sees Dan and waves excitedly at him.
“I see you have a new friend,” Phil says as the song ends and they step over to the edge of the dance floor to stand and observe.
“She came up to ask me to dance, and she curtsied and everything,” Dan grins, waving back. “How could I say no?” The easy humor in his face slides into something more contemplative. He bites his lip for a moment before speaking again.
“Do you think I’d make a good dad one day?” He ventures. His voice is almost shy, and he doesn’t quite meet Phil’s gaze.
Phil has to swallow around the lump that has suddenly arisen in his throat before speaking. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice sounds hoarse. He imagines Dan with a faceless significant other, crooning over a baby one day. He’d be such a good father. And he’d be an even better person to raise a child with; to laugh with and cry with along the way, on all the bumps along the road. “You’d be a really good dad, I think.” He imagines himself on the periphery of Dan’s life with his family; forever the weird, lonely uncle. He feels like he can’t quite catch his breath.
Dan’s smile is small but pleased. “Hey,” he says, looking around at all the other couples dancing. “Do you maybe want to—”
“I’m going to get some water,” Phil says at the exact same time. “Sorry—what?”
Dan’s gaze flickers over to where Martyn and Cornelia are dancing, heads bent close together, and there is something sad in his eyes for a fleeting instant. “Never mind,” he says with a smile, shaking his head. “Maybe I’ll go see if Lucy wants to dance again.”
You’re going to break my heart one day, Phil thinks as he watches Lucy remove her flower crown and solemnly place it on Dan’s head. Because sooner or later the world—some pretty blond girl at the BBC or a handsome guy at the bar—is going to steal Dan away from him.
Someday—not tonight, but someday—whatever it is that he offers Dan that makes him stick around (his friendship, his house plants, his slightly endearing cereal-stealing habits? Phil doesn’t even know) isn’t going to be enough anymore. People don’t spend their entire lives with their platonic friends. Especially not people like Dan, who want to find love and have a family.
Dan’s already given him seven years of his life.
(Phil thinks he would take a thousand more, if Dan were only to offer.)
October
October is a blur—an exhausting, exhilarating blur.
When Phil looks back years later, he will only remember flashes and fleeting seconds—standing backstage just before the first TATINOF show; heart pounding; Dan’s fingers wrapping around his wrist in a vice-grip as they stand alone behind velvet curtains; clinging for dear life.
Quiet moments in the tour van, Dan asleep next to him, the sunset illuminating his tired features with dying light, night mist rolling in over the hills and meadows of the English countryside.
A mother at a book-signing, voice shaky with sincerity, hand warm on his forearm as she tells him: “Thank you for all that you’ve done for my daughter.”
Dan—face blazing triumphantly, hair curly with sweat, happy dimples probably visible from the back of the London Palladium or maybe the surface of the moon, taking a bow as the crowd screams and cheers their approval.
Lying in a hotel bed at night, thunderous applause still ringing in his ears, thinking: we helped build this thing; this whole giant community of people who love each other and love us. And thinking: oh my god, for all the things we fucked up in the past and all the doubts we had along the way, we did the right thing in the end; we made something good; we made something so good.
Small moments.
“So that’s Stonehenge on your left,” Dan says in what Phil supposes is meant to be a tour-guide voice. “Try not to get too overwhelmed.”
“Seriously?” Phil squints out the van window at the gray rocks, unimpressed. “It looks like something I would build with my blocks as a little kid.”
“I can confirm that,” Martyn says from the front seat. “Because I used to knock all of Phil’s block creations over.”
“Well, at least I can say I’ve seen it now, I guess,” Phil shrugs. “And, hey, you used to always tell me mum accidentally kicked them over while she was cleaning!”
“Yeah, well…you also believed you were part fish and that hot dogs were made out of real dogs at the time, so it wasn’t exactly a hard lie to sell.”
“Hilarious,” Phil says. “But, you know—before we get back on the freeway, does anyone want to stop for a—”
“No,” the entire van choruses emphatically.
“No more Starbucks trips,” Martyn says.
“If you say the words ‘pumpkin’ or ‘spice’ or ‘latte’ again before this tour ends, I will play ‘Spooky, Scary Skeletons’ on non-stop repeat for the remainder of our car rides,” Dan threatens. “You have a problem.”
“Just wait until December 1st,” Phil returns calmly. “I’m going to play ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ on repeat for at least an hour every day leading up to Christmas.”
“Stop throwing the C-word around so casually,” Dan exclaims, looking scandalized. “It’s only mid-October.”
And Phil, youngest child that he is, always gets his way in the end, because Martyn turns to stare at them flatly. “Never mind, let’s make a Starbucks stop. I need caffeine if I’m going to have to listen to the two of you in the backseat for the next two hours.”
The Pumpkin Spice Latte feels like victory, but so does Dan’s smile when Phil hands him a cider upon clambering back into the backseat.
Phil isn't jealous of Emily.
That's not him, after all. Dan is the one who is supposed to be a jealous person—he's talked about it multiple times in videos and liveshows; the way that he finds it hard to watch other people succeed when he isn't succeeding; how he finds it difficult to not be resentful when he feels like his place in someone's life is being usurped.
That's not Phil, though. (Most of the time.)
Emily is new, however—he's stood by and watched Dan flirt with other people for ages. But he's never watched Dan get along with someone as well as Dan gets along with Emily.
She's a part of the crew on their tour, and Phil doesn't think he's ever disliked anyone more in his 28 years of life, except for his primary school music teacher, Mrs. Pratt, who had forced him to play a solo on the recorder at the annual holiday assembly (he'd been called 'Flute Boy' for the entire rest of the school year, tragically). All of sudden, everything out of Dan's mouth is, "Emily loves Kanye; did you know?" and "Oh, Emily told me that she plays Guild Wars too!". It's as though Emily has been created and sent into their lives specifically to share every interest with Dan that Phil doesn't share.
"Emily likes Formula One!" Dan tells him one afternoon as the crew is unpacking and prepping for the show.
"That's it!" Phil exclaims, throwing his hands in the air and marching away.
"I can't help noticing that you seem a little tense," Martyn says when he comes and finds Phil pacing around backstage and muttering darkly to himself.
"Who actually likes Formula One?" Phil fumes. "It's just cars going around in circles for hours and hours. It's not even a real sport!"
"The athleticism of Formula One is something that I also like to worry about amidst executing a nationwide tour—" Martyn begins dryly, but Phil cuts him off, voice serious.
"What if she's replacing me?"
Martyn looks sidelong at him for a minute, and then he starts laughing, shoulders shaking silently.
"It's not funny!" Phil says sharply.
"Replacing you?" Martyn declares, wiping his eyes. "Oh, man. That's—that's good stuff—I should call Mum and tell her; I'm sure she could use a good laugh."
"It's not funny," Phil snaps. "I don't get why you think it is."
"Clearly I inherited all the brains in this family," Martyn sighs, looking put-upon. "Maybe you'll get it one day when you're older, Philly."
Phil rolls his eyes and storms away to find somewhere else to mutter darkly in peace. He doesn't understand Martyn, sometimes.
But that night when Phil bangs his head on a set piece in the middle of the performance, it is Dan who drags him behind the curtain during a scene change; Dan, whose face is close and concerned as he studies the red spot blossoming along Phil's hairline; Dan, whose fingers are gentle as they tentatively thread through Phil's hair to seek out the small bump rising above his temple.
"You okay?" Dan murmurs, face washed out under the harsh lights of the stage. It feels like they are the only two people in the entire world, cloaked in heavy velvet curtains and awash in stage light.
Emily scurries by, carrying some sound equipment. She suddenly seems very small and harmless and nonthreatening. Just another crew member; probably someone that Phil would be good friends with if he allowed himself to like her.
Dan's fingers ghost down the side of Phil's face as he draws away. And maybe Emily likes Formula One and Kanye and Guild Wars, but Phil is the one who gets to watch Dan scrub off his stage makeup and crawl into bed across from him in their hotel room that night.
November
Mid-November brings them to the U.S. for publicity and a scattered handful of ill-organized book signings.
“Why the hell did we think it was a good idea to schedule this right after tour ended?” Dan asks blearily as they find their seats on the plane.
“Because we planned it while we were still on a beginning-of-tour high,” Phil answers, rubbing his temples. They’d thrown a party to celebrate the end of the U.K. tour right after the show the night before, and right now he’s not sure if he’s exhausted or hungover. Or both.
Dan shoves his backpack under the seat in front of him, leans back in his seat, and closes his eyes. “Wake me up when November ends,” he sing-songs fervently under his breath.
“Just kidding,” he says a minute later, sitting up straight and opening his eyes. They have smudges of purple under them, like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. “That sounded ungrateful—you know I’m grateful for all the success we’ve been having, right? People know I’m grateful?”
And Phil is suddenly overtaken by a wave of affection so strong that he is sure that some of it must show on his face. Affection for Dan, who had doubted so many things about himself and his life back in 2009, but is now the happiest he’s ever been. Dan, who had given up on his childhood theater dreams but had gotten back up on stage for their tour show. Dan, who reminds viewers to take a deep breath at the end of all his liveshows. Dan, who still worries that people won’t understand how happy and grateful he is for all that they’ve been given.
“Go to sleep, you idiot,” Phil says.
Their final stop in the U.S. is a place just outside Chicago; a town called Naperville with an independent bookstore. Phil likes the way the people there say the name Nay-pur-ville; the way the broad vowels feel in his mouth when he tries to replicate the sound.
This is the best-planned signing of the three—no angry dads, no people camped outside for hours in the cold. Dan pushes the back door of the store open first when they leave, but Phil doesn’t need to be able to see around his tall frame to instantly know that it is snowing. He recognizes the cold humidity of the air in a way that is almost innate; an instinct left over from a childhood in the North.
Winters in Northern England aren’t quite comparable to Chicago winters, however, and he is far more affected by the cold than the fans who eagerly wait for them outside the store, all standing ankle-deep in snow; blithely waving and shouting farewells as he and Dan hustle to their waiting taxi.
Their taxi driver doesn’t seem fazed either. “You should’ve been here during the polar vortex a few years ago,” he says, shaking his head in fond recollection. “That was really something.” He cheerfully pumps the brakes as they skid through an intersection, and opposite Phil in the backseat, Dan’s knuckles are a stark white, clutching to the arm rests as the car swerves.
When they get back to the hotel, Phil changes into his pajamas, pulls his jacket back on, and steps out onto the hotel balcony. Certain things have lost their magic since childhood, but the first snowfall of the year will never be one of them.
“Do you think our flight home will be delayed?” Dan asks, coming out on the balcony behind him, similarly dressed; arms crossed over his chest for warmth.
The snow is still steadily falling, and Phil is struck by how silent the street is below them; how the world feels hushed and calm, made ancient and brand new all at once.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe we’ll be stranded here and we’ll finally get to find out what Thanksgiving is like.”
“Maybe the snow will just keep piling up and we’ll be stuck here til the spring,” Dan says, turning to Phil with a grin. There are snowflakes on his eyelashes and in his hair.
Phil wonders what that would be like—they definitely have a healthy fanbase here, but it wouldn’t be like living in London where more people in the street know them from the radio. They could rent a little house and blend themselves into the smudgy gray skyline of Chicago, and nobody around them would care or know the difference.
“They don’t have mince pies in America, though,” Phil points out, because it wouldn’t be Christmas without mince pies.
“If we don’t make our flight, I will personally buy a boat and paddle us back to England, just for the mince pies,” Dan vows.
That night, Phil lies awake in bed and thinks back to their mini-press junket in New York; to the question that had cropped up over and over again: “Where do the two of you see yourselves in five years?” Dan had immediately deflected with a joke every time the future was brought up, as Phil had known he would.
And Phil had deflected the five-year plan questions too, because the only thing he could see in the moment—his honest, gut answer to that question; his answer to any question about what he wants from the future—is a little house just north of London, with lots of windows and a skylight and a pond in the back garden. Dan in the kitchen, pouring two glasses of wine at the end of a long day. Building new shelves to hold all their shared knickknacks. Dan, warm and bright-eyed and quiet in the mornings, humming while making a cup of tea. Filming videos in a new, bigger bedroom. Dan, nearing thirty, his laugh lines deepening, complaining about the sofa crease bothering his back in old age. Dan, Dan, Dan.
He’d shoved the thought away during the press junket, but he thinks about it now, in the dark; just barely able to make out Dan’s silhouette in the queen bed across from his. Phil sleeps sprawled and restless, but Dan sleeps curled up in a little ball, self-protective and huddled, as though shielding himself from the world. He stands a lot taller and talks a lot louder now than he used too, but he still sleeps the same.
Phil still remembers the first time Dan had come to visit him in Manchester; how he’d fallen asleep in Phil’s bed on a rainy Saturday afternoon, curled in a little ball, relaxed and trusting and looking young—so young.
Dan has changed a lot—they both have—but maybe some things never leave a person.
December
2015 is going to end the same way that it began: a drunken houseparty at their flat.
It’s become their tradition over the past few years: invite all their friends over, drink heavily, and pointedly avoid looking at each other or at anyone else when midnight comes around and everyone starts making out.
This year is shaping up to be much the same. Phil is decently buzzed and he’s standing next to Dan in the back corner of the room holding a champagne glass, not very far from midnight. Dan seems preoccupied with his new phone case; rubbing his thumb along the smooth black plastic, watching the tiny gold stars settle with a contemplative expression. (Part of him doesn’t even know why they exchange gifts still—they’re fortunate enough to be able to afford basically everything they could possibly want to buy for themselves, and they already co-own so many things that the concept of buying something that specifically isn’t a shared possession feels strangely intimate. In a way, it would've been less revealing to give Dan a Versace t-shirt that had cost £200, instead of the £20 piece of black plastic that had caught his eye in the store and instantly made him think Dan.)
“Have you thought up a New Year’s Resolution yet?” Phil asks, just to give himself something to do. The blobfish plushie that Dan had gotten him as a Christmas gift is currently sitting above the fireplace; benevolently overlooking the party.
“No. I think my resolution for 2016 is just to survive the world tour,” Dan says, and his face is still thoughtful. “There was something I promised myself I’d do before the end of 2015.” He stops there.
“Well…did you do it?” Phil asks.
“No. I never quite worked up the courage.”
“You still have a few minutes left,” Phil points out.
“Fair enough,” Dan says. He seems to steel himself to say something.
“Hey, Dan,” someone shouts. “Do you have any more champagne glasses?”
"Do we?" Phil asks, straining to remember.
"Yeah; we bought some over the summer when the Americans were going to be in town for SITC, remember?" Dan says. When Phil shrugs blankly, Dan puts down his glass of champagne and rolls his eyes.
"I guess I'll go dig them up," he says long-sufferingly, which is pretty ironic, considering that Phil had done the vacuuming and the dusting that afternoon while Dan had poured chips into bowls and deliberated over whether to put out mild or moderate salsa.
Phil watches absently as Dan threads his way through the crowd towards the kitchen. Normally their New Year's parties are much smaller than this, but this year, they'd invited all the tour crew. He sees Props Manager Kenny talking to Makeup Sam; Sound Tech Greg pouring and distributing champagne in the glasses that Dan delivers.
Formula One Emily, swinging shiny dark hair over her shoulder and smiling up at Dan; catching hold of his arm as he walks by. Dan, pausing on his way back to Phil, grinning as Emily gesticulates to punctuate whatever joke she is telling.
Everyone begins crowding around the TV, clamoring over the countdown that is about to begin. And Phil is tucking himself away on the empty sofa, sitting and putting his drink down, all his previous festive energy suddenly deserting him, because he is nearly twenty-nine and he's sitting alone at midnight on New Year's Eve. Because Dan and Emily are standing close together and smiling at each other near the doorway. Because he can see the red patch on Dan's cheek even on the other end of the room; because Phil isn't getting any younger, and there will never be anyone for him but Dan. Because maybe there hasn't been anyone for him but Dan ever since 2009, which had begun with some kid constantly commenting on his videos and tweeting him, and had ended with that same kid planning to move to Manchester for uni to be closer to Phil.
It looks like Emily is telling a story, but Dan seems oddly tense and uninterested; fidgeting with his phone case; gaze flickering repeatedly over to Phil's corner.
He wonders what Dan had wanted to do before the end of 2015; if he'd found time to do it yet in these last few minutes. He shifts in his seat and feels his foot come in contact with something unidentifiable on the floor. When he looks down, there is a crumpled-up piece of paper near his shoe—probably an old grocery list or a receipt that he'd unearthed without realizing earlier when he'd cleaned.
He unfolds and uncrinkles the paper, just so that he doesn't have to watch Dan and Emily when midnight strikes.
Someone is drunkenly singing 'Auld Lang Syne', and Phil is frozen on the couch.
Because it's not an old shopping list or scrawled phone number. It's a note, written in his own loopy penmanship; eight words in purple gel ink: I wish I had kissed him at midnight. A confession; letter by painstaking letter.
And now, nearly exactly a year later, he is still in exactly the same place as he'd been when he'd written that note; sitting alone; filled with regret over missed opportunities; passively watching Dan slip through his fingertips.
He thinks about all that he has done in 2015—standing on a stage in front of thousands, pouring all the best bits of himself into a book, stargazing on the Isle of Man, watching the sun sink beneath the horizon on the roof of their hotel in Tokyo—and he wonders why the hell he is still sitting on this couch.
Phil jolts to his feet at the same instant that the countdown begins, everyone lifting their glasses and chanting backwards from 10 along with the broadcasters on the TV. Across the room, everything seems to happen in slow-motion: his eyes meet Dan's, and he watches as Dan's fingers smooth over his phone case absently, the gold stars glittering through the dimness of the room. And then Dan is stepping away from Emily's side as though being pulled by an ocean current, cutting her off mid-word as he abruptly turns away from her to face Phil.
Everything happens very fast then—Phil doesn't know which one of them surges forward first, but then they are meeting somewhere halfway, in the middle of their lounge; right where they've stood thousands of times before. Dan's lips crash against his just as the countdown reaches one and the world around them explodes in noise and light. Phil can feel the reverberation of distant fireworks in the soles of his shoes, but he doesn't open his eyes, because he wants to memorize every single millisecond of kissing Dan—the easy way Dan's hands slide up to cradle the sides of Phil's face; the way Dan's lips part when Phil leans in a little closer; the way he tastes of champagne and his favorite spearmint gum and Dan, Dan, Dan.
They duck into Dan's room a few minutes later and lock the door, eager to escape the wolf-whistles and the catcalls of their friends.
"So that was a little different than our other New Year's parties—" Phil starts to comment delicately, but his words are cut off when Dan kisses him again; deeper and slower this time; cornering Phil against the closed door and eagerly pressing close, fingers twisting in the material of Phil's shirt.
"Sorry," Dan says breathlessly when they resurface a few minutes later. His lips are red and swollen, and Phil doesn't really remember tangling his fingers in Dan's hair, but it must have happened, because he looks an absolute mess. Phil wonders if he looks any better himself—he's going to have to wear a scarf all week to cover up the mark that is undoubtedly blossoming on his neck. "I've been wanting to do that for a while."
Phil's brain short-circuits a little. "How long is a while, exactly?"
"Do you remember in Japan, when that couple asked me to take their picture on the boat?" Dan asks. His tone is practiced, as though he's imagined himself saying these words many times. "Afterwards, you said that I was the only person in the whole world who couldn't see us as a couple."
"And that...made you want to kiss me?" Phil says slowly, trying to piece the story together. "Apparently I've been going about seducing people the wrong way for years now. If only I'd known it was that simple—"
Dan rolls his eyes. "No, that made me wonder if you could see us as a couple. And once I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop. It was like there was this giant thing that had been staring me in the face for six years, but I was just seeing it for the first time."
"Oh," Phil says softly, and the way that Dan is looking at him, eyes dark and serious and close, makes Phil's stomach feel just as fluttery and nervous as it had felt when he'd stood at the Manchester Picadilly Train Station, 22 years old and wholly unsure of his place in the world; waiting for a train due in from Reading.
"I knew for certain at VidCon. That night that you were going to sleep with that absolute asshole—what was his name?" Dan scratches his jaw in thoughtful recollection. "Actually, you know what—fuck that guy. I don't care about his name."
"If it makes you feel any better, I don't even remember his name either," Phil says, because that all seems like a ridiculous fever dream from years ago, instead of five months ago.
"And you?" Dan asks.
"I've known for ages," Phil says honestly, because he recalls the instant he'd realized he was in love with Dan, but he doesn't remember how it came about to begin with—if it had happened on that train platform in Manchester, or perhaps in the kitchen of the Manchester flat, listening to Dan hum as he made pancakes in the morning, or maybe in between moving boxes and lease agreements as they'd packed their lives away and moved 300 miles together. "I don't know why it took me this long to kiss you, though. It seems stupid now."
The soft expression on Dan's face shifts into something that is a little more familiar, everyday, argumentative Dan. "Hang on—I kissed you. It was my resolution; that I was going to kiss you by the end of 2015. I kissed you out there," Dan claims staunchly, and Phil can't believe that this is an actual thing that they are about to bicker over.
"No way—didn't you see how dramatically I stood and strode over to you? That was clearly me kissing you," Phil says, shaking his head.
"Did you see how I completely walked away from Emily right as midnight was about to hit? That was all me," Dan says indignantly, and any mention of Emily hits a little too close for Phil right now.
"Couldn't we have just kissed each other at midnight?" He suggests.
"No," Dan says stubbornly. His eyes light up. "Wait, I kissed you when we came in here a few minutes ago—there's no way you can deny that."
He looks so smug and pleased with himself that Phil can't help it—he tugs at Dan's shirt collar, reeling him in and closing the distance between them, his lips finding Dan's as they stumble backwards towards Dan's bed—all simply for the sake of evening out the score between them, of course.
That night he dreams of his five-year plan—the little house in northern London with a pond in the back garden and bay windows and a king-sized bed—but for now, Dan is right next to him in bed in the London flat when he awakens, one sleepy arm flung over Phil’s waist, his peaceful breaths low and even against Phil's ear. And it’s enough; it’s more than enough; it’s everything.
After all, they have plenty of time for the rest to come.