#hold dan howell accountable
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another lie from daniel dearest...
liar might as well be dan's middle name. today we have a shocking lie that there is no hiding from! first, observe this statement daniel james (read: liar) howell made in 2011:
as a reminder, here is what dan's natural hair looks like:
"but wait!" you may be saying. how do i have examples of his natural hair, when he previously stated that we would never see it again? well, audience, that's because danisnotonfire is a PEDDLER OF FABRICATIONS! this man has not touched hair straighteners in YEARS!
if you need further proof that mister howell regularly shows his natural hair, take only a moment to observe the recent uploads of the so-called "gaming channel" (more to come on that).
please, everyone, urge dan to take accountability for the falsehood he presented in 2011!
we cannot allow him to remain silent!!!
(note: i have made the above text WAD-colored in the hopes that it will catch daniel howell's attention)
#dan howell#daniel howell#danisnotonfire#dan and phil#hold dan howell accountable#lying and faking#we're all doomed#wad#party like it's the end of the world#the slittening#were all doomed#danandphilgames#dnp
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Post Coming Out Universe Masterlist
Better Off (ao3) - tellsfromhale
Summary: Dan's relationship with his family has been getting better, but when his mum drops the bomb that she's seeing someone and wants Dan to meet him, Dan doesn't know how to handle it.
Christmas with You (ao3) - plinth_of_life
Summary: Dan and Phil spend their first Christmas together as a couple, joining the Howell family for Christmas Eve in Wokingham.
Devilishly Endearing (ao3) - Nefertiti1052 (Succubusphan)
Summary: Dan and Phil are making a mess in Karen's kitchen, luckily for them, she thinks they are cute.
endings are like beginnings (ao3) - obsessivelymoody
Summary: Dan wakes up in the post-coming out universe.
from the starting line (ao3) - possumdnp
Summary: Dan and Phil visit Dan’s family for the first time in a post-coming out universe.
hey, brother (ao3) - lestered (clonetrobed)
Summary: It’s time for Phil to reintroduce himself to Dan’s family in the proper context, but there’s one member that he’s not entirely confident about connecting with.
Homecoming (ao3) - Allthephils
Summary: Phil’s first Christmas with Dan’s family
I Want to Hold Your Hand (ao3) - CaibrynM
Summary: A minor incident/misunderstanding while traveling to IOM for Christmas leads Dan to reflect on boundaries and comfort levels in the post coming out universe.
i’ll meet you in the light (ao3) - possumdnp
Summary: Phil looks at the photo and sees them how he sees them in his own head, not them as their larger-than-life internet personas. It’s them, happy and at peace with their lives and who they are in 2019. And he suddenly has the strangest urge to share the photo, to show the world how damn happy he and Dan are, despite everything that’s happened in the past.
i'm ready now (ao3) - orphan_account
Summary: “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.” -Billy, age 4 (2 of 2)
“I’m sorry if my apology isn’t good enough.” (ao3) - yikesola
Summary: “Pretty intolerant of you to be like that, son.” Dan’s dad’s voice is that cloying sort of smug it gets whenever he thinks he’s got someone cornered.
A fic about phone calls and harrowing journeys.
ice is slowly melting (ao3) - calvinahobbes
Summary: Dan's mum brings Colin on a visit.
just tell me how it's lookin' babe (ao3) - phanetixs
Summary: Jeff looks on, partly smug and partly in disgust at the way Dan’s sucking on Phil's ear now, and across his jaw.
“Mm,” Dan rumbles. “You taste so good, Phil.”
(Or, dealing with your ex-bullies the right way.)
Lighter Than Air (ao3) - silentdescant
Summary: Dan and Phil are sappy drunks and they're heading home together.
little comfort card (ao3) - Tarredion
Summary: Phil goes to VidCon alone. Cue separation anxiety, something Dan seems to have accounted for..
Merry and Bright (ao3) - ahappyphil
Summary: Dan and Phil host their first Christmas
Nana (ao3) - ahappyphil
Summary: “The thing is, coming out to his family proved to be the easy part. It’s what followed that’s been difficult, more emotionally draining, more vulnerable. It’s like the invisible wall that’s been between them now has physical form. It has a name now.“
On The Road (ao3) - yikesola
Summary: Phil still isn’t quite used to it all being okay. He isn’t used to Dan not fearfully dissecting a tweet reply that called them queer icons. He isn’t used to things like what the two teenagers they bumped into at the airport said when they stuttered out, “I met my girlfriend because of you,” feeling only good. No twinge of bittersweet.
A fic about changes and landscape.
reconnect (ao3) - Rawritsamehh
Summary: Dan reconnects with his mother after a very big email.
Safe (ao3) - TearDrop1234
Summary: Phil is in a mood and works his way through it with a naked Dan.
Safe Place (ao3) - ahappyphil
Summary: The Isle of Man is warm and unseasonably sunny, or maybe it’s just Kath. Maybe her maternal glow just radiates off this little island.
sense of home (ao3) - theloveofbees
Summary: dan and phil spend christmas together for the first time.
slow days, fast company (ao3) - possumdnp
Summary: Dan and Phil return to Portugal in 2019.
some killer queen you are (ao3) - possumdnp
Summary: Dan’s enjoyed taking a break from YouTube, but for some reason, he still feels like something is missing. Determined to fill the creative void in his life, he decides to try out something new: drag.
stop speak support (ao3) - calvinahobbes
Summary: There’s just an extra layer of awareness in his mind as he sits next to Phil on the sparsely populated tube on their way to a meeting, and the group of lads in their school uniforms stream into the carriage and start filling up the empty seats.
Uncle Dan (ao3) - Ragopamplina
Summary: Dan is a Lester. He knows it, but still, he enjoys little reminders.
When Jokes Go Too Far (ao3) - blissedoutphil
Summary: "i hate men but i want them to touch me"
- actual Dan on twitter
#phanfictioncatalogue#phan#phanfic#phanfiction#dan and phil#masterlists#post coming out#post coming out universe#post coming out masterlist#coming out masterlist
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Heather Cox Richardson
March 24, 2023 (Friday)A follow-up to last night’s examination of the confusion among the Republicans about their budget plans: today when a reporter said to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), had said that he and McCarthy were finalizing a list of proposals to give to President Biden about spending cuts, McCarthy answered: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Noise also continues from former president Donald Trump, who early this morning posted on social media that his indictment could lead to “potential death & destruction”; hours later, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg received a death threat in an envelope with white powder in it. For three days this week, Russian accounts have emailed bomb threats to the court buildings where the grand jury is meeting.
Tomorrow, Trump will hold a rally in Waco, Texas, where a 1993 government siege to extricate the leader of a religious cult who witnesses said was stockpiling weapons led to a gun battle and a fire that left seventy-six people dead.
Although a Republican investigation cited “overwhelming evidence” that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, right-wing talk radio hosts jumped on the events at Waco to attack the administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with talk of the government’s “murder” of citizens, and Alex Jones dropped out of community college to start a talk show on which he warned that the government had “murdered” the people at Waco and was about to impose martial law.
After the Waco siege the modern militia movement took off, and Trump is clearly using the anniversary to tap into domestic violence against the government to defend him in advance of possible indictments.
But will it work? His supporters turned out on January 6, 2021, when he was president and had the power—they thought—to command the army to back him. In the end, that didn’t happen. Since then, Trump’s foot soldiers have been going to prison while he dines at Mar-a-Lago and rails about how unfairly he has been treated.
Trump is also in more trouble today, as Judge Beryl Howell ruled last week that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, former top Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, former national security advisor Robert O'Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, and former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee all have to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election
.Special counsel Jack Smith had subpoenaed these members of the Trump administration, and Trump had tried to stop their testimony by claiming it was covered by executive privilege. Howell rejected that claim. In the past, she rejected a similar claim by arguing that only the current president has the right to claim executive privilege and Biden had declined to do so. Meadows is the key witness to Trump’s involvement in the events of January 6.
Also today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of so-called right-to-work legislation passed in 2012 by a Republican-controlled legislature, whose members pushed it through in a lame-duck session without hearings.
That legislation had a long history. U.S. employers had opposed workers’ unions since the organization of the National Labor Union in 1866, but the rise of international communism in the early twentieth century provoked a new level of violence against organized workers. In 1935, as part of the New Deal, Democrats passed the National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law.
The Wagner Act confirmed workers’ right to organize and to bargain with employers collectively (although to appease southern Democrats, it exempted domestic and agricultural workers, who in the South were mostly Black). It also defined unfair labor practices and established a new National Labor Relations Board that could issue cease and desist orders if workers testified that employers were engaging in them.
The Wagner Act gave workers a unified voice in American politics and leveled the playing field between them and employers. But while most Americans of both parties liked the Wagner Act, right-wing Republicans hated it because it put large sums of money into the hands of labor officials, who used the money to influence politics. And organized workers had backed Democrats since the 1860s.
So, in 1947, a Republican-led Congress pushed back against the Wagner Act. The previous year, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had launched “Operation Dixie” to organize Black workers, which seemed a threat to segregation as well as white employers. Together, business Republicans and segregationist Democrats passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Ohio Senator Robert Taft (who was the son of President William Howard Taft) claimed that the Taft-Hartley Act would simply equalize power between workers and employers after the “completely one-sided” Wagner Act gave all the power to labor leaders.
The Taft-Hartley Act limited the ways in which workers could organize; it also went after unions’ money. Although the Wagner Act had established that if a majority of a company’s workers voted to join a union, that union would represent all the workers in the company, it didn’t require all the workers to join that union. That presented a problem: if workers were going to get the benefits of union representation without joining, why should they bother to pay dues?
So labor leaders began to require that everyone employed in a unionized company must pay into the union to cover the cost of bargaining, whether or not they joined the union.
The Taft-Hartley Act undermined this workaround by permitting states to get rid of the requirement that employees who didn’t join a union that represented them must pay fees to the union.
Immediately, states began to pass so-called right-to-work laws. Their supporters argued that every man should have the right to bargain for his work on whatever terms he wanted, without oversight by a union. But lawmakers like Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who pushed a right-to-work law in his own state, were clear that they were intent on breaking the power of organized workers. He was determined to destroy the political power of unions because, he said, their leaders were stealing American freedom. They were, he said, “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.”
Michigan had been known as a pro-union state, but in 2012, Republicans there pushed through two right-to-work laws over waves of protest. Repealing the laws has been a priority for Democrats, and now that they are in control of state government, they have made it happen.
Joey Cappelletti of the Associated Press notes that twenty-six states currently have right to work laws, and although Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law in 2017, it has been 58 years since a state repealed one. Indiana voters repealed theirs in 1965; Republicans put it back into place in 2012.
Republicans say that since the neighboring states of Indiana and Wisconsin have right-to-work laws—although there were huge protests when those laws went into place in 2012 and 2015—Michigan’s repeal of right to work will make that state less attractive to employers.
But after signing the law today, Governor Whitmer embraced a different vision for the state, saying: "Today, we are coming together to restore workers' rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan's middle class."
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Timothy Massad. Source: a video screenshot, TheStreet/ YouTube Timothy Massad, previous chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission(CFTC) and a present research study fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued that regulative development on stablecoins can be made instantly by using the existing laws. Guesting on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Massad talked about a stablecoin proposition he co-authored with 2 law teachers, Howell Jackson and Dan Awrey, specifying that they are "not exactly sure [legislation] will take place," and if it does, there is a concern of how detailed it would be. " So what we're stating is monetary regulators today have the authorities they require to develop a structure to attempt to bring this activity within the banking boundary," he stated. "Wouldn't be managed precisely as a bank, however what you would do technically is you establish what's called a nationwide trust bank, which then has a trust listed below it that is the payment lorry." This would then allow guidance by a banking regulator, however carried out in a method where there's no deposit insurance coverage, he included. The stablecoin provider need to simply hold money and Treasuries and "so forth." This might be combined with access to a Federal Reserve master account, which would work for "settlement performance." Furthermore, the Office of the Controller of the Currency might set different other requirements, such as functional resiliency, standard customer disclosure, customer security, and so on, Massad stated, including: But the point is that administratively, this might be done. It would need all the bank regulators to get together and work together something that does not constantly take place in our system extremely well. It might be done today under existing law. And once again, we're not versus legislation. That would be great, however let's not linger. We might do this today. The regulator of a bank such as this would mostly be the Office of the Controller due to the fact that it would release a nationwide trust bank charter. There would likewise require to be cooperation with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation(FDIC), while, preferably, the Securities Exchanges Commission(SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission(CFTC) would sign up with too." But you understand, we developed the Financial Stability Oversight Council to bring the regulators together," stated Massad. As for the objections stablecoin business may have, he noted 2 prospective concerns: overregulation, restricting possible competitors. However, Massad argued that, I believe both those things can be dealt within the procedure. It truly depends upon just how much versatility regulators wish to develop into the system. Going into more information about why the United States regulators have actually paid a lot attention to stablecoins, Massad stated that this sector is "not that huge" relative to the monetary sector, however that it is growing extremely rapidly - which triggers issue. Add to this the current crypto market crash, along with the crash of the notorious Terra/ LUNA algorithmic stablecoin, and the regulators' issue reached a brand-new high. And what actually triggered the regulators to focus a lot on stablecoins in the very first location was Facebook's - now Meta's - stopped working Libra coin proposition, he stated. Massad specified that," There's a view that, you understand, these things might grow extremely rapidly and honestly that there's a chance here. They might assist update payments and boost competitors. I believe it is ideal for regulators to be focused on them." Stablecoin guidelines vary from crypto policies due to the fact that stablecoins are seen mainly as payment systems, Massad argued. What an appropriate and extensive structure would include is making sure that stablecoins are totally booked, suggesting they have money or Department of the Treasury securities backing them.
It would make sure "great resolution and oversight as well as we've got to deal with the functional dangers here, due to the fact that these stablecoins are trading on a number of decentralized blockchains." Talking about the stablecoin-related business and occasions that might threaten stablecoin holders, he concluded that," This is a banks. And it's a payment business. We do not desire it to go through the regular personal bankruptcy where individuals are held up. That's why I believe we actually require a more thorough technique." ____ Read More
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Dan Greiner Age, Biography, Net-Worth, Wife, Career & Many More
Daniel Greiner is the Vice President & Chief Financial Officer of For Your Ease Only, a company founded by his wife Lori Greiner, an inventor and entrepreneur who stars on ABC's "Shark Tank." He has worked as a controller at the Bell & Howell Corporation. In 1987, Dan worked as supervisor at the Name Grant Thornton Firm, where he worked for three years before leaving to join Bell & Howell. One of her closest and a vital source of support and inspiration, he has been with her right from the beginning. They met at Lincoln Park Bar Kincaid’s in Chicago when she was an ambitious young inventor with dreams of success. Lori’s ingenuity and drive complement Dan’s dedication and pragmatism, thus making them one of the most recognizable faces in the business world. She looks after sales, marketing and legal aspects; he manages shipping, packaging, accounting and inventory functions.
The facts that she holds 120 US & international patents, has created and sold over 400 products and is worth $50 million are testaments to their successful partnership inside the workplace and beyond. Dan and Lori became a Hollywood power couple after they married in 2010. While Lori joined the entertainment industry in 2012, Dan preferred to stay out of the limelight.
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Dan changed the title and description of an old video!
#daniel howell#dan howell#danisnotonfire#dan and phil#it’s good to hold yourself accountable for things#i still don’t agree with the full on witch hunt people have for him#but he did this on his own accord and that’s good
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it's always the big accounts that get noticed smh
#this is a joke#I don't hold grudges against anyone#good for you if you have a big account it's something to be proud of#dan and phil#phil lester#amazingphil#danisnotonfire#daniel howell#dan howell#phan#phandom#number 1 phil trash#youtube#youtubers#mine#christine talks
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hi hi hi!!! so i just recently hit 800 n i was going to save this for my 1k celebration, but genuinely i am just full of so much love for everyone that i couldn’t hold myself back from doing this so !!!! appreciation post for mutuals!!! n this is absolutely wild to me, bc ive been on tumblr for over 4 years now, n remade this blog at the end of september to both restart and because i was getting super into mcyt n wanted a blog to focus on that, and the fact that ive grown this much since then is absolutely insane to me!!!
im feeling full of love for all of my mutuals (aka people i consider my friends <3) so!!! have written messages for u all :DD i mostly wrote them for people i talk to a lot/look up to, so pls dont feel bad if i didnt write one for u!!!! pls absolutely follow everyone in this list they are all amazing people n deserve ur follow !!!! obs not a complete list bc bad memory but just. they are all so cool :]
also thought i would say this here but im moving blogs lol im @sapienap (wont let me tag bc new </3)
atlas ( @fear-epidemic )
atlas!!!!! oh my god okay so first off??? the fact that our friendship began bc of u thinking my icon was dan howell when it was mr. wilbur soot is sucha cursed fact n i think that describes us very well <3 u r genuioely (i refuse to fix that mistake) such a nice person n uve just listened to me ramble about the weirdest shit n sat there as i watched anakin skywalker be hot n helped me with characterizations n i cant thnak u enough for that!!! ily <3
azzie ( @thediscsaga )
azzie azzie azzie!!!!!! the fact that we became friends bc u looked at me n just decided to call me ‘bestie’ n now here we r is so MINDBLOWING i love you so much!!!!! u r genuinely one of my bestest friends even tho we dont talk as much n i lov u sm ur always there to support me with whatever i do!!! ur always so supportive n i just. i lov u sm !!!! ur one of my favorite people n make this hell site so much better !!!!!! if im being honest lowkey anytime i lowkey feel panicked i just go to ur blog bc it honestly calms me sm :]
beet ( @homophobicpunz )
beet!!!!! okay okay okay the fact that the first time i saw ur main’s user n instantly was like “ohmy god i love that” n now here we r???? friends??? n i get to call YOU my friend??? amazing oh my god. and the fact that uve dragged me into so much shit that i lov now bc of u??? also amaizng. i just love the fact uve dragged me into So Much stuff (daredevil n all of those shows, punz, n more!!! like lowkey darth maul but only lowkey as i ahvent watched the show hes in yet dsjf) n uve honestly been so supportive of me throughout eveythting n just !!!!!! i cant think of much more to say other than ily :]
cam ( @camdotcom )
cam!!!! oh my god okay i jsut. honestly ur so nice ????? anytime im down u always manage to send an ask whenever im not feeling great n always send me smth funny n it always makes me feel so much better!!! ur genuinely one of the best people i know!!! ur always so great at everything n u genuienly make my tumblr experience so much better !!!! ur always such a great person :] n ily !!! im also ur little brother so <333
clay ( @its5undy )
tubs!!!!! my fellow southerner !!!!! im so so happy ive gotten to knwo u !!!! all bc of our weird ass server!!!! i lov u sm!!!! ur one of the brightest people i know n im so glad to have u be someone who forces me to go to sleep when i feel tired instead of encouraging me to stay up <3 n ur so cool !!!! u may not think it bur ur absolutely one of the coolest mfs on this dumb app <33 ur alos my older brother so u cant say anything bad about me Ever
daniel ( @rvnboo )
dan !!!! my sweet homie !!! oh mygod i do not remember how i met u at ALL bc my memory sis o bad but i am so glad i knwo u !!!! i get so happy every single time i get an ask from u !!! u r such a nice persobn n a great joy !!!! every single time i see u on my dash i go “:DDDD daniel!!!!!” anytime i see u in my notes i just go “!!! dan!!” honestly i associate ranboo with u now!!! i see u n go “! dan!!” n i just lov u sm??? i honestly think of u as my younger sibling n i just lov u sm
dream ( @enderrdream )
bad!!! omg ok honestly i dont remember how we met bc ur Old (/j) but seriously!!! ive been friends with u for So Long (even tho i lost u for some time) n now!!!! we r friends again!!!! n ive claimed u as my older brother !!!! we r the only valid sbi dynamic <33 but truly!!! i think u r one of the people i have known the longest!!! u ahve done so much for em n i can never thank u enough!!! i just lov u sm !!! im so horrible at explainging this but just. i love u sm <333
gogy ( @strawberrygogy )
berry!!! oh my god the fact that i ahvent known u that long buit we r so close??? we have a ship that can rival dreamnotfound n have matching cases we r the only bicthes on this entire site <333 people that send weird asks after me being trans have No Bitches KFDHYGGH but seriously !!! im so fucking glad i got to know u!!! the fact we became friends bc i saw ur account, n foudn out u read the serpent king???? that is WILD to me!!! we r Bestest Friends n i fuckign love that and our 420 mile separation <3333 i lov u !!!!!!
hari ( @netheritedream )
hari hari hari !!!!! heblo heblo!!!! god the fact that we’re in different timezones n never get to talk is so homophobic i cant believe time /j but seriously!!!! i cannot believe we never get to talk we r platonic soulmates n i can barely count the amount of times we have talked the last week </3 and the factt hat u joined n saw ME n thoguht “ah, yes. friend.” n now??? we r platonic soulmates !!!! n uve helped me make so many new friends n have even closer friendships !!! n im just. i love you so much im so glad to have you as my friend <3
jannat ( @technosoot )
maya !! my memory is so bad i cannot remember how we met at all but !!! i am so fucking happy i became friends with u !!! u r genuinely such a bright part of my life !!!! i see u n go “:DDDDDD JANNAT !!!!!!!!!” u r such a great person n i will alwayts be here for u !!!! i love u so much !!!! my brain has stopped workin but i just lov u so much omg !!!!!
may ( @notfoundgeorge )
may !!!!! omg okay honestly i look up to u so mjch!!!!!! ur one of my favorite gifmakers on this entire app!!! genuinely ur such a nice person???? n if im being honest???? i got So Happy when u followed me back !!!! bc im like. ur so cool n i was like “wow SHE followed ME??” n just!!!! i lov u !!!
rain ( @theartofmining )
rain !!!! oh my god okay ur one of the few people that have seen my fucking. chaotic side which id ont truly think many people have seen so im glad u have that honor <3333 but seriously i lov u sm shfhgfhg u were tehre as i. hitpost limit and ask limit in the span of less than a hour n u rlly encouraged me when i freaked ouytndjfghgj u ahve been there for me for So Long and i just !!!! lov u sm
roni ( @youngjustices )
roni !!! ive known u for so long n even tho i truly havent gotten to talk to u much, i lov u so much !!!! uve been so kind to me n have helped me with so much n i just. i love you so much !!!! ur such a great person n deserve everything in the world n even tho u r taking a break from mcytblr, im just !!! ok lov u sm
sakshi ( @prettyboydream )
smiley !!!!! ok first off: i wish u were getting cuddles. okay next i cannot beleieve that we r friends !!!! i ddint spell that right but ANYWAYS u r so mf cooler than me!!!! one of the coolest people on this entire fucking app !!!! i do not know how i became ur friend but im so fucking happy i am friends with u !!! ur so great and i just. i love u sm
sam ( @dogboyurahara )
league !!!! i am. god im so glad i became friends with u !!!! u walways come n say some of the weirdest shit but that is literally. the highlight of my day i just love you SO MUCH uve always been so kind to me and i just !!!!! i lov u so mcuh !!!!! ever since becoming friends with u ive rlly discovered myself n i love that fact kdhjgfghggh ur always so nice n just. i lov u sorry i say that so much
techno ( @karda )
TECHIE!!!!!!! TECHIE OH MY GOD IDK HOW I TRICKED U INTO BEING MY FRIEND BC UR GENUIENLYT!!!!!! SO COOL!!!! UR SO TALENTED!!!!! n now!!!! im friends with u!!!!!!! im ur little brother !!!!! n ur my older brother !!!!!!! n just !!!!!!!!!! i love u so mich !!!!!!! ur always so supportive of any and everything that i do !!!!! u always offer to do thinsg for em n just !!!!!! i lov u so mcuh!!!!! u always make me so happy bc i see u n im like “:DD thats techie !!! thats my brother !!” n i just. lov u sm
theseus ( @clownspartys )
tommy !!!!!!!!! tommy oh my god i ahvent known u that long but???? we r best bros??? we r the coolest mother fuckers???? we jsut!!! clicked !!! n its so easy talking to u!!!! we just go n YELL at each other in discord n i think that is very valid of us!!! u truly are one of my favorite people on here !!! anytime i see u im so happy to see u n im just !!!!!! i lov u sm !!!!
wilbur ( @pigstepmp3 )
fundy !!!! oh my god okay genuienly. i love you. ur so supportive of me n anytijme im always down ur there to call me bubba n pull me right back up !!!! anytime anythign happens ur always there like “u absolute buffoon, i lov u sm” n i just!!!! i lov u !!!! ur my older brother n have helped me so much i just love you so much <3333
n then for some other cool people you all should follow :]
@pvnz / @gogyapologist / @fruitbur / @technoblaed / @dreamsclock / @dreamnap / @wooteena / @timedeo / @dreamsmp / @sootwilbur / @wilbysoot / @nickwilding / @jschlatts / @helenspirals / @darkmttrcat / @dreamwastakenalt / @hearty-an0n / @lesbiangogy / @imgns / @dogboykarljacobs / @berenstein / @tommylnnits / @dreamslikeshoney / @enderanboo / @veel556 / @raining-acid / @stick3rzzz / @moo-moo-meadows / @dreampfp / @eret
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1/? I know everyone is happy about dan talking about the next chapter but I can’t help but feel bratty about it. It’s been a year and a half since dan was heavily involved with the fanbase. I completely understood time off preparing to come out that is big. But I expect him to be involved again after a couple months. A year since that happened and nothing’s changed. This isn’t meant to be negative at all just part of me can’t help but be sad. How long till the next thing happens?
2/2 Once that’s drops will be disappear again? Will he give us one upload a year? I don’t think dan wants to quit yt I just can’t think what dan actually does wants to do. And I’m not mad at dan or hate him in anyway. If anything I love him and phil so much that it’s the reason I have these feelings. I’m scared of losing hope or interest in people that have been a big part of my teen/adult life. I just waiting for nothing. I love them and I’m afraid of not caring. That’s my biggest fear. Sorry
No need to apologize! Your feelings are valid, that’s the first thing you need to make 100% sure you know. I’ve expressed some degree of frustration with people who are disappointed it Dan’s inactivity, but that doesn’t mean your feelings are stupid or even bratty. You’re fine! :)
My job here with an ask like this is to try and make you feel a bit better, I guess, but what I say may not have that function in the end, lol.
Dan walks the precarious line between being a person and being a product. That’s the case with a lot of people in social media, but also a lot of celebrities in general, which is unfortunate because it’s literally impossible for a person to be a product. They can play a role, they can present themselves a certain way, but they can’t give us what we expect from products. We want (and can usually safely expect) products to be consistent, reliable, and high quality. People, however, are inconsistent, messy, and flawed.
Dan has been a product for a decade, his ENTIRE adult life, during a period of time in which most people are free to figure out who they are without so many eyes on them, and without so many people judging them. Sure, we endure the judgement of our parents & peers, but peer groups change when we move, our parents stop watching when we move out, and even when we have those people judging us it’s only a few people compared to the scores of comments and reblogs and meetups Dan has had.
The funny thing about self-esteem is that the first ingredient is self-actualization. In order to be confident in who we are, we have to figure out who we are, on at least some level. And right now, Dan is probably spending time figuring out who he is. People get upset about Dan for not communicating his intentions for the future, but no one seems to take into account that he probably doesn’t KNOW what his intentions for the future are. Most of us spend university-age and up experimenting with majors, taking retail jobs, talking to people about their careers and families, and learning what options life has. Dan had a youtube career plus social phobias; he didn’t really have that option. He didn’t even have teen years where he experimented with career paths & talents, I mean he chose “law” as a career more or less arbitrarily -- it wasn’t a passion he was following because he hadn’t figured out what his passions were yet. Then he became a youtuber fairly young, and eyes have been on him, judging his every move and studying his habits and mannerisms, trying to predict his behavior even when, as a human, he’s never going to be entirely predictable, and that really held back his growth as an individual. When everything you do is going to have eyes on it, it’s hard to take any action that’s purely your own. You end up doing everything either to satisfy other people or rebel against them, never to serve yourself.
And clearly he’s been happy enough doing the YouTube thing for ages. It’s clear that he quickly developed a passion for connecting with people (even in AmazingDan you can hear his delight that the people on his channel can ‘be themselves’). But he never really figured out if youtube was the way he wanted to forge those connections, or if he was only continuing it because that’s what his audience expected from him.
It’s entirely possible he’ll discover that YouTube is the best way to connect with his audience in a personal way, and maybe eventually he’ll return to it full time. Or he may find that writing - whether that’s scripted fiction television or novels or anything else - is the way he’d rather go about it so he can work more independently for longer stretches of time. Maybe he’s trying to make his face less well-known so people don’t come up to him in public quite so often because that stresses him out; or maybe he’ll learn he misses those surprise fan encounters because they put a face on the people whose lives he’s touched. It’s impossible for him to know what would make him happy until he actually tries taking his life in some new directions and sees what happens.
Even now, a year after his last upload, we’re watching him and waiting and predicting his behavior based on whether he likes art on his birthday or not, and when you put yourself in the shoes of someone like Dan who has social anxiety and feels like he’s being watched all the time, you start to realize why he’s backing off. I mean.... no offense to my fellow phandom members but we are EXHAUSTING sometimes lol.
But I do truly understand the fun factor of trying to guess what he’s going to do next. The thing is, though, it’s his LIFE we’re trying to predict; not a plot twist on a tv show, or the pre-planned release schedule of a pop idol’s next few singles & album. We’re in the middle of Dan’s first proper gap year (one that, from the sound of it, is extending longer than expected because COVID-19 put a hold on something he’s been working on, so Dan can’t be blamed for that).
I think it’s very reasonable to be impatient about Dan’s absence from our lives. His content is wonderful, he’s a joy to listen to when he speaks, and he makes so many of us feel just that little bit less alone. But I do think we need to give him the grace & space to figure himself out. It’s a luxury a lot of us have, but he never really did.
I also think it’s very unlikely that Dan will stay away from us forever. That connection with us seems to be extremely important to him, however anxious he may be around people. We helped give him the strength to come out. He and Phil went on tour twice just to see as many of us as possible. He looks so genuinely happy to meet fans at conventions. He’s one of us, in so many ways, and I think he wants to empower us and make us feel like we belong. But I think it got to a point where he was letting himself burn to keep us warm, and he needed to back off for his own well-being and long-term growth as an individual. And as much as I miss him, I want to give him all the time he needs.
In the meantime, everything he’s done for us up until last year is part of us, and no one can take that away - not even Dan! Even if he never came back, even if he decided YouTube was too much and he couldn’t do it anymore, his words and the example he’s set is woven into the fabric of who we are now, and that is so incredibly important.
I strongly believe, even though we’ve never met, that Dan Howell wants me to be happy, whatever that means for me, and that he wants me to grab my existence’s reins and take my life wherever I want it to go, and that thought alone is enough to cheer me up. He wants that for you, too.
I hope this helps you feel a bit better, anon. :)
#anon#answered#dan discourse#tagging that just in case this discussion stresses anyone out#long post
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World’s Greatest First Love: Chapter 2
Summary: Dan Howell wanted a clean break from his father’s publishing company. It was why he applied for a different company in London: to stop the ridicule of his coworkers for riding on his ‘daddy’s coat tails’. But he wasn’t expecting to suddenly be going from a literature editor, to a graphic novel editor. And he certainly wasn’t expecting to come face first with his first love who broke his heart from when he was a teenager: who just happens to be his new editor-in-chief.
Based on the Anime and Manga “The World’s Greatest First Love: The Case of Ritsu Onodera” aka Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi
Rating: Mature (For Now)
Word Count: 2.7k (this chapter)
Warnings: None for this chapter
Updates Every Saturday at 1pm EST
Read on Ao3 | Read on Wattpad
The tube ride to work always feels different now that Dan has a longer travel to get there. The building is on the other side of London and while the tube ride is only 5 minutes longer, it feels like an eternity. Especially when Dan is exhausted and can barely keep his eyes open.
When the tube doors open, Dan walks out along with everyone else and he shuffles his feet on the pavement down the street until he comes to the automatic glass doors. The doors part for him and he walks inside to the greeting of the secretaries at the desk on the other side.
He goes to the elevator and pushes the button for 3 and just as he does so, a hand stops the doors from shutting and a disheveled Phil rushes onto the elevator. There is a silence between them as the elevator clicks on each floor and as they get out on the third floor, Phil finally turns to him and says, “You’re here early?”
Dan looks down at the watch on his wrist, not accounting for the time the entire morning and grimaces because he is actually really early. He should still be in bed but the boughts of exhaustion are just not being his friend right now.
“Wanted to get here to work on my manuscript,” Dan lies. He actually is here because he wanted to catch up on more graphic novel edits but he wasn’t going to admit to Phil that he was doing more work that was taking away from his actual work.
Phil just nods and Dan notices that he’s holding a thermos of coffee in his hand and he takes it up to his mouth and takes a sip. They walk to their work stations and Dan no longer takes a seat at his desk when he hears a loud groan come from Phil.
“Are you fucking serious!” He exclaims, slamming a pile of paper onto his desk. “My author still doesn’t have their manuscript done yet! I needed it three days ago. This is getting to be bullshit.”
Dan doesn’t think he’s ever heard Phil be so angry before and it catches him off guard as he listens to the string of curses that are exiting his mouth as he rifles through all of the papers on his desk until he finds whatever he is looking for.
“They’re in Victoria,” Phil says. “I have to go pay them a visit at their office.”
“Can you do that?” Dan asks, turning in his chair and facing Phil who is currently stuffing that same pack of paper into his messenger bag.
“Of course!” Phil says, “I’m their editor and I need their manuscript. I can’t wait any longer.”
Dan watches Phil pick up his coffee again, grab his messenger bag and hike it up on his shoulder, and then pull out his cell phone from his pocket and dial a number. He holds it up to his ear and than looks at Dan and says, “Come on. You’re coming with me to see how we do it here at Sapphire.”
Dan doesn’t want to go anywhere. He wants to stay at the office and get some of his work done but it doesn’t look like he’s going to get much of a choice in this say. Plus, it will be good experience for him to see what it’s like to deal with an author that keeps missing deadlines.
They walk back together to the elevator where Dan follows Phil as they head back down to the lobby. He’s speaking on the phone with someone--well, more like arguing. He’s raising his voice slightly and making his point clear and Dan hear’s him say something about noon tomorrow before the elevator doors open and Phil steps out and shuts his phone off, sliding it into his pocket.
Phil has a taxi called for them by the secretary and he pulls out the paper from his bag to give the taxi driver for directions. Before long, they’re on their way back onto the busy London streets as Phil stares down at the paperwork in his lap and Dan stares out the window wondering what he has gotten himself into.
The office is nice, when they get there. It’s clean and well taken care of and it’s nothing like the Sapphire Publishing office in anyway. This is much nicer. They meet the author at the front door and it’s clear already how in shambles she is.
She looks tired, clear bags under her eyes. It was obvious that she was struggling, but Phil was stilling reprimanding her anyway. He was telling her that she missed her deadline and and that they needed the final manuscript by 5pm that night. She looked like she was going to cry when Phil said that.
They followed her to her office space where it was here and another person sitting at desk, vigorously working on finishing the product, “Can you get it done?” Phil asks. “Your work is our next featured publication and we can’t wait any longer.”
The woman nodded her head and immediately went to work at her desk. Dan thought that this had to be the end of it. The women agreed to finish her work so they should be done and able to go back to the office.
But instead, Phil pulls up a seat at an empty desk and motions for Dan to sit across from him and he pulls out the rest of what looks like a heavily corrected unfinished manuscript...upon closer inspection, Dan realized it was this authors.
As this author finished the manuscript, and worked on it tirelessly, Phil worked on fixing what he did have to the best of his ability. Dan didn’t bring anything with him, so he sat in awkward silence as he waited for any progress to be made from either of them.
It was a half an hour later when the author looked at Phil and said, “I don’t think I can finish this by the time you want it.”
Her voice was laced with sadness and Phil’s nostrils flared a bit.
“You’re our featured author,” Phil presses. “We have no one else who can fill your spot.”
She shook her head, “I can’t realistically get this done and feel happy with it.” She says. “Not in the time frame that you’ve given me. I can’t do it.”
Phil stands up and walks over to her desk, looking over her shoulder, “How much more do you have left to do?”
“About 5 pages,” She answers.
In literature, 5 pages wouldn’t be entirely all that bad to try and finish. But for graphic novels, which are filled with illustrations and thought bubbles to progress the action, Dan can imagine how much pressure and work that actually has got to be.
“How did you let yourself get so far behind?” Phil asks, furrowing his brows. “You’ve never missed a deadline before.”
She shrugged and then said, “I lost a lot of confidence in this work when I got stuck with writers block about a week ago. I didn’t know what direction to go with and I didn’t know what to do for a while. It held me up.”
Phil’s face softened and Dan’s heart began to race as he watched their interaction, “You could have called me,” Phil says. “That’s what I’m here for.”
She nods and Dan can see that her eyes are glossed over, brimming with tears and Dan sighs. He feels terrible, a secondary sadness and guilt that he can feel her radiating from where he’s sitting. He knows how tough it must be to be in that situation. He frankly can’t even imagine the pressure.
“Well,” Phil says, “We don’t actually need the manuscript until tomorrow at noon. I was able to get an extension from the printer.”
It suddenly hits Dan that that was who Phil was talking to on the phone earlier. He may have came off harsh to the author but he was also kind enough to call beforehand and get an extension anyway regardless.
She looked relieved and Phil flashed her a smile before he pat her back in a supportive way and then walked over to the desk and sat back down, working a bit more on the corrections in front of him.
They stayed at the office with the author for a few hours. Dan observed the entire time what was going on and what it was like and by the time that they left, the author had actually finished and given Phil the rest of the manuscript for him to correct and fix before going to the printer the next day.
They caught a taxi back to the office and by the time they walked through the door, Dan was even more exhausted than when he left. Today had been so busy and had already had so much going on that he felt like he needed a break. But yet he also had so much he had to do yet for the manuscript he was given.
He found himself sitting in the lounge, his head in his hands and his body trying so hard to relax. He had an unopened can of coke on the table in front of him and a mound of paperwork to do. He knows he should be working, but he can’t shake off what happened this morning.
Dan had heard a bit about Phil from the week that he’d been in the office so far. He knew that Phil was extremely good at what he does. He was the person who came into the Sapphire branch and brought back the editing department from the ground up. He had done it by his own ommission and his own rules and while some of the editors appeased them, they did respect him for what he was able to do.
As if right on cue, the door to the lounge opened and Phil walked in, carrying a small cup of coffee in his hand with a stirrer sticking out of the hole on the top. He walked over to the couch Dan was sitting on and took a seat beside him, handing him the coffee, “We had a busy morning so I think you deserve this.”
Dan took the coffee from him with a chuckle, “I like my coffee black.”
Phil laughed, “Well, you can deal with three packets of sugar and some cream in it today.”
Dan laughs again and takes a sip, wincing at how sweet it was but it actually tasted pretty good, helping his exhaustion feel not so bad with the warmth that flooded his veins.
“Do you have to do that often?” Dan asks. “Go to authors and get manuscripts from them.”
Phil shrugs, “It depends. Most authors are going to miss their deadlines and really, we expect it. But when the printer needs their graphic novel ready to go, it can be difficult to negotiate with them.”
“Like you did this morning?”
Phil smirks, “I’ve been here for 4 years now. The printer is practically wrapped around my finger.”
“I’m sure that comes in handy then,” Dan teases and Phil nods.
“You’ll get to that one point too eventually.”
They sit in silence and Dan sips his coffee slowly as Phil gets up and gets a coke from the vending machine. He opens the can and sips on it slowly before he turns to Dan and says, “I know you from somewhere.”
Dan furrows his brows and shake his head because Phil must be mistaken. Dan hasn’t ever seen Phil prior to being hired here.
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall knowing you?” Dan says, his voice nervous and a bit shaky.
“You really don’t remember me?” Phil asks. “I mean, I figured maybe you didn’t when you didn’t recognize me when you first were hired but...I recognize you.”
Dan shakes his head again, “I really don’t think we have met. Maybe we just passed by each other on the street and that’s where you know me from?”
Phil gets up from the couch with a shake of his head and lets out a sigh. He walks over to the door of the lounge and slowly opens it, “My name used to be Phil Peterson, but it legally got changed after my parents divorced.”
The door shut behind Phil and Dan sat on the couch, his mouth agape, jaw fallen open as he struggles to control his breathing.
No. There is no way.
Phil Peterson was Dan’s first love as a teenager. He was the one who broke Dan’s heart.
Dan suddenly wanted answers. He stood up from the couch quickly, kicking the coffee table with the toe of his shoe in the process, spilling the remnants of the coffee in his cup onto the wooden surface.
He raced out of the lounge and followed Phil to where he was putting on his coat and going to the elevator. Dan reached out and grabbed his arm to stop him, “That’s impossible! You can’t be him.”
Phil shook his head, “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“But it’s not possible.”
“It is!” Phil argues. He lets out a loud sigh and looks at Dan. “It must have been nice for you forget about me,” He says softly. “Because I’ve never forgotten about you.”
The elevator doors open and he steps on.
Dan doesn’t have the heart to stop the doors from closing so he lets them shut with a clang and he stands there, watching the numbers on the elevator counting down to the 1.
***
Dan’s mind raced for the rest of the afternoon. He struggled to concentrate on his work and he found himself making more mistakes than actually fixing any. By 4pm, he figured he wasn’t making any progress and he threw his stuff into his bag and walked out, bidding his coworkers a good night.
On the way back to his flat, he stopped at Sainsbury’s and picks himself up a quick meal. He had no food in his flat at the moment, too busy for work to actually finish moving into his new flat.
He’s technically had the keys for it for three weeks, but he moved into it just a week ago, the same day he started his new job. Because apparently Dan has no recollection of time and how to manage it.
So now he’s stuck with a virtually empty flat with boxes thrown everywhere and a bed that consisted of a wooden frame with a cheap mattress, a thin sheet and pillow. He needs to sit down one day and get everything straightened out but he doesn’t have the mental ability to do that at the moment.
He takes the tube back and he hops out at his station and walks the short walk to his building and he walks inside with a slight drag to his step. He can’t wait to get inside and collapse on his sad excuse for a bed and sleep.
Dan takes the elevator up and as he’s getting off, he notices a familiar back to him at the flat next to his. He shakes his head because surely he’s imagining it but as he gets closer, the man turns to him and Dan groans.
“We’re neighbors,” Phil said with a smirk. “Didn’t realize that. How long have you been living here? We can travel to and from work together.”
“I’ve only been here for a week,” Dan says, fishing out his keys and pushing them into the door to unlock it.
“If you ever want to come over and have dinner or anything,” Phil says, “let me know.”
Dan just nods and opens the door and rushes inside, shutting the door behind him.
He sinks to his butt on the wooden floor and lets out an incredulous laugh because life is really testing his right now.
How are the odds that after ten years of forgetting who Phil was and what he looks like, he’s suddenly living next to him and also working under him.
There is no way fate works like this. There is no way.
#phan#phanfic#phanfiction#angst#fluff#eventually smut#office!au#first love fic#alternate universe#princesslexi763fics
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to kick off this blog, we have a 2-for-1. as we can see the initial lie is dear daniel saying that @fuckyeahmargaritas will be updated starting jan 13... yet there was not another post until feb 21 as you can see from the tweets. and reader, the second part of this lie is the word "continuous." in fact, feb 21 is the last time the best blog to exist was ever touched. almost 13 long years ago.
this is an egregious lie and i will not stop until daniel james howell is hald accountable!
stay tuned for more lies that will be exposed...
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don’t complicate it
pairing: dan howell/phil lester
rating: t
warnings: none
tags: magical realism, canon compliant (not anymore! it was canon compliant in 2017), psychic abilities, phil is a psychic and dan is an embarrassment
word count: 11,289
summary: A magical realism au where everything is the same except sometimes, Phil's dreams come true. Featuring YouTuber cameos, existential crises, and a love story. (Or: It's 2017 and Dan Howell's entire universe has been flipped upside down.)
NOTE: this is not a new story! this is my first dnp fic and i’m just transferring it here to have all my shit in one place, basically. i wrote this two years ago and if i were to write it today, i’d change some stuff, but. i’m generally still pretty pleased with it! so i hope y’all get a kick out of old daye’s bad pacing and shaky dialogue
read on ao3 or here!
If there's one thing Dan knows for sure about his housemate, it's that Phil Lester is weird. He's always been weird - weird to film with, weird to listen to, even weird to look at since he's usually pulling a face for no reason or turning his hand backwards to fit in his pocket - but living with him has made Dan eternally grateful that he is so fond of Phil's weirdness, because otherwise this friendship thing just wouldn't work.
In addition to the general weirdness, Phil has more superstitions than Dan's entire family. Dan has been yelled at for putting a box of new shoes on the table, yanked away from ladders rather violently, and asked if he's angry if he leaves his cutlery crossed on his plate. It would probably be annoying, if Dan ever got seriously annoyed by the things Phil does.
It's funny instead of annoying, like most things about Phil, but Dan has to draw the line somewhere.
"What do you mean, I can't use my laptop today?" he asks Phil slowly, trying very hard not to freak out. "What have you done to it?"
"Nothing!" Phil insists. He holds up his hands like it somehow proves his innocence.
"I don't believe you," says Dan, "and I'm not going to stay off my laptop for an entire day, you absolute donkey. Give it back."
"I can't give it back to you." Phil sounds exasperated, which is the exact wrong emotion for him to be feeling after hiding Dan's laptop at ten in the morning. "If you use your laptop today, it's going to break. We can't afford another iProduct."
Dan narrows his eyes. First of all, he has his own bank account with his own money, and there is no 'we' about buying Dan a new laptop. Secondly - "My baby is perfectly fine, assuming you haven't done something to it and you're planning on replacing it before I notice."
"That would be stupid of me, of course you'd notice."
"Phil."
"Can't you just trust me?"
If it was anything else, Dan would probably let the argument drop and let Phil be weird about this, too. His laptop, though? That's off-limits.
"No, I can't," Dan says, holding out his hand. "Give me back my laptop. Right now."
Phil sighs heavily and leaves the lounge, returning after a few minutes with Dan's laptop in his hands. He hesitates when Dan reaches for it, but passes it over reluctantly.
"Just... don't click anything Felix sends you," says Phil. Dan rolls his eyes and agrees in order to placate his friend, but he has a bad habit of forgetting things Phil has told him - and can he be blamed? He has eight years' worth of Phil-specific information to retain, it can't all stay at the forefront of his mind.
That's his reasoning for clicking the link Felix emails him, despite explicitly being told not to. He inhales sharply when his screen immediately goes black.
Phil turns to look at him from the other end of the sofa, expression already resigned. "I told you not to click it, Dan!"
"What happened?" Dan asks, panicking as he tries every keyboard shortcut he knows.
"I don't know," Phil huffs and pulls out his phone. "I'll ask Felix, I suppose."
It turns out that Felix's email got hacked, because of course it did, and everyone on his contact list got an attachment full of scary computer viruses. Felix gives everyone a heads-up on Twitter, but the damage to Dan's laptop is already done.
When Dan gets back from the Apple store with bad news and a shiny new laptop, he stops in Phil's doorway and frowns. "How did you know Felix got hacked?"
"I didn't," Phil says without looking up from his own laptop. "I just had a feeling you'd break your laptop today."
"No, you told me this morning not to click on anything Felix sent me. That's more than 'a feeling', Phil." Dan struggles not to look or sound sheepish. He isn't the one who needs to explain himself, here.
"I don't know what you want me to say, Dan," says Phil.
"I want you to tell me how you knew about this," Dan insists, pointing at his shopping bag even though Phil isn't looking at him. "Did you and Felix plan this?"
That makes Phil look up. "Of course not!"
Phil is the worst liar Dan has ever met, and the hurt in his voice at being accused of murdering Dan's laptop on purpose is real enough. Dan bites his lip so that he doesn't apologise reflexively. Even if Phil had nothing to do with the death of his laptop, the fact that he knew about it beforehand is suspicious enough to withhold apologies.
"Okay, so tell me the truth," Dan says instead of apologising like his mouth wants to.
"The truth," Phil repeats, looking back down at his laptop to close the lid. "I mean, okay, but you won't believe me."
"Try me," Dan challenges.
"I had a dream about it," says Phil, making careful eye contact with Dan. "That's it, that's all that happened. I dreamed that your laptop died because of an email from Felix, and then it happened, because my dreams come true sometimes."
This is not the first time Phil has made such a claim, but it's definitely the first time he wasn't at least half joking. Dan's scoff dies in his throat at how genuine Phil is acting.
"You're not psychic, Phil," Dan says slowly.
"Of course I'm not." Phil rolls his eyes, and Dan has a moment of relief before Phil adds, "I'm clairvoyant."
"Those are the same thing!"
"They actually aren't, interestingly enough. See -"
"Please stop," Dan groans, holding up a hand. "Stop right there. I don't believe in any of this nonsense, and you know that. I'd sooner believe you became a master hacker overnight and sent me that virus yourself as an expensive and unfunny prank."
Hurt flashes across Phil's face before annoyance takes over, and he shrugs. "Believe whatever you want, Dan. You asked for the truth and I told you."
"Your 'truth'," says Dan, air quotes difficult with a shopping bag but necessary, "is scientifically impossible."
"Fine, I won't tell you about my dreams anymore," Phil huffs, standing up to pointedly start getting ready for bed.
"Well, good," Dan says after a long pause. Phil doesn't deign to reply to his cutting wit, so Dan goes to his own bedroom and starts setting up his new baby. The first thing he does once he can start using it is type in the word 'clairvoyant'.
Google doesn't tell him anything he doesn't already know, so that's a non-starter. He ends up in a Reddit thread about premonitions during sleep, and even though the stories are interesting, they can't be true. That isn't how the universe works.
There's a lot about the universe that Dan doesn't understand. He knows that better than anyone, and it's the cause of many a crisis in his life.
Magic, though? Fortune telling? That's just factually wrong.
Dan decides, when he hears birds start to sing and realises he's spent all night in a Google vortex again, that what Phil experienced was nothing more than a coincidence.
It has to be a coincidence, or a joke, or else Dan is going to lay facedown on the floor for an entire week.
--
Phil is acting weirder than usual.
They're recording for a danisnotonfire video that Dan isn't sure yet if he actually wants to upload, and Phil keeps looking over his shoulder and reacting to every small noise outside their building. After ten minutes of this, Dan tells him to stop the camera for his own sanity.
"I can't use any of that," he says like he wasn't second-guessing the idea already. "You're so jumpy! Did you play spooky games without me?"
"No," says Phil.
He doesn't elaborate, which forces Dan to respond with a slow, "Okay, so why are you acting like a small rodent?"
Phil opens his mouth, probably to bicker about exactly what he's doing, but he's interrupted by the sound of someone banging on their front door. As if this is what he's been expecting, Phil leaps to his feet and bolts out of Dan's bedroom.
"That was weird," Dan tells the camera. It's no longer recording, but he has no one else to commiserate the weirdness of Phil Lester with.
While he waits for Phil to get back, he wonders who's at the door. It's not like they have many friends in the city, and the ones they have tend to text or call before showing up. Louise always says it's so she doesn't 'interrupt anything', which Dan tries not to read too deeply into.
Dan gets bored and follows Phil down the stairs, where he hears a loud and familiar voice drifting up from the entrance.
"- and I'm only trying to get to Dublin, right, but Heathrow decided I was suspicious somehow and I make inappropriate jokes when I'm uncomfortable - stop laughing - so they detained me and I missed my flight!"
"And we're the only people you know in London?" Dan hears Phil ask, and he sounds amused but not at all surprised. Which is weird, because Markiplier being in London without warning is pretty surprising stuff.
"I don't know anyone else's address," Mark admits, sounding good-natured despite an apparently difficult airport adventure. "Yours is in my phone, but I don't remember putting it there."
"Pretty sure I added it at VidCon this year," Phil says, starting to climb the stairs. "I had a feeling you'd need our sofa at some point."
That's a sufficient enough explanation for Mark, who has moved onto asking what they have in the way of coffee and food, but Dan hurries back up to his room to have a minor mental breakdown. He checks Mark's twitter and Facebook, but there's no mention of a trip, and it wouldn't make sense for Phil and Mark to have planned this to trick Dan, with the way they were talking downstairs.
So how did Phil know that Mark was coming? Why did he have a feeling, months ago, that Mark would need to know the address of someone in London at some point?
It doesn't make any logical sense. This isn't a joke or a coincidence, it's just really fucking weird.
Dan eyes his floor, considering lying down on it, but they have a guest. Existential crises are not proper host etiquette. Still, he waits for Phil to shout his name before getting out of bed and confronting this very strange turn of events.
Maybe the universe doesn't work scientifically at all. Maybe scientists are just people who make shit up and act like it's the truth, because Dan is starting to think that Phil might not have been lying at all.
He doesn't get a chance to say anything to Phil, between getting shot down for an impromptu collab - "No offence, boys, but I'm on vacation, maybe on my way back!" - introducing Mark to their current favourite anime - "Fuck you, I'm not crying." - and setting Mark up on the sofabed in their gaming room - "It's too small for either of us, but you're about a foot shorter, aren't you?" - until they're walking downstairs together in comfortable silence, arms brushing.
"You knew Mark was coming," Dan says, not bothering to make it a question.
"Yeah," says Phil.
Dan appreciates that Phil doesn't try to lie, but it only adds to the paranoia that's been building all day. "And like, you already knew about that? At VidCon?"
"You were listening?" Phil asks with a surprised grin as they reach their main landing.
"Irrelevant," Dan sniffs, crossing his arms.
Phil laughs at him, but it's not mean. Sometimes Dan thinks that Phil doesn't have a mean bone in his entire body.
"Yeah, I had this dream at VidCon," Phil leans against his bedroom doorframe, "and Mark was wandering around London without a travel plan on his phone, trying to find a hotel he could afford. I just thought it would be easier and more fun for him to come here."
"And you had the same dream last night," guesses Dan.
"No, last night I dreamed he ate all my cereal, which only makes sense if he's in our apartment."
"Good, you deserve to have your cereal eaten," Dan says automatically, because that's something he understands. The universe might get turned on its head if Phil is actually magic, but at least Dan can find comfort in the fact that he's still a cereal thief.
"Shut up," Phil laughs and reaches out to push Dan's chest lightly.
His hand lingers, but Dan is far more concerned about the fact that Phil might be psychic.
"I want to hear about your dreams." Dan knows as he says it that this is a mistake, that if magic exists and it isn't being used to his advantage, the world will be a scarier place than it already was.
"All of them?" Phil asks, still smiling. "Or just the clairvoyant ones?"
"You can tell the difference?"
"Sure. I mean, if it's realistic or boring, it's probably going to come true. My regular dreams are frickin' cool."
Dan can feel a grin tugging at his lips. "I suppose if they're so 'frickin' cool', I want to hear about those dreams too."
"Cool," Phil giggles a little and steps away from his doorframe, looking more relaxed than he has in days around Dan. "I'll keep a detailed dream journal just for you."
"You'd better," Dan says faux-sternly.
This entire situation is one of the most unsettling things Dan has ever experienced, but the bright smile on Phil's face when he says goodnight is worth every panic attack Dan is going to have about the makeup of the known universe. He seems so happy to be believed that Dan wonders if Phil has ever told anyone about this in so much detail.
Probably. Phil is basically an open book, after all.
If it makes Dan feel better to pretend as he's falling asleep that Phil has confided something in him that he's never divulged before, nobody has to know.
--
Dan wakes up before noon on his own, for once, and he startles when he sees someone in his kitchen before remembering that they have a guest. Yawning, he opens the kitchen door and greets Mark with a distorted, "Morning."
"Hey," Mark grins, leaning against the counter with a bowl of Phil's cereal. "You think Phil's gonna mind if I finish this?"
"Course not," says Dan, "you're the guest."
They both maintain a straight face for a couple seconds before Mark breaks and causes Dan to start laughing too. It's always comfortable to hang out with Mark, but Dan would be lying if he said he liked having guests spend the night. He doesn't like the feeling of someone being in his apartment while he's asleep.
It's nice, then, to be reminded that Mark is funny, and warm, and leaving in a couple of hours.
"So, you're going to see Jack?" Dan asks, because Phil had elbowed him every time he tried to ask the night before. "Shit, I mean, Sean."
"I fuck that up constantly," Mark admits, rinsing his bowl in the sink. "Yeah, I'm spending the weekend at his place. We're trying not to make a big deal of it, because - well, you know."
"I do?" Dan raises his eyebrows and starts making coffee for three.
"Obviously." Mark points at the mug that Dan pulled out for Phil, the one with Daddy emblazoned across it.
"That's a joke," Dan says automatically.
Mark starts laughing again, far too loud for the subject matter and time of day. "Bro, I know it's a joke. I meant you obviously know why we're keeping it on the down-low because you also have crazy shipper fans who think you guys are going to get married and die in each other's arms."
"I prefer to think of them as 'dedicated'," Dan says, turning away from Mark until the heat in his cheeks settles down. "But yeah, I get it."
"Didn't mean to make it weird, dude," Mark says apologetically. Apparently Dan didn't hide his face fast enough. "I figured you were, like, comfortable joking about it."
"I am." Dan glances at the kitchen door, paranoid that Phil is listening and getting the wrong impression. "For a second I just thought you were saying that you and Jack are together, and then I felt stupid when I realised you just meant the fan speculation."
The ensuing quiet is strange, considering his conversation partner, but Dan doesn't look up from the mugs.
"Wait," Mark touches Dan's shoulder to get his attention. "Wait, hang on, are you saying that you and Phil are in a relationship?"
"No, but I guess we're closer to it than not," Dan half-jokes. "So sometimes I forget we aren't."
It's the truth, but it seems to shock Mark into silence.
The fact of the matter is that Dan knows who he's going to spend the rest of his life with. He knows, despite everything, that Phil is the most important person in his life and probably always will be. Nothing about them has ever been on the down-low, because they have nothing to hide, but there are times when it slips Dan's mind that the fans aren't onto something.
After coffee is poured and Dan has drank half of his own for something to do with his hands, Mark finally speaks. "I don't think Sean and I are thaaaat close, so I get why the joke was weird coming from me. Also, I'm pretty sure you should tell Phil that you want to be with him."
Dan nearly spits coffee onto the floor.
"What?"
"I know it's not my business," Mark says with a shrug, "but it sure seems like you're pining."
"I am not pining," says Dan, affronted.
"You totally are."
"Am not."
"Are too."
"Am not."
"Are - look, I'm not getting into this with you." Mark looks like he's trying very hard not to laugh, and Dan glares at him. "I'm just saying that I'm never going to just randomly forget that Sean and I aren't in a relationship. and it's weird that you do."
"Phil being my platonic life partner is the least weird thing in my life," Dan says dismissively. Mark rolls his eyes.
"Whatever you say, dude," says Mark.
To Dan's relief, he lets the topic drop for the next few hours. They play Mario Kart until their shouting wakes Phil, and then they take turns kicking Phil's ass. Phil is pretty good-natured about the whole thing.
As fun as Mark is to be around, Dan is relieved to see him to the door. He doesn't need any more of the pointed looks Mark keeps sending his way whenever he grabs Phil's arm in excitement or leans in close to psych him out.
"You should come round again sometime," Phil is suggesting as they gather awkwardly in the small bottom landing.
"On purpose next time," Mark agrees, giving each of them a one-armed hug. It's nice - Mark is a champion hugger, even while holding a duffel bag.
"It was good seeing you," Dan says truthfully. "Next time, maybe a heads up?"
"Nah, I think I'll be spontaneous again."
"What if we're not home?"
"That's a good one, Dan."
"You'll miss your flight if you keep bickering," Phil interrupts with a laugh. He squeezes Mark's shoulder and cryptically adds, "Don't eat the sandwiches on the flight. It'll make you sick."
"Okay," Mark says easily, hefting his bag onto his shoulder. "I'll see you boys around."
The ensuing quiet in Mark's wake is welcome, but all Dan can think about is how close together he and Phil have to stand in order to fit on this landing. Thanks to the proximity, he can see uncharacteristic bags under Phil's eyes.
Dan reaches out to press the pads of his fingers gently against Phil's skin there and hums, "Mark being sick kept you up?"
"No," Phil says with an indulgent smile.
"You promised to tell me about your dreams," Dan reminds him when Phil shows no sign of continuing. He's probably been touching Phil's face for too long, so he lets his hand awkwardly drop to his side.
Still smiling, Phil shrugs. "It wasn't that interesting, Dan. Just hard to figure out."
"I can help," says Dan.
He wants Phil to confide in him, even about the weird things. As much as this situation freaks him out, and it's a lot, Dan doesn't like Phil keeping anything from him.
"I just remember being anxious, and I couldn't figure out why," Phil admits at long last, sitting down on the steps. "I wasn't at home or anywhere familiar, which just made it worse."
"Were we travelling?" Dan asks, leaning back against their front door instead of sitting beside Phil on the narrow steps, like he wants to.
Phil grins and shakes his head. "You just assume you were there, huh?"
"Of course I was there," says Dan.
"You were." Phil's grin widens as he looks down at his hands. "Obviously you were there. You kept telling me to calm down, but I couldn't, and then you left the room."
"I left?" Dan asks in disbelief. "I literally left?"
Just another piece of evidence supporting the fact that Phil does not have psychic dreams - Dan wouldn't leave Phil alone when he was in the middle of freaking out, that would never happen. When Phil is freaking out, the only thing that calms him is having someone talk him through the situation.
"Yeah, that's what confused me," Phil hums. "You don't usually leave."
"I never leave," Dan corrects him.
Phil looks up at him with an expression that Dan can only categorize as, well, fond. It's the expression that somehow means 'you're an idiot' and 'I'm glad we're doing this together' at the same time. The internet has probably labelled it as something else, since there's a good chance the expression has been caught on film, but Dan doesn't think anything will describe it quite as well as fond.
The moment is stretching into something harder to laugh off, and Dan has to clear his throat before the quiet becomes suffocating.
"Alright, did you figure out why dream-me left you alone?"
"No, but I'm sure you have a good reason," says Phil in a soft voice. He stands and stretches, purposefully breaking eye contact with Dan. "You fancy a tea?"
Dan shakes his head and watches Phil climb their narrow stairs, wondering if there's something Phil isn't telling him.
--
Phil's smile disappears as soon as Dan turns the camera off, which isn't unusual when their filming takes a long time, but Dan gets worried when Phil sighs and puts his head down on the desk.
"You okay?" Dan asks, resting his fingertips on Phil's shoulder.
"I'm tired," says Phil into the wooden surface, "and I keep having bad dreams whenever I try to rest."
This isn't news to Dan, as Phil has been keeping him in the dream loop for the past couple weeks, but Dan didn't realize it was getting so bad. He feels guilt settle in his stomach for not noticing before Phil faceplanted into their desk.
"Is there anything that usually helps? Like, stops you from dreaming altogether? I think we still have that vanilla vodka from New Year's, that usually conks me out."
Phil tilts his head on the desk to give Dan an indulgent smile. "No, getting drunk doesn't help."
"That's a shame," says Dan.
"I don't know, nothing really stops me from dreaming," Phil says when it's obvious that Dan isn't changing the subject. "Like, I guess there are things that help make the dreams blurry and more fun to be in, but I've never woken up and thought, 'wow, I didn't have a single dream last night'."
"That sounds... exhausting," Dan admits. He has more dreamless nights than not; he thinks that if he had dreams every night and also, some of them might come true, he'd go mad.
Phil doesn't bother to respond to that, because obviously it's exhausting, but he sighs again and closes his eyes.
"You can't sleep here, c'mon," Dan murmurs, squeezing Phil's shoulder before standing up. "I'm sure your bed will be more comfortable than wood."
"Your mum is more comfortable than wood," Phil says, nonsensically.
With a bit more prodding and cajoling, Dan gets Phil to his feet and guides him down the stairs so he doesn't wipe out. Phil wrinkles his nose when he looks at his bedroom, so Dan finds himself saying, "Will it help to sleep in my bed? It's not like I'm using it right now."
"Why would that help?" Phil asks, which isn't a no.
"Change of scenery," Dan suggests, opening his door and gesturing for Phil to go in. "Make yourself at home - within reason, like."
"I'm going to snoop through everything," Phil threatens weakly. Dan rolls his eyes and gives Phil a gentle shove into his room. "Okay, okay. Thanks."
Dan stands in the doorway long enough to make sure that Phil gets to the bed without colliding with anything before turning to leave. He normally stays in his room for a good portion of the day, but he doesn't mind taking up the browsing position in their lounge so Phil can get some actual sleep.
Before he can walk away, though, Phil mumbles something that makes him pause.
"What's that?" Dan asks without turning around - just in case Phil hadn't said anything at all.
"Will you stay?" Phil repeats. His voice is quiet and muffled by Dan's comforter, but the request is unmistakable.
Dan isn't sure how this will help, but he smiles over his shoulder and says, "Sure. Let me grab my laptop from the kitchen, I'll be right back."
Considering the exhaustion, he expects Phil to be asleep by the time he gets back with his baby, but Phil's half-closed eyes watch Dan hesitate and look between the desk and bed uncertainly. He doesn't say anything to guide Dan, which is annoying, and Dan ends up making a frustrated noise before flopping onto the far side of his bed and opening Tumblr.
Phil makes a contented noise and curls around Dan, close enough that Dan can feel his body heat but not quite touching. Dan isn't sure if he should feel relieved or disappointed.
It's easy to get lost in the void of Tumblr, and it isn't until Dan gets a text that he realises actual hours have passed. He doesn't want to disturb Phil, but he thinks it might be worse if Phil's sleeping schedule gets all out of whack, so he shakes Phil awake before checking his phone.
"Huh?" Phil bleats, startling awake and blinking a lot.
He has a half-quiff and his eyes are redder than usual. Maybe he should have taken his contacts out before napping, but Dan refuses to feel guilty about that because Phil is a grown man and has been able to take his contacts out without reminders in the past.
"Your nap was becoming a coma," Dan says, picking up his phone before he forgets to check the text.
"Oh," Phil says around a yawn, curling further into Dan so his head is sort of resting on Dan's tummy. "I'm sorry for taking over your bed."
"It's fine, you doofus," says Dan. He's paying more attention to the fact that his mum actually texted him than this conversation, and that's his excuse for carding his fingers through Phil's weird sleep quiff.
Phil doesn't seem to mind or even find it weird. It would probably be weirder to stop doing it now that he's started, so Dan just keeps absently petting Phil as he reads through the strangely long text from his mother.
"What're you looking at?" Phil asks into Dan's shirt.
"Mum texted."
It's such an unusual occurrence that Phil rearranges his entire body in order to stare at Dan whilst keeping his head on Dan's stomach.
"Your mum or my mum?"
"My mum," says Dan, and when did the word 'mum' turn into something that needed clarification in his life?
This is what he'd meant, when he told Mark that sometimes he and Phil are more like a couple than not. He can't picture any of his other friends in this situation, can't even fathom having his hand in someone's hair and talking about their shared mums in bed if there wasn't a romantic element.
With Phil, though, this is just what their friendship is like. Dan honestly isn't sure if things would be easier with said added romantic element, because things are already so easy.
"Dan?" Phil is saying, his voice slightly raised, and Dan guesses that Phil's been trying to get his attention for a while.
"Sorry, what?"
"I said what does she want?"
"Um," Dan looks back down at his phone, trying to collect his thoughts and hide his flushing face, "my family's going on holiday, so she wanted to let me know."
Phil plucks the phone out of Dan's hand and ignores the squawking protests to sigh, "Dan, she also asked you to water her plants."
"So?"
"So, you have a job in London," Phil says, his lips pursing unhappily. "She always thinks you have free time."
Cheeks burning, Dan snatches his phone back and pushes both Phil and his laptop off of him. He doesn't need to be told that his family doesn't take his job seriously, he knows that already.
"Will you come to Reading with me or not?" Dan asks, swinging his legs out of bed and stretching to avoid looking at Phil's apologetic face.
"Course I will," says Phil. "Are we going for a day or the whole time they're gone?"
The idea of spending an entire week in his childhood home is unappealing to Dan, so he responds that he'd prefer only staying over for one night. With any luck, he won't run into anyone he knows while he's there.
Phil doesn't push the topic. He knows when to stop, when all he'll get from Dan is sullen glances and 'I don't want to talk about it, Phil' if he says one more time that Dan might be happier if he tried building stronger relationships in his family.
It's no wonder that Phil doesn't get it, since the Lesters have basically adopted Dan as one of their own.
That's not who the Howells are, though; they aren't sunny and jokey, they don't watch his videos and text him thumbs up emojis, they don't invite Phil over without prompting.
Dan loves them all the same. Of course he loves them, they're his family.
It's just that - when Dan gets homesick, it isn't for Reading. It isn't for Manchester or this crappy London flat either, really. Sure, he misses his sofa crease and the cracks in his bedroom ceiling when they're on the road, but only until the next moment that Phil catches his eye and grins brighter than the sun.
Dan doesn't get homesick often.
--
"I can't even read your writing." Dan tries very hard to sound exasperated when all he wants to do is laugh.
"My writing is so much better than yours!" Phil says defensively, making grabby hands at his dream journal. "A dramatic reading of my dreams was not included in this deal."
"It should be, that sounds hilarious."
Dan doesn't give the journal back, because he's just winding Phil up. He flips open to the last page, ignoring Phil's annoyed squawk of a noise that he's only capable of making before his morning coffee, and starts reading.
Lots of the dream descriptions are straight-up impossible; Dan notices that there are stars marking the most realistic entries and a fair few with just a giant question mark. He also can't help but notice that there are places where pages have clearly been torn out. Judging by the dates on some of the earlier entries, Phil has had this journal for months longer than Dan expected, and Dan wonders what Phil wanted to keep to himself.
To be fair, he's had plenty of dreams that he would rather Phil never heard about, but he also would have never written them down in the first place.
Phil leaves the lounge to make coffee at one point, returning quietly with two mugs just when Dan thinks he's had enough of reading older dreams that have already come true. He closes the journal and accepts his coffee before mumbling, "Thanks. Did you make some of these up?"
"No," says Phil, rolling his eyes.
"These ones have happened," Dan says unnecessarily. "You should really keep better track of which dreams have passed."
Before Phil can say anything, Dan fishes for a pen between their sofa cushions and puts a checkmark beside a dream about Dil becoming a nightmarish crafts project.
"Oi, don't mark up my journal," Phil says, but he makes no effort to take the journal or pen from Dan.
Dan ignores him to ask, "How do you not live in constant fear?"
"I dunno." Phil is shrugging when Dan looks up with an expression of disbelief. "I mean, I don't usually dream about anything bad, so it's not like I have death and devastation hanging over my head all the time - unlike you. Don't hit me, I have coffee!"
--
The train to Reading isn't long, especially compared to some of the treks Dan has had to do with a caffeinated Phil at his side, but he still hates every second of it.
It makes him feel younger, and he isn't sure if he likes that feeling. Young Dan was embarrassing and judgemental and so, so terrified that he wouldn't be liked by anyone that he made a lot of choices to make other people happy.
Plus, he can't move the whole journey, since Phil has decided to fall asleep on his shoulder.
Phil's steady breaths are normally quite calming, but he keeps mumbling things that Dan can't quite catch, and it’s driving him crazy.
He never used to care this much about dreams, even his own, but he thinks that the paranoia is justified here.
This whole clairvoyance thing has made Dan incredibly anxious. He can't help but wonder what other things in this universe he doesn't understand, if a form of magic is real. Part of him hopes that this is all an elaborate prank - he'd be mad at first, but it would be better for his mental health all around.
When the train finally starts slowing down, Dan gently shakes Phil's shoulder.
"Dan?" Phil mumbles, not sounding fully awake.
"Yeah, 's me."
Something about the moment that Phil blinks up at Dan without moving from his shoulder causes the breath in Dan's throat to catch.
"I had such a weird dream," Phil confides. "Like, an actually weird dream. Tyler Oakley was doing a collab with Leatherface."
"Sounds harrowing," says Dan.
"It was, a bit," Phil says on a yawn, sitting up properly and blinking at the train window. "Oh, I didn't mean to sleep the whole trip! You must have been so bored. I'm really sorry, Dan."
"The quiet was a nice change," Dan says instead of admitting that he was in fact very bored without Phil's chatter, "and you needed the sleep."
"I did," Phil agrees, before pulling out his phone to check his fringe in the camera app.
"Shut up, you look fine."
"Wow, Reading puts you in a bad mood. We haven't even got off the train yet and you're a grumpleton."
Dan doesn't grace that comment with a response, as Phil is right anyway - Reading does put him in a bad mood. He just stands up and nudges a still-sleepy Phil to do the same when the train is stopped completely.
They take a cab to Dan's family home and Phil talks the entire time about absolutely nothing. Dan appreciates it; the chatter helps him tune out his surroundings so he isn't thinking about the time he threw up on that bench over there or when he got caught shoplifting at the nearest corner store.
Walking into his parents' house is always so weird, because Dan half expects it to have stayed the same since the last holiday he visited. Obviously, it never does.
Part of Dan can't help but think of their books, proudly displayed on the Lesters' coffee table, while looking at the cringey graduation photo on the wall of his own parents' lounge.
Somebody else is growing up here now, is the thing. The photos of Dan on the wall have been the same for five years, but Adrian is still going through the motions of becoming a person, and it's weird for Dan to see that happen in chunks.
"He's getting so old, it's weird," Phil voices, looking at the new photos next to Dan's awful ones.
"Tell me about it," says Dan. "We are all dying."
Phil laughs, because that's what he does when Dan makes a joke about death, and carries his bag upstairs. Since he's feeling listless and like a stranger in his own family home, Dan follows.
--
Dan was upset with me? is the latest thing written in the dream journal that Dan sneaks out of Phil's bag when he can't sleep. It doesn't help.
--
When Dan wakes up in his old bed, the afternoon sun filtering through the blinds in an all-too-familiar way, he has a moment of absolute panic that he's gone back in time - honestly, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing in his life right now - but he’s too long for his bed and he can hear Phil singing in the kitchen.
Dan only has a couple of hours before their train leaves, so he pushes himself out of bed and doesn't bother with getting dressed to water his mum's plants. On his way downstairs he calls out, "Good morning."
"Afternoon!" Phil's voice comes back, bright and loud and not suited for Dan's old house at all.
"Can you get me some water?" Dan asks as he ambles into the kitchen.
"For you or the houseplants?"
"Both, I guess."
"I already fed the houseplants," Phil says with a smile, opening wrong cupboards until he finds a cup. "You want lunch?"
Swallowing around the sudden, inexplicable lump in his throat, Dan murmurs an affirmative. There's something about Phil making himself so at home in a place he hasn't been overly welcomed that is making Dan feel some kind of way that he isn't prepared to deal with at this time of day.
His parents like Phil well enough, but they don't really understand him; they don't understand the person he helped Dan become, either.
Even if Phil is feeling weird here, he's going out of his way to make Dan feel comfortable.
"Why was I upset with you?" asks Dan. His voice is almost too quiet, and he watches as Phil's fingers slip on the loaf of bread he's slicing. "In your dream, I mean. I couldn't sleep so I - yeah."
"I'm not mad you looked," Phil says over his shoulder, "since I made it for you and all."
Dan knows that isn't true from the dates and level of detail in the journal, but he isn't about to call Phil out.
"Well, that's good. So?"
With a heavy sigh, Phil starts to spread peanut butter on bread for Dan - the exact amount that Dan prefers, not that he notices.
"I'm really not sure," Phil says slowly, not looking at Dan. "Remember when I had that dream about me freaking out and you leaving? It was like, the exact same, except you were really upset that I was freaking out instead of trying to calm me down."
"That doesn't sound like me," says Dan.
Phil shrugs and holds out Dan's finished sandwich in response. Dan has to stop himself from squeezing Phil's hip in thanks like he usually does, because Dan is half naked and they're in his old house and he thinks it might be weirder here and now. Then he thinks maybe it's weirder if he doesn't do it, but Phil has started moving towards the lounge before he decides.
Around a mouthful of peanut butter, Dan asks, "How many times have you had this dream?"
"A few," Phil says as he flops his whole body onto the sofa. He leaves enough room for Dan to sit near his feet, which is considerate of him.
"Have you considered that it might just be... a dream?"
"I have done," says Phil, "but it just feels so real, you know? And it's been the same weird room, not on like Jupiter or something."
"I'm not sure what we'd have to argue about on Jupiter," Dan muses out loud. If Dan is honest with himself, he can't think of anything in the entire universe that would make him angry at Phil during what sounds like a panic attack.
"Maybe I stole your space cereal," Phil jokes, poking Dan's thigh with his toes.
Dan wants to say that he wouldn't be legitimately angry over cereal, that he's never been more than irritated by it, that he plays his reaction up for his own entertainment, that almost anything he buys is for Phil too, but all that seems too serious for the moment.
Instead, he cracks a joke and changes the subject so he can make Phil smile for a little while longer.
--
It happens so slowly that Dan doesn't even notice until it's already out of hand.
They've been back from Reading for a week, and Phil has been acting weirder than usual the entire time. Dan didn't see this as a reason for concern, because sometimes Phil is weird for no reason, but when he catches Phil eating his cereal and the first thing out of Phil's mouth is a frantic "sorry!" instead of his usual squawk of "don't look at me!", Dan gets concerned.
"Phil," he says slowly, running a hand through his bedhead and trying to act more awake than he is, "I don't actually give a fuck if you eat my cereal."
"You don't?" Phil immediately puts his hand back into the box, the little shit.
"I mean, it's annoying, but you looked like a startled deer just now," Dan says around a yawn. "I'm not going to yell at you."
An emotion passes over Phil's face too fast for Dan's tired brain to categorize it. Phil shrugs a shoulder and looks back at the box of Crunchy Nut like he's deciding whether or not he wants to eat more.
He's been like this all week, careful and anxious and avoidant, and Dan doesn't know what to do. If he confronts Phil about it, Phil will just deny everything and try too hard to be normal - Dan remembers 2012 vividly - but he doesn't want to encourage this behaviour either.
"Are you alright?" he asks, hoping the simple question won't spook Phil.
"What d'you mean?"
"I mean... you're being weird."
"I'm always weird, Dan."
Dan decides to drop it for the time being. The last thing he wants to do is push Phil further into this weirdness by interrogating him.
"How did you sleep?" he asks instead, noticing the way Phil's shoulders relax when he changes the subject.
"Pretty good, thanks," says Phil, "my dreams were boring but, like, peaceful."
It only takes a bit of prompting from Dan before Phil gives him a play-by-play of his dreams, and since they're as boring as advertised, Dan lets himself zone out and worry about Phil on his own time.
Phil doesn't get any less weird after that, but he tries harder to cover it. Since Dan is a good friend, he pretends like he doesn't know that Phil is still jumpy and anxious underneath the bad jokes.
Honestly, it sucks. Dan wishes that Phil would just open up and say what's on his mind so they can both move on.
That is, until Phil freaks the fuck out.
See, they've been looking at bigger places to live for a few months now, but they have time until their lease is up so they're in no rush.
Dan gets a notification for an available duplex a few weeks after he tried getting an answer out of Phil, and it looks confusingly laid out but otherwise a good fit. It's exciting, but he hesitates before texting Phil about it - does he really want to play the 'everything is normal' game while meeting a potential landlord? For all he knows, Phil is going to come across as a serial killer.
Instead, he texts Louise. She responds with more emojis than characters, but agrees to check the place out with Dan.
The duplex has so much room that Dan has a startled moment of bewilderment. Does he own enough furniture to fill this place? Before he can voice the concern, Louise waves him off with an easy, "Stop worrying, you dingleberry."
"I'm not worried," Dan lies.
Louise rolls her eyes and starts snooping in the closets. "Oh, blimey, can I keep some of my things here?"
"No," says Dan, although he's sure that at least one of his closets will be taken over by Darcy's old toys and Louise's heels. "Me and Phil need the storage for all our miscellaneous shit."
"You could always, I don't know, get rid of some," Louise suggests.
"Maybe during the move we will," Dan allows, gently guiding her out of the closet before the landlord gets concerned.
Aside from a few awkward moments - inevitable, with Louise at his side - Dan thinks that the tour goes really well. He likes the space, the road is blissfully free of loud noises, and the landlord doesn't immediately think he's in adult films when he mentions where lights could go.
Dan likes it so much that he's reluctant to leave, but Louise reminds him that he isn't the only person whose opinion on the house matters.
"You know Phil has to live here too, right?" she says with a laugh when Dan starts asking pointed questions about when the place will be empty. Dan makes an exaggerated huff of a noise.
"He'll take what I bring home and he'll like it."
The landlord gives them an indulgent smile. "We can arrange another day for you to bring your boyfriend by, see if he likes it here?"
"Sure," Dan says automatically, trying to ignore his heart beating faster and Louise staring a hole into the side of his head. He knows that a Talk is coming. "I'll talk to him about it tonight. Thanks for, y'know, having us."
Dan hopes that ignoring Louise on the way to the tube will delay the Talk, but Louise is not easily deterred.
"Boyfriend, eh?" she asks in a lilting voice, elbowing Dan in the side.
"Shut up, it was easier than explaining."
"I actually think that it wouldn't be hard to say 'Phil's my friend and roommate'." Louise, he thinks, sounds far too amused by this situation. "Now if you get the place, your landlord will think you're a couple the whole time!"
"Would that be so weird?" Dan asks. "I mean. It's what people already think when they meet us, and sometimes I forget that we aren't."
Months ago, Dan had said the same thing to Mark; he doesn't expect Louise to react much differently.
"Well, duh," Louise says matter-of-factly, "because you love him."
Dan almost walks into a telephone pole. "Excuse me?"
"Don't be daft, you light up every time he comes in the room," says Louise. "Plus, I can feel your heart rate speed up."
"You can... feel that?"
Wrinkling her nose, Louise shakes her head. "Maybe sense is a better word, but your emotions are so much louder when Phil's around. It's given me migraines in the past, you know."
"Exactly how many of my friends have magic powers and why don't I?" Dan exclaims. He resists throwing his arms in the air dramatically, but only just.
"Ooh, who else?"
"That isn't the point! What the ever-living fuck, Louise? You can sense emotions?"
"Only really strong ones," Louise says with a shrug, like that isn't a big fucking deal. "That's how I know when you do something awkward that makes you want to die - honestly, I thought I already told you this!"
"If you did tell me," says Dan, "I would have assumed you were joking."
Louise rolls her eyes and pulls out her phone as if Dan is boring her. "That sounds like a you problem, then."
She changes the subject when they get to busier streets, chattering about her new boyfriend while Dan, once again, re-evaluates his entire worldview.
--
So, Phil freaking the fuck out.
It takes Dan by surprise, because Phil seems excited by the prospect of more storage and less drilling, but he tenses up as soon as they walk inside the duplex. The landlord doesn't notice, busy repeating the same things that Dan has already heard and gesturing at all the closet space.
Dan doesn't want to draw attention to Phil's weird stiffness, so he makes idle conversation until the landlord leaves to take a phone call.
"Are you okay?" he asks, reaching for Phil's arm.
It's one of the most bewildering moments Dan has ever experienced - and that includes recent magical discoveries - when Phil jerks away from his hand like he's going to be burned.
"I don't - I don't -" Phil stammers, his eyes wide as saucers, "- I mean, it's that - I know this place."
Dan feels useless with his hands at his sides. "Did you see it online?"
"No, I - in my dreams, I -"
It clicks.
"Phil, are you panicking because you had dreams about panicking here?" Dan asks slowly. He doesn't want to laugh or show any irritation in case it makes Phil's hands start to tremble even more, but this is a little funny and a lot annoying. "You know that's such a catch-22, right?"
The look of absolute distress that Phil gives him says that yes, he knows that very well, but he doesn't seem to be able to stop hyperventilating.
Dan sighs and runs a hand through his own hair, letting his fringe do whatever it wants when he does.
"Okay, mate? I'm going to tell the landlord that you aren't feeling well and that we're leaving so that you can have a panic attack in peace. I'm not in any way leaving you alone because I'm mad or because I hate you, alright?"
Phil gives him a shaky thumbs up before covering his face with both hands and making audible attempts to breathe deeply.
The last thing Dan wants to do is leave Phil alone like this, but he does. He doesn't want a potential landlord thinking that they're batshit, after all, so he relays the not-feeling-well lie and comes back to lead Phil outside by the elbow. Instant relief washes over Dan when Phil allows the physical contact.
"You're so weird," says Dan.
He means it to come out as exasperated yet still fond, keeping grip on Phil's elbow for his own peace of mind, but something about Phil struggling to breathe evenly has Dan sounding unexpectedly soft.
To his surprise, Phil huffs a breathy laugh. "Thanks, I think? And thanks for, um, not leaving me alone for long."
"I told you that didn't sound like me," Dan says, squeezing Phil's arm, "you've been trying to avoid a fight that was never going to happen, you absolute knob."
Phil laughs again, loud and genuine. He's starting to sound more like his regular self, so Dan lets go of him to hail down a taxi. It would be silly to put his hand back immediately, Dan thinks, because if Phil's panic attack is over, he has no real excuse to continue touching him. He opens the taxi door for Phil and clamps down on every instinct that wants to help him in - Phil is thirty years old and capable of getting into a car on his own, thanks ever so - and folds his own hands on his lap once they're both buckled in.
"I quite liked that place, actually," Phil admits. He's twiddling his thumbs, and Dan is proud of himself for not putting his hand atop both of Phil's to make him stop. "Do you think they'll let us come back?"
"They seemed to like me," Dan says, because making a good first impression is a point of pride.
"Maybe they'll only rent to you, then," Phil says in the cadence of a joke.
Even though Phil is finally himself again, Dan can hear the uncertain edge to his words. After all, neither of them need a roommate anymore.
Dan looks out the taxi window so it doesn't feel like an admission when he says, "No, we're a package deal. The landlord knows. Honestly, I'm pretty sure everyone knows."
There's an eerie silence from Phil beside him, but Dan focuses completely on the scenery changing to more familiar buildings. The cabbie isn't paying attention, thank the lord, so Dan isn't completely mortified by having this conversation in front of a stranger.
He's still slightly mortified.
It feels like an honest-to-God jumpscare when Phil puts his hand on Dan's knee and squeezes - Dan is pretty sure the noise that startles out of him isn't human.
Phil laughs, not unkindly, and leaves his hand there. "Yeah, I suppose we are."
--
"You're not acting weird anymore," Dan observes later that week as they wait for a Sims lot to load.
"No, you were right about that dream," Phil says with a sheepish smile. "You didn't get mad like I kept expecting you to, but be honest - you were definitely annoyed."
"Of course I was annoyed, you made yourself panic," Dan says with a fond roll of his eyes. He hates when the fantastic is logical, but the evolution of Phil's dream makes a lot of sense; at first, Dream-Dan was worried, and then got angrier as Real-Dan learned about the dream.
Phil elbows him in the side. "Shut up."
The game loads, then, so they stop discussing it and lose themselves in Dil's world for a while. It isn't until Dil becomes 'VERY ANGRY' that Dan remembers he wanted to share some information with Phil.
"Right, you've been acting so weird that I completely forgot to tell you," Dan says, pausing the game. "Did you know that you aren't the only person with weird powers?"
"It would be pretty egotistical for me to think I'm the only one, Dan."
"Shut up," says Dan, "Louise can feel other people's emotions."
The look on Phil's face is totally worth springing this on him. He goes through a whole face journey, starting on pure shock and ending in something that looks strangely nervous.
He looks away before Dan can analyze the expression further, pointing at the computer scene. "Like - like, she can see when people are focused or inspired, like we’re all Sims? Dan. Dan, that's terrifying."
"She said it only worked with strong emotions," Dan laughs, batting Phil's hand away from his monitor so he doesn't leave finger smudges.
"Do you believe her?" asks Phil.
Do you believe me now?
Dan gives a noncommittal shrug, his first instinct to being asked an opinion, and adds, "Yeah. You've both made a pretty compelling case for magic being, like, a thing."
"What did she feel off of you?" Phil asks curiously, and Dan accidentally-on-purpose presses the pause shortcut so their attention can be consumed by their odd little virtual family again.
--
Dan assumes that if Phil asks Louise anything personal, Louise will keep her mouth shut. He has a lot of blackmail material on her, after all, and friends don't tell people that a friend is feeling Things without consulting that friend.
As the month comes to a close, though, Phil starts pretending he can't find his dream journal and gives Dan looks when he thinks Dan isn't paying attention. It's nerve-wracking.
Luckily, Phil is his regular self aside from that. Dan lets himself revel in how good it feels to have his best friend in top form and cracking decent bants again.
He wants to ask Louise if she's spilled the beans on what are certainly misunderstood feelings, but he's a little scared of the answer. If he doesn't ask either of them, Dan can pretend that everything is back to normal and that he isn't hyperaware of his own body every time Phil touches him.
To make a joke of it all, Dan texts Markiplier without context that he finally understands how Schrödinger felt, because Mark and Louise are the only ones who have an inkling about this situation.
From Mark: Dude, it's 5am here. Shut the fuck up and tell Phil how you feel.
To Mark: that's not what i'm talking about
From Mark: Ohhh, so you ACTUALLY have a maybe-dead cat in your apartment? That's so weird. Maybe you should call someone for that.
To Mark: you're enjoying this too much
Mark, the twat, leaves Dan on read - presumably to go to sleep - and Dan hovers over Louise's contact photo before groaning and opening Tumblr instead.
It's best if he doesn't know. He's pretty sure a cat inside a box is eventually going to die.
--
I should examine this, probably, Dan thinks as another casual brush of Phil's fingers causes his heart to jump into his throat. He doesn't particularly want to end up facedown on the floor, so he decides he'd rather play Mario Kart.
--
Unlike their brief attempt to buy a house, which went sideways in the worst way, signing a lease at the new flat is deceptively easy.
Phil is talking the landlord's ear off while Dan reads the paperwork over and tries to look like he knows what he's doing. He has uni flashbacks at the legal buzzwords, but he tries to focus instead of interjecting in all of Phil's stories and questions. It's working relatively well until Phil has to ask, "Are we allowed a dog?"
"No," Dan answers before the landlord can, tapping a line in the lease. "Sorry, Phil, a dog will have to be got when a house is bought."
He notices that Phil looks a little disappointed but not surprised, and he wonders if that's because Phil anticipated this downside of renting or if he had a dream involving their lack of pets.
"Fair enough," Phil acquiesces, squeezing the back of Dan's neck casually.
Their new landlord smiles at them and Dan is feeling quite good about this whole situation until they ask, "So, how long have the two of you been together?"
"Excuse me?"
Phil doesn't sound offended or even bewildered, just curious. It makes sense; they get mistaken for a couple quite a lot. For his part, Dan is trying to become invisible by melting into the sofa, because he knows that their landlord's assumption isn't coming from nowhere.
"Sorry to pry," they say politely, "Daniel mentioned that the two of you have lived together a while, and I do enjoy a good love story."
Dan hopes that the floor is going to open up and swallow him whole. He feels Phil's gaze but refuses to meet it, face burning.
After a couple of seconds - during which Dan contemplates death or, at the very least, running away to Tokyo - Phil returns his hand to Dan's neck and easily says, "Eight years."
With a mortified noise, Dan hides his face in his hands and tries to ignore the heavy thumping of his heart. Their landlord is saying something else, probably asking what the fuck is wrong with Phil's boyfriend, but all Dan can pay attention to is the weight of Phil's hand and the sound of his genuine laugh in response to whatever question he's asked.
"He's just embarrassed because he hates telling people how we met," Phil stage-whispers. "He basically stalked me online until I noticed him."
"Oh my God, I hate you," Dan groans into his palms.
"No, you don't," says Phil cheerfully.
New landlord chuckles before a phone rings and they have to leave the flat to take the call, murmuring an "excuse me". The silence left in their wake is horrible, and Dan thinks that he's never going to come out of the safety of his hands again.
It takes a few minutes for Phil to move his hand from Dan's neck; honestly, Dan is expecting him to laugh or ask questions that Dan doesn't have answers to, but Phil just takes Dan's hands in both of his and gently pulls them away from Dan's face.
"Did you tell our landlord that we're a couple?" Phil asks, his voice lilting strangely on the last word.
Dan nods, biting his lip. He can feel the heat of an ugly blush radiating off his face, and he has genuinely no idea how he's going to explain this away.
"Why?"
It's a simple question, and certainly a fair one - anyone would want to know the answer - but it stumps Dan. He'd done it because the landlord had assumed, but seeing as most of the people they meet have the same assumption, the logic doesn't really hold up. He could say he'd done it ironically, which he thinks that Phil might accept as an answer, or a joke, which he thinks Phil would disapprove of.
He could say a lot of things, but they all feel like lies. Dan looks down at where Phil is holding his wrists between them on the sofa so he doesn't have to make eye contact when he answers, "Sometimes it feels more like the truth than saying we aren't."
"I guess I can see that," says Phil. To Dan's absolute bewilderment, his voice is calm and his hands aren't shaking. Dan's are. "Tell me something else, then? What do you want to be the truth?"
That... is a less simple question.
"Dunno," Dan shrugs, because he can feel Phil watching him and he doesn't want to take too long to answer. "I never really thought it would be a relevant question."
"Well, do you still want to live with me?" asks Phil. The question is filled with such genuine concern that it startles Dan into looking up to shoot Phil an incredulous expression. He's not prepared for how close Phil is, even though personal space has long been a myth between them.
"Of course I do, you fucking buffoon."
A corner of Phil's mouth curves upwards and Dan tries not to show how nervous he is, because Phil is still weirdly calm.
"Okay, okay," says Phil, squeezing Dan's wrists before letting go, "we should sign, then."
Dan had completely forgotten what they were doing before Phil asked if he wanted to be in a relationship, so he's grateful for the reminder. He skims the rest of the lease as thoroughly as he can with Phil watching him.
There aren't any surprises in the paperwork, which Dan is grateful for - he isn't sure he'd be able to debate with the landlord in his current state. He signs quickly and hands the pen to Phil as their new landlord walks in, pocketing a phone.
"You're all set?" the landlord asks with a smile.
"We are," Phil answers for them both. He stands up and shakes the landlord's hand, making small talk while Dan forcibly drags his gaze away from Phil.
He doesn't know what he wants. It should be easy, sorting through his feelings and deciding yeah, that's how I want things to be, but there are serious downsides to any decision Dan makes right now.
Ruining their friendship would be unacceptable, but honestly, Dan doesn't think anything he says will make Phil stop being his best friend. It would just be awkward if Dan wanted something Phil doesn't - and why didn't Phil say what he wants, so Dan isn't freaking the fuck out and wondering? - it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Dan thinks it would be pretty damn close to the end of the world if they tried, failed, and had to dance around each other as awkward exes. That's the darkest timeline, right there.
Or maybe it's not.
Phil is gesturing for Dan to leave with him, smiling widely, and Dan considers what would happen if nothing changed between them. It's certainly the path of least resistance, but as Dan stands up and Phil leans into his space out of sheer instinct, Dan has to admit that not addressing the way his heart reacts to Phil is the worst option on the table.
The landlord says things and Phil says things back, but Dan isn't listening. He's too busy forcing himself to imagine Phil moving out, Phil getting a dog without him, Phil finding someone else to share his life with, because that's what best friends do.
By the time they hail a cab to their terrible current flat, all Dan can say for sure is that he really, really doesn't want to do nothing.
Phil is quiet for once, looking out the taxi window and letting Dan have space to think, and Dan is so fond and so sure, at this moment, that he reaches out and puts his hand over Phil's.
It only takes a moment before Phil registers what he's doing. He grins so damn brightly that Dan hates himself for not considering his options before this.
"Is this your final answer?" Phil asks, affecting a silly announcer voice to lighten the moment.
Dan snorts and says, "Yeah, alright."
It's all he can manage out loud right now, but Phil beams at him and turns his hand over so they can wind their fingers together properly. It's not the first time they've held hands, but it's the first time it's meant something so important.
Things could still go so wrong. This might not work, and things will be awkward, possibly forever.
Dan, well. He chooses to hope for the best here.
--
"Did you dream about this?" Dan thinks to ask during a commercial break. Phil is curled into his side, lanky giraffe legs thrown over Dan’s lap. It should be weird, since they've never cuddled quite like this before, but Dan feels warm to the core. "Us, I mean. Is that why you hid your journal?"
"I didn't hide it," Phil lies, "I lost it."
Dan huffs his disbelief and pinches Phil’s thigh. "You can tell me. In case you didn't notice, I'm not going to mind."
The grin Phil shoots him is almost shy, which tugs at Dan's heartstrings. He smiles back and runs his fingers through Phil's hair, because he can.
"Does it really matter what I dreamed?" Phil hums, leaning into Dan's hand like a cat. "I've had dreams about us for years, to be honest, but I could never figure out if they were premonitions or just, like, wishful thinking."
"You weirdo."
"Your weirdo," counters Phil. The words are a bit stilted, like he isn't sure if Dan wants to hear them, and Dan can't help himself - he presses his lips to Phil's, quick and chaste and easy as breathing. He'd worried that maybe it would take a while for them to be comfortable with kissing, but honestly, it feels like the natural progression of their relationship.
Phil grins and chases Dan's mouth as he leans back, pressing light kisses all over the bottom half of Dan's face until Dan is laughing breathlessly.
"Okay, fine, you're my weirdo," Dan says as Phil smooches the tip of his nose. "Now shhh, the show is back on."
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seven days
day two: part two
summary: dan is stuck in the wrong timeline. one day, he kisses phil goodnight. the next morning, he’s completely alone. he doesn’t even recognize where he wakes up, and little details in the world around him have changed. he has no clue what’s happening or where to go next in an effort to fix it; all he knows is that he has to find phil.
genre: sci-fi, a lil bit of angst, happy ending
warnings: none (for now)
fic word count: 5.5k
chapter word count: 1.2k
written for the @phandomreversebang !
inspired by the awesome moodboard/edits by @maybeformepersonally !
beta’d (beginning to end) by @i-might-just-leave-soon !
read it on ao3
“have a great day!” dan shouted as he watched the love of his life walk out of it clueless. he sighed, and muttered under his breath, “i love you.”
Dan put his head in his hands. He’d been refreshing Phil’s Twitter for nearly half an hour, and he’d yet to post anything about meeting Dan. Was he not as big of a fan as he let on at the meetup? Would he even respond if Dan messaged him? How would Dan even start that conversation?
The only way he figured was to use the art as a conversation-starter. He did find that post, and he liked and retweeted it, but he couldn’t seem to message Phil. Something he couldn’t quite identify was holding him back; it was like there was an invisible forcefield blocking his thumbs from typing Phil’s handle into his DMs.
“Dan!” James called from the other room. “Are you ready to go? It’s time to leave for your panel!”
No one had even bloody told him he had a panel that day. He decided to count himself lucky that he’d been too down to change out of his meetup clothes and stood up to head to the door. Before he moved, though, he stopped, looking back down at the phone. By then, it was already about 2:00; he didn’t have all that much time left.
hi there! i really like the art you gave me at the meetup; would you mind if i used it in a video? thanks so much x
He typed it and sent it without even thinking, and he was gone.
Checking the phone nonstop up until the panel did no good for Dan; Phil had yet to respond. He was probably sitting in the audience chattering with someone, Dan thought. Finally, when he was ushered out onto the stage, he was met with deafening shrieks. At least something was normal.
Dan spent the next few minutes scanning the crowd for any sign of Phil but to no avail. Furthermore, not only did his plan fail, but it also managed to distract him from a panel he already knew absolutely nothing about. He didn’t even figure out the topic of the panel until five minutes in, and that only made it worse: he was sitting in a row of makeup YouTubers.
Dan didn’t know a single thing about makeup, so every answer he gave, he lied straight through his teeth. It didn’t take long for him to notice creators up and down the panel giving him odd looks, and he started sweating through his jumper. He could tell he was crashing and burning, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He was like an astrophysicist giving a lecture on Shakespeare.
Every time the moderator asked him a question, Dan answered as confidently as he could, but he knew that everything coming out of his mouth was dead wrong. Only fifteen minutes into the panel, shouts were radiating from the audience.
“Dan’s a fraud!” one critic shouted.
“That’s not Daniel! He’s an imposter!” someone yelled over the murmurs of the croud.
Suddenly a chant broke out: “IMPOSTER! IMPOSTER! IMPOSTER!”
Dan sunk down into his seat as if that would hide him from the audience. Up and down the panel, the looks from his fellow creators had changed from confused to angry. He bowed his head, stood, admitting defeat, and took a walk of shame off the stage.
“Dan!” someone shouted, and his heart jumped out of his chest. There was currently a crowd of people angry at him; his name coming from the other end of a hallway immediately spiked fear in his core. He gave a deep exhale as he turned to find James running towards him, but his eyes quickly widened as he realized the situation he was in: he had just bombed, and “his” manager was making a beeline straight for him. “What the hell just happened?” he said, anger and concern about even in his tone.
“I’m sorry, I just….” he trailed off, panic setting in. “I’m not well right now. I think I need to go back to my room for the rest of the day and just lie down.” James raised an eyebrow.
“Damnit, Howell, if I didn’t know your face well enough I’d say you were an imposter.” He sighed and turned on his heel, finally leaving Dan completely alone.
It was a miracle, really, that Dan made it back to the hotel. Between his general lack of direction and the fact that angry makeup experts were probably out to get him, he was quite paranoid through the entire walk, but he somehow managed to make it.
After he was safely locked up in his hotel room, he pulled out the phone, and it was already flooded with texts, half of them asking if he was okay and the other half making very rude yet technically true allegations.
All the notifications stressed him too much for him to be bothered to look through them, so he simply opened his phone and went straight to Twitter. Or at least he attempted to. Before he could even reach the top row folder the Twitter app was hiding in, he found himself tapping the notification to another concerned text.
At this point, a mix of stress and anger began to pool in his stomach, and he finally snapped, frantically searching for the settings app (and hitting a couple more notifications along the way). He began shutting off notifications for each app, one by one, and when he reached the bottom, he discovered that Twitter notifications had already been off. At least the YouTuber he personified had a little bit of sense.
However, he suddenly realized that this meant Phil could have messaged him back hours ago, and he wouldn’t have known. He rushed back to the Twitter app, this time uninterrupted, and found a DM sent only a few minutes early.
Depends. Are you who you say you are?
He’d been at the panel. Dan sighed and began to think. Could he continue to lie to Phil? What would happen if he told the truth? Would Phil stop talking to him? He anxiously typed out a message, refusing to even look at the screen as he went.
sorta. i know this is weird, but i am daniel howell. just not the one you know. i look identical, and by all legalities we’re the same person, but i’m not… from here. again, i know it’s really weird, but i need you to trust me. i need to talk to you.
He threw his phone down on the bed as if it were suddenly burning. He knew the only way he’d be able to tell if he got a response was if he checked, but he was terrified to do so. It was like 2009 all over again.
Finally, a few minutes later, he opened Twitter to find what he considered the worst case scenario; Phil had read his messages, but there was no answer. He went to Phil’s account, and, even worse, the most recent tweet was a screenshot of their conversation captioned “Creepy texts from @/danielhowell ???”
He was screwed. Dan rolled over in his hotel bed and pulled up Netflix on his television, feeling his depression setting in with every passing second. “Maybe in the next universe.”
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tell me somethin’ new
summary: dan's kind of regretting throwing away his friday night to have a skate-off with the guy who insulted him earlier today, but maybe it won't be as bad as he thinks.
or the one where dan howell is a little hot-headed and accidentally challenges former ice-skating champion, phil lester, to an after-hours skating competition.
a/n: this was written for the jolly friends and dickmates gc winter secret santa gift exchange. happy christmas/new year/random friday in january @amczingphil! special thanks to @knlalla and @philsroots for continuing to beta this even after i argued against almost every suggestion they made. to quote myself, “i’m sorry for being a stubborn gay bitch.”
word count: 3.7k
read on ao3
warnings: sexual references, sports injury, dan doesn’t know when to Stop
Dan is, decidedly, a dumbass, though he has yet to realize it. He slumps forward, eyes dropping down to where the laces on his skates hang limply at the sides. He glares at them. It’s not their fault that he’s here at an ice rink, after hours on a Friday night. They weren’t the ones who declared that Dan could outskate the cute ice rink owner, Phil, in a fit of half-flirting, half-frustrated hubris, after all. No, Dan did that just fine on his own, but he needs to take his irritation out on something, and the laces happen to be right here.
It hadn’t been on purpose, of course. He hadn’t stepped onto the rink earlier today with the intention of challenging a complete stranger to an after-hours skating competition.
Dan sighs and combs his fingers through his hair. This was a mistake. He could have actually had a fun night, could have gone out to a couple local bars to find a hook-up, but there’s not much he can do about it now. He’s already here, and he’s not about to forfeit when he knows he can win. With a sigh, he reaches down and begins tying up his laces. Might as well get it over with. At least this Phil guy is hot.
Planting the blades of his skates into the ground as firmly as he can, Dan pushes himself up off the bench, but it does little to stop him wobbling the moment he adds his weight into the mix. His ankles buckle and he finds himself reaching out to grab onto the nearest support. He just manages to wrap his arms around the nearest bench in an attempt to hold himself up before he finds himself in a heap of his own limbs on the floor.
Groaning, he presses his forehead against the seat top. It’s made of metal and cool from the chilly air, and it helps to temper his rapidly warming face. Fuck ice skates. He never really has much of a problem with them when he’s on the ice, but he can’t walk for shit in them when he’s on solid ground. He’ll have to learn pretty quickly if he doesn’t want to fall flat on his face in front of Phil, though.
Using the arms he’s already wrapped around the bench, Dan pulls himself back to his feet. This time, he positions himself closer to the wall. As long as there’s something for him to lean on if he needs to, Dan should be able to make it all the way to the rink without incident. He just needs to spend less time thinking about what he’s doing.
Somehow he manages it.
Phil is already on the ice by the time Dan makes it out to the gate. He’s gliding across the ice in figure eights, his long legs clad in tight black leggings, and Dan’s half-tempted to just stay quiet and hide behind the barrier so he can keep watching. It doesn’t really seem like Phil would notice Dan if he doesn’t make his presence known - he appears to be lost in his own world, his entire body swaying to the rhythm of a song that isn’t actually there.
Actually, he appears to be dancing - properly dancing - on the ice right now. His arms come up to circle over his head, fingers locked tightly together, and he bends at the knees, tucking in to begin spinning in a tight circle on the spot. The sharp blades of the skates grind against the ice, cutting through the air like a siren, but all Dan can focus on are Phil’s legs. He seems to be winding himself up, although for what exactly Dan isn’t quite sure.
The answer, it turns out, is nothing. But Phil isn’t done yet. He plants his toe into the ice to stop himself from spinning and immediately begins gliding backwards across the smooth surface. He draws his right leg back, allowing the left one to continue to carry him over the ice as he gears up for something Dan’s not sure he’s ready for himself. Dan can feel his heartbeat in his ears as Phil drags his right skate forward to plant the toe in the ice and propel himself off the ground.
It isn’t until this moment that he realizes Phil must know twice as much about skating as Dan does himself. So what if Phil falls flat on his arse the moment his skates touch the ice again? Dan knows that he’s not a bad skater, but he definitely doesn’t know how to skate quite like that. Regardless of whether or not Phil can land his jumps, he can still do more than Dan will ever be able to. Maybe this was a bad idea. Dan’s throat closes tightly as he watches Phil reach behind himself to press a hand to his lower back. The wince is visible even from here.
Phil pushes himself to his feet and brushes the ice shavings off of his arse, and Dan doesn’t know whether to keep watching or to pretend he hadn’t seen the fall to begin with.
It seems he doesn’t even need to make the decision. Before he can even think about it, Phil’s calling out from the middle of the ice.
“I thought you wanted to skate.” He fixes his gaze just to the left of Dan, eyes rimmed with just a tinge of red.
Dan takes a deep breath and then steps through the gate and out onto the ice. As soon as his skates touch the new surface, a calm washes over him. He begins gliding towards the center of the rink where Phil is, the blades cutting smoothly through the clean ice. It feels familiar, comforting in the same way it feels to walk through the front door of his flat after a long day. Phil meets Dan’s gaze, crosses his arms as Dan digs his toe into the ice to come to a halt right in front of him.
“Sorry, I - erm - I saw you out on the ice and I didn’t want to interrupt,” Dan says.
“I saw you come out of the changing rooms.” Phil’s turned his attention to his fingernails, and Dan wonders if he and his big mouth have already ruined any prospects for a friendly flirtationship.
“Oh yeah, I was, uh, re-tying my laces,” he says lamely.
“Cool.”
The question are you okay sits on the tip of Dan’s tongue, but instead he blurts out, “So what, were you trying to show off for me or…?”
Phil rolls his eyes, muttering something under his breath, and begins skating away. Dan watches, unsure of whether he should follow after him or just turn around leave before his shoves his foot even further in his mouth.
“Are you coming?”
Once again, it seems as though Phil is making all of Dan’s decisions for him tonight. Maybe he doesn’t mind as much as he should.
"Yes, sir," he grumbles. When he starts towards Phil, he goes slowly, opting for long, smooth strides over the short, choppy ones that would get him there faster. He comes to a stop about two metres away and clears his throat. "Okay. So tell me how I have to kick your ass."
Phil huffs. "Three trials. One timed lap around the rink, seven figure-eights, one triple lux. Loser has to pay for drinks afterwards.”
Dan gulps. He has no idea how to do a triple lux, but maybe if Phil goes before him, he can just wing it and try to mimic what he does.
“Do we have a deal?” Phil says.
“You know,” Dan starts against his better judgment, lips turning up at one corner into a crooked smirk, “you don’t have to go through all of this just to take me out for a drink. Hell, I’d fall right into your bed if you smiled at me.” He’d probably fall right into Phil’s bed without the smile, even. Although, considering that Phil hasn’t so much as smirked since the moment they met, Dan’s definitely itching to get at least one out of him before the night is over.
“You were the one who called for a skate-off.” Phil’s voice is flat and low, his eyes once again searching for anything to look at besides Dan. His cheeks are tinged pink, but as much as Dan would like to take credit for that himself, he’s pretty sure it’s because Phil’s been stood out on this ice for a while. It is rather nipply out here. Perhaps that’s why Dan loses the ability to bite his tongue every time he’s out on this ice. All his blood is trying to circulate towards his head.
“I only called for a skate-off in the first place because you seem to think I’m incapable of teaching my niece how to skate.”
Phil eyes him suspiciously. “That was your niece?”
“Well yeah,” Dan scoffs. “I promised her I’d take her skating this year. She’s never been before and this place had the best reviews. Obviously none of the reviewers took hospitality into account.”
Phil freezes, his jaw dropping and his eyes narrowing into slits. “Well maybe-” he growls, pausing to let a deep breath pass in and out of his lips. Any fight he has in him seems to dissipate as he exhales. He closes his mouth slowly. “Look. You were distributing your weight all wrong. I know it probably feels more comfortable balance-wise when you angle your skates outward, but it leaves you more susceptible to injuries. I just thought that if you were trying to teach a kid how to skate - which you were - you should at least do it right.”
Dan’s ears grow hot at the insinuation that he’s unfit to teach Maggie how to skate. He scowls at the thick layer of ice beneath his feet. “Oh yeah? Well who crowned you king of the fucking ice rink?”
“The deed to this place,” Phil says flatly. There’s a beat of silence and then he lets out a long sigh, causing Dan’s eyes to flit up. Phil’s eyes are squeezed tightly shut, his teeth worrying at his bottom lip. “Fuck,” he bursts out finally. “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re not like. A bad skater. I think you already know that.”
Dan can feel the tension beginning to seep out of his shoulders just from this half-compliment, and he kind of hates himself for it. “But?”
“But there’s something I want to show you. C’mon.” The ice grinds beneath Phil skates as he starts making his way towards the main gate.
“Is it your cock?” Dan calls after him. He can see the eye roll from here. “I thought we were going to skate?”
“Raincheck?” Phil looks down at his skates. “I, erm, assume you saw me fall earlier?”
Dan nods despite the guilt crawling up to expand in his throat. He swallows it down. “Yeah, I did. But, uh, I mean to your credit, I wouldn’t even attempt whatever jump that was you did.”
Phil looks up, laughs humourlessly. “A triple lutz. They used to be my specialty. Anyway, It turns out that I’m also pretty shit at distributing my weight. I am now, at least. I, uh, strained my knee on that jump, so I should probably get out of these skates and try not to fuck it up any more.” Shaking his head, he turns and takes his first step off the ice.
“Specialty?” Dan murmurs to himself. Phil used to have an ice skating specialty. One that involved actually jumping off the ice. It’s only a moment later that he registers the second thing Phil just said. “Wait!” he calls out, skating towards the gate he entered the rink at - the one Phil’s just used to step off the ice. He slows down as he approaches the wall. “Are you hurt?”
With a small, sad smile, Phil turns back to look at him. “Nothing a little ice won’t fix.” He sits down on the bench beside gate while Dan uses the wall as a support to help himself off the ice.
Dan sits down on the opposite bench as Phil begins untying his laces. He won’t say it out loud, but Dan is glad for the excuse to take his skates off instead of walking back to the changing rooms in them. If Phil can take his off out here, then Dan will just do the same. He reaches down, tugs at his laces until they loosen. It’s always ten times harder to get the skates off than it is to put them on, so he gets to work, trying to wiggle them off of his feet one at a time.
He isn’t having much luck. Phil’s are already lying on the floor next to his feet, just another testament to how foolish Dan had been to challenge him in the first place. He got lucky with Phil’s forfeit, although from his view of the way Phil’s currently hunched over and massaging his knee with the palm of his hand, Dan doesn’t actually feel all too great about it.
Phil looks up at Dan from beneath his lashes. “Need some help?”
Dan nods silently and sticks his foot out to make it more accessible to Phil, but Phil just drops down to press his good knee into the floor.
“Bit too soon for a proposal, don’t you think?” Dan teases as Phil fiddles with the laces to loosen them up a bit more.
“You know, I could just let you keep these on and laugh as you stumble around in them.”
“Philip,” Dan gasps, “were you watching me? I knew it. I’m irresistible, aren’t I?” He winks.
“Embarrassingly comedic is more like it,” Phil mutters, although his cheeks have gone pink again. He tugs on the heel of Dan’s boot and it gives up its tight grip on his foot. “Okay, now point your toes.” Dan does as he’s told, and the skate slips easily off of his foot. Phil sets it on the floor like he’d done with his own.
Dan whistles. “Wow. Do you do this kind of thing often? For the record, when I say ‘this kind of thing’ I mean ‘help guys who really want to bang you undress from their skates.’”
Phil rolls his eyes. “Do you have an off switch?”
Dan reaches behind himself with a smirk. “Yeah,” he says, pointing to his bum, “it’s right around here.”
“Jesus Christ,” Phil mutters as he starts working on the second boot. “Something tells me that only winds you up more.” He tugs the skate over Dan’s foot and sets it on the floor next to the first. “Now come on. I need to go get some ice on my knee and wrap it up.”
Dan watches as he uses his hands to push himself up off the ground, careful not to jostle his right knee in any way. Following suit, Dan picks his skates up off the ground and grabs Phil’s also. “I know you’re going to turn me down,” he says, “but you’re welcome to use me as support if you need to hobble.”
To Dan’s surprise, Phil slings an arm around his shoulder without a word.
“Oh,” Dan breathes. He shuffles the pair of skates in his right hand to under his left arm, slipping his now free hand around to grip Phil’s waist. “Is this, erm, is this okay?” he says quietly.
“Yeah.”
They make their way slowly and wordlessly, the newly shared intimate space drawing even Dan into a precarious silence. He’s afraid that if he opens his mouth, this bubble that they’ve built around themselves will burst. His heart thumping against his ribcage is the only thing tethering him to reality right now. Each beat feels like there’s a bird trapped in his chest, flapping its wings relentlessly in the hopes that enough friction will set it free.
Luckily, Phil’s office isn’t too far away. There’s a hallway just after the changing room entrance, and all the way at the left on the end is the office.
When they reach it, Phil pushes the door open and flicks on the light. “You can have a seat,” he says, pointing to the armchair near the far wall. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”
Dan watches warily as he hobbles towards his desk on his own. It’s only when Phil makes it to his desk chair without incident that Dan lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding in. He strolls over to the armchair and plops himself down on it.
With Phil busy rummaging around in something beneath his desk, Dan is free to look around his office. He hasn’t thought about it enough to have any real expectations, but for some reason he finds the orderliness of the room surprising. Phil’s sat at a large mahogany desk in the corner opposite Dan. It has a computer with two monitors, a picture frame, a coffee mug, a pair of glasses, and what appears to be a page from a newspaper on it, but otherwise, it’s bare. A couple filing cabinets line the wall opposite the desk, but they too have nothing on them. It’s very...plain.
In fact, the only real decoration he can spot in the whole room is a staggered row of shelves built into the wall next to Phil’s desk. On each of them is a collection of trophies, medals hung neatly around their necks. Dan probably wouldn’t have even noticed them if he hadn’t a glimpse of a glare reflecting off their surface.
“That’s a lot of trophies,” he says, finally breaking the silence. “So you’re an ice skater? Like competitively?”
Phil looks up from the ace bandage he’s been steadily winding around his knee while Dan’s been distracted. “Was.” His voice cracks. “I was a competitive ice skater.” He opens his mouth as if he wants to say more, but then closes it abruptly.
Dan doesn’t know how much more he should push, but he’s willing to test the waters if it means getting to know this man a little bit more. “It looks like you were a pretty damn good one,” he prompts, nodding to the shelves.
“Erm…” Phil turns his attention back to his knee so he can finish wrapping it up. “Yeah, I was alright.” His voice shakes. “I was better than alright, actually. I was on the track to the Olympics, but then I made a rookie mistake and...well, long story short, I tore my ACL.”
Dan sucks in a breath. “Oh my God,” he says softly. “I’m so sorry.” He doesn’t know what all a torn ACL entails, but he knows that it’s ruined careers for a lot of unlucky athletes. And if Phil is here instead of out on the ice, Dan’s pretty sure that he was one of the unlucky ones.
“Me too,” Phil whispers. “Me too.” He shakes his head and turns to tuck the end of his bandage beneath another layer, clipping it in place. With a sigh, he looks back up at Dan. “I was trying to do a triple lutz when you came out to the rink earlier. Just to see if I could do it. I mean, the doctor told me when I came out of surgery that I’d never be able to skate competitively again. I think a part of me has always held out hope that I’d be able to land jumps eventually, though.”
Dan nods. He knows what that feels like. He knows how it feels to chase after something even when the odds are against you. “So what did you do? After they told you you wouldn’t be able to compete again?”
“I, uh-” Phil laughs darkly.“I did a lot of moping for about a year. And then I signed on to be a coach to some younger skaters for a couple years. But I found out that just wasn’t a good fit for me. It was just this painful reminder of everything that I’d had to leave behind.” He presses his palm into his knee and looks up towards the ceiling, letting out a long sigh. “So as soon as my contracts ended, I moved out here and used some of the money I’d saved up to buy this place. Part of me wishes that I could just leave it all behind. But I’ve tried, and every time I do it’s like I can hear the ice calling out to me. Like we have unfinished business. I don’t know, I probably sound like a freak.”
“No,” Dan says, “no, not at all. That’s how I feel about writing.”
“You’re a writer?” Phil’s eyebrows shoot up.
Dan laughs, bringing a hand up to run his fingers through his hair. “Uh, yeah. Not a very good one, but yeah.”
Phil frowns. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Tell that to every publisher I’ve sent my manuscript to in the past two years.”
Phil’s frown deepens, his eyebrows scrunching together in a way that’s both endearing and maddeningly practiced. “Well fuck them. You’ll get it published. I know you will.”
Dan sighs, ruffling his hair again. “Thanks. Really, thank you.” Part of him is afraid that his earnestness makes him sound like a bit of a loon, but mostly he just feels relieved. He’s forgotten how it feels to sit down and have a conversation with someone who actually listens to what he’s saying.
“You will,” Phil says softly before clearing his throat. “Anyway, I, uh, I just wanted to say that I wasn’t trying to like. Insult you earlier today. You’re a decent skater and you skate with confidence, which is half the battle sometimes. There are just some techniques that could help you skate a little more smoothly if you’d learned via a trainer.” He scratches his head. “I could teach you sometime, if you want. And your niece, too. What’s her name again?”
“Maggie,” Dan answers automatically. He pauses for a beat, letting a smile spread slowly across his face. “So you could teach me some techniques, huh?”
Phil blinks. “Aaaaand he’s back.” Shaking his head, he stands up from the desk chair and tests out his knee. It seems to be holding up from what Dan can see. “C’mon,” Phil says with a sigh, the small smile tugging at his lips betraying his apparent annoyance. “Let me buy you a drink. I did technically forfeit after all.”
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A Somber Day
Summary: Dan has been a bit off lately and won't tell Phil why. Despite not being a pushy Phil, he can't take it and tries to find out for himself.
Pairing: Daniel Howell & Philip Lester AKA Phan
Genre: Fluff & Angst, I guess
Word Count: 3.1k
Trigger Warnings: Arguing, snooping around (is that a trigger??),
* * *
There was something wrong with Dan, Phil was sure of it. After all, he had been dating his best friend and practically soulmate for a decade now! In fact, their mutual friends, Dan's family, and the fans often rushed to Phil to ask if everything was okay and if they could get ahold of Dan since they couldn't.
Phil was always the one calming Dan down, he understood why. Usually, Dan would lock himself in his room to try and wait it out and Phil would have to force him to eat and try to maintain a decent sleep schedule so he would feel up for it when his depressive episode would pass. Sometimes, Dan came to Phil right away to cuddle when he wasn't feeling his best (it was rare for him to do so though).
But Dan wasn't doing any of that. He wasn't locking himself away in the darkroom only accompanied by the glow of his laptop and phone. He wasn't pressed against Phil's side and mumbling lies about himself that Phil would have to recorrect either.
He was just...off.
He seemed fine, maybe a little sadder than usual to the casual person. He was smiling, laughing as usual at Phil's corny jokes and embarrassing statements in videos like he always does. He had that big grin that Phil adored on his face but that was for videos and they always put up a persona for videos, just like any other YouTubers.
But it was outside of the videos that alerted Phil something might be wrong. Dan was still laughing and smiling, there was no doubt of that.
But there would be these few small moments that Phil noticed. Whenever Dan was looking at an electronic like his phone or his laptop or heck, even the TV, he would begin to loosen his cheeks and smile somberly. His hard coffee-colored eyes would soften at the sight of something all these things had in common apparently and the screen's reflections and glows would cause little dots to glimmer in the dark brown pools of his eyes.
It was like he was staring at a photo of someone he missed, who he yearned to see again as if this person had died or was too far away to contact again so all he could do was simply miss them. But this wasn't a photo of someone in particular who Dan missed, not at all.
To be honest, Phil was at a loss for words. He couldn't piece together what was wrong. What were these devices showing him that tug at Dan's heart? On a rare occasion, it almost looked like Dan was about to cry because of whatever was making him stir inside.
'What is it?' Phil pouted, sat at his desk, editing another video. 'He would usually tell me by now. Why hasn't he told me yet?'
Phil wasn't a pushy person contrast to his bubbly and pressuring nature on camera. That was for work and they were always playing some type of video game so it was fine to yell at Dan to hurry up and go to the other side of the map so they could get a good score on a level or when they were playing some game that was a Dan Vs Phil. It was a competitive land of videos so naturally, he was pushy because he didn't want to lose to Dan.
But in real life? He would never try to push someone into telling him what's wrong right away. If they broke down when he asked what's wrong, he would rush to their aid and gently rub his hand up and down their back soothingly. He would let them know it was okay to not tell him and that he could wait until they were ready to tell him. He didn't want people to force him to say anything so why be a hypocrite about it?
But he was becoming a bit agitated.
"Dan, what's wrong?" Phil gently asked, now sat next to his boyfriend who was just clicking through meaningless channels on the TV. He reached over and gently placed a hand on Dan's shoulder, rubbing his thumb in a circular motion to try and fizz out the nerves.
"Huh?" Dan stopped clicking harshly on the remote, drawing his stretched out arm back to a comfortable position on the arm of the couch. "What do you mean?"
"Well, something is wrong. I know that much." Phil said, narrowing his eyes at his boyfriend who still stared up at Phil with a confused and innocent gaze. "Just, please tell me. Maybe I can help you."
"I literally have no idea what you're talking about, Phil." Dan rolled his eyes and went back to flicking through the channels to try and find something interesting to watch.
"Dan," Phil whined, reaching over and grabbing onto his upper arm. He glared at the boy who just stared forward at the TV. "Please, just tell me. Is it me? Did something happen with PJ or Chris or Tyler or-"
"Stop, Phil." Dan groaned, throwing his head back against the couch. "Nothing's really wrong, maybe it's just old age hitting you fast."
Normally, this is when Phil would stop and just assure Dan that everything would be okay and whenever he needed to talk, Phil would be there even if it was at the crack at dawn. But he couldn't stop. He couldn't bear the idea of Dan holding something in that was eating him alive from the inside out.
Okay, maybe that was a bit of a hyperbole but he didn't care right now. His mind was focused on Dan, not logical metaphors.
"Dan, please just tell me," Phil begged at this point, he was just desperate to know what was hurting Dan. Maybe he could help with it if that was the case.
"Phil," Dan glared, ignoring whatever channel the television was on now. It was just white noise at this point with Phil's constant insistence. "Nothing is wrong, trust me on this."
"I can't!" Phil blurted, immediately he began to regret it considering he was supposed to be the mature and wiser one than Dan and yet the table seemed to be switched. "Something's wrong Dan, I know it is!"
"Why can't you believe me?" Dan growled, tossing the remote to the side of the couch and now staring directly at Phil with a knitted brow.
"Because you don't trust me!" Phil gripped on Dan's arm, maybe a little too tight since how Dan slightly flinched. "What is it? Did you have a fight with a friend? Or maybe you lashed out on someone you didn't mean to? Did something happen with your family?"
He stiffened.
Dan stiffened at that last one.
'Aha!' Phil cheered in his head, finally grabbing some sort of indication of what was wrong with no help from Dan. He scooted closer to Dan, smiling softly at Dan this time around and relaxing the tension in his limbs.
"Dan, it's okay. Whatever happened with your family is in the past." Phil released Dan's arm and reached over for Dan's hand that was splayed out on his thigh and intertwined their fingers together. He looked over at the still stiff man and frowned, maybe he wasn't being reassured enough? "It'll be okay, I'm here with you and I know, whatever happens, you didn't want to happen. I know your family, Dan. They aren't really supportive of your job choice but they do love you, no matter what happens. I'm sure of that, trust in me with that statement."
"That's not..." Dan released a shudder, his grip tightening quickly on Phil's fingers. Phil watched as Dan squeezed his eyes tight and gnawed at his lip as if he was fighting with some beast inside him on whether he wanted to tell Phil or not.
"Hey, hey," Phil reached over and wrapped his arm around Dan, drawing him closer to Phil. "It's okay, everything is okay. You're alright, I'm right here. Just breathe for me, alright? Can you do that, just for little old me?"
"You're far from little." Dan chuckled breathlessly.
"Hey, I'm shorter than you because of you and your stupid height thing!" Phil whined.
"Not my fault my body decides to add a few more inches on me, Phil." Dan rolled his eyes, leaning forward and pressing his head into Phil's chest.
"Yes, it is." Phil giggled, threading his fingers into Dan's mess of curly golden brown locks that glow thanks to the light above them shining so brightly against them. "It's your body."
* * *
He still didn't get his answer as Dan fell asleep on him soon after although he tried to protest ("You need a decent sleep schedule!" "Shut up and let me cuddle you.") So he decided he was about to go where no one had gone before.
Dan's browsing history, on both his phone and computer.
It was a brave task to do indeed. He knew it meant he might be caught by Dan but maybe it was worth it. Dan had just fallen asleep after all and Phil put him in the comfort of his own room, leaving Dan's phone and laptop unsupervised by no one but Phil.
Maybe this was a breach of privacy but he decided it was for the better good.
"Okay, Dan's browsing history here we go!" Phil yelled quietly and click on the 'History' tab. He only found what he expected, a bunch of times he posted something on Tumblr or a link that he clicked on Tumblr or just Tumblr related basically. On brand for sure. But nothing that would acquire why he was acting differently and hiding what was wrong. He scrolled down, it was just a mix of Youtube videos from friends and Wikipedia articles. He really needed to stop reading that at three in the morning.
"Computer was a waste of time," He groaned, a little agitated he wasted precious time on that. Dan could wake up at any moment and that scared him since he didn't want Dan to be mad at him for snooping, although he certainly had a right too. He leaned over the side of the coffee table, peeping into the hallway where their bedrooms would be located at and saw nor heard any indication of Dan being awake or getting up. "Please, give me something."
It was a waste of time. Phil forgets the phone and the computer was connected with their history because it was under the same account. He slapped himself in the face for that one.
"This wasn't helpful." Phil groaned again, feeling like a dirty jerk for going through his stuff without permission only to find any reason for Dan to act strangely. He stood up with both devices and brought them into Dan's room for him to plug them up.
"Nngh," Dan had made a little grumble in his sleep when he rolled over startling Phil a little.
"Oh Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack." Phil panted with a hand over his ever fast beating heart.
But Dan was mostly silent from then on as Phil plugged them up. He stood up and looked around and noticed a paper and a ripped envelope on Dan's desk.
'Did he seriously forget to file something?' Phil questioned, rolling his eyes at the hypocrisy that Dan was always getting on him for being an unorganized mess. He shook his head and walked over there nonetheless so he could file it for him.
But it wasn't a paper you file. It wasn't a paper Phil expected at all. It was something much more personal than that which he should have been notified of by Dan.
Of course, he had to read who it was from and what it is said for him to file it correctly otherwise a hissy fit would arrive from Dan and he couldn't have that at the crack of dawn. But this definitely wasn't something he was supposed to file given the content on the paper.
We regret to inform you with all great consideration given your occupation status, relationship status, and living status that we do not see you as a suitable future temporary foster parent and especially not a guardian for any children open for adoption. We're sorry to disappoint of such a thing, Mr. Howell. It isn't legal in England yet for a same-sex couple to be able to adopt and your occupation as a "YouTuber" doesn't offer an assurance of money amount for sure without a reasonable doubt each month. We cannot forget your living status either, sir. As a YouTuber, you often travel for events out of the country such as VidCon and you are in a middle of a second world tour and we cannot find ourselves happy with the arrangement that a child may be left alone without a proper guardian watching over them carefully to make sure they are not causing harm to themselves or others and caring for them to make sure they are healthy and happy. Along with that, your current living conditions do not accommodate a child's living space.
In short, we appreciate your consideration and eagerness to help offer a home to a child in need but we must regret your application has been rejected due to circumstances and factors provide above. Thank you for continuous patience, Mr. Howell. Do send our regards to Mr. Lester.
Sincerely, The Head Of The British Orphanage.
"Oh my god," Phil felt tears well up in his ears, fingers splayed over his mouth. Of course, he wanted a child as well, he was getting in his years as well but he just assumed that maybe Dan didn't want or rather couldn't handle the responsibility of handling a child. It was either that or that they would be rejected in such a way similar to this.
Dan didn't flinch because he fought with his family. He flinched at the family because it must have reminded him of what he was being denied by their country. Those YouTube videos of their friends? A majority of those videos had been Lousie's video who actually has a family and whose child they have held and cooed at before in a video.
"Oh, Dan." Phil felt his heart tug and he placed the paper back down where he found it. He wiped the tears from his eyes and crawled into bed with Dan instead, pulling the boy flush against him.
* * *
Dan opened his eyes confused. When had he gotten in his bed? He felt someone against him and quickly opened his eyes to find that it was Phil.
'Oh,' He immediately relaxed and smiled, knowing Phil probably brought him in here after he fell asleep on him. But he grew tense, remembering what had happened before. Phil's curious and pushy questions tugging at his heartstrings in a way he yearned for it to stop.
He didn't want to tell Phil. How was he suppose to tell Phil? "Hey, I applied us to be foster parents, isn't that cool? Also, I let this lady come from Child Services to see if our places were okay for a kid while you were away, hope that was alright?" Yeah, right. No way in hell could he admit that but he knew he would have to one way or another.
Dan sighed and resigned himself to his face. He just wanted a kid, was that so hard to ask? He just wanted a family, a place of love and care that would make him all fuzzy inside that made him want to barf at all the fluffiness. He sneaked himself out of Phil's lanky arms and slithered out of the duvet to throw his legs over the side of his bed. He got up and stretched, ready to head to the living room and go plug up his phone when he saw it laying with his computer on his desk.
Next to the rejection letter.
'Oh my god, he had to have seen it!' Dan's heart raced at the very thought of it, his gaze flickering quickly back and forth from Phil sleeping soundlessly on his bed to where the letter was laid out for anyone to pick up and read it. 'Oh no, oh no, oh no, he's probably mad. What do I do??'
Now, he had gotten over most of his teenager tendencies across the years but one thing that never failed was his ability to overthink everything and send himself into an anxiety and stress overdrive. That's why he was like how he was now. He groaned loudly, plopping back down onto the bed and putting his face in his hands.
What was he to do now that Phil knew?
"Dan?" A groggy and scratchy voice that usually sent shivers of pleasure down Dan's spine was now sending shudders of fear instead. He gulped and found his fingers gripping into the fabric of his pants from the day before. He slowly turned to face Phil, hearing his heart beat louder than ever and his blood go cold.
"Y-yes?" He stuttered. God damn it, why did he suck at this?
"Is everything okay?" Phil said, rubbing his eyes sleepily and reached over, wrapping his arms around Dan's shoulders.
"...you know," Dan muttered, looking down at his lap. "Don't you?"
It took a moment for Phil to register what he was talking about but he finally found his grip on reality through the exhaustion. "Yeah, I do."
"Do you hate me now?"
"No."
"Well, you should," Dan muttered, reaching up and gripping Phil's forearm.
"Why should I hate you? We both want the same thing silly, a family and we can't be at blame for that." Phil said wisely. "It's what most people want."
"But I didn't tell you." Dan tried to reason.
"I'm sure you have your reasons as to why, Dan. Everyone does." Phil whispered, leaning forward and kissing his boyfriend's cheek.
"But aren't you disappointed now?" Dan said. "We can't have a family."
"Same-sex people can't adopt, Dan." Phil chuckled in his ear, the hot breath against his neck making him shiver a little. "But that doesn't mean we can't have a child of our own."
"Phil,"
"Hmm?"
"Two dicks can't procreate." Phil laughed loudly in his ear at that one.
"I know that silly," Phil said, he was wearing a smile for sure. He usually was smiling, that's one of the reasons Dan adores him so. "But (whatever the word is) exist. We just pay them to have one of our babies."
"Oh," Dan muttered. "Do you wanna after the tour?"
"How could I dare say no?"
#phan#phan fluff#phan angst#phanfic#phanfiction#tw homophobia#arguing#snooping around#cawerkuu#cawerkuu writes#fluff#angst#happy ending#love
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Businessman!Phil Masterlist
Links Last Checked: March 30th, 2022
Acknowledge - trysomecats
Summary: Dan has been working at Lester Global Inc for two weeks now. His co-worker Louise is absolutely sure that their boss has a massive crush on the newest employee, but Dan has trouble acknowledging it. Contains pastel!Dan + rich and successful Phil.
Blossom - crescendohowell
Summary: Phil is a rich businessman who decides to leave the city in favor of buying a house in the country. He expected to find beauty in the house and the surrounding gardens, but he didn’t account for a cute gardener who loves flowers and hates him.
Born To Die (ao3) - sheriff_lester
Summary: Lonely businessman Phil Lester and lonely stripper Dan Howell.
Fool with Feelings (ao3) - cockwhoredan
Summary: Cam boy Dan has never been this obedient for a guest who hasn’t tipped. Businessman Phil has never been this happy with a misclick.
Holding Onto You (ao3) - xxxwhy
Summary: Dan Howell is a thief, a pickpocket, who has a surprisingly kind heart. His life has gone haywire for as long as he can remember, but he's trying to make the most of what he's been given. Phil Lester is a young uprising businessman who is close to his final breakthrough to the world of fortune and wealth. This is a story about the time when Dan just so happens to steal something from Phil and their paths cross, turning their worlds upside down.
losing the feeling (of feeling unique) (ao3) - orphan_account
Summary: dan is homeless and phil is a wealthy business man.
Million Dollar Man (ao3) - metal_arm_metal_shield
Summary: An AU where Dan and Phil are both powerful, filthy rich, and just plain filthy men. At an extravagant business party hosted by Phil, Dan steals him away to give him a show.
Paramour (ao3) - dannihowell (anotherdaughter)
Summary: Phil, a wealthy businessman, is having an affair with Dan while married to a woman.
Professionally, Yours (ao3) - deletable_bird
Summary: Dan is an overworked, underpaid, very homosexual uni student in need of an easy job. Phil is a successful, rather lonely businessman in need of a housekeeper. This is their story.
Sweet Sugar Meeting - trysomecats
Summary: Rich CEO and businessman Phil Lester is fed up with being lonely, which is why he decides to become a sugar daddy. Dan ends up being the perfect candidate for a sugar baby.
The Business Man (ao3) - gaywizard
Summary: Dan is homeless, and everyday Business!Phil walks past in his fancy suits. The have never talked until one day Phil walks past and farts, and Dan can’t help but laugh.
you just accidentally fell asleep on my shoulder, but i don't mind (ao3) - what_the_gosh_dang
Summary: Dan takes the underground at a very bad time of night while slightly intoxicated.
#phanfictioncatalogue#phanfiction#phanfic#phan#masterlists#au#businessman!phil#businessman!phil masterlist#rich#rich!phil#richpoor
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