Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When Phil gets back home, he changes back into his pyjamas. He had plans for the day, probably (there are so many hours left), but they feel so inconsequential now. Compared to the storm in his head, their structure is flimsy; it only takes a few minutes - set the kettle to boil, fill Minton’s food bowl, stack the dishwasher - for them to be lost to the hurricane. Tornado. Whatever. Point is, it’s slowly siphoning everything out of him.

He doesn’t use magic. By hand, he lines bowls up on the spokes of the dishwasher, runs a glass under the tap and fills it back up with water, and places his dirty clothes into the laundry basket. To cast a spell would seem too much like furthering the betrayal, which doesn’t make sense, because if he tells Dan he uses magic only to not use it, surely that’s a lie in itself, but things like this aren’t meant to be sensical. The mere thought of using magic makes him feel ill. The power it brings is too strong for him to handle, and the memories it would conjure are too potent.

It’s been half an hour, at most.

It isn’t that he’s never felt like this. Over the years, he’s had his fair share of crises, arguments, and self-doubts - magic related, school related, mental health related. But this feels so uncanny. Not because he has feelings for Dan. No, in many ways Dan is irrelevant, a component and a catalyst but not a defining feature. He just feels...

He’s split in two. Two warring sides of himself have collided, pushing up into mountains, and the tremors have made him restless and edgeless. Hiding his magic had never affected him so badly, in the past. There were never any consequences. People knew, or they didn’t, and Phil acted accordingly.

Genuinely, Phil doesn’t mind burying himself every once in awhile, because he can still be himself - he still is himself, his magic is only a fraction of him - at home. What does bother him, he’s discovering, is the morals of it, the ethics (such bulky words, for something so personal and small). Dan is the case where it’s gone wrong. Not because Dan is the issue, but because Phil is. Maybe. He can’t tell how guilty he should feel about this. At least, he knows one thing for certain: he should have told him.

Right and wrong aren’t concepts, but emotions roiling in his gut. There is no solution, only each situation before the next and the next.

All of this stays in the background. A barbed fence, but not the contents of his thoughts. He’s too shaken for deep thought. He’s just trying to forget, and the sense of disruption won’t leave him.

Phil scoops up his laptop from his bed and sits at the desk in the lounge. The square of white light from the window shifts from the table onto him. He can hear the gobbling sound of Minton eating in the kitchen. Waiting for the laptop to boot up, he drums his fingers on his thigh twice before standing up; in one sweep of the room, he picks up any litter and all misplaced belongings, subsequently shoving the rubbish into the bin and locating homes for the other items: a book of poems, two fine-liner pens. One of Dan’s moth eaten sweaters.

“If he wants it, he’ll have to place an ad in the paper,” Phil yells to his dog, and shoves it into the cupboard under the stairs.

Phil mutes Dan on Twitter, because it feels like the right thing to do. He doesn’t unfollow him, or the fans will know, and he can’t stand to face that. Not today, not anyday. He could ask Gwen what to do about it, how to handle the PR. Oh, God, since when was his life so manufactured? Although it’s probably his fault, for building such a public relationship when the foundations were so unstable. The tornado cleared them away in no time.

(Is his magic the tornado? Or is he the tornado?)

The word document for Jelly Hearts is open, waiting. This morning, he was so ready to write. The words were popping out of his head. The excitement to get them out and onto paper was so palpable, but now it’s a distant memory. He has no idea where to turn next, every sentence is stiff and boring. Even with the deadline looming over him, he can find no incentive or motivation in him. There are worse things than missed deadlines.

Writing his novel is so boring and so pointless. He’s bursting with feeling, but not for that.

He goes to his blog, jots down a short piece of prose that reveals too much and solves too little, and hits post before he can think twice. Activity on NINELEGGEDOCTOPI had been slow, recently, anyway.

Phil gives up. There is nothing else to do. Shutting the laptop with a smack, he pushes away from the desk and opts to lounge on the sofa instead. He has several episodes of a TV show to catch up on. Minton plods over and slumps onto his lap, so he can’t possibly move now.

He can’t write, and he refuses to use magic. Suddenly, he’s useless. They’re not a part of him anymore, leaving him as a shell of dried blood and frazzled wires of thought, tied up with tracksuit fabric. As if his mind was wired with a five-amp fuse, and it’s blown.

As Netflix loads, he strokes the thicker fur around Minton’s neck and tells him, “You’re getting old, aren’t you?”

Four years ago, when he finished University and moved into a cheap flat in Manchester, he treated himself by getting a dog. The landlord allowed pets - that had been a pivotal criteria for Phil, not that he’ll ever admit it. Minton wasn’t a puppy any longer, but he was juvenile and endearingly friendly, and that didn’t change over the following months and years. Phil feels a certain, warm affection for his dog, an affection reserved for Minton and Minton alone.

Minton just breathes, his chest rising and falling, his heart beating into Phil’s thigh.

“That’s not allowed,” says Phil. “We’re meant to do that together.”

-

http://nineleggedoctupi.co.uk

UNEXPLODED BOMB FOUND IN LONDON GARDEN.

when i planted those flowers, i did not mean for them to die. people write stories for the endings but why should everything have an epilogue? so what if i want to live for the middle, for the story arc? you arsehole. just because you make endings out of checked black and white lines. just because my flowers’ roots weren’t dug deep enough. there are brains all over my garden. my brains. the badgers came and dug up a bomb i didn’t know i planted. not their fault. (this is your fault.) is it? i planted the flowers, after all. perhaps it is my fault. those flowers were a bomb. not a heart. nothing is a heart but a heart or a stable home and a smile coming from a place where there are plenty more to use. the badgers have dug me a grave, which is nice of them. where were you to help, you arsehole? do i put myself in that hole, or you? i did not think i could be emptied so quickly. easy. this, too, shall pass, but i did not want it to pass! those flowers were to bloom every spring and their roots were to never see the light of day. do i replant them? do i try a different seed? i cannot tell if it was the flowers that were bad, or their death. is death the act of exposure, or the act of leaving? are flowers secrets or good things that go bad? but, for now, you stay over there, with your endings and your severed ties, and i’ll stay over here, picking up my pieces and tearing up turf and calculating the perfect trajectories to enter eternal orbit.

-

A week or so ago, a movie night at Phil’s was planned for. Phil is certain he can still be a functioning human, so he doesn’t cancel it; the next day, the day after the incident, he starts afresh. Writing is still hard, but he perseveres at it for a while, in order to generate a basic draft; magic is still out of bounds. He struggles through the rest of the week, and makes it to the day of the arrangement. He reads a little, conjugates ten new French verbs, and at five o’clock he goes to the local shop to buy groceries and snacks. He’s halfway home when his phone buzzes; it’s Gwen, texting the group chat to check their plans are still on.

of course! Phil replies, slowing to a halt by the side of the pavement, you can’t cancel plans with steve.

Jack sends a text soon after, I cannot believe you’re referring to Captain America by his first name. Fame changed you.

Phil allows himself a smile, unsubstantial but a smile, nonetheless, and sets on down the road.

-

Phil knew he’d have to face the others with it eventually. Jack and PJ were friends with Dan before Phil was, and Gwen grew to care for him, as she often does with her friends; their friendship circles had coalesced. A missing piece, a subtraction, wouldn’t go unnoticed.

He didn’t want it to happen so soon, though, because he still needed some time to sort himself out. When it did happen, he wanted to be in control.

He doesn’t get his wish.

“We know about Dan,” PJ announces, eyeing him carefully from his perch on the sofa. His expression is cool and ambivalent, and the only sign he cares at all is that his hands are tied together. “And you.”

They only arrived fifteen minutes ago. Gwen had smiled widely at him and thrown her arms around his neck, while PJ showed that he was going to the kitchen by lifting a bag of crisps over his head, and Jack squeezed past, muttering something about inappropriate work relations. Phil wasn’t hurt; not only had Jack made the same joke a dozen times before, but he was also a massive hypocrite. If you weren’t his friend when you joined his crew, you became one. Gwen let go before Phil asked her to, pushing him towards the living room while shooting another dazzling smile his way. In the living room, Jack complained about the film choice and took a handful of roasted peanuts; PJ carried his bowl of crisps through into the lounge and set himself the task of attaching Phil’s laptop to the TV; Gwen greeted Minton much the same way she greeted Phil, as always.

Back in the present, Phil is pinned to a spotlight. PJ, Gwen, and Jack all have their eyes on him. Having taken over the laptop mission from PJ, Phil sinks to the floor where he stands. “Christ,” he mutters, a hand rubbing his forehead, “there’s no such thing as a build up with you, is there?” He states it - it isn’t a cutting remark. Their gazes surround him.

“It’s why his films are rubbish,” Jack replies.

“Jack!” Gwen chastises. “This isn’t a place for your comedy.”

“Made him smile, though.” He did. “That’s the only thing I’m good for.”

“I’m still hurting over here,” Phil reminds them.

PJ looks guilty, but as if he knows there isn’t anything he can do about it. “I don’t think there’s such things as softening the blow with this kind of shit.”

“You’re probably right,” he concedes, and sighs - it rattles in his chest, unable to find a comfort to sink into.

“Did you think we wouldn’t find out?” PJ asks.

“Of course not,” Phil replies. He buries his face in his hands, but his skin doesn’t burn from embarrassment; he’s simply empty, and covering his face is a way to keep that fact at bay. “You’re not omniscient beings, but you’re not stupid, either.”

“Thanks.”

“Shut up, Jack. I know you’re friends with him, too. Either he’d tell you or you’d work it out.”

“Was you telling us not an option?” Gwen picks up on his reluctant tone, and voices her thoughts, not unkindly.

Phil shrugs. “I couldn’t imagine how I’d say it. How do you say something like that?” He exhales. “My words aren’t working at the moment.”

“Well, Dan managed it,” PJ informs him. Not unkindly.

“Dan’s a writer.”

“So are you.”

“He works in surrealism, though,” Jack points out.

“If I had a penny for every time I heard that joke,” Phil says. The sadness is brimming on his skin, pooling around the breastplate of his armour. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s harmless. The situation isn’t awful. He’s surrounded by friends who only want to help, and aren’t afraid to face the truth in order to do so.

He looks round at them all. Gwen insisted on having as little light as possible; the glow of a lamp puts a loose cap on the darkness and crowns his friends with gold.

“I wasn’t joking.”

“Alright, alright,” Gwen interjects. “Let’s not argue.”

Phil pulls his knees up to his chest. His heart beats onto his thigh. He doesn’t want to be anchored to himself - he wants to be free again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

He is. He is. Recently, he’s lost track of how much of himself he’s meant to give away freely. How much is he entitled to disclose? His magic felt like the secret of something bigger. His argument with Dan doesn’t feel like his to tell, either. If anything, it’s both of theirs to bear. Or perhaps he just doesn’t want to accept responsibility.

“You didn’t have time nor opportunity,” Gwen comforts, while PJ says, “We’re not offended.”

Phil nods, slowly, letting it all wash over him; the kinship, the forgiveness, the change. By his hip, his laptop whirs into life and goes quiet. He has nothing to add, so he doesn’t try.

Jack breaks the silence, “Are you gonna tell him the rest of it, or not?” He pinches the last, uneaten half of a crisp as he throws a look round at his friends. “Well?”

Phil snaps his head up. “What rest of it? What more could there possibly be?”

“Get off the floor, Phil, and come and sit down,” Gwen says, patting the sofa beside her. She ties her hair up into a knot at the top of her neck, and her eyes look round and soulful in the low light.

“Why?” Phil asks, apprehensive, but tucks his legs under him and pushes himself up with a frown. “Do I need to be sat down for this? Should I be scared?”

“No. You just looked quite pathetic down there.”

“I see.” Phil sits down, perching on the chair, and glances round at them all. The change of perspective has brought with it a shift in mood, he thinks, but there’s no evidence to support it: just three friends, looking at him in the same way - not down, but across - a dog, and a mess of his feelings.

“Like a lost child,” Jack adds.

“You can be pathetic if you want to be.” PJ softens his gaze and crosses his ankles.

“Thanks, Peej.”

“Anytime.”

“So now the pep talk’s over,” Jack prompts, and then stops. He looks to Gwen, and then at Phil. The others don’t say anything, either.

“Christ, would you all stop staring?” Phil mutters. “I feel like I’m coming out again, and I’m not even the one who’s meant to be saying anything.”

Gwen touches his shoulder and says, “Sorry.”

“This isn’t a big deal,” Jack comforts.

“It feels like one.”

“Okay, I take it back. It is a big deal. You’re a big deal, because you matter, right?” Jack looks around at PJ and Gwen for support, his glasses glinting with a reflection. “We’re not here because we know you want to marry him, or something.”

“I should hope not.”

“This is about something more than that.”

“I know.”

“Jack,” PJ cuts in softly, “I think you’re stalling.”

“And I think we all know what the real issue is here.” Jack turns back to Phil. “You’re both hurt. You’re probably blaming yourself - don’t argue, I know you too well. I just want you to know that we’re not mad.”

“Now I feel like I’m having a talk from my parents,” Phil grumbles, but feels ungrateful, so he adds, “Thank you.”

“Any time, mate.”

Next, more silence - distended from pensive thought. There is something funereal about it; their heads bowed, the low light, the past a separate time and not a younger form of the present. Phil calls Minton over with a click of his tongue and tickles his ear, his collar jangling.

“I want to know what I stood up for,” Phil announces, once the stagnancy is unbearable. He locks eyes with PJ and holds him there. “Please.”

“He asked us all round, said it was quite urgent,” PJ offers.

Phil can’t quite be surprised by this statement; Dan was always a thorough, diligent thinker. He would want to find out the whole story, check he was doing the right thing, no matter how much it hurt him. “And you went?”

“I was so surprised that he actually called,” Jack inputs. “I couldn’t say no.”

Phil nods in understanding. “Then what? What did he say?” He looks at PJ, then at Jack, then at Gwen.

Gwen’s hesitation isn’t because she’s uncomfortable. She doesn’t look at PJ or Jack for help. Instead, she returns his gaze steadily and the meaning is clear. I wish there was a way of saying without hurting you. “He asked us if we all knew.”

Again, Phil nods. He thought as much. The sinking feeling plummets, and he stays buoyant only from their company. It doesn’t change anything, of course. He’s still just as fucked as before. Now, Dan knows it as well as he does.

Liar, sorcerer, coward, hypocrite, betrayer.

“You don’t seem surprised,” PJ notes.

Phil shakes his head. “It was the Dan thing to do.” He sounds defeated.

“Yes,” PJ ponders, “I suppose it was.”

A thought strikes him. He feels rather panicked. “You didn’t lie for me, did you? To protect me?”

Gwen shakes her head. “God, no.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“Putting you in that position.”

Jack raises a hand. “We’re not injured.”

Phil hums in flimsy agreement. “How did he seem?” He hates to ask, but curiosity is a frost biting at his ankles. He wasn’t ever going to be able to walk away without looking over his shoulder. “Was he mad?”

“He was very calm, actually,” recalls PJ.

Phil huffs. Of course Dan doesn’t care anymore. Of course he can cut himself off from this without wearing the scars on his face. “Did he look mad when he asked you?”

“Half-mad,” Jack admits. “If by mad we mean aggressively hurt.”

Phil pulls his mouth into a fine line. “What about the other half?”

“Confused, I think,” he decides, after a moment’s thought.

“I deserve that.”

“What about you?” PJ asks. “Are you mad?”

In his lap, his fingers knot together, and now he watches them. “Kind of. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m more just...lonely. I don’t know what to do, who to blame.”

“Oh, Phil,” says Gwen.

“I know we didn’t come here to give advice, but you could wait for him,” says PJ. “It’s not like you’d have to get to know each other all over again. This is just one thing. Once he’s got used to the idea, and you’ve both had the chance to apologise, you could be friends again.”

Phil shakes his head, lips still sewn straight, and tries not to cry. “You didn’t see him when he found out. He looked like he hated every part of me.”

“He wasn’t disgusted when we saw him. His upbringing was bound to manipulate him when he was mad. It’s what he thinks after that matters, and Phil, he was many things, but disgusted at magic itself was not one of them.”

He takes a long, shaking breath. “I don’t think I could ever face him again. As long as me disgusting him is a possibility, I can’t face him. Even if he...doesn’t hate me, even if we made up again, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for lying to him.”

“Okay,” PJ says, and leaves the matter to rest. “Let’s watch that film now.”

Dan is a meteoroid which has yanked itself out of orbit, but Phil can’t blame him, because he isn’t leaving behind a good home, he’s leaving behind a burning planet.

He doesn’t cry. He lets Gwen curl up against him, resting her head on his half-fledged heart.

-

He does cry. A couple of days later, he’s fuzzy with alcohol, with only PJ with him, the pair sitting in a local bar, and he cries.

It’s PJ’s fault.

“When was the last time you used magic?” he asks, after watching Phil kneel down to pick up a dropped napkin.

“I thought this trip was meant to cheer me up,” Phil bitterly reuses PJ’s words from earlier, pulling himself back up onto the barstool.

“It was, until it came to my attention that you may be punishing yourself.” PJ regards him unerringly.

Phil sighs. PJ was always too astute. “Not since the argument. And I’m not punishing myself. I just don’t feel like I can take it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re only saying that out of courtesy.”

“You’re probably right,” PJ concedes. “I’m afraid you have to take it. You can’t be like this forever. You have to let it go.”

“This isn’t about Dan,” Phil blurts out, hotly. “Fuck. This is about me.”

“I’m sorry.” Apologies are PJ’s way of prying the information from him.

“I don’t know who I am anymore. Or, well, I don’t know how to use myself. Who am I, if I hide my magic from people?”

“So this is about Dan.”

“No. Maybe. Yes, in a way. Using my magic isn’t just a reminder of him and what we lost. It’s just one massive lie.” Every time he considers magic, he feels nausea roil his chest. He can’t help but think of all the parts of him he keeps hidden - from the rest of the world, from his friends, from himself. How much of him does he see fit for use? Not enough to be enough.

“Just because,” PJ begins after a pause, “Dan didn’t react well, doesn’t mean you were wrong to hide it from him. You couldn’t know if it was safe or not.”

“But surely he was worth that risk?” Phil cries, but bites down on his volume. “I have all this power, and yet I let it make me weaker. I’m a liability. I hate it.”

“You have to forgive yourself.”

“But I don’t know what I’m forgiving myself for!” he sobs. His cheeks burn hot with tears, his head feeling heavy with them. “Oh, God, I’m crying. I didn’t want to cry.”

“That’s my fault,” PJ says, pulling him into a loose embrace. “It doesn’t reflect on you at all.”

“Right, sure.”

“Don’t let this change you,” PJ whispers to him. “This isn’t a lesson you deserved. This is a side-effect of a corrupt society.”

“You sound like a piece of propaganda.”

“I mean it,” PJ presses.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I lie to my friends. I can’t even face that side of me, now. I can’t write. The fact I’m scared of myself makes this even worse.”

“I’m sorry. And I mean it. I really don’t think this is your doing. No one should have to answer these questions.”

“That doesn’t make them go away, though.” He’s limp in PJ’s arms.

PJ stares ahead, eyes shadowed, expression composed. “You’re right. Let’s go home.”

-

“You’re heartbroken.”

“Why did I let you in here?” Phil asks Jack, looking up from his laptop and spinning round to face him. He lifts a hand in question.

From his place on Phil’s sofa, Jack grins. “So you are heartbroken.”

“I trusted you, that’s why I let you in. Now you’re ruining that trust. I don’t want to talk about it; everything’s been said. You already knew I was heartbroken.”

“I suspected . You never actually confirmed it,” Jack corrects. “And I’m not ruining your trust.”

“If you’re here to pitch a trip to New Zealand, don’t bother.” Kicking his feet on the carpet, Phil turns his chair back around.

“Here me out, right. You need that trip.”

“I want to go Jack, I do, but I can’t. I have a book to finish, and I’m struggling to write as it is.” He talked to Gwen about that a couple of days ago, asking if they’d need to put back the release date or anything; she told him not to fret, that he was near the end and hence far enough ahead that it didn’t matter, as long as he got his head back into it soon. Phil’s trying, he is - jotting down ideas every day, even if they don’t amount to enough.

“My point exactly. You’re lost without him.”

“Stop making me sound like a hopelessly devoted puppy. I’m not,” he reprimands. “You said yourself that it isn’t about that.”

“I did. But you’re still lost.”

“It’s been, like, two weeks.” Phil shakes his head. “Hardly long enough to judge.”

“PJ told me that you cried about it last night,” Jack carries on - the words were clearly queued up for the argument.

Exasperated, he says, “Why do I bother?”

“He also said you hadn’t used magic since.”

As if daydreaming, Phil thinks aloud, “I may as well tweet it. Make sure everyone knows.”

“What you need,” Jack announces, standing up and striding over to him, and placing his hands down on the desk, “is a summer romance in New Zealand.”

“It’s April, Jack.”

Rolling his eyes, Jack gives a falsely derisive laugh. “You are a man of many demands, aren’t you? If it were summer here, it would be winter in New Zealand. It’s April, meaning it’s…”

“Probably Autumn,” Phil supplies.

“Probably Autumn for them, okay? Which should be nice.”

“Is New Zealand nice in Autumn? And did you plan for the seasons? It doesn’t sound like it.”

“I’m trying to help you,” Jack insists.

Phil sighs, staring at his blank computer screen. “I know.”

“This could be the break you need. In both meanings of the word. You need more inspiration - this’ll give you some.”

“Hmm.”

“Plus, I could really use your Masters-level skills.”

“I’d be working in Production?” Phil raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“You’ll be working wherever you or I want. Honestly, Phil, it’s just that I had some money in the budget spare for accommodation, as a smaller crew is required than we first thought, and it’d be great to have you there.”

“Gwen knows about this?”

“She thinks it’s a great idea. Always did, but especially does now.”

“Is there some sort of ‘We need to talk about Phil’ cult I don’t know about?”

“No.”

Phil raises an eyebrow, but drops the matter. He swings in his chair. “Who’s going that I know?”

“PJ and me. The others are all great though, and excited to meet you.”

“You told them I was going.”

“No, I said you might ,” Jack says, holding out his palms. “Anyway, they’re all so lovely, they’d be excited to meet anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Is that a yes?” Jack’s expression doesn’t fail to convey his excitement: the mirth undulates out of him like bursts of electricity. It’s contagious; Phil can’t help but smile as he says, with an unconvincing sigh, “Yes, whatever, it’s a yes.”

“Fuck yeah!” Jack exclaims. Minton barks in objection. They both laugh. “You’re not going to regret this. I know you’ll only know me and Peej, but meeting new people will do you good.”

“I know.” Phil squints up at Jack, before going still. He stares down at his lap. “One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Do I tell them about…” He gestures to himself. “Me?” (Is it him? Or is it magic? Are they separate ideas? Is he a part of magic, or is magic a part of him? He’ll never know.)

Jack’s demeanor hardens into sincerity. Like he thinks this isn’t just about the film anymore. “That’s up to you. It’s always been up to you. I can’t tell you you’re wrong if you don’t or you do.”

It’s definitely not just about the film anymore.

“It’ll be a surprise to us both, then, what I decide.”

Jack pats him on the back, comfort lingering between his shoulder blades before he takes his hand away. “You’ll make the right choice. You always do.”

Phil snorts. “Debatable.”

“Yeah, well.” Jack stops by the doorframe and turns back round, pulling a comical face. “We’re not all perfect, are we?”

“Apparently, only you are, Mr I’m Going To New Zealand.”

“You’re right about that, Mr I’m Going With Him.”

“Are the tickets booked?”

“Absolutely,” Jack yells. “We leave in three days,” and the front door slams after him.

-

The shoot is meant to last three weeks, so Phil plans to pack for two, and hopes laundry facilities will be available to him. Because of its close proximity to the film’s main location, a village dropped onto between mountains and a tremendous lake, they will be staying in a Bed and Breakfast type lodging instead of a five star hotel, so he’s optimistic. He’s less optimistic about how he much help he’ll provide; other than the basics ( New Zealand, South Island, peak of Autumn, mountains ) he knows nothing about the film. Despite Phil’s best efforts, Jack seems determined to keep it that way.

“I don’t want anyone to have any expectations prior to it,” Jack tells him once more. “It’s much easier to see it than to be told it.”

“Is this some new method technique you’ve found out?” asks Phil, dryly.

“Ha ha, no. Although the actor’s intrigue should be at least half genuine, I don’t care about that. I just can’t be bothered to explain something that defies all expectations. Not all of us are as gifted with words as you are.”

“At this moment in time, anyone could be as gifted with words as I am,” Phil mourns, thinking solemnly about his struggling Word document.

“And New Zealand will change that. Stop stressing.” Jack shoves a pair of shoes into his suitcase. “You know what to pack?”

Phil nods. After some Googling, it became clear that - unlike Britain - New Zealand suffered through temperatures in the twenties even in the ‘colder’ months. Warmer clothes was still a good idea, apparently, as cold spells can come in quickly, especially at night. “Will there be somewhere to clean my clothes? I don’t think I own enough pairs of pants for three weeks.”

“Yep,” Jack confirms. He reaches over to his wardrobe, reaches up and grabs three shirts, and throws them onto a pile on the bed. “A massive fucking lake.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We will have a laundry basket, yes, and it will be washed. Don’t take advantage of it, though. This isn’t a holiday.”

“Holidays are voluntarily,” Phil adds, to prove Jack’s point.

“Stop being bitter. You can one hundred percent drop out if you want to, but you don’t.”

“I don’t,” Phil agrees. “But are you sure you want me? I doubt I’ll be of use. I haven’t done any editing work since Uni.”

“I lied about that. All Post-Production will be done back in the UK. I just need your experience.”

“I’ve never been on a film set before.”

“Then I need your familiar, pretty, pretty face.”

Phil scoffs. Jack is well acquainted with using flattery for the purpose of persuasion and comfort, and Phil is well acquainted with detecting it. Jack knows this, and Phil thinks that by this point he only uses it for humour.

“I mean it. I need you. I am offering you a free trip to New Zealand -”

“Nearly free,” Phil corrects. He had insisted on paying for the plane tickets.

“Your fault,” Jack dismisses him. “A nearly free trip to New Zealand because of a marvellous set of coincidences.”

“Those being?”

“The crew is smaller than we first thought, I told you.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Point is, stop questioning it. Gift horse’s mouths and all that. Okay?”

Phil pretends to consider for a moment. “I am sufficiently inspired and convinced.”

“That’s why I’m director.”

“Directors normally tell their crew what the hell they’re doing.”

“I will! Once we’re there.”

“A belated compromise.”

“Still the director, though.”

Phil bows his head in surrender. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

-

Back at his flat, Phil begins putting the rough piles of belongings into his array of bags, and decides that packing, at least, is easy without magic. Minton weaving between his legs doesn’t help, especially since he comes up past Phil’s knees, but he’s leaving tomorrow, and companionship makes him let Minton stay.

When someone knocks on his door, Phil is nearly finished; only half reluctant, he drops the toiletry bag and goes to answer it. Minton’s trained well enough not to chew anything he shouldn’t.

“Hi.” Gwen sounds half out of breath, but she gives him her best pathological smile. “I came to help.”

“I don’t need help,” Phil says, but steps aside to let her in. As she toes her shoes off, he heads back to his bedroom, talking to her over his shoulder. “You sure this isn’t about business?”

“I’m sure.” She catches up with him.

“Are there any articles about Lester and Howell’s angsty breakup that I should be worried about?” Since he stopped talking to Dan, there’s been no media drama at all. He always felt like the whole world was watching them, but as it turns out, the reality was that the world had nothing to see. Their ties were established, but only existed through intermittent tweets and posts. Such that, even two and a bit weeks later, no one had caught wind of the events that unfolded. Phil trusted Gwen to keep it that way.

“None, save for Jack’s,” she replies, “and that’s only for his own private use.”

“I’m glad.” Phil sweeps the bed with a cursory gaze, goes to rearrange the contents of the case, and stops.

Gwen comes to stand beside him, and surveys the mess with him. “You’re sure you don’t need help?”

“I’m nearly done.”

“Good. I brought you cupcakes,” she reveals, brandishing a small plastic tub.

“ Gwen ,” Phil says in surprise, smiling fondly as she pops off the lid. “I won’t have time to eat them all.”

“I know.” She grins. “Meaning I won’t feel too bad towards myself for eating more than one. When’s your flight?”

“Noon.”

“Are you going to write during the flight?”

He nods. “Probably. I managed it before.”

“Don’t overwork yourself.”

“I know.”

“There’ll be a lot of new people.” She’s watching him closely.

“Have you been talking to Jack again? I don’t need a summer romance. Or an Autumn one. Whatever.”

“I just mean that you should take advantage of a large skill pool. And I’m checking that it doesn’t daunt you.”

When Phil first met Gwen, he was ten minutes late for their meeting because he was too nervous to go in. She’d found him sat outside, stamping a foot on the ground in a fervent attempt to work out the nerves. He’s reminded of it now: her kind, watchful eyes he couldn’t hide from, the understanding in the line of her mouth, and he thinks that some things never change.

“It doesn’t,” he promises. “I’m excited for it.”

“Good.” Her relief goes only as far as is appropriate - anymore, and he’d get annoyed at her for treating him like he couldn’t look after himself. Not that she’d ever want to do that. “I -” she starts, a short stab of a vowel, then closes her mouth and hums to herself. She looks at the bed again, her hair falling against her cheek.

“Spit it out, Gwen,” he says, simply.

“Have you decided if you’re going to tell them?”

Phil’s heart clenches. “Is there some sort of secret code I’m missing out on?”

“This is an odd time for everyone,” she explains, expression worn and tired. Not with him, though. Never with him. Sometimes, Phil feels that it’s a mistake that she’s always so determined not to blame him. “We’re trying to get out of this unharmed.”

“It feels like this is all I get to talk about,” Phil admits, slinking down onto the bed. It’s not true, but if different conversations weighed different amounts, these would tip the scales over.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she assures him, perching beside him. “You’re allowed to change the conversation right now.”

Phil could, but he says, “I’m not gonna tell them,” instead.

She nods earnestly. “Good, okay. You know that it’s okay, right? You’re under no obligation to tell them.”

“What if I should be, though?” Phil stresses, struggling to articulate his thoughts. “We don’t live in the dark ages. I’m not gonna be killed for it. What if the only way for us to progress is to be out and proud about it? As long as I’m ashamed of it, other people will be too. But if I tell everyone, and people don’t like it, then it’s their loss.”

“Definitely their loss,” Gwen enthuses. “But I know you’re not really convinced by that.”

“Well, no,” he says, “because maybe I owe it to myself to make myself convinced.”

“You can only do what you feel like. You can only tell the people you want to tell.” That’s how he’s always worked, and she knows it. Meet new people, get to know them, tell them if they didn’t shoot derogatory comments out of their arses; that was the protocol, and it worked. It doesn’t feel enough anymore, though. He’s thought this through too many times to recall, but he always took away the same idea: nothing feels enough anymore .

“And, what if,” he supposes, speaking carefully, “I want to tell someone, but don’t. That’s cowardice, not better judgement.”

(He can’t forget the look on Dan’s face. The bruise betrayal stamped into his jaw. The familiarity Phil couldn’t find. The confusion that didn’t fade to nothing, no matter how far into his gaze Phil searched. You’re a coward, Phil Lester, they tell him, and now look what you’ve done. )

“You’ll have to be brave,” Gwen confirms. “But everyone does, sometimes, in order to do the things they want to do. I don’t think that means you should go yelling it from the rooftops, though.”

“Perhaps it does. Maybe all my ‘instinct’ is cowardice. I should tell everyone, and if they don’t like it, it’s their loss, like we said.”

“You can’t let such simplistic and idealistic thinking affect you,” she warns. “You have to do what’s good for you.”

“Part of me does just want everyone to know,” he confesses, so quiet the sound of his tongue against his teeth is the same volume as his words. “It’s hard, being so powerful and yet having to act normal.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But it’s not that simple.”

“Nothing is ever that simple,” she agrees. “God, I feel awful for trying to give you so much advice.”

“You’re just trying to help.” He bumps his shoulder with hers.

“You don’t have to listen to me, ever. You know what’s going on in your own head, you know what it’s like. I can never know. Only you know what’s best for you. You have to do whatever will make you happiest.”

“I thought I knew what that was. Now…”

“No one wants you to transform your ethics for the salvation of the human race. You…” She sounds on the verge of breaking, but pauses to regather herself. “Do what you want, and fuck anyone and anything that suggests otherwise.”

“Except the law.”

“Of course , except the law. The day I encourage misconduct or felony is the day I die.”

She holds him close, and he lets her. He allows himself to picture a possibility where she is right, where it doesn’t matter what he chooses or does, as long as it’s what he wants. That possibility seems so liberating.

This is a chance for him to reassess his choices, but that doesn’t mean he has to change them. He has to be true to himself, has to do what’s best for him, and has to find a balance between them; between truth and protection, openness and tact. If Dan was hurt only because of the lying, not the magic itself, perhaps that means his balance went askew, but it doesn’t mean his reasons were badly judged or corrupt. In general, his approach is sound: tell those you trust, lie by omission to those you don’t. But this time, he kept it a secret too long. It had been clear from the get go that Dan viewed honesty and efficiency highly. It should have been clear that waiting too long to divulge the information would only result in grief.

He’d known all along that he wanted to tell Dan, but couldn’t; the fault came when he miscalculated the line between ‘couldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’. He couldn’t tell how Dan would react; he wouldn’t put Dan in a position where he had to choose between him and his father; he couldn’t tell how safe he would be; he wouldn’t risk it. The better solution is obvious in hindsight, but in that situation, Phil was doing his best. Perhaps it isn’t his fault. Perhaps it’s no one’s fault. Perhaps it would always end this way.

A possibility: by always knowing that part of him existed, he was true to himself after all. A possibility: this isn’t the end of all the values he used to live by. A possibility: doing what’s good for him is the way forward, but some people - the people who are good for him - are worth the risk.

This isn’t a raincheck, this is reassurance.

If he follows this possibility, his goal won’t be to end up where he started, but to uphold the principle perfectly: pursue a clear judgement. If personal attachment makes the judgement harder, if it requires pushing past fear to get to full faith, then it only means they are worth the risk.

He is himself with everyone, but he needs to be his full self with those he loves. He won’t lie to someone like Dan again.

(There will never be someone like Dan again.)

As for the rest of the world - well. He’ll happily tell it, when it’s ready for him.

The possibility seems so liberating. He could guide himself towards it, eventually. He thinks he will.

“I did what I thought was best,” he interprets, tipping his words into the swirling silence. “And maybe that decision came from fear, but maybe it also came from a good place. A wise place.” He looks to her, and she nods, her cheek hollowed from where she’s biting into it. “There doesn’t have to be a right and a wrong, does there?”

“No.”

“Do you think I was wrong?”

“You had opportunities to tell him, and you chose not to,” she decides. “Was that the wrong choice? We can’t tell. But you had your reasons, and they’re valid.”

He closes his eyes. “Does that mean Dan’s in the wrong? Is he unreasonable to react like this?”

“I don’t think he knows exactly how he’s reacting. Just like you don’t.”

“But is he unreasonable?” he presses.

“You both have your reasons.”

“What do you think, though?”

“Phil…” she sighs, reluctant.

“Please. I won’t be hurt. I need to know.”

“I think,” she says, “that right and wrong don’t belong in a situation like this. This decision wasn’t made for those who were right and those who were wrong, only those who could take it well and those who couldn’t.”

He opens his eyes. “No one’s reacted as badly as him,” he sulks, and then feels awful for doing so.

“You mean a lot to him.” Phil scoffs, Dan’s look of disgust and betrayal ever present in the back of his mind. “You do. Whatever his reaction, it was always going to be one of the extremes, and knowing Dan, is it really a surprise that it would be like this?”

Phil thought the exact same thing while cursing himself for failing to predict the consequences, but it feels better to hear it from someone else. The loving mess of righteousness, passion, and self-doubt that made up Dan Howell was programmed for anguish in a circumstance such as this.

“I suppose,” he replies.

“I’ve never seen you react this badly, either,” she adds. “The pair of you are one hormonal mess.”

“It’s because we’re writers.”

“No, I’m sure you became a writer because of your hormones.”

He lets himself grin. He prises himself from her arms, and nods to himself. “I’d love those cupcakes now.”

“Me too.”

-

Phil meets Jack outside the airport, surrounded by towering piles of luggage that stand around him like bodyguards. After his months of flying, long flights don’t phase him much - he doesn’t look forward to them, God no, he just knows he can survive them - but Jack is clad in so much comfy, tracksuit fabric that Phil feels tired just looking at him.

“Is anyone else on this flight?” Phil asks, tugging his suitcase over a bump in the concrete to join him.

“Nah, they’re all on a later flight. We have to go early to check everything’s in order.”

“You have to be early. I could be in bed,” he points out, as they walk towards the entrance.

“Bullshit. You’re up earlier than this most days voluntarily.”

“But this morning I wanted to be in bed.”

Jack grimaces, clicking his tongue. “Tough shit, mate.”

“Aw,” Phil says, with very little emotion. “Thanks, dude.”

“No problem, bro. Think of this as seizing the day.”

Dodging a family of four, Phil glares at him. “Fuck you.”

“Aw, c’mon, where’s your enthusiasm?” he goads, elbowing Phil gently in the ribs. His grin is wide and teasing.

Phil pulls his teeth into a sickly smile, and chirps, “Fuck you!” in a singsong voice. He even punches the air afterwards.

“There you go,” Jack says appreciatively. “Now cheer up, you bastard.”

Phil grunts. Jack’s relentless, explicit optimism is infectious at the best of times, and abrasive at the worst. This is somewhere in between. “Are you this rude to all your crew?”

Jack shakes his head. “Just the whiny ones.”

Phil knows he’s being wound up, and he knows Jack doesn’t mean it, so he simply repeats “thanks bro” and yanks the elastic cord of Jack’s sweatpants as an act of revenge.

-

Though he didn’t go to New Zealand during his tour, Phil thinks that, perhaps, Australia should have prepared him a little for the scenery of its neighbour. He knows this: the houses are the same, painted smoothly white and with open porches; the cities have the same arcing coastlines and skyscrapers with teeth-white lights. Combined with what he’s seen on TV shows and Google, he figures he knows roughly what to expect.

He is wrong. This isn’t urban Australia - this is rural New Zealand.

The first hour or so of the car journey from the airport to their accommodation is familiar territory, to a certain extent, but with every mile gained and every suburb left behind, the world’s limits bend and break in front of Phil’s eyes. By the time they leave the city truly behind, they sit in the pocket of the early hours of the morning, and the light unrolls the scape before them. Where before they travelled through false light and shadow, they are now pinned to the sights by soft sunshine.

The vastness; the sheer vastness of it. That is what hits him first. It is startling. This isn’t the English countryside, split it into squares, cut raw from cattle’s teeth, wired with telephone poles; this is vast, unadulterated wilderness. The trees and the foliage meander over the roll of the glacial valleys, taking the space they want - they are not cramped. The countryside lasts for as long as the eye can see, and farther than that. A light fog carries the night over into morning; a white blanket keeps to ground level, and above it he can see the drowsy heads of mountains. Rather than a solid thing, the fog is an unpredictable web of wisps that tumble down the valley’s sides. The divine band of the Milky Way remains in the pinkish suds of the sky, but only barely - an exhale of light, a layer of condensation.

Phil watches it all through his window. He tilts and cranes and shuffles to take in as much of it as possible. He’s impossibly tired, but it’s even more impossible to feel it. He’s awake.

Here, magic feels like it belongs. Here, he doesn’t feel like a burden or a misfit, but a part of a supernatural ecosystem.

His mouth is open with awe, as if they could work like his eyes and help comprehend fully what he’s seeing, as if the sights could dissolve into the ether and flood down into his lungs.

“I warned you,” Jack remarks, breaking their silence. “Indescribable.”

“You say that like you’ve been here before.” Phil won’t take his eyes away from the window.

“Only through Google Images, mate,” he says, but even the indifference in his voice can’t hide what the rest of him betrays him as. Jack is as stunned as Phil is.

A house stands, solitary, in the haze. The sun breaches the horizon and pours more and more light into the stillness. The car takes a gradual turn, and heads for the mountains. Above, the sky is dusty but filling with colour; below, the mountain side spills down and down into the cloud. Edging around the peaks, the road teeters on the risk of falling, too. As their altitude increases, the fog thins; until, as they start their descent on the other side, it is pulled apart by delicate fingers, reels of cotton unravelling down into the valley.

And there is the lake.

Its water reflects the grey-blue of the weather perfectly. Mountain peaks and lonesome trees and bodices of cloud all swim together on the surface. Far in the distance are more mountains, shredding the clouds into bronze-red tatters; leading them to the lake, the road is a silver thread cutting through the greenamberyellowred of the terrain. Even in the feeble light of dawn, he can detect the potential of the colour. In full light and in clear weather, the shades will be saturated, and will pulse as the valley’s beating heart.

The mountain tops bleed.

“That’s us,” Jack whispers to him, motioning to a cluster of buildings kneeling in an outcrop of rock. The lake is so impressive in size that Phil feels he could jump into it from where he stands; the lodge, then, can hardly be more than two hundred metres away. A copse of elegantly slender firs watch on beside it; the land in front is open and empty, except for what looks like a forest of flowers. “That’s where we’re staying.”

“How?” Phil breathes. “How did you find this place?” It feels like a secret, the tranquil kind, tucked between the ribs of a mountain range.

“I don’t know.”

“How could you afford this?”

“Phil!” Jack chastises. The whisper hisses.

“It’s a valid question! I can’t believe you inviting me here for free isn’t a loss to you and your budget.”

“Nature is free, Phil,” Jack explains. Neither of them are looking at each other anymore: the lake and the lodge are coming closer and closer.

“People charge thousands for a view like this.”

“And these people aren’t. It’s all covered easily by the budget. Stop worrying. I’ve already told you about the horse, haven’t I?”

Breaking his gaze away from the view, Phil rolls his eyes at him. “Yes.”

“Then my point is made.”

-

The white paint of the lodge glows, almost eerily, in the sunrise. Beside it is indeed a mass of flowers, tall and slender and painted magnificent shades of purple and pink; a few hundred metres in every direction, the fog swallows up all light. It’s thicker than before: they stand in a basin, and someone has pulled the plug on all the colour. Phil turns his attention to his home for the next few weeks: the lodge itself consists of perhaps half a dozen smaller huts married together by narrower passageways. As the building carves into a hillside, the front stands on stilt-like foundations, while the back sits neatly in the grass. Compared to some retreats he’s seen - villas with swimming pools, hotels with rivers curling around the corners - the setup is incredibly frugal; it’s the pureness and simplicity, though, that lends it its charm. The tranquility of isolation and the potency of the view make up for it - more than make up for it, even. The acknowledgement that the landscape speaks for itself is better than any spa or water park could be.

The middle of the cabins, from which the others stem out, is flanked by small windows and a door, a sign above reading check-in . The car pulls up on the dirt track outside it.

“Is anyone else staying here?” Phil asks, falling against his door to open it.

“We booked the whole place out. This place only has twenty-something rooms.”

Phil trudges around to the boot, helping the driver heave out his suitcase. “And how many of us are there?”

“Barely twenty-something.”

“Am I expected to know all their names?” Phil squeezes his eyes shut and pouts, an expression of histrionic despair.

“Every name you remember equals one day of meals.”

“Well, I’m fucked.”

“Sorry to hear it. Thank you!” Jack says this to the driver, who lifts a hand to them before closing his door; the engine catches, the wheels drift along the dirt, and the car drives steadily away.

“How did you convince him to drive us all the way here?” Phil watches the dust trail as the car leaves; the fog means he can’t do it for very long, so he turns his attention to Jack instead. The cold starts to take effect, and he squares his jaw as he awaits an answer.

“It’s kind of his job, Phil.” Jack barks a laugh. “I didn’t just pick up a random guy off the street.”

“I know, I know!” Phil flaps an arm at him. “But in London, a several hour taxi drive would cost hundreds.”

“This is New Zealand, though.”

“Lay off, alright, I’m tired,” he defends himself, and rubs his eyes. God, he falls like he could fall apart right here; there’s an almost magnetic pull tugging at him - or, more, his magic, as if it’s aching to flow out of him into the ground, in the way electric current flows through an earthed object.

“Stop worrying about it.”

“I’m not. Can we go in now, please? I’m fucking freezing.”

“Yeah, c’mon.” Jack picks up his luggage and heads for the door, Phil not far behind him; at their approach, an automatic light flickers on. Phil blinks harshly. Jack knocks his knuckles against the door, and seconds later a shadow falls across it. The door opens without a sound, and the owner steps out: a woman dressed in ironed dungarees and heavy boots, her hair cropped short, her face bright despite the early hour.

“Thank you for waking up for us,” Jack greets immediately, flashing one of his gentleman smiles and holding out a hand.

Taking his hand and giving it a hearty shake, she says, “It’s no problem, love. You must be Jack.”

“Yeah, I am. Hi. This is Phil.”

“Hello,” he says on cue, meek but polite. The effects are wearing off, leaving him empty and unsupported.

“Morning, both of you. I’m Miriam. Let’s get you inside and into a bed, yes?”

Jack looks back at Phil, who doesn’t need to nod to show he very much likes the idea. “That sounds great,” Jack enthuses. “Lead on.”

The inside of Mildew Lodge (Phil learns its name from the bunting hanging above the desk) is as clean and charming as its outside; a string of multi-coloured bulbs line the walls of the lobby, and soft hues alight on the desk and the pinboard behind it; from what Phil sees and registers, the walls are painted a powder blue, and remain empty of art or other decor as they are lead through corridors to their room. The lights are on a dim setting, so his fatigued brain isn’t shocked by the brilliance.

Other than a fake fireplace on one wall, the room is similar to any other holiday home room: wardrobe painted cream, two single beds with a gangway of carpet separating them, bedside tables and lamps at one end. A TV sits on a wide desk, under which is a mini fridge. Finally, a door leads into a tiny toilet and shower room.

“I’m too tired to react to that,” Phil says, as Jack starts stripping in front of him.

“And I’m too tired to be offended by that.”

Sluggish, Phil empties one of his smaller bags onto the floor and picks through its contents to find his sleep clothes, and bundles them up in his arms. “Why are we sharing, anyway, I thought we booked the whole place out?”

“We did, but most of the rooms aren’t ready yet. Be grateful, alright, and make sure you get your eight hours.”

“Sounds more like you need your beauty sleep,” he retorts, and shuts himself in the bathroom. He changes as quickly as he can without falling over and swirls some water around his mouth; when he emerges again, Jack is a dozing lump under the covers. With one forlorn look at the floor - it would be easy to tidy if he could use his magic, but now is not the time for overcoming fears - Phil pushes his own sheets aside and falls onto the mattress. His eyes smart in pain, and to finally close them, to finally have something over than an aeroplane chair or his own limbs holding him up, is a relief.

-

When Phil wakes, an analogue clock on the wall opposite tells him it’s a little after three o’clock. He’s had more than eight hours, but his body clock disputes the fact, so as he pushes himself off the mattress with little tact, his head swirls with narcotic. The other bed is empty, Jack’s bags piled up and toppling over the duvet.

As he goes through to the bathroom, washes the sweat from his skin, brushes his teeth, and uses the loo, the feeling persists. As he changes, as he picks up all the items he dropped, as he puts them back in the bag and surveys his luggage, the feeling persists.

It reminds him of standing up too fast and the blood dropping to his feet. It’s a feeling that sloshes around his head like water and pounds in his head like electricity.

After a moment, he lowers himself back down on the bed. His arms are slack on his lap. He shuts his eyes, frowning, and tunes into the sensation. He’s had jetlag before, and it was never like this; part of him wants to return to slumber, and this isn’t that, either. This is separate - not a feeling, but an emotion , or the hub of an instinct fired into life. With staggering intensity, it fills his head, until everything is this : a hunger, a disquiet, a denouement painfully near to its conclusion. A whole grimoire melted down and poured over him, until his skin burns.

He feels he should go outside. He needs food, and probably a paracetamol too, but this comes first. Until it goes, he won’t do anything else - it’s driving him insane, meaning it’s important. It’s like he’s separated from himself, but he is himself. But he also knows he could be much more than himself, there’s an energy source plugged into his heart but something is causing a faulty connection.

He feels he should go outside. He doesn’t know quite why. The thought appeared, with no before nor after, and it won’t go away.

Fresh air should be good. Clear his head a bit.

A justification found, Phil doesn’t feel so afraid to listen to the thought and make his way outside. The memories from last night - early morning, he supposes - were never strong, and have inevitably collapsed into snatched images, but his feet still walk the path to the outside like it’s a well-trodden track. The sound of Jack’s laugh trips and falls into his ears, coming out of a door he assumes leads to the dining room. Other people must have arrived.

Clicking away on her keyboard, Miriam sits at the front desk. Phil smiles cordially to her and motions to the door. “May I go outside?”

“Knock yourself out, darling,” she says, raising her eyes over the top of her computer. “You don’t have to ask.”

“Thank you,” he says, but the words have barely left his mouth, clipped short by his teeth as he clacks his jaw shut and hurries to the door. Impossibly, the sensation is even stronger. If he doesn’t get some fresh air soon, he’s going to combust.

When his feet touch down on the soil, the cry goes quiet. When he gets a lungful of that endless air, the charge is dispelled. When he sees that sylvan scape, the urge is fulfilled. The power doesn’t flow out of him. It flows into him. His potential is redrawn, way above his head.

Last night, he was struck with the sense of belonging, of magic living on the surface of the water and in the boughs of the trees. It appears it was not just an impression, but a reality. Somehow, this place is captured with magic - not that it is bewitched, either, but that magic itself grows from the grass seeds and the tree roots. This is nature without mankind, the origins of the world still living and breathing their ages away.

Now he knows why he wanted to be outside: not for the fresh air, but for the completeness. The fullness. This place is a power source, and this close to it, his body needed to take the few steps necessary to complete the circuit. Everything is three times bigger, three times more powerful, three times more eternal.

The energy surges through him. Beckoned to use it, to cast a spell, nicks him with a cut of pain. He wishes for free reign of himself again, but his experience built up a barrier he can’t quite bring himself to break. The notch joins a multitude of others he has collected over the few weeks. This time is different, though. This time, he feels like is strong enough that the pain doesn’t mean anything to him. Maybe, in this state, he could overcome even his own mind.

Maybe. Maybe.

The connection and the discovery that comes with it are so monstrous in size, but also calming and soothing. Hence, he can put it aside and turn his eyes to the surroundings.

In full daylight, he can appreciate the view totally; the autumnal bloom of foliage is ablaze, the colours saturated but deferential, not too much but just enough to nudge and startle. On a shelf of cloud, the sun rests, the beams split and spilling down into the lake, pouring over distant mountains; the sky gushes watery blue. He can see now that the mountains closest to the lake’s shore are more like oversized hills, lush with grass, smooth except for rivulets of shadow oozing through the ledges. He sees them twice: once up in the air, the second time balancing on the gentle crests of the lake’s water. The grass turns into dirt, and then round pebbles at the water’s edge. The field of flowers look even more whimsical and mighty as they drift in the breeze, their colours delicate, their petals dainty.

With the rich timbre of the hills, the beatific weep of colour from the mountaintops, and the cupful of mist that still swirls in the distance, the scene looks understandably Tolkienesque, he decides. And so, predictably, he is reminded of Dan.

Phil waits for the shot of pain. It comes, sharp and tender, and he braces himself against it. He closes his eyes, fixates on it, and ensures that he feels it. He doesn’t distract, doesn’t wait for it to ebb. It’s okay. He’s allowed to miss him. This is okay.

It hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts. The valley doesn’t change that. It likely doesn’t even increase his tolerance; it’s just a side effect of its power - an inebriation of sorts, or a burst of confidence from finding a long-lost home.

Phil holds onto the memories for a while. The charged ground and myriad of wildlife all vying for energy around him augment it, somehow, so that ignoring is a much worse plan than listening.

He doesn’t try to do magic. Just because he could, doesn’t mean he will. It’s too sudden.

The clatter of the door behind him sends a shatter through his reverie; Phil flicks his eyes behind him, and, seeing Jack stride out towards him - bleary eyed but cheerful - he turns back to the hills.

“You alright?” Jack asks him, coming up to stand beside him.

“Tired, but okay.” Phil hooks his fingers in his pockets.

“Jetlag’s a bitch,” Jack agrees, grimacing. “But don’t worry, you get your own room tonight.”

“Well, thank God for that,” he intones, squinting into the sunlight. “Have other people arrived?”

“A couple,” he discloses. He shifts his weight onto one leg with a rustle of fabric. “More will come later, in time for the party.”

“Party,” Phil echoes.

“It’s more of a gathering,” he amends. When Phil raises a disgruntled eyebrow, he continues, “A group of people standing around in a dining hall with finger-sized snacks.”

“I take it I have to go?”

“Of course! I’m introducing you to everyone. You’re an important part of our team.”

“An important part that comes and goes from set to do their own thing.”

“That’s your job description. You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

“It’d be more fine if I knew what the film was about,” Phil reminds him.

“Alright, alright, I’ll get the damn script to you.”

Phil nods, and they both turn their full attention back to their view. A fish sends a glistening ripple running through the surface of the water; the sun blooms through a cloud and the green smolders.

“Are you sure you’re not filming the next Hobbit film?”

“I asked him the same thing.” Phil turns in surprise at the unfamiliar voice; unbeknownst to him, the door had opened again, and a stranger - it must be one of the crew - has come out to join them. She looks decidedly more tired than Jack, her dyed hair crumpled in it’s style. Sticking out a hand, she introduces herself, “I’m Jo, assistant director.”

Her grin fills her face. Phil takes her hand. “Phil. So you’re important, then.”

“I also have to work with this idiot,” she points out, jutting her chin out at Jack, who snaps a laugh. “So there’s that.”

“You win some, you lose some,” he says sagely. Jo laughs keenly.

“Tell me about it.”

“If you’re done bitching,” Jack cuts in, but he only looks amused, “I’m going to get you that fucking script.”

-

Over the next day or so, Phil is introduced to people intermittently. Jack has him practically cradled under his elbow in bursts throughout the gathering, taking him round to different groups of people and brandishing him as if he’s famous. Knowing Jack, and his ability to talk about his friends to anyone who will listen, he very well might be - if it counts as fame. Which it doesn’t. But Phil is still flattered.

He does his best to remember them all. There’s Jo and Danny and Eliza, who together form some combination of directing and production; Ethan has red hair and works with a camera, he thinks, but he might be getting confused with Lexie; Isy and Jon and Oskar were all chatting when Jack interrupted, but he doesn’t quite recall who does what, or which is Jon and which is Oskar - Isy is welsh and her hair goes down to her waist, so she’s easier to remember. The list goes on, and the best he can do is recognise faces from somewhere, but can’t keep a name to a face. He tells Jack this under his breath.

“It’ll come to you. You’ve got three weeks to get sick of them.”

Next, Jack introduces Phil to PJ. They both go along with it, overly sarcastic with a quirk to their polite smiles, because it would be in poor taste not to. Once Jack leaves them, they hug and take the time to catch up.

-

The second day, he finds the time to read the script in its entirety. The film turns out to encompass ghosts, murder, philosophy, and humour, in a way that is both mind-bending and interpretable. He isn’t spectacularly surprised - it’s quintessentially Jack - just scrawls a few notes and thoughts down in the margins, and heads off to find him.

-

In the days that follow, he settles into his routine: oscillating between film set work and writing work, waking up at random times as his body clock adjusts, feeling the inexorable buzz through his being.

As far as film work goes, he takes each day as it comes - along with the not so subtle persuading from Jack. He has free reign, but Jack knows what he wants support on and where he needs particular people, so Phil does his very best to accommodate him. Besides those scenes, there are particular ones he has his own ideas on, or ones he wants to see, so he goes along to those and observes, only offering criticism when it looks like he’s needed; Jack always thanks him profusely afterwards, so he assumes that the arrangement is working and continues it. It isn’t an annoyance. The main actors, Jon and Will, are incredible at their job (most of the time, Phil finds himself too enthralled in the story to consciously find feedback or help to give), and while most of the film is set in the surrounding hills, some of it requires travel, so Phil does as Jack tells him and takes the opportunity to see more of the country. PJ’s job as production designer means he is constantly behind the camera, surveying and frantically jotting down notes; Phil’s time on set is spent beside him.

The crew are charming and entertaining. Jack is proven right, as Phil learns all their names after three days, and forms friendships with all of them in four. In the evenings, they all eat in the dining hall, or - if it’s warm enough - outside: the gathering parked in the lee of the copse of trees, the embers of a fire smoldering in the centre.

Each single room has a small porch: a deck of wooden slats, demarcated from the grass and flowers by a fence. The lodge meticulously does not encroach the wildlife, instead staying and thriving within its self-set limits. Phil does most of his writing out here. Especially in the dusk before their evening meal, the cool air and darkening sky provide the perfect conditions for focused work. His creative block ends in an explosion of words, calming into a steady torrent of ideas. Thus, the novel blooms at his fingertips; the faults and gaps he left find themselves fixed, his ideas more meaningful and articulate than could be pictured before. The deadline isn’t a threat anymore, just a simple, realistic fact.

(Miraculously, the lodge has internet connection. It’s dodgy, which doesn’t prove much of an issue, as Phil doesn’t use it often. In his solemn moments, or his curious moments, he keeps an eye on rumour circles to see if Dan’s dating anyone new. The media says the answer is no, he isn’t.

That shouldn’t comfort him, really, but it does. Maybe.)

He misses home. The London atmosphere evades him; it’s a struggle to stay in contact with Gwen and his family. But he doesn’t regret leaving; every time he steps inside, his body misses the completion the valley brought him. The environment never fails to stun him. Homesickness is merely an unfortunate side effect, one he treats with time spent with friends and a busy day.

-

A week and a half in, the group sit in the dining hall during a break in filming. Chatter bubbles easily up the walls, dissolving into the air; the memory of the cold outside is a spider’s web clinging to his skin. As always, the magnetism of the magic tugs at his insides.

“What do you think about the next scene, then?” Jack targets the question at Phil and PJ, though it isn’t clear, as he’s flicking through a script.

“Dusk is a good choice,” PJ starts off. Phil pulls his steaming mug closer.

“That’s why I made it,” Jack replies. His sarcasm is too boisterous to be hateful.

Ignoring him, PJ continues, “It’ll mean more work for lighting, ‘course, but we really need to get those last few minutes of sunshine. We want only our characters in the spotlight.”

“I agree.” Jack rubs his hands together. “Good, great. Phil? Anything to add?”

Phil stares down at his drink. “Can you get me another coffee?”

“You have a problem.”

“This line, here.” Phil reaches across the table to point at the script. “I think it should…” At the far end of the room, the door swings open, the movement diverting his eye.

The figure who emerges snags his attention. His heart slams into his chest and judders to a halt.

The noise of the dining room explodes in his ears, going on and on and on. How could they continue at a time like this? He needs to focus, needs to see, needs to know . He pushes his palms into the table and cranes his neck, strains his eyes, grappling for purchase and protection as a fleet of feelings - feeble, fevered - rains down on him.

The room isn’t too large, but it isn’t small, either. At this distance, it’s impossible to tell if it’s certainly...him. It could be anyone. He can’t even see his face yet, there’s no way to tell…

PJ taps him on the elbow. Both him and Jack are staring attentively at him, their backs to the door.

“Is - Is that…?” It’s the last thing he wants to ask, but he asks it anyway. There’s nothing else: just him, and the figure hovering at the door. Two ends of the same piece of twine, bullet and target, the start and the end. PJ frowns at him. Phil feels all thought vaporize from his head. To him, there is nothing but the other end, the bullet, the end.

It’s the last thing he wants to ask, but he has to ask it, or face silence.

It’s like the feeling the valley gives him, but the opposite: antagonist, not salvation, draining, not filling, zero, not infinity.

“Who?” Jack twists around in his seat. “Oh, Dan! Perfect, I was wondering when he’d turn up. Excuse me.” Grabbing the script in his fist, Jack rushes along the length of the room. He greets Dan with a thump on the back, offering the script to him and laughing loudly at something he must have said. Dan is shaken into startling clarity - Phil can see the steel-capped smile, the glint of his eyes.

Phil’s eyes strain with trying to see. His mouth hangs open. All activity leaks out of him - a foreign poison tips a vacuum into his chest.

“Phil?” PJ prompts, glancing between Phil and Dan, his eyes worried away at the edges.

It’s a spark to gunpowder. One moment, he’s too stunned to talk, corroded by the sight of him across the room. The next, feeling comes flowing back like it’s injected. Ghost after ghost come filing into his head and crowd the back of his mind. Just obscurities, nothing solid, nothing he can stamp out; a flaming impulse like repulsion throws him into action mode. Clamping his fingers around PJ’s wrist, he ducks lower to the table and hisses to him, “What the fuck is happening?”

His consciousness is in the grey zone. He’s not quite sure how he feels about this. Each reaction fills his periphery as swirling, murky fog. He daren’t look, because observing would only make them more real.

Taking his gaze away for the seconds it takes to ask PJ the question is too long for him, and his eyes fly back over PJ’s shoulder to the door. To Dan and Jack. They’re still chatting away. Dan has a bag thrown over his back, another at his feet. His clothes are wet from the fine rain outside.

His jacket is still in Phil’s cupboard.

“Dan’s here to help Jack film.” PJ’s answer is slow and steadying as he processes the circumstance.

By chance - it must be by chance - Dan’s gaze travels around towards them. Phil pulls himself down lower.

“Did you know about this?”

“No.” Phil sets his jaw. “I didn’t,” he insists. “I knew he invited friends, but I didn’t think…”

“You didn’t think he’d dare,” Phil finishes. The zap of energy drains away again, and he slumps. Doubles over, his hands over his stomach.

“Something like that,” PJ agrees, soft, when it’s clear Phil has nothing more to say. “I’m sorry.”

They’re still talking. Dan looks so clean, so careless. So unperturbed. Porcelain. Painfully pronounced, Phil can feel each boundary and every tear of his own corpse.

“He doesn’t know I’m here, does he? He wouldn’t have come if he knew I was here. Would he?”

It’s not a reopened wound. It’s a new one. Messily cut, a shallow slice that stings and stings. He was prepared to recover slowly. He never expected to see Dan again.

“I don’t think so,” PJ replies. It’s the answer Phil expected, but it still hurts, to know his presence should repel Dan like that. Under that perfect exterior, there is a volcano.

“What is Jack playing at?” he spits. “What’s he trying to achieve?”

“You’re his friends. He probably wanted you both here, and didn’t want one of you to cancel because…”

“Because of what? Some dumb fallout?”

“No.” Though PJ offers no further protest, his point is undisputable. There’s far more meaning and intent delivered in that one syllable than he could say, and to receive it makes the emptiness Phil feels even more unbearable. This isn’t a simple dilemma, but he feels so two-dimensional. So empty. Memories sting, magic stings, his wounds sting.

Their conversation settling into its conclusion, Dan picks his bag back up and disappears out of the room. Phil doesn’t wait to watch him go: he sets his sights, instead, on Jack, who wanders back to them slowly. After stopping to talk to Jo, he collapses back onto his seat opposite Phil. Hands empty. Chuffed smile.

“What the fuck,” Phil asks again, “is happening?”

Jack looks at him, quizzically. “What?”

Phil pulls himself back up to meet his eyes. It feels like a string has been nailed into his spine, and it’s the only thing supporting him. “Stop screwing around,” he states, “and tell me what he’s doing here.”

“He’s here to help with the script.”

Phil stays silent. He takes a gulp of coffee, and the lukewarm bitterness sticks in his throat.

“I invited him when I invited you. I couldn’t tell him not to come, could I?”

“You could have told me not to come.”

“Don’t be an idiot, you know I couldn’t have.”

“Do I?” Phil can’t help it; his eyes find the shadows of the doorway before he even knows he’s looked away. His belly feels bloated, flooded with the blood of these wounds and the poisons of this event and the pathos of his loss. Bloated, as if filled with sopping, soggy rose pulp.

“Phil,” PJ says.

Jack stays composed, and looks hard at him. “I wanted you both here. Because you’re my friends, and I need your company as well as your expertees.”

“Do you have a plan for this?” Phil points to himself, because Dan’s not here. He’s here, but he’s not here . Dan’s gone.

“You know I’m shit at plans,” Jack replies.

“Why’d he arrive late, then?” he persists, but his voice has slumped into the dip of his elbows.

“Work. He was always going to arrive late,” Jack tells him. After a considered pause, he says, “It’s hardly incriminating. Or relevant.”

“No, it’s not. I’m just trying to understand.” He looks down at his lap. He keeps searching for some sturdy perspective, an answer - even if it’s only a temporary one - but for all this grappling and rummaging, he finds nothing. Nothing, only desiccated remnants and saturated entrails. His hands are covered with slippery gore.

“I should have warned you.” Jack sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“Can I eat in my room?” He sounds so pathetic, but there’s nothing to transform it into.

“Phil,” PJ says. This time, it’s not a warning, but a sigh, a regret, a pity.

“I’ll still go on shoots. I’ll stay, and I’ll do everything you wanted me here for. I’m -” His voice runs out. “I’m just asking for this one thing . Please. I need to know,” he implores, eyes beseeching as he watches Jack.

“You can eat in your room,” Jack decides, grave but understanding. “ If you don’t mind company every once in awhile.”

He has to smile, even if it’s numb. “Sure.”

“Good. I’m glad. And sorry.”

“Are you going to tell him I’m here, or wait for him to work it out for himself?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“What will you say?”

“You know you don’t want to know the answer to that.”

He bows his head. Jack’s right.

“I don’t think,” he says, “I’ve quite comprehended what’s happening.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

“I’m sorry,” PJ says.

“Yeah,” he agrees, a shaking sound. “Me, too.”

Standing, Jack walks round to Phil’s side of the table. He stands above him with a rueful smile and his arms out. “C’mere, you bastard.”

“If anyone’s the bastard, it’s you, Jack,” PJ points out.

“I agree with him,” Phil says, but obligingly walks into Jack’s clumsy embrace.

“You’ll still come to the shoot, though, right?” Jack checks, pulling away after a second and clapping him on the back. “Dan’s not coming, he’s taking a nap.”

“I told you I’d still do everything,” he reminds Jack. He holds his face taut.

“I know, but I wouldn’t have blamed you if you needed some time to...adjust.”

Phil nods. “I’m still coming to the shoot.”

Jack smiles as if Phil’s just told him he’s won the lottery. “Brilliant.” He clambers up onto his chair, holding onto PJ’s shoulder for support.

“What the hell are you doing?” PJ asks. He throws a look Phil’s way, as if to say typical Jack.

“My job,” Jack tells him. Then, clapping his hands together, he yells out, “Everybody! We need to be back on set in twenty minutes!”

-

The shoot goes well. They film up in the hills, at the treeline, where the grass comes up to their ankles and the shadows run riot before them. It’s the coldest it’s been since they got here, and the fog has returned: he can see it lying thickly in the basin, but at this altitude it’s more cowardly, evading his hands and recoiling with every step, snagging on tree branches and shaking itself free. Though there is still a crescent of sun peering over the mountains, they abide in tangible darkness: at ground level, retreating blacks and the deepest of navies; in the sky, an aegean blue roils the clouds, and where the lighter sky bleeds through, a shade like slate boils up.

At night, the valley’s magic is stronger. It’s something to do with the secrecy and the freedom: the power is unleashed, unfurling with the snap of a whip. He’s inside, and the feeling is simmering away under his skin. He’s outside, and he snaps into sensation. Normally, the potency would fuel him with spirit, but now the potency only nauseates him. He’s weaker, unstable by the thoughts in the back of his head (why is he here do i even want him here i never could see him again but did i want to see him again i don’t know what do i do). He isn’t suited to be a vessel to such magnitude. Not now.

“It looks like they’ve known each other forever,” Phil mutters, watching Jon and Will play their scene out under the dimming canopy of dusk. Jon’s character cracks a joke, and Will’s character laughs splendidly; Will’s character talks, and Jon’s character listens with perpetual interest. Jon’s character grieves, and Will’s character falls to the ground with him.

PJ turns his face to him, already smiling. “They’re good, aren’t they?”

“Let’s go with that.”

PJ laughs quietly, before turning back to the scene.

“You did a good job with the set.” The lights are positioned just so: it sets stark shadows under each crevice and bone, and they stick like plaster; the light has a supple lustre to it, candidly wistful. The characters are dressed in greys and blacks. A type of glitter has been applied to parts of the undergrowth, and although the background is rarely illuminated, when it is, it emits a ghostly glow.

“Thank you. It means a lot,” PJ says, genuine. “These lines are brilliant, too. Your handywork?”

“Parts of it.”

“Well, it’s magical.”

“They’re doing most of the hard work,” he dismisses, waving a hand towards the actors. Afterwards, he adds, despondent, “Magic isn’t really my thing anymore.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“That. Dramatic and pessimistic. It really doesn’t suit you, or do you any good.”

“Should I pretend everything's okay, then?” he bites, a brief flare of protest. “Does lying suit me better?”

“It will be okay,” PJ replies, sure and simple. “It will be.”

He shakes his head. “We’re never going to be friends again.”

“Maybe not. But you’ll be able to do magic again, one day. And maybe this will never repair, but it will heal, until it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It will always matter.”

“Matter’s the wrong word, then. I more mean that one day, this won’t be the only thing you have.”

From behind a tree, Jack calls cut. Phil blinks quickly, three times in a row, and cranes his neck to gape at the trees. He can hear the murmur of a trickling stream. “It really is beautiful here.”

-

At dinner time, Phil slinks away into his room. He picks up his book, and decides he’s not hungry - he’ll get food later.

Left alone, his mind wanders. It’s a foolish move, this introspection, but he can’t help it. It’s like the temptation to put your hand in the flame, or exploring an unknown cave. As furiously hot as the flame is, its vigour encapsulates. As terrifying as the cave is - a gaping blackness that only expands - he still finds himself going in.

Where, before, his exact feelings towards this were meagre poltergeists and indistinct trails of smoke in the corner of his eye, they are now shadows flickering on the cave wall: confused and incomplete though they are, their characters are corporal, their origins easier to determine.

Phil is…

Well. He’s not angry. He can’t find any anger left: flakes of distaste where there should be ire, brittle bones of despair where there should be a battle cry. He has his fair share of hurt, of course. It dwells where it always has, tender and sore and routine, but no less there .

And he knows he would forgive Dan, and that’s why it’s so awkward to bear, because he knows Dan doesn’t want him. He shouldn’t forgive Dan, or maybe he should. It’s irrelevant, because he will cling to any remedy. He would forgive Dan, but only because he wants to return to how things were. That option is too far gone, now.

There’s no right or wrong, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. No one’s told him what the right thing to do now is. Is it right to forgive him? Maybe, but he can’t do that now. He needs time to recover - to stabilise - to work out what the fuck he’s doing and who he is.

PJ would tell him that it’s better to just talk to him. “All your questions would disappear,” he’d say, “if you just asked him for the answers.” He’d be right, probably. But he can’t do that now. So he won’t ask.

Entwined with his residual hurt is a new thing. He’s never felt so lonely. Before, he could be as angry and despondent and confused as he wanted, because there was no other option. But now he’s here , and Phil has to navigate around that. His friends will speak to him. Everyone will speak to him, but Phil. After the argument, it was all past tense: was I right not to tell him? Was he right to react like that? We were friends. Now, the future drills at his head: do I talk to him? Will I have to talk to him? We will be strangers.

It’s a new wound.

The knock at the door is polite but definite.

“Yeah?” Phil looks up from the book balanced on his knees.

“Can you open the door for me?” It’s PJ. “My hands are rather full.”

Phil stands, book pressed to his thigh, and pulls open the door. Two plates of food balanced in his hands, PJ cracks him a grin.

“Oh,” he says. “Thank you. You didn’t have to.”

“Jack was getting on my nerves,” PJ explains, offering one plate to Phil and laying the other on the desk.

It’s an obvious lie, but Phil plays along. “Was it making the food taste bad?”

“Exactly that.” He pulls a knife and fork out of his pocket. “Here you go.”

“Do I want to take those?” Phil wrinkles his nose.

“These are a clear pair of jeans, thanks.”

“That’s not a comfort.”

They eat in silence, Phil managing to position his book on his lap and putting down his cutlery to turn the page every couple of minutes. Beside him, PJ eats diligently, one earphone in.

His room is near to the dining room, so after twenty minutes or so a chorus of chairs scraping on linoleum crawls under the door to them, followed by the rise and fall of talk drifting away. Five minutes after that, there’s another knock.

“Yes?”

“It’s me,” Jack says, nudging the door open. “Hi.”

Phil swallows his final mouthful. “Hi.”

Closing the door shut behind him, Jack fills the final space on the edge of the mattress. He sits with his hands in his lap, eyes trained on them both.

“Did you tell him?” Phil asks, staring at the wall opposite.

“Yeah.”

“Did he want to get the next plane out of here?”

“I wouldn’t let him even if he wanted to.”

“He didn’t want to?” Phil’s head jerks round to look at him.

“Nope.” Jack’s eyes look optimistic, but it’s not a good thing. It means Dan doesn’t care anymore, not even enough to stay far away.

“I don’t want to know what was said.” Phil picks up his plate, dusts the crumbs off his lap, and stands. “I’ll take these back to the kitchen.”

-

At the shoot the next day, Phil is talking with PJ and Jack about the complexities of the scene when Dan comes over. Phil doesn’t notice, at first - he’s too focused on what he’s telling Jack - but then he sees PJ’s expression frost over, as if preparing himself for battle. Frowning, he continues to talk but follows PJ’s gaze.

Dan stands a few steps away, glancing at his phone.

Phil finishes his sentence, and goes quiet. Dread builds in him. He doesn’t know where to look, what to say. Becoming overly-conscious of himself, fear spews up and stakes him to the spot.

“Jack?” Dan says, suave as he strides towards them. “I wanted to talk to you about this part of dialogue.”

Jack grins. “Sure! Open fire.”

Phil thinks he should say something more, but all speech fails him. He stares hard at Jack, but Dan is chafing the edge of his vision. He stutters out, “excuse me” before retreating. Dan doesn’t skip a beat.

-

The rest of the day, and the one following, adhere to the same rules: they avoid each other, and avoid, and avoid, and avoid. Hating each other was one thing, but being so harshly ignored is a whole other ordeal. He never thought it could make him feel so inconsequential. Dan’s moved on, and Phil doesn’t mean anything anymore. Phil’s the tombstone of a supergiant. Dan’s still supernova. Phil has to detour and reschedule and divert in order to avoid the burn of his heat.

“I don’t think I can cope with this any longer,” Jack declares, throwing himself down onto the ground next to Phil. Metres in front of him, PJ and Dan are talking, and while he desperately wants to look away, he can’t. Instead, he’s opted for watching and wallowing, basking in his gloom. “I’m sorry, but this is painful to watch.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to cope with it for a bit longer.” When he reaches down and tears out a few strands of grass, he can feel his magic pushing at his skin, but he pushes back.

“This is only making you more upset.”

“Really?”

“I only mean,” Jack continues, gentler, “that this is helping no one.”

“It’s all I can do.” His voice is thick with rot.

“Everyone can tell something’s up.”

“It’s obvious and painful, apparently.”

“You should talk to him.”

Phil knows it was coming, so he doesn’t react. He’s numb from the cold.

“If it goes badly, it will be even more painful and obvious,” he cuts back.

“Then you have to make an effort to be civil, or something.”

Phil scoffs. It’s impossible to be civil when you’re both stained red. Our whole hearts, we said, Phil recalls. They didn’t mean that they should tear them out and to pieces. “That’s not gonna happen.

“It’s up to,” Jack says. “I just want you to know there are other options.”

He rests his hand on Phil’s back for a second. Dejected, Phil lets himself lean in only slightly, knowing that if he lets himself go, he won’t stop. Jack sighs, an apology in itself, and hauls himself back up to standing.

Back at the lodge, Phil is on his way to PJ’s room; he is on his way down the corridor as Dan is on his way up. Pressing himself close to the wall far before they come near, Phil dodges out of his way, scrapes an apology off the roof of his mouth, and scurries along. Dan’s jaw is set and his eyes are screwed tight to the doors ahead, but he is so strong and vibrant and alive alive alive .

A bitter thought comes to mind: while this argument weighed Phil down, Dan has been set free.

-

“Phil!”

Phil catches himself on the doorframe, and twists round to face Jack. “Yeah?”

“I left my jacket back at the campfire,” Jack says, looking hopefully up at him with his eyes wide.

“That’s a pity, isn’t it? You’ll have to pick it up in the morning.” Phil takes a step forward.

“Phil!” he calls again. Phil stops - he was expecting that - but makes a show of groaning in annoyance.

“ What ?”

“It’s meant to rain later tonight.” Jack conjures a beguiling smile.

“You want me to go and get it,” he states.

“I’d do it myself,” Jack rushes to say, “but I’m already in my pyjamas.”

Extravagantly, he sighs, shrugging and leaning against the door. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Please?”

Phil meets his eye and they stare at each other for a long moment, Jack collapsing into greater shows of pleading with him. “Fine. Only because you’re my boss.”

“It ought to be because I’m your friend, really, mate,” Jack laughs. “Thank you. It’s the black one.”

“Right.”

“And Phil?”

“What now?”

“I’ll have a coffee waiting for you when you get back.” Jack wiggles his eyebrows at him.

“I’d hope so.”

Phil ducks into his room to grab his coat, and following one last glare cast Jack’s way, he shoulders open the door and steps out into the night.

The copse of trees is only a few hundred metres from the lodge, with a beaten track connecting the two together. A few fragments of sunlight remain, and even from here Phil can see the entrance: two particularly sturdy firs, a gaping, impermeable hole opening its jaws between the trunks. Consisting of funereal fir trees and gnarled roots, the copse is of lofty size - large enough for there to be a clearing in the middle - and the barbed treeline claws out into the sky, colliding with a hunk of misted cloud. As a wisp of a breeze whips at his feet, the crowd of lupins rustles with a noise like feathers (a member of the crew told him the flowers’ name, but he can’t remember who.) Phil tugs his collar up and hunkers down into his coat. He watches as the gibbous moon (waxing, tinged gold) shakes off the cloud and gleams brighter.

He steps over protruding roots, ducks under ivy-laden branches, and cracks discarded twigs in two, whistling a distorted tune as he goes. For once, the magic isn’t too terrible to bear: the air is dulcet on his tongue, and the tune of the wind through the branches consoles and comforts. He fancies he can hear the wash of water on the lake shore.

He emerges into the glade, and the sight cuts his ditty short.

The remains of the fire smoulder away in the pit, which is a normal occurrence. What he isn’t expecting is the silhouette standing in front of it, nor for that silhouette to manifest into the form of Dan Howell.

He hasn’t been alone with Dan since the fight. While Dan’s been in New Zealand long enough for him to accept - begrudgingly - that he’s here, and not stored away in the UK, he hasn’t even thought about what he’d do if he had to talk to him. The hushed proximity charges the air; there’s a heavy expectation that he should speak now. When there’s just the two of them, everything feels worse. Worse, with his wounds erupting in searing pain, with the ties he can’t quite sever tugging at him.

Dan’s form is lax, pensive. There’s no sign anything is wrong at all. The sight hurls him into a memory, as if he’s viewing a time from Before.

Maybe, if he leaves now, he can get away with this. Explain to Jack that he couldn’t find his damn belonging, and proceed to lock himself up in his room for the rest of the night.

Another twig snaps under his footing. Dan whirls around. With fallen hope, Phil watches his expression toughen; his scowl contorted by the mesh of moonlight and firelight.

“I’m really sorry,” he hastens to disclaim, to explain his appearance here in Dan’s space. Apprehension seeps through him like sweat. Normally, he would turn and leave, but there is no room to disappear from, no door to leave through. Only him and Dan and the glade of mute trees. “I’m looking for Jack’s jacket.”

Dan diverts his eyes to the floor. “There’s no jacket here.”

“He said it was…”

“It’s not here. I’d know, ‘cause I was sent to get it.”

“But he sent - oh.” His insides fall out of him. “I think we’ve been set up.”

“It would seem so,” Dan agrees, grimly. “And I fucking bet they’re not going to let us back in until we’ve talked.”

“Probably,” he realises, with increasing despair. “Um. Shall I…” He flings an arm behind him, the way he came.

“No point.” Dan falls onto one of the wooden benches and supports his chin with his hands. Phil stays in place, unsure of what’s happening; Dan’s told him to stay, but only because there’s no point in trying to get back inside. Dan has now chosen to sit down, after speaking more than two words to him, and he’s right here. And he’s still going to be right here until he decides he’s endured enough time for him to be allowed back inside. He looks just as he last did in Phil’s presence: the rough edge of composure, barren of his former gentleness, hardened by some inexplicable emotion. “Sit down, would you? You’re making me nervous,” Dan orders after a moment, making Phil jump. It’s nearly a growl, except it sounds closer to surrender than conflict.

“Sorry,” he says, barely, and falls onto the same bench. He leaves plenty of space in between them.

Dan says nothing more. When Phil dares to steal a glance at him, he sees it’s clear Dan doesn’t plan to say anything any time soon, so he settles down to wait, withdrawing into himself slowly.

A williwaw strikes, blasting the air from Phil’s lungs; the fire withers away under its strength, so only a few shells of embers remain. While the moon recoils behind another battalion of cloud, the light dims to almost complete darkness; shadows skitter close before retreating into the tree cover. Deathly silence strings itself between branches. Although the air was sweet, it has since soured on his tongue; although the magic had, for once, fuelled him, it trembles in him, tremendously, painfully conspicuous. He shouldn’t feel it when Dan’s here in such proximity. He can’t . It’s a reason to hate him, wielded clumsily. It’s an axe, a hammer, a shovel. Dan is a relic.

They sit with an electric fence snarling between them. Wanted, unwanted. Found, lost. In the stars, in the gutter.

The wind crumbles away into nothing. Only cold remains.

His heartbeat is skittish. His hands shake in their clasp. He breathes out and out and out -

He so wishes he could talk to Dan. He’s so close. Before, he could reach out with his words and his hands, and hold tight until he had to let go. After, not even his tearful cries can transcend the chasm between them. Everything is stagnant - from the air to the trees to Dan - and it saws away at him. Digs and jabs and bites until he wants to scream.

- and out and out and out. And, then. Then, he starts to cry.

He doesn’t want to. He desperately pulls at parts of himself, trying to keep himself together, but it’s impossible. For every success, another piece slips away. So he’s forced to stay as silent as he can. He shoves a hand to his lips. He needs to muffle the sound, the grief.

If only it weren’t like this. Dan doesn’t show even a stain of what went on between them, but their relationship is tarnished with it. There’s no going back, no reparation. He so wishes it weren’t like this.

“Why are you crying?” Dan’s words slice through the dark. An ember flares up before extinguishing.

It doesn’t sound like he cares.

There’s no point in lying. “You’re right here,” he says, “but you’re so far away.” Phil doesn’t dare look at him again. It would only ruin him more. He can’t tell if Dan’s crying, too. Probably not.

“I was always right here ,” Dan spits. “It’s not my fault you never realised that.”

“I couldn’t help it!” Phil doesn’t know where it comes from, this sudden burst of angry protest, only that he burns from it. A twisted attempt to save himself.

“What? Like you couldn’t help telling Gwen or Jack? Like you couldn’t help getting mad at me for keeping secrets?”

“I didn’t want it to be like this!” he shouts. It scratches his lungs, but it feels good to experience something other than numbness.

“What the fuck did you want it to be like, then?” Dan yells back. “Did you expect me to take the information happily ? Was I meant to make it easier for you? How thoughtless of me to be hurt by this!”

The cave shadows have mutated into gargoyles and chimeras, clawed and ferocious. “You could have been understanding!”

“What’s there for me to understand ? The fact you didn’t trust me? The fact you lied to me? The fact everyone else knows? Or all three?”

“You’re being ignorant.”

“And you’re being bloody selfish.” Dan turns on him, glowering in the gloom. “This doesn’t just affect you, you know.”

“You think I don’t know that? I tried my best not to hurt you!”

Dan throws his head back and barks a hysterical laugh. “Did you? How fucking stupid of me, then.”

“I tried. It doesn’t mean I was guaranteed to succeed,” he snaps. “I had my reasons. You were at the centre of all of them. I can only be sorry it didn’t go the way I wanted it to.”

“Sorry’s one word for it,” he retorts, lip curling. His eyes spark with challenge.

“It’s my word for it. I didn’t want this. I never wanted this.”

“Should’ve tried harder, then.”

“But that’s not true, is it? Whenever I ended up telling you, you’d be mad. But I couldn’t tell you from the off, could I? I didn’t even know you.”

“So it’s my fault?” Dan exclaims. “Fuck you.”

“Sometimes it feels like it is.” He regrets it as soon as he says it, wincing from the force. It’s a truth, though, belonging to the more hateful, wrathful parts of him. Dan’s right: it’s selfish, but he needed him to make it easier.

Dan doesn’t respond, just shaking his head over and over.

This is torture. His chest is bursting, and deflating, and crumpling, all at once. Dan didn’t have to do this. He’s such an arsehole. He could at least pretend he cared enough about Phil to be upset. He could at least pretend there’s more to this than the damage to his own righteousness. He could at least pretend he misses Phil, and wants him back. Any of those things, right now, would help him feel a little better. Not fixed - it wouldn’t fix him. But it would prop him up, until he could drag his animate corpse out of here. Arsehole.

Magic wails in his head, calling for attention and closure. A law of nature. Penalty: the end. Phil pushes down at it with his hands every time it rears its head, but it only rises back up.

Phil looks back at Dan, and sees nothing.

“If this is how it’s gonna be,” Phil begins again, when the break in the argument has left his lungs shuddering and his heart knocking, “I think it would be better if I left.”

Bleeding down his cheeks are tears, as pain rushes in his ears. Stumbling, he fumbles his way round to the exit of the clearing. He knew it would be like this. He knew there was no way to make things right again. He knew he couldn’t forgive Dan.

“Phil.”

He’ll never know what it is that makes him stop so suddenly: Dan’s voice, its fury suddenly doused, or Dan saying his name. Whatever it is, Phil stops in his tracks and gradually turns to face him. In mere seconds, Dan’s expression has dismantled into something quieter, mournful.

“Stop,” Dan continues. “Don’t - don’t.”

Phil doesn’t.

He knows he should go back, but he also knows he should stay. Hence, he traipses back to his space on the bench. He sits back down. He stares at the remains of the fire, feeling Dan’s gaze on him before he, too, turns his attention to the ashes.

Silence returns. It pulls to and fro, swinging from the gallows. But there’s a promise at the end of it, he’s sure, so he stays. He lets it run algid zigzags down his spine. Phil’s heart is beating, maybe from Dan’s presence, maybe from their surroundings. The inherent sense of magic doesn’t feel like an illusion, it feels like a fact. His veins hum from it.

He feels it’s his turn to wait, but he has also spent his life awaiting each judgement, and then he can’t stand it any longer. He whispers, “Say something,” and tries to make it sound less beseeching than it is.

Dan doesn’t say something, but another glance his way reveals that he is wrestling with his own thoughts. Phil accepts that, and abandons himself to more waiting: he has offered it, and he can’t accept it for them both.

“Show me something.”

Phil pushes himself more upright. “What?”

“Magic,” Dan breathes. One word. Show me your magic.

In his imagination, he’d pondered upon what he’d do in this situation. What he’d show Dan, if he ever asked. What he could do if Dan ever knew what he had, and loved him for it.

His magic soars. There’s no denying it any longer.

“Okay.” In this more reserved species of conflict, Phil feels like he owes Dan something. No matter how long he’s gone without magic, no matter if he shouldn’t follow orders blindly, he owes him this.

The electricity is pushing at his edges. Collecting his nerve for a second, Phil reaches out and scoops some of that magic up; it falls through his fingers, and then he tightens his grip and casts it out into the fire pit. There’s no timber left. The charred square bursts into flames. It feels so bizarre, with Dan’s steady gaze on him the whole time. Performing magic in this augmented reality is uncanny, leaving him doused with a feeling almost like fine sugar. It’s been so long since he performed any spells, even the typical sensation of magic feels unusual on his skin, but he welcomes it back. The fire burns on in front of him, and Phil utters a surprised, relieved laugh.

Dan watches the air go up in flames; Phil watches Dan’s face set alight with gold.

A moment passes, dropping in the uneven beat of his heart.

“Is that meant to be impressive?” The joke is clearly there, present in Dan’s subconscious grin and careering awe.

This calm won’t last long, so Phil proceeds with caution, careful to make it last as long as he can. “I wasn’t sure if it would work.”

Dan looks at him in confusion. “Why not?”

“I haven’t done any spells in a while,” he admits. “Since... Since we, you know.”

Dan frowns, but nods. Looking at the fire again, he says, “I can feel it, somehow, this...energy, and I know it’s magic.” To Phil, he says, “Is it you?”

Phil shakes his head. “It’s this place.” He digs a heel into the dirt. “It’s stronger here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this what it feels like all the time for you?”

He could say I don’t know what you’re feeling. He could say It’s never as strong as this. But Dan doesn’t want technicalities, he just wants answers. “Yeah.”

Turning forwards, Dan’s face is cast in plaster - somber and sober and set. “All this time,” he says, “you lied to me.”

Phil ignores the frantic wriggling in his gut. “I never said anything outright. It just never came up. I wanted it to.”

“That’s still lying.”

“Yeah, I know.” Phil bows his head.

Dan exhales, an elongated sound, and closes his eyes. Opens them. “You know, I never hated the magic. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I don’t. I don’t hate you for having magic. It was just that I didn’t know for so long.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

“If I could have, I would have told you from the start. But I didn’t have a chance. It was too risky.”

Dan nods. “I think I see that now. But I’m still so mad at this whole situation.”

“You’re allowed to be -”

“No, I’m not. I shouldn’t be mad at you. But I am. Even though there was no other way, I hate that you lied. And that’s the wrong reaction to this.”

“No, it’s not. There’s no right or wrong to this.” Phil thinks back to Gwen, and an acute ache scalds his chest, taking him by surprise. “This was never going to be easy.”

“Damn right,” Dan laughs humourlessly. He is so different from when they first met. He’s more jagged, his flaws and passions as prominent as the mountains they’re crouched under. As quickly as his laugh began, it dissipates again; he sobers and lowers his gaze. “I don’t want to live by this.”

“By what?”

“This anger at you. I don’t want to listen to it.”

The idea is so familiar and tangible that Phil’s chest hurts once more, echoing over and over. “We can’t undo this.”

“And I don’t want to. I want this to make us closer, not farther apart.”

Phil digs at his cheek with the heel of his palm. “But you’d have to get to know me all over again.”

“Would I?” Dan challenges. “I know everything else, don’t I?”

“This is a large part of me,” he presses, as much as he hates to disagree, as much as he wants Dan to be right.

“And now I know it. It doesn’t change everything else, does it?”

“It makes me a liar. And a hypocrite.”

“Not if I can understand why you had to do it.”

Slumping his shoulders, he reminds Dan, sullen, “I already told you. It was too dangerous.”

“Not that. The real reasons. Why were you scared?”

Clamping his hands to his knees, Phil stares into the flames and thinks hard. It doesn’t take long before he emerges with one of the answers he had known, really, all along. “I knew you’d have to choose between your dad and me.”

Phil watches Dan swallow, observes the fall of his shoulders. With the moon’s reappearance, silver light filters down onto him, as tentative and fuzzy as he feels. “If you’d’ve told me at the start,” Dan admits, “I don’t know what I would have chosen.”

“And I never wanted to put you in that position.” How oblivious Dan is to him, to all the respect and reverence and rapture he has stashed in him. “I wanted to tell you, but it felt selfish to put you in such a fucked up situation.”

“Ultimately, though, you were always going to have to tell me. If you wanted to. One day, you’d have to.”

“I tried not to think about it,” he confesses. “God, I never wanted things to be complicated between us. We just worked , and it was simple. But if I told you, and you then had to understand and choose and whatever, it would be complicated.”

“Was that really the end-all for you?”

“I didn’t want to lose you,” he says, with all the faltering of a feather balancing on his finger. “And then I did anyway, which was my fault, too. So.”

“No. It’s not. It’s mine,” Dan argues, resolute. His eyes are distant, lost in this labyrinth of a problem. “I never stopped to think - Fuck, I hate this!” The sudden flare in volume makes Phil cringe away, and Dan looks to him with an unspoken apology. “Not you. I hate this. I hate that you were scared and I hate that you thought you couldn’t trust me. I hate that you thought you had to contend with my shitbag of a dad and I hate that I made you think that.” His voice is distorted with despair. Phil shuffles a few centimetres closer to him.

“It was never that I didn’t trust you,” he consoles. It feels like they’re getting somewhere, all the anger burnt into nothing by the flames. His friends were right, then: they just needed to talk. “I promise.”

“But you didn’t feel you could tell me.”

“I promise,” he repeats.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, I just -” Phil leans his head back and fills his lungs with cold night air. “I’m trying to explain this without -” Giving myself away, he thinks, letting you know why I was ten times more scared to lose you. “Confusing you,” he finishes instead.

“Doesn’t matter.” Dan turns his body ninety degrees, so he’s completely facing Phil. He rests his hands on his lap and looks like he’s going to listen forever, until Phil lets him understand.

“You’re as stubborn as ever,” he remarks, with a gentle grin.

“And you’re just as slow.” Before, this would be when Dan would prod him with a finger. “Please.”

“I trusted you with my life,” he returns to the matter at hand. With the growing flames, the shadows keep a safe distance, but they don’t flit and flee - they sit and watch, calm. A breath of wind ghosts over them, and the whole copse leans in close. “I didn’t want that to change by telling you.”

“What do you mean?”

He dismisses him with a shake of his head. “It’s really dumb.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Fine.” Phil meets his gaze purposefully. “It felt like, if I told you and you reacted badly -” Here, Dan’s eyes darken and his mouth dips, and his own voice falters, so he plows on, “Then that trust would be ruined. Proved wrong, I mean. I had so much faith in you, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“Your whole heart ,” Dan recalls the memory quietly, summoning it as if any disturbance could displace it.

He swallows. “Exactly.” To his right, the fire begins spitting out petals of flame. They pirouette a few metres upwards before dissolving. “I’d given you that. I didn’t want to drive you to breaking it. Wait, no, that’s not a sentence. Um.” He rattles out a nervous laugh; the fire spits, crackles. “I knew I could trust you, and I didn’t want to lose that.”

“And I made sure you did.” The reminder is raw in its sorrow, and it pulls Phil’s wounds open; however, Dan’s appearance is so dispirited and forlorn that he thinks that alone would convince him to forgive him.

“No,” he hastens to disagree. When Dan cocks his eyebrow, he rectifies, “Well. Yeah. But it’s okay now. You had your reasons.”

“But you had yours.”

Phil hums but says nothing.

“What does that mean?”

He settles into his memories, and tells him, “It didn’t feel like I had my reasons. Ask Gwen, I was completely broken over it.”

“What? Why?”

“I was convinced I had lied to you for nothing, and in the process had betrayed who I really was.” He snorts when he hears it aloud. “I told you it was dumb.”

“You did,” Dan agrees, nodding. His smile appears in a split second, and he laughs to himself. “You did . But it’s not dumb. I’m...I’m really sorry I put you through that.”

“It’s quite dramatic, though, isn’t it?” Phil says. He means you’re forgiven.

Dan pretends to think for a moment, pulling his mouth shut to suppress a smile. “It is pretty fucking dramatic. You haven’t changed.”

“I can change, though. If you need me to be less...offensive, I can be.” Phil speaks quietly, tinged with a shame he can’t repress.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t do that. Phil, just...Don’t ever do that.” Phil hadn’t noticed they had got any closer, but now Dan puts his hand on his knee, and he’s leaning forcefully onto him, whole weight tethered to him.

“Are you drunk?” he asks, half concerned, half teasing.

“No, no.” Dan shakes his head. “Just emotional.”

Phil catches a light hold of his waist, just to be sure.

Dan rests his head on his shoulder for a brief second. “I’m sorry.”

Phil leans into him. “I’m more sorry.”

“You bastard, I’m the most sorry.”

“Does that mean we’re okay?”

“Only if you can show me something better than a shitty fire.” Detaching himself, Dan jabs a thumb in the direction of the fire. It’s become more golden, somehow. The colour of Phil’s eyes when he casts a spell. Dan’s cheeks are flushed with the cold; Phil can feel the heat on his own skin. He’s alive again. He’s not some wretched dwarf star, he’s alive . Burning. But the sensation is tender despite its strength, a current eddying through him without end.

Phil laughs at the distaste in his tone - it’s so much easier, when it’s clearly jest - and laughs harder when an idea comes to mind. Dan doesn’t urge him farther, just sits and waits with an amused look in his eye.

When a book comes hurtling out of the dark towards him, Dan’s eyes widen in surprise. It’s heading for his arm. At the last second - upon impact - the pages and binding disband into flickering sparks. They alight on his sleeve and glow, comfortable.

“That’s better,” he says, the sarcasm lost in his almost childish interest. Phil watches Dan guide a few embers onto his fingers; he studies them with endless intrigue and wonder, as if he were discovering Phil himself. “Do you always make such macabre jokes? Or are you still bitter?”

“You tell me,” Phil replies.

Dan laughs again, a short and distracted sound. Then he breathes out, brushes the glitter off his jacket sleeve, and kisses Phil.

Phil Lester watches his life reassemble in the ethereal embrace of New Zealand’s autumn night, in the clumsier embrace of someone whom he trusted his whole heart with; witnesses it restart - for while it had never gone away, it had got stuck on one particular spike - with his magic threaded through his whole being.

fin