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Night One
He was going to be fine. So what if Phil was away and he was alone in the strange house and all of the corridors had different shadows now? So what, he was perfectly fine walking through the millions of rooms they now have to check for axe murders. Perfectly fine. Except, he’s not, really.
He resists contacting Phil the first night, because he knows that he’s gone home for some family thing and Dan had said he wasn’t going and they’d had a bit of a spat about it. Dan still can't shake the awkward feeling that comes with visiting Phil's parent's house and remembering how it was a few years ago. It's weird to still visit your ex-boyfriend's family. But then, he supposes it's weird to still be living with said ex-boyfriend 6 years later, and to still be best friends. Maybe ex-boyfriend is too strong a term, they'd never actually put a label on it anyway, and 2009 seems like such a long time ago.
It was all fine, and Dan knew there would be no lasting damage from the quarrel, but he didn’t feel like subjugating himself by calling and admitting that he kind of wished he’d gone after all because he’s pretty sure that the girl from the ring is hiding under the bed right now and waiting to pounce.
All he’d wanted was a few days of alone time. Just some space and time to clear out the cobwebs of his mind, possibly get back into a creative headspace after Florida and all the travelling they’ve done lately. What he didn’t count on was that actually, they’ve barely spent any time in the new place at all.
He needs to get it together. The creaks and sounds he can hear are not people walking around, they are the pipes in the walls or the boiler kicking in. It’s not a ghost or a demon or a crazy serial killer escaped from a local mental asylum who has somehow managed to find his way into their apartment building and then the elevator and—He’s being ridiculous.
He doesn’t call Phil, but it’s a close thing. Around midnight he hovers his finger over the call button, watching the letter of Phil’s name on the screen of his phone blur together. He’s just about ready to admit defeat, suffer through the embarrassment of Phil laughing at him if only to hear his voice so that he doesn’t feel like he’s so far away. The only thing that stops him is that it is midnight, and while that isn’t particularly late for them under normal circumstances, Phil is currently staying in his parent’s house and he’ll ever hear the end of it if his call wakes them up too. Not only from Phil, he’s pretty sure Kath will have his guts for garters when she next sees him.
He puts the phone down instead and tries to go to sleep. He’s in the centre of the bed, limbs tucked under the duvet in some sort of deep-seated self-preservation tactic left over from his childhood. It’s actually making him overheat slightly, but he’d rather that than the feeling of a ghostly hand wrapping around his ankle. He’s seen Paranormal Activity, he knows how these things go.
It doesn’t stop either. And he lays there until the sun is just peeking in through his curtains before he finally drifts into a sleep disturbed by dreams of all the terrible things that could potentially be lurking in the shadows. He doesn’t call Phil the first night, but when he wakes up, he really wishes he had.
Night Two
Night two is almost worse. He’s used to the noises now but that means his brain has pretty much decided that yes, it is the terrifying figure in all of his nightmares made real and stalking around his house in the next room. So now he doesn’t even spend any time trying to convince himself he’s being stupid, just jumps straight to the ‘laying in the dark and trying not to make any noise’ part of the evening.
It’s only eleven so he thinks he can probably get away with ringing Phil, and he’s far beyond the point of caring whether Phil laughs at him. Because he will. Dan just wants to hear Phil’s deep soothing voice, is that a crime? It's not weird. At least, that's what he tells himself.
“There are no ghosts in the flat,” Phil answers the phone in place of the usual ‘hi’.
“Obviously not, Phil, ghosts don’t exist.”
“How many are you imagining right now?” Phil chuckles.
“…four.” Dan pauses while Phil laughs. “But to be fair, most of them aren’t actually ghosts, they’re escaped mental patients come to suck my brains out of my head by inserting a straw into my ear. So don’t you look like an idiot?”
“Well, nice knowing you I guess. I’m sure brainless Dan will be a good housemate. He probably won’t talk during films like you do so I might even prefer him.”
“Actually shut up,” Dan grumbles, “You’re supposed to be making me feel better.”
“I am?” Phil says, “Didn’t realise that was part of the job description.”
“Well it is. So… go on.”
Dan hears the sound of a shrug on the other end of the phone and he feels a sudden pang for a Skype call. They haven’t done one of them in so long, it might be nice to see Phil through a shitty webcam again. Nostalgic in all the right ways.
“What do you want me to do?”
Dan thinks back to those Skype calls in the early days, how they'd routinely fall asleep, laptop screens lighting their faces a sallow, faded blue and listening to the rhythmic breathing of the other through low quality speakers.
“Just… tell me about your day?” Dan asks, shuffling down the bed and putting him on speaker. “And I’ll try to sleep.”
“Alright,” Phil says soothingly, “I can do that.”
Dan falls asleep to the low resonant sound of Phil in his ear. He zones out of the actual words fairly early on so he isn’t entirely sure what Phil did with his day, but the cadence of his voice and the familiarity of it are enough to placate his troubled mind so that he is lulled into a peaceful sleep.
Night three
Phil pre-empts him on the third night and his laptop signals the familiar ringtone just as he's setting up the DVD player. He hits the answer button so fast he almost sends the laptop flying off the coffee table.
Phil's face blossoms in to view and it creates a sort of pang in Dan's chest, a weird sense of longing. That isn't weird either. Not really.
“Are you doing what I think you're doing?” Phil asks.
“Just watching a film” Dan shrugs, fiddling with the DVD case so that he doesn't have to look at Phil for too long. It's making him slightly breathless and that is just inconvenient.
“Which one?”
“Doesn't matter.” Dan flings the DVD case over the top of the laptop so that it lands on the sofa.
Phil raises an eyebrow at him and cocks his head slightly. “You're watching sad movies aren't you?”
Dan doesn't reply but he does adopt a slight pout.
“You'll make yourself cry.”
“Better than getting scared of imaginary monsters,” Dan retorts, “Think I'd rather be sad.”
“Don't be sad. But also don't be scared.”
“I'll try.” Dan turns to face the webcam and Phil's unblinking eyes are staring back out at him. “Any particular reason you called?” he asks, trying to think over their long list of upcoming projects and working out whether he's forgotten to do something.
“No...” Phil says, scratching the back of his head with one hand, reaching his arm up so that his sleeve dips over his bicep slightly.
Dan finds himself tracking the movement in a way that would probably be concerning if it wasn't something he did all the time. So maybe that one is a bit weird, maybe a lot of things are weird, but it doesn't stop him doing them.
“I just... missed you?”
“What?” Dan splutters.
It’s not that they don't miss each other. Well, Dan certainly misses Phil, if not just the knowledge that someone else is in the house to tempt away the phantom dangers that plague him on a nightly basis. But they don't admit it, they don't say these thing out loud. Dan watches Phil over the grainy Skype call and thinks about how it could be 2009 again, and Dan could be hearing that and not letting it dissolve this time. Not letting it slip through his fingers.
“I... miss you, I guess.” Phil laughs it away, waving a hand, “Guess I'm just used to you being there. Sorry for being a bit grumpy about you not coming, I... I knew I'd miss you. It's not new.”
Dan isn't entirely sure how to react to that one. He settles for just being honest, because it's getting to exhausting not to be.
“I miss you too.”
Phil smiles a little, just one side of his mouth moving upward. “I'll be home soon.”
“Yes.” Dan smiles back. “You'll be home soon.”
They talk a bit longer and Phil re-tells Dan all the things he's been doing because Dan admits that he didn't really hear much of it the night before. Dan sets his chin in his hand and watches Phil talk, they joke and laugh and duck out of frame for only seconds before righting themselves again. At one point Dan gets up to get fetch something and sets up a nearby house plant in front of the camera 'to keep Phil company'.
And it’s exactly like old times, Phil keeps saying things that catch Dan off guard, make his heart skip in his chest and his breath catch in his throat. Dan is blushing and hiding his face behind his sweater sleeve pulled down over his knuckles and Dan wonders when it had stopped being like this, and, not for the first time, why it had.
“This is giving me some serious 2009 vibes,” he risks saying.
“Hmmm,” Phil hums, “It is, isn’t it?”
Dan nods, pulling his lip between his teeth. Phil doesn’t look away, but his face is doing something odd where he looks a little sad. Dan coughs to break the tension and it dissolves slowly, Phil blinking back into normality and Dan wanting to linger in the moment but knowing that sensibly, he should let it go. Hope is becoming something that tortures him rather than soothes.
They move on but all too soon Phil is glancing at the corner of his screen to where Dan knows the clock is displayed and declaring it is nearly 1am.
“I should get to bed,” Phil says, yawning and stretching so that Dan can see where his t-shirt has ridden up on his stomach.
His fingers twitch to reach out before remembering they are a couple of hundred miles apart and separated by a computer screen. It’s a familiar ache, one he hasn’t experienced in a while but that he knows all too well. He shouldn’t be welcoming it back the way that he is, but he allows himself the longing for a moment, squeezes his eyes shut and wonders what it would be like if there was any hope of resolution to it.
“Okay,” he says on his exhale, “Goodnight.”
“Will you be okay?” Phil asks, “No scary demons or anything?”
Dan forces a smile, “I promise I’ll be brave.”
“I wish I was there so you didn’t have...”
It’s as if Phil realises suddenly what he’s saying, and clamps his mouth shut, Dan listens to his teeth snap together only barely over the sound of his own gasp.
“Did you just…?”
“I…”
“That’s my line…” Dan whispers, trying to pass it off as a joke.
But Phil’s face is stunned, his mouth parted slightly. His eyes are wider and bluer than usual and for a moment Dan forgets how to breathe as he comprehends what is happening. They both know what Phil was going to say, they both understand the familiarity of the sentence, what it meant the first time. It can’t be an accident, it can’t. Phil is remembering it too.
“Phil.” Dan sets his hands on either side of the laptop, gripping onto it so that his knuckles turn white.
They’ve promised, silently at least, not to talk about that time and here they are mentioning it twice in the same Skype call. They don’t talk about how they were pretty much something back in 2009, they don’t talk about how the word ‘love’ had been bandied about between them on calls just like these. How once it had all been made real they’d gotten scared. They don’t talk about how the pressure of finally being in the same city, of having to keep it hidden, of not knowing how to navigate everything they were feeling had made them scared and vulnerable, to such an extent that they’d let it go, let it drift away into the easy comfort of friendship. They don’t talk about how, sometimes, they catch themselves wandering closer and thinking about what would have happened if they hadn’t.
“Phil,” he repeats, because finding the right words is difficult, even when you know what it is you’re trying to say, never mind when your head is all fuzzy with the possibility of what if?
“I… I’ll see you tomorrow.” Phil says, and the screen goes blank.
The ding-pop sound of an ended call seems to linger in the living room and Dan keeps staring at the left over chat box, as if willing something to appear.
Nothing does. But his hands hover over the keyboard, it feels like tempting fate but he can’t leave it there, can he? That can’t be it.
He toys with it for a moment before becoming resolute. His heart is hammering and he’s chewing on his lip to the point of pain but the possibilities are swirling around his head and he knows he won’t be able to stop until he just say it, until he puts something out there finally.
I promise I’ll be brave for this too.
He types it quickly, slamming the enter key before he loses his nerve. The green dot next to Phil’s icon stays there, and he can see his message hanging on the screen, letters stark against the white background.
As he stares at his own message, it moves upwards suddenly and his eyes flicker. It’s position replaced by a message from Phil. A typed message, of something he can’t say over the call.
We'll both be brave this time.
The dot turns grey, Phil has logged off.
That’s enough for tonight though, it’s more honesty than they’ve had in a few years.
He doesn’t even try to sleep that night. But for the first time since Phil left, the only impossible things he’s imagining, are ones that make him smile.