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Dan always had a voice in the back of his head, telling him all sorts of depressing things, thought that were so brutal that he knew they didn’t belong to him. Even if they had started back when he was a kid, they grew stronger with the years, almost engulfing him during his teenage years. Back then, they hadn’t all been about how “you could just stab this person right then and there and no one would be able to stop you. You have the power to end someone’s life in your hands, why not use it?”, as it had been the case during the first ten years of his life. These ones had been more insidious, against him instead of against others. Thoughts that “you’re not enough, you have to do more, to be more if you want your friends to accept you. You have to change for them to like you. Or you could just kill them.” And for a while, he learnt to live with it and accept it. He saw himself as a waste of space, as useless. Until he found a friend, the best friend he ever had. Someone who would listen to him, not only hearing him. When he was with him, the voice was quieter, as if the presence of the other man soothed him, lured him to sleep. But this would never last long, and as soon as he was left alone the voice would be back, more insistent than ever.
As he grew older he learnt to fight the voice. Yeah, he would never be enough, but so what? He didn’t have to be enough; he just had to be him. And, as Phil often said, being yourself is the only thing you can’t fail at. Besides, nearly six million of people seemed to agree that Dan was worthy of their love. Too busy trying to block the voice, he didn’t realize that it had shifted strategy. Inciting him to kill had failed; inciting him to commit suicide had failed; so why not, instead of trying to get him to change onto something twisted like it was, wouldn’t it change into something more human, become a better version of him, a version that people will like better than the real Dan, something that would make him desperate enough to make a deal with the voice. Or maybe it would fuel it just enough that it would be able to take over even without Dan’s consent. I could take years, but the voice was patient. It had already been waiting for decades; it could wait a few decades more.
Eventually it did happen. Dan had let his guard down, and Daniel™ had been able to slip away without Dan noticing. The first few times were only trials, when Dan was alone and would be for a few days, so that it could do whatever it wanted without being interrupted. Then it learnt to impersonate Dan, and finally it was able to have enough control to film a video. For its appearance in the videos, it decided it wouldn’t change too much about Dan’s usual look. Mostly, it got rid of his fakely-straighten hair and kept it curly, because it was too lazy to spend half an hour straightening its hair every morning.
Thanks to the fans asking for more and more “curly Dan”, Daniel™ grew stronger, closer to its final goal, permanent possession of Dan’s body. Daniel™ found an unexpected ally in Dan’s roommate. The man, whom he’d taken for nothing but a nuisance at first proved to be a man of many talents. This was only small things at first, but Daniel™ realized that Phil had the strange ability to predict some things that would happen. For example, he’d done a video before meeting Dan where he tried reading his own future with tarot cards. One of the cards he drew was the knight of hand, which predicted that “some guy is gonna have a big impact. An energetic warrior, heven as a hasty personality and is very quick to love or hate”. Then, as Phil grew more confident in himself and in his power, his predictions became more frequent, more precise. Until one day, while both boys were watching a movie, he said to Dan, without facing away from the TV:
“He’s coming. Soon, he will be back and this time, he’s here to stay.”
At the time, Dan had been too scared to ask what that meant and thus left it at that, trying hard to forget the event even happened. But Daniel™ remembered. It remembered and it knew that if Phil’d seen it, it would happen. Soon, it would be powerful enough to crush its host into submission, which only served in it fighting harder against Dan.
One day, finally, Daniel™ was able to slip through, and this time it was for good. Dan was now the one reduced to being a voice in the back of the head, screaming for freedom. But there was no way Daniel™ would give him satisfaction. Now that it was finally in control, it was not going to abandon the ship.