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“Can you pick up some milk on your way home?” Phil asks as Dan walks to their front door.
“Yeah, sure.”
“And cereal, too?”
Dan shakes his head, his hand on the cool metal of the door handle. “My kind or your kind?”
“Hmm…your kind and my kind.”
“Yeah, you would, Lester.” Dan laughs. “Be back soon. Text me if you need anything else.” He faintly hears Phil say “Okay” as he steps into the hall. Dan shuts and locks the door to their flat behind him.
Dan can’t actually count the amount of times he’s picked up cereal or milk or drugs from the pharmacy or whatever for Phil over the years. It’s something he’s done too often and too consistently to keep track of, and Phil has done the same for him.
How would Dan feel if he could actually see that number added up? Or see all the things they’d picked up for each other laid out across the floor? Would it feel overwhelming? The sheer amount of it all?
Maybe—but this figurative collection of items wasn’t actually picked up all at once. It isn’t some massive haul either one of them had dragged into their flat one afternoon. They are just little daily kindnesses that only last as long as his Crunchy Nut does. Which, with Phil Lester in the house, isn’t very long at all.
When Dan gets to the bottom floor of their building, he steps outside into the biting air of a wintery evening. Sometimes he needs little walks like this even if he doesn’t particularly want them, needs to remember the world beyond his own four walls. It’s occasionally a way of pushing back against the bad days, and he feels like he definitely needs it tonight. Something besides an infinite scroll through one of his fandom tumblr accounts to sort things out in his busy head.
It’s in his nature, he thinks, to tuck himself away like cold hands into the pockets of his coat, to protect himself from the natural disasters and purposeful cruelties of the world. And he’s lucky to have found someone who sees the world much the way that he does. Someone whose instinct is to guard the things he cares about, the things that matter most, from the world—and not just lay them bare for the crows of opinion to pick apart like a carcass.
Dan tries not to call it cowardice because he doesn’t think it really is—except on his worst days. It’s just a way of walking through the world, and everyone gets to choose the way they do that.
They choose, at least in the ways that matter most, to walk quietly.
The lamplights dotting the pavement are like little dim islands that Dan follows down this now familiar path to the corner store. It’s not too far away, but just far away enough that Dan can breathe fresh air and unscramble some of the thoughts bouncing around in his mind.
It’s nice to know that when he gets home from these little walks of solitude, he won’t be coming home to a quiet, dark house. He’ll be coming home to a warm place filled up with another two hands and two feet, another beating heart like his own. He trusts that Phil will be there, on the good days and the bad days, that he will be honest with Dan if things start to change, if his needs aren’t being met, if something is falling apart. He knows Phil trusts him in the same way. He trusts him, even before he loves him. And that’s saying a goddamn thing.
They’ve been together such a long time that it’s easy to forget it hasn’t always been like that, that there’s a shadowy albeit distant reality that won’t be like this. It can’t always be like this. It took billions of years but even stars managed to turn into people, because change is the dominant force in the universe.
Dan has always said commitment is scary. And it is. Because it’s a lie. It pretends to know something it doesn’t know, that it can’t possibly know. Dan has a good thing—the best thing—and he knows it, but he’s also honest enough with himself to know that if the stars can’t even last, neither can this life they’ve built with four hopeful but unskilled hands.
It will end—as all things do—in one way or another.
So he and Phil don’t talk about forever, at least not in so many words. It just doesn’t come up. Tomorrow does. Next week or next month or next year. They make mince pie codexes so that next year they’ll know which are the best ones to buy. They plan for the future, but only as far as they can see it. They talk about houses and dogs and even kids because those are tangible things, little realities, they can create together. Forever is concept, a construct, and Dan won’t build the most important thing in his life around an idea. Certainly not one as flawed as forever.
Because it’s always later than you think. Always.
Instead, Dan goes into this little corner store and he buys a half-gallon of milk. He buys Shreddies and Crunchy Nut, just like Phil asked him to.
This is how he builds their life—day by day with things he can see or hear or hold in his hands. He listens to Phil when he has something to say, and he takes his hand as often as he can. He says “I love you” like he means it, because he means it all the way down to his bones. He kisses Phil—and he doesn’t count those kisses because they don’t need to be counted they just need to be. To occupy the space they’re given.
When Dan makes it back to their flat, Phil is waiting for him. He’s sleepily curled up on the sofa, wrapped in a warm blanket, his feet on their fluffy grey pouf. He smiles over at Dan and it too occupies that single space it is given.
Dan calls to Phil from the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Do you want me to make you a bowl of cereal too?”
“No, I’ll make it,” Phil says softly as he stands. “You sit down.”
And that’s it, Dan thinks, that’s how they do it. A single second, a single kindness, at a time.