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The light is on in the bathroom but Dan can't see it. He's face down in his pillow, enjoying the softness of it under his face.
He could fall asleep like this, maybe. Just letting his face smush into the pillow, listening to the sounds of Phil brushing his teeth and washing his face and the other miscellaneous taps and thunks and clicks of things like trading his contacts for his glasses.
They're normal sounds. They're comforting life sounds.
Fuck, he's tired.
"I'm tired," he says, muffled through the pillow.
"What's that?" Phil calls out.
Dan rolls over onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. "I said I'm fucking tired. Why am I tired? I don't remember being this tired until at least a month into the last show."
Phil's head pops around the corner, grinning. He's still got flecks of toothpaste on the corner of his mouth. "You're old now."
"Fuck off," Dan says.
"Older, at least." Phil steps out properly. He's only wearing underwear and Dan's eyes flicker over his body with an absent minded appreciation. "Nothing wrong with it, you know. Happens to the best of us."
"You think you're helping," Dan says. "But you're not helping. Now shut up and come to bed."
*
There's a certain way Louise looks at them when they're holding Pearl that makes Dan's stomach churn uncomfortably.
"What?" He says.
She just wiggles her eyebrows. "Bout time now, isn't it?"
"Oh," Dan says.
He catches on faster than Phil, who is distracted by the squirming little human awkwardly in his arms. "For what?" Phil asks.
"Oh, you know." Louise won't say it but she gestures toward Pearl. "The little pittery pattery feetsies. You boys, you're old enough to settle down now, you know."
It's like another language, but one that even Phil manages to decipher. His mouth gapes open. "Oh, I don't - no."
"You don't know?" Louise asks.
"Louise," Dan says, voice cascading into more of a tone fit for an audience interaction than a chat with an old friend. He doesn't even notice. "If I want to live with someone who has undeveloped hand-eye coordination and doesn't know how to even walk properly yet, well - I've got Phil."
"Right," she says, but she doesn't stop giving them that little all-knowing smile that Dan, for reasons he can't really explain, suddenly hates.
*
They don't talk about it after.
They can't, really. It's not a conversation meant for prying ears, and they're surrounded by them.
Maybe they will tonight. Maybe in the hotel room.
He thinks about how it might go in his head, about asking Phil how he felt about Louise thinking they might have children. He tries to predict what Phil would say back, but he can't decide.
Because he doesn't know. He doesn't know what's going on in Phil's head. He has no idea if Phil wants children now or in five years or in ten. All he knows is that their life right now doesn't feel like a life that's ready for any more added responsibility.
He used to think he'd just be ready for a family, he'd just know when he wanted one, but it's all vague now because he's old enough and no magic flip has switched. He's still just Dan, who struggles to get through one day after the other.
*
"I want a milkshake," Phil says, staring at the takeaway menu.
"You cannot have a milkshake before we go on stage," Dan says. "Don't do that to yourself."
A frown flickers over Phil's face. "You're not my real dad. You can't tell me what to do."
"Don't sass me or I'll tell you that you can't have one after the show either. I mean, that'd just be doing myself a service, I'm the one that has to share a hotel room with you on nights when you over-lactose yourself," Dan says.
"Fine. No milkshake." Phil pouts. "Are you getting a burger?"
Dan shakes his head. "Salad, I think. I had the worst indigestion on stage the other night after we had those burgers."
"I remember," Phil says. "You burped in my face during the interval."
Dan leans in close like he's going to say something to Phil, then opens his mouth and burps.
"I hate you," Phil says, shoving him back away.
*
"Dan," Phil says, late into the night.
Dan jerks half awake. He rubs his eyes and they feel achy.
They probably shouldn't have gone out for drinks. Sleep is important now; keeping the best schedule he can, not running himself down. He doesn't have meds to lean on anymore. That shit is important.
But fruity cocktails are also important.
"What?" He says, belatedly remembering that Phil's said his name.
"We're settled, right?" He asks.
"Huh?"
"I mean," Phil says, rolling over. Dan can halfway see him with the moonlight filtering in from the slightly parted curtains of the window beside them. "What Louise said. About how it's time for us to settle down."
Breakfast with Louise was a lifetime ago. Everything feels like a lifetime ago after a show. Adrenaline crash adds at least eight hours to his day.
"Are you still thinking about that?" Dan asks.
"Aren't you?"
Dan half shrugs. Phil probably can't see it. "I'm thinking about a lot of things."
"But not that?" Phil asks.
"I'm thinking about..." Dan pauses to mull it over. "How one of us will definitely break a limb on stage at some point. Whether Kanye's meltdown was a marketing ploy or a warning sign of how out of touch celebrity culture can be with normal values. If the cleaning person we hired is going to find our sex toys. How amazing it is that we're a week in and neither of us is deathly ill - don't think I'm above doing the show from a bubble if you get sick, by the way. I'm not having that pneumonia shit again. But I'm also thinking about that one pizza in America we get to have again in like a month. And which one of us will be the first to accidentally instagram something we shouldn't. If security will-"
"Shut up," Phil says, covering Dan's mouth with his hand.
"You asked," Dan says. "Hard questions make my head hurt."
"Idiot," Phil says fondly. "So we are, then."
"Yeah, Phil." Dan shuffles over and curls himself into Phil's side. "We're settled."
They used to get asked all the time. It was always easy to laugh it off. No one expected much of Dan in his early twenties. He's sure the world isn't blind to the fact that they're not growing out of togetherness, they're growing deeper into it. Louise is a reflection of what lots of people probably think about them.
And Dan's opinion is that people can think what they fucking well want, it won't change how Dan lives his life right now.
*
He wakes up with an ache in his neck.
"Fuck," he mumbles, sitting up. He stretches his neck from one side to the other, hoping to work the tension out.
"Did we oversleep?" Phil asks, alarmed.
"No, we're good." Dan glances at the time on his phone. "We have an hour. I just slept wrong."
Phil relaxes back into the bed, yawning. "You know why, right?"
"Why?" Dan digs his fingers into a particularly tense spot at the base of his skull. It feels good but he's not entirely sure the pain there is related to the other pain. His body hates him, clearly.
"Because you're old," Phil says, and then shrieks and rolls away to escape the pillow Dan starts beating him with.