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Dan’s nightmares haven’t been so bad lately. They haven’t been bad enough to actually wake him, thankfully. He sleeps through most nights.
Then that week in March fucks everything up.
He’s ill, he’s irritable, he’s unsteady— he’s weak, he’s confused, he’s barely holding on. His body is in full rebellion. His brain is unleashing all the things his medication had been holding back, dampening like a cloth thrown over an on-fire frying pan that catches fire in turn.
And he can’t fucking sleep.
What little he gets, passing out from exhaustion after being sick for the umpteenth time, is interrupted by nightmares he thought he’d already worked through. Trauma he thought he’d already unpacked. But no, it was just waiting there. Waiting for him to be low enough to pounce on.
He can’t even remember what the nightmares were by the time he wakes up— the images are long gone by then. He only knows he has tears on his face that he doesn’t remember crying, and shouts ringing in his ears even though his throat doesn’t feel raw. He only feels the ghosts of punches to his stomach, to his back, the ghosts of hands on his throat and slaps across his face, but he doesn’t remember if his dream put the faces of the people from his past onto those ghosts or if it’s all himself. Himself beating himself into the ground.
What he does remember, before he even fully wakes up, is that the arms around him now are safe. They’re protective, everything the ghosts in his nightmares are not. He remembers that the lips at his temple whispering, “Hey, hey, calm down. They can’t hurt you anymore,” in an exhausted, caring, Northern voice are lips he knows so well.
They’re the same lips that smile sadly when Dan leans over the toilet, retching up what little food he could choke down. Saying, “You’re okay, Dan. It’s okay,” so much that Dan has to believe it. He has to. Phil wouldn’t lie to him.
He’s worried about what this week in March has unlocked. He’s worried about what going back on the meds means, if he’s awoken something, if he needs to go off them for good. But properly. Controlled, so this visceral shitstorm doesn’t knock him on his ass again.
He’s worried about these nightmares persisting. In small ways, like being tired and feeling guilty to putting Phil through all this. In larger ways, like how much of his own past trauma he’s still weighed down by, how much blame he’s assigning to himself, how much internalized oppression he’s still carrying around even to this day.
“It’s a bad week,” Phil tells him. “It won’t be so bad after this week.”
And Dan does his best to believe him. To know that the worst of his hopelessness is a lying cocktail of brain chemistry and drug withdrawal.
To know that he’ll feel happiness again, even if it seems impossible right now as he’s lying on the carpet sweaty and shaking and scared.
It’s just hard. It’s hard because it’s so easy to blame himself for fucking up the prescription, and to blame himself for needing the meds in the first place because of course being mentally ill is all his fault even if he has to make up how.
“It’s a bad week,” Phil tells him. “I’m here,” he says, his fingers tangled in Dan’s damp curls.
It feels nicer than Dan can say. He wishes he had any sort of energy to thank Phil. For everything.
“I’m here,” Phil says again, “Eat something, please.” Dan tries. He’ll retch it up later because his body is rejecting anything and everything right now, but fuck it. Phil asked him. So he’ll try.