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Dan knows Phil is still sleeping fitfully despite the doctor assuring him just yesterday, in a check-up which marked a month since he’d gone in for fainting twice in the bathroom upstairs, that he was perfectly alright. He can hear Phil tossing and turning, hear him kicking the sheets down then pulling them back up again. He can hear Phil alternating between grinding his teeth and letting out exhausted sighs.
“You’re fine,” Dan says, his voice seemingly loud in the great silence of the night. The night was never really silent, of course— between the cars passing their building below, and a dog barking in one of the apartments that surround them, and Phil’s fitfulness. But his voice seems to minimise all those other sounds. “You’re alright.” He’s lying on his side, facing the wall. Phil, he thinks, is lying on his back. He stops grinding his teeth at Dan’s words.
Dan doesn’t know what time it is; he hasn’t opened his eyes but figures the room is still plenty dark.
“Yeah,” Phil says. Dan feels him reach out to run a hand along Dan’s spine. Dan hums in acknowledgement and appreciation, then drifts back easily into sleep.
Sometime later, a few hours he thinks, he’s woken up again. He’s on his back now; he feels Phil’s head on his chest, and a hand only a centimetre or so below his nose.
All of that tells him it’s somewhere between 5 and 5:30 in the morning.
This has kinda become something of a routine.
Dan had heard in a podcast once about how a married doctor first realised that maybe her husband wasn’t just feeling anxious, rather maybe her husband had anxiety. She said it was when he went through a period of time where he would routinely wake her up in the middle of the night because he was checking to see if she was still breathing. He was making sure she was still alive. There was no reason to think that she, a perfectly healthy adult woman, would have passed away in her sleep. But her husband still had to make sure.
That podcast drifts to the forefront of Dan’s mind after their tour bus is hit by a car one night, and Phil is shaken even weeks and months later by the fact that Dan slept through the whole thing. He joked about it at the time; they both joked about it.
But every so often afterwards, Dan is jolted awake between 5 and 5:30 in the morning by Phil checking that he’s breathing. That he’s just asleep; that he’s still alive.
Phil isn’t great with death… neither of them are. But Phil’s never been great with death, in a different way compared to Dan.
Dan’s approach to death is startlingly apathetic— jokes about its sweet release, and the fact that it would finally be a way to escape the existential dread that is both his branding and his preoccupation. It’s not that he wants to die; jokes begging for euthanasia aside, that is never what it’s been for him. Not for many years now, at least. It’s that some days he doesn’t care, in a supremely listless way, whether he dies or not. He can remember some days where he would lie flat on the carpet between the stair landings and he felt an overwhelming apathy; felt he could lie there until moss grew in the spaces between his ribs, felt he could lie there until everything around him turned to dust… and that’d be just fine. He wouldn’t care in the least.
But Phil fears death. He fears drowning and he fears medical maladies and he fears his loved ones growing older.
This morbidity panic is not new. It stems from a predisposition towards anxiety and the traumatic experience of loss in his uni days. Death became an inarguable and unkind reality for him then. Some of the years since have been better than others, but a car running into their tour bus most definitely unearthed that buried panic.
He doesn’t notice he’s doing it; he has told Dan that if he says it out loud— I’m checking your breathing, I’m checking that you haven’t died on me in the middle of the night— it sounds crazy. It’s like nail-biting; he doesn’t realise he’s doing it until he looks down at his fingers with the nails far too short now and bleeding near the edges.
Not that Phil was ever much of a nail-biter.
Still, when Dan moves under him and grunts to signal that he’s awake, Phil has the decency to look bashful. “Sorry, babe,” he says. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
Dan threads his fingers into Phil’s hair and tries, but a few minutes pass before he figures it’s useless. He’s fully awake now.
He doesn’t exactly know what they should be doing about this. Phil has his toolbox, coping mechanisms they’ve picked up over the years that should be enough to combat this. Phil should know from occasions this fear gripped him before just what to do with this current iteration of the fear that’s settled into him. But it’s still sticking; it’s stubborn. And Dan wants to pull it out of him, to have something as simple as a pore strip that could take care of morbidity fixation as easily as it takes care of blackheads.
He wants Phil to have a good night’s sleep again. It’s almost been ten months— ten months since a car swiped into their tour bus, a vehicle so beefy that it did hardly any damage at all. They weren’t even late getting to the venue afterwards. Dan didn’t even wake up when the crash happened, just slept right through it, and that seems to be what bothered Phil the most.
That, and the noise. The thump and crunch of metal.
He’s told Dan that he hears it sometimes, when he’s halfway between sleep and awake. Or when he’s sitting alone without any kind of distraction.
A thump.
A crunch of metal.
It could’ve been so much worse. Phil tells Dan that he doesn’t feel it was a bad enough accident to “deserve” or “earn” or “justify” the fact that he’s carrying around any trauma from it. But when have brains ever been judicious?
He says he’s fine by light of day. He was fine being on the bus for the rest of the tour. He’s been fine in cars and planes and boats in the months since. In fact, Dan thinks Phil is pretty convinced he’s fine through and through, that it’s Dan he’s pinned all his worries on. Why didn’t Dan hear the thump and crunch of metal? Why didn’t Dan wake up? Will Dan ever wake up? Is he even breathing…? He’d better check—
That worry builds and builds each night until somewhere around 5 or 5:30. It’s like clockwork, but neither of them wants or needs to be up at that hour. If they had somewhere to be at dawn, it’d almost be convenient.
Dan stretches his legs and pops his toes. Phil moves off of his chest. He looks ready to apologise again, so Dan stops him before he has the chance. “Breakfast?” he says, “Crash Bandicoot?”
Phil nods.
*
Just the smell of coffee warms Phil to his toes. The first sip has him practically melting into the sofa. He’s so tired. Surely this will help.
He hates feeling like this, anxious and irrational and incapable. He hates that he can’t barrel forth like he wants, that he can’t get everything on their to-do list taken care of, clean their plates, so he can deserve the rest his aching back is begging him for. He hates feeling like Dan’s watching him with worried eyes, which of course he has done since he was in hospital a month ago. And longer… since he panicked about the tour bus being hit by a car.
He hates it because he knows Dan has enough of his own shit to worry about without adding Phil’s own morbidity panic into the mix. The lack of structure, the lack of clear predetermined goals that tour provided, is hitting Dan hard. Even if he won’t say so. And there’s the June video he never posted, one he feels is necessary in order to live his truth. But one he wasn’t ready for.
It’s all leaving Dan exhausted. And Phil feels childish, selfish and stupid and plain crazy for waking him up without realising it, night after night.
They both need a proper break, he thinks. Something more substantial than sunny days in the Australian jungle, or more genuinely restful than catching up with family. They need some time where they’re thinking about nothing— nothing at all, not videos or brand deals or their forever home. But neither of them are good at thinking about nothing. Neither of them have learned how to turn their brains off and on again like a Wi-Fi router, no matter how much meditation or yoga or bath bombs they try.
There’s just too much to do… there’s always too much to do.
They can’t catch their breath. And it’s all things they agreed they could handle, all things they took upon themselves, all things they’re fully aware they’re so freaking lucky to consider problems. Their bones ache all the same.
There was no Pyjama Week pt2, there was no time to reset after traipsing around the world for months and months and months. Instead there was editing the movie, and last-ditch efforts to pull off something, anything, for the TBC dates, and seeing family they hadn’t seen in ages, and big scary life things like what the hell next year is going to look like now that they don’t have the reliability of having every minute planned like they did on tour.
There was Phil in hospital, and several brand deals that needed videos made, and Spooky Week, and Dilmas was right around the freaking corner. The combining of the merch stores, the popup shop, the signing of so many holiday cards that their hands cramped up. And then there’s the fact that Brazil completely knocked them on their ass; a month of trying to adjust to not being on the road, to not facing screaming crowds, to not performing at such high intensity. Only to jump right back into it. They were happy to go, happy to see Brazilian fans and drink caipirinhas and put on the Q&A.
They just didn’t know they could ever feel so tired— and fuck, it stands to reason that being so tired the one thing they’d manage to pull off is sleeping through the night. But mental health doesn’t give a fuck if you’ve been busy all year or not.
Dan’s curled up into Phil’s side, and hands Phil the controller when he’s killed by a snecky spike. Phil miscalculates a jump almost immediately, but Dan seems to be too tired to tease him about it. He just takes the controller back without a word.
“You’re not dying, you know,” Dan says a few minutes later after finishing the level, pausing the game and sitting up.
Phil shrugs. “The doctor doesn’t know what causes the fainting though,” he says. “They don’t know what this is and they don’t know what my headaches are and they don’t know why my hands shake…”
“But they know it isn’t bad. They may not be able to pinpoint it, babe, but they know it’s not killing you.”
“They think they know.”
“They’re pretty fucking sure. It’s their job.”
“Yeah,” Phil says. “Yeah…”
“The stress isn’t doing you any favours. You’ll just go even greyer.” Dan reaches up towards Phil’s bedhead quiff, and plucks a steel grey strand.
“Shut up, rat,” Phil laughs, pushing Dan’s hand away. The laughter is good. Dan can always make him laugh.
*
It hits Dan like an epiphany while they’re on a jog. They let the exercise fall by the wayside whilst on tour, and now trying to get back into running seems like the only real way to take advantage of Phil waking them both up so bloody early in the morning. Somewhere around the second mile, they stop because Phil has a pebble in his shoe. Dan keeps bouncing left and right, and it hits him.
They needed movement, motion, momentum— they’d spent last year constantly going, no time at all to think. And now that they’ve stopped, well… Dan thinks maybe it’s best if they don’t stop. Not yet. He thinks it’s best if they get moving again, for a little while at least.
He doesn’t let himself start planning until after they’re back at the flat, after they’re both showered and snacking on bagels and summer berries despite the grey December sky outside their windows. After he’s clacked away on his laptop, pulling up rental car prices and Airbnb info and weather forecasts for the Welsh coast. He does as little research as he’s comfortable getting by with. He wants to dive deeper and plan every detail and to find comfort in knowing exactly what to expect like he had the luxury of for tour, but he stops himself.
That’s not exactly what this is about.
There needs to be a level of spontaneity, a level of chaos— of him and Phil throwing themselves to the mercy of the winds, or some horseshit like that. That’s how they’ll snap out of this, he figures.
Manorbier, in Pembrokeshire. On the Welsh coast, just under a five hour drive from London.
It’s an ungodly amount of driving, or he would’ve thought so if they didn’t have two American tours under their belts, with days that were nothing but straight stretches of road and fields and red American barns. He isn’t sure why a car appeals to him more than the train. Surely Phil’s travel sickness has a preference. Dan supposes he just really wants it to be him and Phil alone, him and Phil and the thoughts they’re trying to sift through.
The village’s Wikipedia page says that fossils can be found along the stream bed. Dan thinks Phil will get a kick out of that.
*
Phil’s scrolling through the wave of PINOF questions that came as a response to his tweet. He screenshots a few that make him laugh, that he’ll want to run by Dan. He ignores plenty, a skill he’s honed after all these years, skimming them and moving on quickly. He hears Dan on the other side of the lounge, sat at his computer and typing away. The constant sound of his keyboard almost sounds like music, he thinks. With pauses every once in a while and long, loud, repeating tap-tap-tap-taps when he hits the backspace rapidly.
Then he gets so lost in scrolling again that Dan’s hands are on his shoulders before he even realises that Dan has stopped typing. Dan gives a little pressure to push his shoulders down; he’s been tensed up for who knows how long, without noticing.
He tilts his head back to see Dan bent over him. Dan leans down for a kiss. It reminds Phil of Spiderman and he laughs. “C’mere,” he says, opening his arms.
Dan goes around the arm of the sofa and flings a leg over Phil to straddle him. “You’re too tense,” he says. He kisses Phil’s forehead.
“I’m always tense.”
“You need to relax.”
Phil takes in a theatrically deep breath and lets it out slowly. “There,” he says, “relaxed.” The deep breath does some good even if he meant it mostly for show. He doesn’t want Dan to be worrying about him any longer. He can see the purple shadows under Dan’s eyes— half there because of insomnia and depression, half there because of Phil’s own paranoia. He pulls Dan forward to kiss him again, right-side-up this time.
It’s a languid kiss. It’s a kiss to pass the time, together. God, he thinks, when was the last time they had a kiss like this? Australia? Amsterdam? He feels Dan shiver in his lap when he snakes a hand under Dan’s shirt and it’s so fucking good, he wants to keep taking his time.
Maybe Dan’s right: they need to relax. Dan’s been too sad lately, Phil’s been too nervous. They just need to slow down… kiss like this some more… relax…
*
Dan brings it up after they finish filming the final PINOF. After Phil pushes his flattened quiff back off his forehead and Dan screams about needing to be put under the sink lest he spend another minute with his straightened hair that’s reminding him of so many hours he wasted for so many years trying to fit into some arbitrary mould. Sure, pure laziness means the straightened hair will stick around until he showers, and considering he’d showered just that morning… well, it might stick around long enough for him to get some humorous selfies out of it.
Or maybe, he thinks, snapping some now might buy them some time. Let them unplug while they’re in Wales and forget about everything else. So he does, so he can hop in the shower once they’ve cleaned up because the straightened hair really is too much for him.
He tries to bring it up while Phil’s packing up the lights. Brings it up in what might have passed for a casual tone if his fucking voice didn’t crack at the end. He should’ve guessed it would. “We should, er, we deserve a holiday don’t you think?”
Phil doesn’t stop cleaning up, and Dan wonders for a moment if he even heard him. Then he says, “We kinda just had a year-long holiday, didn’t we?”
“No,” Dan says. “We worked for a year. Exhausting work. Our body clocks never knew what fucking time zone we were meant to be in one week to the next.”
Dan sees the crease in Phil’s brow. He knows what it means. He knows Phil never meant his feeble excuse in the first place.
Phil turns back towards him and gives a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s scrub off these whiskers and get some lunch, huh?” Dan nods. He’d forgotten about the whiskers somehow, even if the sharpie scent is still burning his nostrils in a deeply familiar way.
*
Dan’s quiet enough over lunch that Phil feels appropriately bad for shutting him down earlier. It’s just… a holiday? How in the world can he claim to deserve a holiday, with all the work they have to do and after the year they had?
Sure, Dan’s right: that wasn’t a holiday.
But it was still travelling the freaking world, and spending a week in the Australian rainforest, and indulging Dan’s formula one obsession by going to the Singapore grand prix, and hiking the mountains of Colorado, and a million experiences in a million different places that make him feel he couldn’t possibly justify taking any more time that isn’t work work work. No matter if he passes out again or not.
Maybe Gamingmas 2017 didn’t teach him a damn thing about rewards after all, but he doesn’t care. He’s already ruining enough by ruining Dan’s sleep. Why pile more on?
Dan breaks through the fog of Phil’s spiral by clearing his throat and saying, “Can I make a John Green reference without you teasing me about that time I touched his butt?”
“Go for it, mate,” Phil smiles, resisting the urge to tease anyway.
“Remember how Augustus Gloop would hold the cigarette between his teeth but never lit it?” Dan asked
Phil holds back a laugh for only half a second. Then he lets out a big one that makes Dan jump slightly. He has to catch his breath and wipe away a tear before he can choke out, “Augustus Gloop is from Willy Wonka!” and then the laughter starts all over again. Dan laughs along too this time.
“Shit!” he laughs. “Oh my god, no… I meant Augustus Waters! Whatever…”
Phil tries to calm down long enough for Dan to say what he meant in the first place. He takes a sip of his afternoon coffee.
“Augustus Waters, and his metaphor?” Dan tries again.
“Yep,” Phil nods. Then he giggles through a botched German accent, “It’s a metaphor, Grandpa Joe!”
He has to duck to dodge the napkin Dan balled up and throws his way.
“We’re going on holiday.”
Phil stops giggling because of the seriousness in Dan’s tone then. It wasn’t a question; it wasn’t even a suggestion. It’s a decision he’s already made, apparently.
“Are we?” Phil asks, not sure why his stomach is dropping the way it is. Who dreads a holiday? Even if it feels unearned?
Dan nods. “We need it… metaphorically. We were go, go, go all year. And now we’re in a funk. So let’s keep going.”
“Dan—”
“—pack a bag,” Dan interrupts him.
“What, now?” The nervous twists in Phil’s stomach starts to turn into proper panic. He hasn’t prepared for this, and he’s the kind of guy that needs to psych himself up for a week before going out to dinner with more than two friends.
“Yeah, after lunch. We’ve gotta pack a bag then get the rental car. I want to be out of the city by dark and check into the Airbnb before midnight.”
“Where the fuck are we going?”
Dan cracks a smile then. Phil has the usual urge to poke a finger in those deep dear dimples. “You’ll see, Lester. It’ll take us five-ish hours.”
“You’re gonna drive us all that way?”
“You’re sure as hell not doing it!” Dan laughs. “I haven’t forgotten filming the Asphalt video, babe.”
Phil notices that he’s biting at the skin on the corner of his thumb and stops. When did he develop that habit, he wonders? That was always Dan’s thing…
Dan stands up and his expression is soft. He places a warm hand on Phil’s shoulder and says to him, “Is this all okay? I really think we need to.”
Phil nods, because sure it’s all okay. It’s okay, but still he’s freaking out and feels the rug has been pulled out from under him and all he can think about is the millions of things they need to do like the holiday merch and editing PINOF and that whole idea of a gaming channel hiatus which they’re still flip-flopping about— how in the world could he just allow himself to be whisked away somewhere by Dan. Hell, Dan’s even giving him an out. He could take it. He wants to.
“Bet I still pack faster than you, Danny, even though you had all this notice,” he says. Dan wraps him into a hug and Phil breathes in the scent of him. He smells like warm.
*
Though Dan hardly ever drives, it doesn’t take long for him to fall back into the habit and navigate the roads more or less on autopilot once they’re out of London, driving through Reading and onwards.
Phil’s sitting beside him with a tense everything— a tense spine and tense shoulders and a tense jaw. Sure he’s been tense for ages, but now he’s clearly using all his little tricks to not get travel sick which adds to the tension. Tricks like looking at the horizon, counting ten and back again, sticking his long fingers through the cracked window and feeling the cool winter air for a bit.
He feels good now that they’re on the road. Feels like he has a purpose, feels like there’s a task in front of him, feels like he can help out Phil the way Phil’s always trying to help him. By changing scenery. By being there. By trying.
He doesn’t expect this to really fix everything. Hell, he doesn’t expect it to fix anything, if he’s being honest. He’s just not sure what other choices he had. He’s taking a break from therapy he thought he could handle. And Phil doesn’t think his morbidity panic is something worth going into therapy for, which just… Dan can’t talk in circles about that anymore. So now they’re trying this.
And he’s really fucking hoping it does something.
The Airbnb has a built-in bookshelf on either side of the archway into the kitchen. It’s full of airport variety paperback books and glass bowls of seashells and ceramic vases with dusty paper flowers. The décor, he’d peg based on all those home shows he and Phil have been binging, is decided cottage shabby chic. An intentional kitsch: a cluttered, doily-covered living room with loads of quilts and wicker baskets in every corner.
He steps into the bedroom while Phil runs a finger along the spines of the books, searching for anything he’s heard of or anything that sounds intriguing.
The bedroom is just as cluttered, and therefore almost suffocating. After all those months of franchise hotels and the sparsity of the tour bus, this is a change he’s not sure he would’ve welcomed except that he was so pleased with the Airbnb’s proximity to the beach.
He just wishes there was one clear corner. One table surface that hasn’t been covered with a vase of paper flowers or a jar of potpourri so old it doesn’t even smell anymore.
He sets his bag down with a bit of a thump, and Phil comes in from the lounge. Phil wraps his arms around Dan’s waist, and he feels the tension of a long drive falling from him. He’s just tired. God, he’s been tired for months now. Maybe they’re both tired enough for a proper sleep, he hopes.
Phil kisses Dan’s temple. “We’re on holiday,” he says.
“Mm-hmm,” Dan grins.
“Glass of wine?” They’d stopped at a Tesco on the way and stocked up on all the holiday essentials considering the place has a proper kitchen and not a barely-passable kitchenette. Though Dan’s quite tired, that glass of wine does sound tempting. Along with one of those soft triple fudge brownies Phil had pouted theatrically for in the bakery section until Dan rolled his eyes and smiled and said they might as well buy them.
*
Phil doesn’t think that Dan is asleep, even though they both fell into the sinking soft mattress more than two hours ago, groaning that their bones hurt and yawning that they were so tired they’d surely sleep like logs. Dan’s got his back pressed to Phil’s chest, and he’s holding one of the spare pillows tight to his own. Phil can’t see his face, but he can hear his sure and steady breath which isn’t nearly so deep as it would be if Dan were actually asleep.
It makes sense. His insomnia is always affected during these patches of deeper depression. He can lie in his grey fog for hours and days and hardly sleep a wink. It’s why Phil’s habit of interrupting what sleep Dan does get cuts into Phil’s gut as selfish. Supremely selfish.
His shoulder begins to ache though; the way they’re laying. He doesn’t want to move because it’ll shatter something, somehow, that he isn’t sure he wants to shatter. It’ll maybe open up a conversation he isn’t sure he can have right now.
Or it won’t open up any sort of conversation, and he’ll have to keep dancing around it the way he has for months. And which at this point is grating him.
Like that water drop torture, where one drop of water is fine really— but one drop of water drip-drip-dripping on you for ages and ages will start to feel like knives and you’ll start to go insane. He knows he doesn’t want to have the dreaded conversation, but the dancing around it at this point is torture. Fuck, they scuttled off to Wales to keep putting it off after all! That may not have been what Dan said they were doing, but Phil’s as sure as the ache that’s creeping from his shoulder up to his neck now that it’s exactly what they’re doing.
Dan pushes Phil’s hand away from his face. Phil hadn’t realised his hand was there at all. Right under Dan’s nose, right in the path of his breathing.
He tries not to think that Dan pushing his hand away was harsh or annoyed. He hopes Dan’s just tired.
But he’d have every right to be annoyed, of course. Phil hadn’t even been thinking to check on Dan— but, well, he never is thinking about it when he does it— and now he’s interrupted any chance he had at sleeping, slim as it was.
He doesn’t want to say anything. If he says nothing, they don’t have to fight.
But his goddamn shoulder…
Phil shifts a little to relieve the pressure on it, and is immediately met with Dan leaning up on his elbow. “Phil, what the fuck?”
“What?”
“Just… sleep! It’s fucking nighttime, that’s when people sleep!” He’s yelling. Dan hasn’t yelled like this in ages. Not since things were really bad. Phil feels like a kicked puppy; he’s sure he looks like it with his bottom lip protruding in a pout the way it is.
“I can’t sleep. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t wake me,” Dan sits up fully and runs his hands through his frazzled curls. “You couldn’t possibly wake me because I was never asleep to begin with!”
“Dan,” Phil nearly whispers. He can’t have this conversation… he has to go on ignoring it…
“Physically how are you still able to feel tired but not sleep and then still stand up each morning, I don’t understand. And how are you able to do that and think that you’re dying and think that I’m dead, and still think you don’t need to see someone about this?”
“Dan—”
“—It’s been months, Phil! So, what? You’re just gonna keep on like this until it’s been a year? Until it’s been five or ten or fifty? Until we die of exhaustion or the problem magically goes away?” He throws the sheets off his legs and climbs out of the bed.
“I don’t—”
“—I’ve been trying… I’ve been trying to support you, and to pick up the slack, and to tell you that it’s going to be alright. But Jesus fucking Christ. Sleep is like a basic fucking necessity and I need to sleep. You need to sleep!”
Phil’s trying to make out Dan’s face but the dark of the night and the blurriness of his unaided vision is making it difficult. Oh, and the tears. Those aren’t helping.
The worst of it is that Phil knows Dan is right, and he knows that Dan doesn’t mean to be hurting him. It means he can’t be indignant. He can’t stamp his foot and throw a fit like the child he feels he is when he’s so exhausted and afraid of everything in the world.
“I’ll…” his voice cracks. He clears it and tries again. “I’ll, er, go lay on the sofa. Let you get some sleep.”
Dan’s shoulders drop at this. “That’s not—”
“—It’s fine,” Phil cuts him off. He staggers half-blind into the lounge because he didn’t grab his glasses off the nightstand, and he stubs his toe twice against the unfamiliar furniture, but eventually tumbles into the overstuffed sofa covered in a floral print fabric that seems to swirl psychedelically in Phil’s tired vision.
He lies there for a handful of hours. The sun starts to rise outside the round bay window.
Dan’s footsteps creak on the old hardwood as he walks out of the bedroom. He mumbles something about heading down to the beach. Then Phil hears the door open and close.
*
There isn’t anything wrong with him, really. There isn’t anything wrong at all.
Dan kicks an empty beer can as far down the sand as he can. Who the hell litters anymore anyway? It makes no sense.
There isn’t anything wrong at all.
He’s only chewed out his boyfriend for his muddled mental health like a complete ass is all. He only let all the horrible thoughts that clog his brain when he’s feeling low spill from his mouth like he actually meant any of it.
He’s ruined this trip already; this trip which was supposed to be their symbolic salvation, or some shit like that.
He’s been trying to trick an epiphany out of the universe by showing up here on the beach. The sun is breaking through the clouds and glinting on the water and it’s almost too beautiful for words. As good a place as any for an epiphany, he thinks. An epiphany, or a breakdown. He isn’t about to be picky. Any brand of crucial moment is fine by him.
It’s a crucial moment that’s been a long time coming. It’s an event which he had convinced himself he could conjure by doing all the things protagonists in books usually managed to do just before their own crucial moments: he cut his hair, he whisked his boyfriend to the coast, he slouched and grimaced and drove too fast and cried into the wind.
But it turns out that being actively aware of archetypes deflates their effectiveness. It turns out that knowing knights slay dragons isn’t enough to survive walking into a dragon’s den— you still have to do some fighting.
He’s been trying to be reckless and rebellious, only it hasn’t been working. He doesn’t know what he was being reckless for. He doesn’t know what he was being rebellious against. Not specifically. Not enough to put a name on it.
There is too much desperation to be alright, even if none of it is real, which binds him and keeps him sane enough not to have a breakdown, but not sane enough to feel like he doesn’t need one. Like he’s not barreling towards one. One good one, to tornado through all of his corners and to blow the dust from his caverns.
Maybe he’s simplifying it. He’s absolutely simplifying it.
Maybe he’s read enough books that made it seem real simplified. Perhaps this was normal? Dan can’t decide if that’s a comforting thought or not.
In fact, this road trip has been the most reckless thing he had ever done in his life. Arguably. Then he immediately loses that argument, because he remembers that there was also dropping out of university and pursuing YouTube and two world tours and two books… oh and also falling in love with a hot older guy from the internet.
So maybe not.
Still, he had felt stagnant, he had felt all his organs rotting inside him, and he had craved the movement and momentum that would jolt him clean again. If he’d ever been clean.
Only now there was no epiphany or breakdown to cap it off. No crucial moment. It was a lot of buildup, his nerves wrung tight and his expectations high. And every quiet hour that passes has his momentum fizzling. The best he got were a few rolling tears that made a smooth path on his cheeks. They were sincere, but they were unobtrusive, and he hardly noticed them.
There isn’t anything wrong with him at all, but a pervasive numbness, a stunted stilting boredom. His pleasure, his privilege, to be so bored. He had driven all that way, but he hadn’t really been in motion: he had been utterly stagnant.
Him stagnant and Phil reeling— neither of them able to be what the other person needed. Because so rarely do their bad brain days overlap like this, and so rarely do they last so long.
He wishes he hadn’t kicked that beer can from earlier so far away, only because he wants to kick it again all the harder. Then he scans the area for it, finds it, picks it up. Gotta save the dolphins and all that.
*
Phil is sitting on the steps of their Airbnb’s porch with his head in his hands as dark storm clouds blot out the sun above him. He didn’t sleep, he didn’t expect to sleep. He thinks he might be getting just enough of a half-sleep here hunched like this to stay alive.
He’s waiting for Dan to get back because he doesn’t like the look of those storm clouds.
There’s a drizzle of rain. There’s a breeze that turns into a howl. Amidst all that noise he hears the old familiar cacophony— a thump and crunch of metal.
He thinks softer than the sounds in his own head that he might be able to hear the crackle of gravel on the walk, but it still surprises him when he feels a warm hand on his shoulder squeezing tight. “I’m sorry,” he says without lifting his head. He’s too bloody tired to lift his head.
“Shut up,” Dan says. His hand moves to Phil’s neck. It’s so warm, and his tone was warm, and when he sits down beside Phil he smells of warm.
For the first time in a while, Phil has to admit to himself that things are going to be okay. If for no other reason than the way he feels when Dan’s arms are around him like this.
They move inside and Dan plays the Atlas: Space instrumental tracks on his phone and promises that they’ll talk properly once they’ve laid down for a bit. The storm rages on outside the round bay window and Phil finds the same sort of comfort he always has in extreme weather, especially as he and Dan are both safe and inside, dry and warm.
Phil doesn’t realise he has fallen asleep until he’s waking up, his head on Dan’s chest. Dan is awake, threading his fingers through Phil’s hair, and it feels so nice that there’s a knot of dread in his stomach knowing he has to break this moment. But he needs to stop running from this conversation. He doesn’t want it to turn into a fight, and that’s easy enough to avoid if they just talk. He yawns. Dan hums and stretches and the long line of his spine pop-pop-pops.
“I’m sorry,” Dan says.
“Shut up,” Phil half-heartedly slaps Dan’s side. “We’ve both… neither of us have been fair to each other.”
“I shouldn’t have said all those things last night,” Dan’s voice is tight, worried. “I should know better. I refused to see someone professional for years. I should know that screaming at you won’t change your mind.”
There’s a lump in Phil’s throat so large it’s reminding him of that Jawbreaker movie, which does absolutely nothing for his morbidity panic.
“You’ll get the help you need when you’re ready for it. And in the meantime, Philly, I’m here.”
“But you need help too,” he says. “You’re struggling too, this isn’t just about me.”
“Yeah,” Dan shrugs. There isn’t an easy answer. That’s the fucking problem.
“I… if I saw someone, there’s every chance they’ll tell me I’m wasting their time. I’ve been to therapy, I know how to unpack trauma, I’ve got the tips and tricks…” he shakes his head, “I shouldn’t be struggling like this.”
“But you are,” Dan says slowly, deliberately, “and it’s okay to ask for help.”
“I just wish I could press pause on my stupid fucking anxiety and focus on your post-tour depression.”
Dan barks out a laugh then, so surprising that it makes Phil jump. It’s not unkind though; it’s an overwhelmingly welcome sound. “I wish I could press pause on my post-tour depression and focus on your stupid fucking anxiety.”
Phil sits up. “I love you, dork.”
Dan pulls him into a kiss. “Love you, idiot.”
They lay back down together as the storm lets up. The sun breaks through the lightened clouds and Phil tries not to read too much into the symbolism of it all; Dan would gently tease him about the universe’s randomness anyways if he did.
*
The grassy area is nice; the ground is drier than it has a right to be in December, especially considering the storm that had blown through a few hours before. Because the planet is dying it’s warm enough today that they leave their big winter coats in the car.
Dan almost teases Phil for wearing Interactive Introverts merch but can’t think of what the joke would actually be. He just thinks it’s funny, after months being surrounded by the branding and now having the choice to wear anything he wants, Phil opts for the familiar black hoodie.
They sit a little way apart from one another, not for any particular reason. Just because they’re feeling too much and it’s all on different scales— Phil’s feeling wound too tight, and Dan too exposed. So Phil sits spread in an attempt to let the stress running through his veins out into the world, and Dan sits compact with his legs curled up and his knees on his chest in an attempt to keep his tethers from fraying any further.
Dan eyes Phil’s hand on the grass, where he’s leaning all his weight back on. He wants to reach for it. To thread their fingers together. He doesn’t, for a million reasons he’s not going to bother to list. But the thought and the want cross his mind.
“Can we go home now?” Phil asks, not looking at Dan but looking instead to the horizon and the coast before it.
“You want to?” Dan asks, hoping his tone his neutral. He doesn’t want to convince Phil they should stay another night only because he sulked his way into a win.
“Yeah,” Phil says, sitting up a little straighter. Phil had mentioned he’d been eager to get back to the city ever since the storm rolled out. “I don’t wanna die out here.”
“We’re not going to die,” Dan says.
“You don’t know that.”
“We’re not going to die,” he says again, gripping Phil’s hand. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Can’t help it… everyone’s wrong sometimes. But we’re going to be okay, Phil.”
He waits to see if Phil has anything to say to that. Instead, Phil grips Dan’s hand back just as tightly. Dan shuffles to sit closer to him.
“Yeah?” Phil says, half question and half agreement.
He kisses him. “Yeah. We’re not going to die. We’re going to be old, old men together, and someday they’re gonna download our consciousness into robot bodies so we can be old, old robots together. So just… I know that saying don’t worry doesn’t ever actually stop someone from worrying but like, we’re not going to die, Phil.” He kisses him again. “Not tonight in our sleep, not driving the rental car back to London. We’re not.”
Phil smiles then, a barely-there tilt to the corners of his mouth. His full bottom lip which is prone to pouting seems to resist the smile.
“You can’t just state things. Definitive things like we’re not gonna die. It’s like saying the Titanic was unsinkable. You’re tempting fate, Danny.”
“I’m saying it,” Dan raises an eyebrow. “Guess you’ll have to kill me if you want me to stop.”
Phil kisses Dan’s knuckles before letting go of his hand to stand and pace a few steps. Dan figures he has too much nervous energy to be sitting still. The wind is howling in his ears, but Phil’s words when he finally speaks echo loudest for him.
“We should take a proper break on work things,” Phil says, determined. Something they’ve been bouncing around for a while now, too nervous to commit to. “Pause the gaming channel, focus on life things. The house. June videos, maybe. Brains…”
“The plants,” Dan smiles. God, Phil loves that smile.
“The plants,” he nods. “Things that really matter. Not that the rest doesn’t matter. But we can’t keep at this pace anymore. You’re sad and I’m worried and… I want us both to have a good night’s sleep again. Better to take a proper break, and figure out later what we want the new pace to be when we feel like actual people again.”
Dan pulls Phil close. Phil presses a kiss to the top of his head and Dan breathes him in, his lips against Phil’s cold smooth skin.
They’ll take a proper break. They’ll get the help they need, for work and from doctors and all the people who surround them with love. And they’ll take care of each other. That’s the trick. Some days require a hell of a lot more than others. But it’s been nearly a decade now, and as difficult as a lot of the journey has been, as blind and as dicey and as wonderful as it’s all been, that much remains— they take care of each other.