Work Text:
Falling.
Falling and crawling and rolling, rolling, rolling.
Phil is lying in his bed, curled up on his side, with his eyes shut tight and his breathing slow and steady. And yet he feels nothing but waves of anxiety all through his skin, like he’s falling, like it’s crawling all over him, like everything the bed he’s laying on is rolling, rolling, rolling despite being perfectly still. He wants to break out of his body through his spine, like it’s an exoskeleton— surely that would end this feeling. Surely the anxiety could be left behind with his husk, his shell.
He is still breathing slow and steady. And old trick he knows well. It’s something he can focus on, the only thing he can focus on. It’s helping, even if it’s only helping infinitesimally. It’s keeping him from breaking apart.
He absolutely hates this.
Most days aren’t bad like this. Most days just include him not wanting to make a phone call or agonizing over how stupid he looks when he trips over his own feet. Most days just include things like being worried about money or his family or the specific tightrope of his life as a very private person who is in the public eye.
But every once in a while he gets a day like this. A day where the anxiety doesn’t live in his head anymore, it migrates out to his body. He wakes up feeling off kilter, a panic attack or even the constant threat of one leaves him feeling drained, and everything is too much.
Everything. All of it. Even things he loves.
He hears something over the buzzing in his brain, the cacophonic chaos that is filling the empty space in the otherwise quiet apartment. It starts hesitantly even if he knows what the sound is right away. It’s piano keys. Heavy, out of tune piano keys. No real melody, nothing Phil recognizes. Not even a scale. It’s like morse code that isn't actually morse code but which is sending a message loud and clear: I’m here.
Phil rolls over onto his back. Dan stops playing random notes and begins plonking out the opening bits of Für Elise with the same level of hesitation he’d had before. Not because he doesn’t know it. He does, it’s what he learned piano for. But he’s testing the waters, Phil knows. Waiting to see if Phil can handle it. Waiting to see if it will help.
Phil had left his bedroom door open. Dan’s is open as well. The music travels easily across the hallway. Phil’s still alone, he still has the space he needs on days like this. And Dan is right there.
It’s something old, something tried and true. Something Dan does sometimes and Phil doesn’t even ask him for and fuck does he love him so much for it. He can remember when Dan first played for him, over a grainy Skype connection with lag and shitty internet. He can remember Dan’s rosy patch in full frustrated bloom because he kept stumbling over his fingers making tiny mistakes that Phil hardly noticed or cared about.
He can remember Dan’s bashfulness when they’d already been Skyping for an hour and he said, as casually as he could fake, “Hey, uh, I’ve been working on something. D’you wanna see?”
And Phil nodded, and Dan pulled his old keyboard piano into his lap and started playing what Phil recognized as Muse’s “Neutron Star Collision”— a song the two of them had gushed over, lyrics that felt written just to describe how they feel about each other. And sure, maybe everyone who falls in love feels that way about song lyrics, but it didn’t change the fact that Phil’s face cracked into a wide smile while listening to Dan play.
“Fuck,” Dan frowned as he tripped over some notes. He shook his head, frustrated. “I had it down perfectly before, I swear.”
“I believe you,” Phil teased.
Dan looked up, and Phil hated nothing more than the miles and miles between them. “Guess you make me nervous or something, Lester.”
That was still very new to Phil at the time, the idea that he could make anyone nervous. Let alone this beautiful boy whose eyes crinkled when he smiled. This beautiful boy with his own bad days to deal with, something they would learn to deal with along the way.
It’s less new nowadays, and also he makes Dan less nervous. So when familiar songs like Muse or Final Fantasy soundtracks drift through from Dan’s room into his, there are no nervous flubs. Sometimes Dan plays a little too quickly, sometimes he decides halfway through a song that he wants to play a different one instead, but Phil feels a calmness he hasn’t felt for hours start to radiate through him and he knows that Dan sounds perfect.
Perfect, but a little too far away for his taste. Even if he’d kicked Dan out of bed as soon as he recognized it was a bad day, even if he’d told Dan he wanted some space, he can’t help his tactile nature.
“Dan,” he calls, still on his back in the centre of the bed. The room is dim as the sun has started to fall and he never bothered to turn the lights on as his anxiety built and built over the day. He thinks of the fairy lights in Dan’s room and wishes he had something like that in here. “Daaaaaaan!”
The playing stops. “Wot?” Dan says with a laugh. An amused, expected laugh.
“In here, please.”
There’s some rummaging while Dan grabs his old keyboard piano, then makes the short walk from his room to Phil’s. He sits at the foot of the wicker bed. He smiles a crooked, dimpled smile when Phil nudges him with his toes.
“Thank you,” Phil says. Dan doesn't say anything, just smiles a bit wider and starts playing.
The song kinda sounds like falling. The melody is falling. And Dan’s hands crawl knowingly across the keys. And the sounds are rolling, rolling, rolling over Phil.