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Phil’s first mistake was going looking for the source of the humming noise. His second was finding it.
In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have touched it.
This only occurred to him as he was whizzing through some sort of continuum while apparently experiencing all five stages of grief at once, plus a couple of extras he’d just made up, and feeling like he was being squeezed backwards through a tube of toothpaste.
It only lasted a second, and then he was being spat out in his bath.
“Ow,” he said pointedly, then realised he was expecting an apology from the time space continuum and that it unlikely to be forthcoming.
To add insult to injury, he was in his pyjamas, and every single emoji looked somehow unbearably smug.
The shower dripped on him as he untangled his knees from his neck, and he glared balefully up at it while trying to make sure all of his internal organs had made it through whatever the hell that was. He was never touching anything again. He was going to wear oven gloves for the rest of his life.
Dan would probably have something to say about that, but Dan would just have to deal. In any case, Dan’s first words would probably be ‘why the fuck did you touch it??’ and Phil had to concede that that was a valid question.
While Phil was trying to scrub the water off the back of his neck, it occurred to him that their bath in the current London flat did not have an overhead shower.
He was in a stranger’s house.
“Huh,” he said, staring around. This room was ringing several bells, all at once, like some kind of hideous mental alarm system. The colour of the tiles. That one that was cracked by the door. The slightly mildewed shower curtain. The Original Source mint and teatree shower gel. The forest of half-empty conditioner bottles. The hair dye. The battered cabinet above the sink and the way the loo system dripped ominously.
The patch of damp on the ceiling that he had contemplated for years as he had a bath.
“Ah, fuck,” he said stridently, instantly in the worst mood he’d ever been in.
“I’m calling the police!” said a high, reedy voice from outside the bathroom door.
“No, you’re not, Phil,” he said, with fatalistic resignation, the memories already beginning to trickle into his head.
There was a moment of silence. Then, uncertainly: “yes, I am?”
**
So. He was in Manchester. He was in Manchester in 2009. And his twenty-two-year-old self was the other side of that door, terrified and wishing – for the first time ever – that he’d never moved out of his parents’ house.
The bathroom door technically swung outwards in this flat, but twenty-two-year-old Phil had the strength of terror and had managed to dig his heels into the cheap laminate flooring to prevent the door from budging.
“I am calling the police!” Baby Phil said, his voice high with bravado.
“You left your phone on the bedside table when you came to investigate the noise,” Phil said wearily. He was examining the bathroom. If this was where he was going to spend the next few hours, then he could probably fashion some sort of nest out of Baby Phil’s towels and catch up on some sleep – provided he didn’t get taken down to the station to answer some awkward questions.
“Hey, look, is anything humming anywhere in the flat? Kind of like a, microwave-on-acid, sort of hum? Really loud?”
“What have you done?” Baby Phil demanded, voice managing to ratchet up another octave.
“Nothing,” Phil said wearily. “I know how dumb this is going to sound, but that’s the time-warp, and I need to get back into it.”
There was another, sceptical silence, and then Phil heard himself say “OK….”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Oh no, no, I do!” Baby Phil said hurriedly, in the tone of someone blatantly humouring the strange man who had somehow managed to get into his windowless bathroom without using the door. How Baby Phil had thought Phil had managed that was unclear, but then, critical thinking under pressure had never been his forte.
Phil sighed. “You know what, that’s fine, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to believe me. Could you just – go and look for the humming noise?”
“I’m not leaving you alone in my flat!” There was a faint sound of the bathroom door hinges straining as Baby Phil put his full weight on it again. “I don’t know who you are! Who are you? Why are you in my flat? What are you doing here?”
That’s right, Phil. Start with the hard questions. “I’m you,” Phil said, aware of how it would sound.
“….. no, you’re not,” Baby Phil said, voice rank with suspicion.
“Ok, not you, you,” Phil said, exasperated. “I’m you from the future.” He winced. There really was no way to make that sound good. “I’m you from ten years in the future. I think. It’s 2009, right?”
The door hinges squeaked as Baby Phil relaxed a little bit. For perhaps the first time in his life, Phil rejoiced that he’d been and probably still was a little weirdo with antisocial habits and very specific viewing preferences. “Huh. Do you…. Have a message? From the future?”
For a lightning second, Phil considered lying and then remembered he’d never been all that good at it. “No,’ he said honestly. “I went looking for a humming noise in my flat, and then I poked it.”
“So you’re not meant to be here?”
“Don’t think so.”
A pause. “Huh,” Baby Phil said again. “Do you… want to be here? Is the future that bad?”
Phil considered Brexit and then weighed it up against his London flat, Dan sleeping next to him, and the fact that Baby Phil still slept in a twin bed. “Phil,” he said, “you have no idea how little I want to be here.”
The door creaked again, and then the handle moved. Baby Phil’s head appeared round the edge of the door, and Phil winced at the sight of his hair. Both of them flinched as their eyes met.
“Weird,” breathed Baby Phil, not entirely unappreciatively. “Is that what I look like?”
“Is that what I looked like?” Phil said, with a great deal less appreciation. This was not the first time he had been surprised that Dan had looked at him and gone ‘having that’, and it wouldn’t be the last, but the hair was really something.
“What did you do to my hair?”
“It’s my hair,” Phil snapped, “and I improved it.”
“Mm,” Baby Phil said dubiously. He was edging progressively around the door, and Phil was getting a better and better look at him all the time. There was something deeply unsettling about seeing himself in the flesh, decade younger notwithstanding. It was like looking in a mirror with the angles all wrong – he was somehow absolutely convinced that his face should be the other way round. He wasn’t sure he would have recognised himself in the street.
He sighed, landed his hands on the edge of the bath and began to lever himself up and out of it. His coccyx was killing him. There was a shriek, a whirl of yellow-plaid shirt, and the door slammed again.
“Phil,” Phil said wearily.
“You can’t come out!” The note of hysteria was back in Baby Phil’s voice.
“Why?” Phil asked, calling on reserves of patience he would have sworn he didn’t have. “We just established that we are one, but I have better hair.”
“Are you going to wear my skin as a coat?” Baby Phil asked, high-pitched once more.
And this was the moment when Phil went back to regretting that he was a little weirdo with anti-social habits and very specific viewing preferences. “I have my own skin,” he said, which had sounded OK in his head, but then he was a little weirdo with… yeah, he knew what he was thinking.
However, he was forgetting that he had found his perfect target audience and it was himself. “That’s true,” Baby Phil said dubiously, in a more normal register.
Phil leant back against the door. “Look, I’m you, OK? From ten years in the future. I can prove it. You named your first chest hair Winston. You were so proud of that little guy. And he was so alone. For so long.” There was a tentative little silence and, encouraged, Phil pressed on. “You told everyone you lost your virginity to a girl, but you didn’t. You lost it to Ben Merton in a Gregg’s bathroom, and you made it like three seconds into what I can now tell you was a very uninspiring hand job before you came all over yourself, and you got come on your tie and had to cover it up with toothpaste so Mum wouldn’t find out-”
“OK!” Baby Phil said shrilly, clearly unnerved that his – their – deepest secrets were being spilled out between them.
“So you agree? I’m me? I mean, you? And we’re us? But mainly me?” He had ten years on this Phil. He was more Phil than this Phil was Phil.
Christ, he was tired.
It had been three in the morning when he’d gone investigating with the intention of unplugging whatever it was and going back to bed, and now he was wondering if he could unplug himself.
The silence was still ongoing on the other side of the door. “Fine, fuck, look. I will stay in here and I will lock the door. You go and look for the humming noise. Don’t touch it.”
He could only imagine the chaos if Baby Phil was sent rocketing through into the future. Apart from anything, Dan and Phil’s moral compasses were two very different animals. Phil’s pointed mostly northwards, but Dan’s had created entirely new dimensions in which to point. There was an outside chance that twenty-eight-year-old Dan might look at twenty-two-year-old Phil and go ‘I’m having that’ again. Hair and all.
It was an outside chance but it was still a chance Phil was not going to risk. Dan was in favour of imparting learning in a way for which Baby Phil was not ready.
“OK,” said Baby Phil. “I’ll go look.”
**
For the next fifteen minutes, Phil stood in the bathroom staring up at the crack in the ceiling he had always thought looked like a Victorian lady, and now realised looked like a problem his landlord should have sorted before letting the flat. Finally, when Phil had finished the second draft of his mental email to the landlord, there was a tentative tap on the door.
“I can’t hear anything humming?” Baby Phil’s voice said, and Phil’s heart sank. He did not want to have to roam Manchester looking for a time warp in these pyjamas. “But there’s a weird light coming from under my sink.”
“<>i>Don’t touch it,” Phil said urgently. “OK, OK. Can I come out now?”
“I suppose,” Baby Phil said ungraciously, and Phil breathed a sigh of relief.
Fifteen minutes after that, they were both sat at the breakfast bar, staring into their cups of coffee in uncomfortable silence. Phil had unsubtly placed himself between Baby Phil and the glowing, humming light under the sink. He didn’t know how Baby Phil had missed the humming noise – it seemed to be the only thing he could hear.
“So what do you do?” Baby Phil asked finally, with the forced brightness he recognised as the one he adopted when placed in an unwanted social situation.
Dan, mostly, Phil thought but didn’t say. “What, like, for work?”
“Yeah. You – we have a job, right?” Baby Phil said, eyeing Phil’s pyjamas.
Phil crossed his legs defensively. “Yes, we have job. I freelance. I do a bit of work for the BBC, some independent stuff… mostly I’m still with YouTube.”
Baby Phil looked surprised, not entirely flatteringly. “YouTube? Really? That’s still a thing?”
Phil thought of the chaos that would be his life if YouTube was not still a thing. “Oh yeah, it’s a thing. It’s bigger than ever.”
“Huh,” Baby Phil said dubiously. “But it’s not, like, a career, is it? You can’t make money from it. It’s just… videos.”
“I make enough,” Phil said, not willing to go into the mess of merchandise, marketing, royalties and touring that made up his admittedly confusing career. “Martyn works for us now,” he added, like bait.
“Really? But Martyn’s got a real job.”
“Thanks ever so,” Phil said dryly, and slurped his coffee obnoxiously. “We make money. I’ve got a flat.” And a boyfriend, which is more than you’ve got, he added mentally. Smug little shit.
“I was actually thinking of giving it up,” Baby Phil was saying, with hilarious world-weariness. “I mean, I’m twenty-two, you know?” The hand pressed self-consciously to Baby Phil’s chest was the icing on the cake. “You know, I can’t be doing it forever-”
“You can be doing it forever,” Phil said urgently. He wasn’t sure how much he could say without ruining the entire world – or his entire world, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned – but if this was why he’d been sucked through a time warp at three in the morning, then he was not going to leave the job unfinished.
“OK,” Baby Phil said, his voice sliding up a couple of notches as his stressed terror kicked back in again. “YouTube! Great! Love it! Will never leave!”
“Yeah, well, good,” Phil grunted. “So what are you doing now?” He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d been doing ten years ago, and he decided a little reciprocal curiosity was called for.
“Well, I’m doing my master’s – we got that, right?”
“Yeah, we got it.” It was amazing how far away and unimportant the master’s seemed now. “What else?”
“I don’t know!” Phil said defensively. “I guess I’ve been putting videos up, just not as regularly. I dunno, I’m just thinking about the future, you know?”
Phil knew. He was also thinking very hard about the future, and how much he wanted to be back in it.
“And I can’t exactly show my videos to an employer, can I?” Baby Phil rolled his eyes and dropped his voice into a mocking drone. “’Oh yeah guys, here’s this video where I talk about the lobster of responsibility, wanna hire me?’”
Phil paused, thinking back, and then remembered the video in question. “Hey, for the time, that editing was good!”
Baby Phil eyed him. “Yeah, I know, I worked really hard on it. I’m just saying, it’s not exactly impressive to future employers.”
Oops. “Yeah,” Phil agreed hastily. “And it was super original! Come on, give yourself some credit.”
“Yeah,” Baby Phil said again, glaring at him. “I am. I just can’t give it to an employer because they’ll think I’m weird.”
Phil sighed, frustrated. “You would be surprised, the shit employers ask for. Look, look, OK, it’s not the content they’ll care about, it’s the editing. You’ve got a whole portfolio of stuff you’ve come up with and edited and produced yourself, and that’s on basic equipment, not the professional stuff. Don’t sell yourself short – and don’t sell YouTube short,” he added, remembering his pitch, and exactly how much Google had paid for it. “It’s…. useful,” he finished lamely. “And fun! You make so many friends from being on YouTube.”
Baby Phil’s nose wrinkled. “What, like creepy strangers from the internet?” he asked, but Phil’s mind was already elsewhere.
Ten years ago. Ten years ago and there was no evidence that this Phil had ever so much as looked at Dan’s profile page on whatever crappy internet social media they were using right now.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Don’t you get messages from people?”
“I get loads of messages from people,” Baby Phil said, with simple pride. “But I’m not making all of them my best friend.”
“Yeah, uh… had any particular messages recently?”
“What do you mean?” Baby Phil asked urgently, and Phil realised that the kid had put two and two together and come up with lasting trauma.
“Look, look, there’s a kid called Dan,” he said, and Baby Phil pulled a face.
“Oh, yeah, him.”
“Oh, so you do know him?”
“I mean, not really. He’s sent me a couple of messages. I’ve kind of ignored it. I don’t know what to say! He’s not asking me anything, they’re just… messages. It’s kind of weird!”
The way that Baby Phil was staring down at his coffee, head tilted, meant that he was flattered but rather confused. In fairness, that was still how Phil felt when he thought about Dan.
“Just talk to him, OK? He doesn’t want, you know… ‘AmazingPhil’. I mean, he does, or that’s what he thinks he wants, but what he actually wants is just – Phil.”
“What, like, my kidneys?”
“What is it with you and thinking strangers want your body parts? Because if I’m remembering my early twenties accurately, almost nobody wanted any of my body parts.”
Except Dan, but Baby Phil would figure that out soon enough.
“I just… what do I say?”
“Anything! Literally anything. He just wants to talk to you. He wants to be your friend.” Your special, special friend. “Give him a chance.”
“But he’s just a kid!”
Ah yes, twenty-two, when nineteen had seemed like a vast difference of age and experience. “You’ll figure it out.” Phil figured a little carrot was due to be deployed among all the stick. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be the one with a bit of worldly wisdom?”
Baby Phil looked a little terrified, but he also looked intrigued, and Phil would take that. “I don’t have any!” he said sadly.
“He doesn’t know that,” Phil pointed out. “Anyway, trust me, compared with him, you’re streets ahead.”
“Hang on, I don’t know who this person is! And I don’t want to take advantage of… him!”
At least Baby Phil had always had his heart in the right place, even if he’d apparently thought that strangers on the street had designs on putting it into an organ transplant bag. “You won’t. He wants to be friends. You’re gonna be his. You’re going to love him so much. Just-just- Just message Dan. I’m going to get back in the time warp now.”
“Cool,” said Baby Phil. “Should we hug or something?”
“No,” Phil said flatly, and opened the cupboard under the sink. “Oh, superb,” he said, staring at the tiny opening, and the bleach bottle teetering perilously close to the edge of the glowing, eddying time warp. Grimly, he pretzelled himself down. “Message Dan!” he said, and then he was being sucked in.
**
Phil very slowly closed the doors under the kitchen sink, and leaned back against the breakfast bar, chewing a nail.
That had been weird.
That had been very weird.
It was only the sight of the two gently-steaming mugs on the breakfast bar that made him believe it had actually happened.
He considered it, then went to his computer, idly checking his emails. There was a new message from the mysterious Dan. A black and white avatar of a good-looking boy with big eyes and a swooping fringe stared back at him as he clicked on the link.
‘Hi Dan!’
Delete delete delete delete.
‘Hi there!’
Delete.
‘Hi, I’m Phil!’
No.
‘Hey, a creepy thirty-year-old version of me told me to message you and that I would love you so much, so here I am. No pressure!’
Yeah, accurate but not exactly reassuring.
‘Hey Dan! Great to hear from you!’
It’d do for now. Phil would just have to see what came of it.
**
Their bedroom was dark, and amazingly Dan was apparently still asleep, judging by the sound of his soft, deep breathing. Their bedroom smelled familiar, slightly stuffy and sleepy, and just being in there made Phil yawn. He stumbled over to the bed and climbed in, trying to make sure he didn’t jostle Dan and wake him up, but as he relaxed into the bed, Dan rolled over to him, half coming awake and mumbling.
“Hey, you’re back,” he said, throwing an arm around Phil’s waist and burying his face in Phil’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Phil said, too tired to make much of it or wonder where Dan thought he’d been. “Yeah, I’m back.”
He was asleep almost before he’d finished the words.
He woke a bare handful of hours later to the sound of Dan moving around the room. He rolled over, groaning, and checked his phone. It was seven am.
“What the fuck?” he asked, wearily indignant, and Dan chuckled.
“Go back to sleep, you idiot,” he said, and scratched his fingers through Phil’s hair briefly, bending down to kiss him. “I’ll see you later.”
“Hmm,” Phil said, already half-asleep again. “Later.”
**
It was much, much later when Phil woke up again, squinting against the headache pounding in his left temple. Gloomy December daylight was filtering through their cheap, shitty blackout curtains, and the room felt cold outside the cocoon of the duvet. Phil cracked his eyes open and listened, but the flat was quiet and still in a way it never was when Dan was in it. Wherever he’d gone, he was still there.
Phil groaned to no one in particular and sat up, fumbling for his phone on the bedside table. One pm; that was more like it. These days, he tried not to sleep in so much, but he figured he could use a break. He yawned and stretched his legs against the sheets, then paused, frowning at the unfamiliar pattern and texture of the fabric. Had Dan sprung for a new set of sheets? If he had, they were much nicer than the normal Wilko no-iron ten-quid polycotton ones they usually bought. These sheets felt like they had a thread-count. They were expensively uncomfortable, and he didn’t remember Dan telling him about them.
That was a mystery for later, though. Dan would let him know – volubly and probably at length – when he’d bought them and how much an idiot Phil was for forgetting when he got back from… wherever he was. In the meantime, Phil wanted coffee and some Crunchy Nut.
He rolled out of bed, made his unsteady way to the bathroom – his own bathroom – brushed his teeth, eyed his contact lenses and decided against it, and headed for the kitchen, already plotting a self-care Lush bath bomb post-breakfast.
Then he discovered that Dan had moved all the mugs a cupboard to the right, the only milk they had left was almond milk he didn’t remember them buying, and, weirdest of all, Dan had emptied the dishwasher before going out. Phil ‘s habit of leaving the cupboard doors open might be a bone of contention, but Dan’s utter inability to empty the dishwasher was another. Suspicious, Phil flicked on the kettle and leaned against the kitchen counter, surveying his domain.
The little dining table at the end of the island was free, and Phil got out a bowl and spoon while eyeing the neat stacks of paper covering the island. One of them was hidden under a pile of books containing the Law Review and something titled ‘The White Book’ which looked official and frightening.
These were new and concerning additions to their kitchen landscape. Phil munched his cereal and flicked through the Law Review, eyeing the post-its that had been added at intervals. They were all annotated with Dan’s scrawl, and said things like ‘Hunter v Stobart’ or ‘Re: Emerson Publishing’, and most frequently just frustrated question marks.
“Hum,” said Phil, and took himself through into the living room.
Even here, something was fucked up. Phil’s YouTube plaque was still proudly displayed, but Dan’s was nowhere to be seen. The creeping sense of wrongness crawled another couple of vertebrae up Phil’s spine. The Dan and Phil Games plaque was also missing, and there were photos everywhere.
Phil loved his life, but if there was one thing he loved a little less, it was that almost every room in their flat was effectively part of a film set. There was self-expression aplenty, but not exactly untrammelled self-expression – namely, no photos, no family and nothing he would have to explain. Somehow, overnight, a whole crop of photos had appeared, neatly framed. There was even one large, glossy and clearly professional photo of him and Dan over Dan’s piano, looking blissfully happy and very much together.
Phil was no stranger to professional photographs, but he had no memory of ever having this one taken.
The more he looked, the more photos of him and Dan he could see, together… and compromising. They’d agreed long ago that private life was private, and this was about as unprivate as it could get.
Which was admittedly a weird thought to be having in the middle of his private living room, but he knew what he meant.
There they were in Japan, under the cherry blossoms, Dan kissing Phil’s cheek. There they were in the Bahamas, arms around each other’s waist, Phil’s head on Dan’s shoulder, Dan’s hair a frizzy mess and his eyes light and tranquil with happiness. There they were in Florida, kissing against a warm sunset. And there, on the bookshelf, in a little silver frame, was Phil sliding a ring onto Dan’s left hand, ludicrously down on one knee.
Phil sank down onto the sofa, adopted the brace position and wheezed against his own knees.
**
Are we married?
Haha
Answer the question
Why yes, Phil. Yes we are. Two years of marital bliss which I hardly ever regret
But you’re pushing it, Philip. Are you OK?
Very no. Wrong world. Bye.
Do I need to take time off?
Phil?
Philip?!
PHIL
**
So. They were married. That was cool. It was fine. Not before time, if Phil was honest.
But that was a small matter compared to the fact that they had got married and Phil had apparently blanked the entire thing.
That and a day of digging through Dan’s stuff had brought up a series of horrifying inconsistencies with the world Phil knew. DanandPhilGames was gone, and had apparently never existed. Danisnotonfire only had seven videos which stopped abruptly and without explanation in 2010, had fourteen subscribers and the top video had a hundred hits. In their gaming room, which still appeared to be a gaming room, much to Phil’s enormous relief, there was a graduation photo with Dan circa 2012, smiling awkwardly and looking supremely uncomfortable in a cheap suit and an academic gown. There was another plaque in there, for a channel called ReadyPlayerPhil. Weirdly, there was still a giant papier-maché Dil head in there, which Phil didn’t want to examine too closely.
But there was a second desk there, with a bookshelf full of books. The Secret Barrister. Tort, Contract, Land, a plethora of intellectual property law books, and a framed letter from someone terrifyingly called Slaughter and May, congratulating Mr Howell on his successful application to their training contract.
Dan was a lawyer.
Dan was a lawyer.
Dan.
A lawyer.
They had a humorous fridge magnet that said ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’, and Phil had laughed hysterically for about fifteen minutes.
There were things that he had done too. A newspaper clipping in a cheap IKEA frame from the Metro about the ‘internet star’ changing the face of radio. Elsewhere, in their bedroom, he found a collage about a programme he had apparently produced and edited for the BBC about homophobia in schools, with a little card at the top written in Dan’s handwriting which said ‘congratulations to the best producer and best boyfriend’.
The show had apparently won an award, judging by the trophy underneath the collage, set next to a photo of them at the ceremony, Phil with his arm wrapped around Dan as they both held up their backstage passes, Dan pouting ridiculously at the camera and clearly having the time of his life.
Phil sat on their bed, with the stupid scratchy expensive sheets that they’d clearly only bought because they thought that was what successful people should sleep on, and tried to get his whirling head to focus on something. Anything. A plan.
They were clearly doing well in this universe. They were happy, they were together, they were in love, they were married. But… well, it was stupid to say their lives were separate, but they weren’t together in the way he was with his Dan. The crippling co-dependency wasn’t there, and goddammit, Phil was prepared to fight an entire pointless one-man-crusade to protect that nonsense. Some kind of Sliding Doors bullshit had clearly happened because of what he’d said to Baby Phil.
Maybe Baby Phil had supported his Dan so much that the law course had been OK, and that was good, except that it was also terrible.
So Phil was going to have to find the damn time warp, go back, and sabotage Dan’s entire university career.
An hour later, a key turned in the lock. Phil did not hear that. Phil had his ear pressed against the freezer door, listening intently. He wasn’t sure the humming was the same frequency as the time warp, but he was gearing himself up to take that risk. If he had to shove himself feet first into the freezer to get his Dan back, then so be it.
“Hey, Phil,” Dan said from the doorway.
“Hush. Can you hear humming?” Phil demanded, throwing up an imperious hand.
“Uh, yeah?” Dan said, slowly putting his rucksack on the floor. There was a bike helmet attached to it. What the entire fuck. “Because it’s a fridge. That’s what it does. If someone asked me, Dan, what does a fridge do, I would say, well, my strangely uninformed pal-”
“Shut up and come and listen to the fridge,” Phil said.
“OK then.” Dan obligingly walked forwards, dropped to the floor next to Phil and listened. “Well, it’s definitely humming. What am I listening for exactly?”
“Well, it’s going hmmmm, but it should be making more of a MMMMMM. You know?”
“Not even a little,” Dan said soothingly. “So, uh. You’re still alive then?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Phil asked, giving him a distracted glance, followed by another longer look, because Dan looked like a whole snack in that suit with the loosened tie (a suit), and that merited appreciation but not much more at this current time.
“Well, I don’t know, Phil, but when I get a text from my husband that says ‘wrong universe, bye’, I get my paralegal to cancel all of my meetings, take a sick day and come home immediately.”
“What’s a paralegal?”
“You’ve met Jackie! That’s not the point. Are you alright?”
“Jury’s out. Hahahaha, jury, law, get it?”
Dan was dead-eyed and unamused. “Have done for six years now, yes, thank you Phil. We were going out tonight to celebrate my second year post-qualified-experience. But I’m guessing that that’s off the cards given your whole… deal… right now…” he trailed off as Phil went back to looking under the fridge.
The fucker had to be here somewhere.
“Phil,” Dan said after a few moments of Phil silently feeling around under the fridge.
“What?” Phil snapped, nerves fraying further with each passing moment.
“What are you looking for?” Dan’s eyes zeroed in on Phil’s hands when he emerged out from under the fridge. “And where’s your ring?”
Ah.
Phil sighed and sat back on his heels. “If I tell you, do you promise not to have me committed?”
Dan looked at him seriously. “Yes. Mainly because the Priory doesn’t have any inpatient slots available for the next three weeks. I checked on the way home.”
Phil snorted, shaking his head. “That’s fair. OK. I…. am not your Phil.”
Dan stared at him. “Like. In a pod-person, body-swap kind of way, not my Phil?”
“If it were a body-swap, I’d still be wearing a ring,” Phil pointed out, so, so glad that even now, Dan just rolled with whatever weird shit was on Phil’s mind. “Anyway, you’re a lawyer. You’re not supposed to know about this stuff.”
“Still a nerd, Phil. They don’t revoke your geek license when you pass the LPC.”
“Huh. OK. Well, no, not a body swap. More of a, went back in time and accidentally altered the universe… thing. Well, not the universe. Our universe.”
“But you still know me, right?” Dan said, looking vulnerable for the first time. “I mean, I was who you were expecting to be in bed with last night, right?”
“Oh yeah, no, that’s all fine,” Phil said quickly. “But my you, my Dan, he’s not a lawyer, he’s a youtuber like me. We do YouTube together. We still live in this flat, but there’s a hundred percent fewer law books and way more plaques and gaming shit and cameras. Fewer photos, though. That’s a bummer. I like the photos. You guys look really happy together.”
Dan’s face softened briefly. “We are,” he said, then shook himself. “So if you want to change the universe back to get to your Dan, what do you need to do?”
“That’s why I’m trying to find the time warp!”
“The time warp, right, of course,” Dan said, straight-faced. “How stupid of me.”
“Dan.”
“I’m so sorry, I’m trying, I really am, but it’s three in the afternoon and I’m on my kitchen floor on my knees asking about the time warp, this isn’t exactly how I saw today going,” Dan said, with admirable calm.
“OK, that’s fair, I guess,” Phil agreed grudgingly. “Look, I’m looking for a light and a humming noise.”
“Can I interest you in an LED bulb?” Dan asked politely.
“LED bulbs don’t hum,” Phil snapped.
“Maybe not in your universe,” Dan said, then heaved himself up and held a hand out to Phil. “OK. OK, fine. Let’s go towards the light, babe.”
“You’re going to be looking up in-patient facilities while we do it, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes,” Dan said, laying a hand on Phil’s arm. “I’ve already texted your therapist.”
**
The humming noise was in their wardrobe.
“Huh,” Dan said, staring at it. “You touched that? Why do you always have to touch things? This is why we had to go to hospital in Japan and get you a tetanus shot, Phil. You’re gonna get time-rabies.”
“I think I already have it,” Phil said dolefully.
“So, uh, what’s the deal? You just walk in, you say a magic word, you dress in drag and do the hula?”
“Well, last time I just kind of touched it and got slorped in.”
“Slorped, nice, OK,” Dan agreed. “I’ll stand way back and hope it spits my Phil out.”
“I just don’t get it,” Phil said, staring at the coruscating light. “I don’t have to change anything here. You guys are happy! You’re married! You have photos up!”
Dan eyed him in silence for a second, the glowing light highlighting his cheekbones and casting interesting shadows over eyes and mouth. How did the bastard even look good in the warping light of the time space continuum, Phil wondered sourly.
Dan shrugged. “Well we’re happy. Maybe you aren’t. Maybe there’s something you need to change. Let yourself go. Put a couple of photos up. Go wild. Get married in Vegas. I don’t know.”
“Thanks,” Phil said dryly. “We’re not going to get married in Vegas, but cheers for the thought. I hope you guys stay happy.”
“We will,” Dan said, sublimely confident. “Go fix the universe.”
“Ugh,” Phil said, and got back into the closet.
**
Dan was still staring at their now entirely empty wardrobe when Phil burst back into the room.
“Love, I am so sorry,” he said urgently. “I crashed with Mike last night – you got my text, right? – and then they said the pitch today would take forty minutes and we were in there for four hours because of sodding budget concerns, and then you would not believe the traffic to get back here… are you OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I think I did,” Dan said, feeling a little dazed now the whole bizarre thing was clearly over. “You ever think how different your life would be if you’d just changed a couple of things?”
“About once a day, yeah. Why?”
Dan held a hand up and Phil pulled him to his feet. “Eh, no reason. Just one of those things. We’re OK, it’s all good. I wasn’t feeling dinner, by the way, so I cancelled it.”
“Is it bad if I say thank you?” Phil asked, pathetically grateful.
“Nah, that’s pretty much how I feel,” Dan said, crowding in close and looping an arm around his shoulders. “What does a guy have to do to get kissed around here?”
**
“Well, Toto,” Phil told the white ceiling, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
The time warp had spat him back out somewhere, but worryingly, it was nowhere Phil recognised instantly. It was a bedroom, with long-undecorated walls in a shade of ochre-magnolia, and a single bed with blue plaid sheets shoved up against the wall. There was eyeliner on the pillow, and Phil might have been briefly cozened into believing it was a girl’s room if it hadn’t been for the size nine converse on the floor and the encroaching sense of horrified recognition.
“Oh no,” he groaned, and ducked as something came flying at his face and an equally horribly familiar voice screeched,
“Who the fuck are you?”
Phil turned to look at the child in the doorway, and realised the moment the light from the hall fell on his face as Dan’s infant face creased in startled recognition.
“Wait. Phil?!”
**
“So,” Dan said, half an hour later. Thankfully, his parents and his brother were all out, and they had the house to themselves. They were now sat on the sofa in the living room, and the mandatory three-foot distance Phil had tried to impose was dying a drawn-out death.
It wasn’t as though he’d forgotten what Dan had been like as a nineteen-year-old with a violently obvious crush on Phil. But it was becoming increasingly clear that Dan had hidden his more tentacle tendencies from twenty-two-year-old Phil, and having thirty-two-year-old Phil crash into his bed had removed any inhibitions he might have felt. Phil was having to remove Dan’s hand from his thigh every thirty seconds.
“So,” Phil agreed, wondering if he could schedule in a quick chat about consent and boundaries before he yeeted himself back through the time warp, hopefully into the arms of his own Dan. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“Was hoping I knew, actually,” Dan said in a voice which Phil recognised as his inept nineteen-year-old attempt at flirting.
“I just want to get this out the way now,” he said, hoping to head things off at the pass, “I’m not going to fuck you. I don’t want to fuck you.”
He really hoped he hadn’t just made himself into a challenge, but from the light in Dan’s eyes, that was exactly what he’d done.
“You totally could though. If you wanted to.”
“I literally just said I do not want to,” Phil said. “I am from the future, and I have an age-appropriate Dan of my very own. You have an age-appropriate Phil who is just waiting for the right moment to show you his etchings, OK.”
“He has etchings?”
“Yeah, they’re improbably acrobatic diagrams of what he’d like to do to you, just give him some time and he’ll get there.”
“Oooh,” Dan said, his entire face lighting up. “Really? Like what kind of stuff?”
“Oh my god. Anyway. I am from the future.”
“Aren’t you, though,” Dan said, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. He was looking up at Phil from under his eyelashes, which was endearing and spectacularly ineffective. Had current-day Dan been looking at him that way, Phil would have known that Dan was trying to get him to do something he did not want to do.
“Why are you so calm about this?” he asked. “I am a strange man in your house, I literally told you I am from the future and I’m suggesting you make videos in your bedroom. You should be calling the police right now.”
“But you’re Phil! I know you’re Phil. You have the same eyes.” OK. Maybe Baby Dan was quite cute. “Maybe you’ve got other stuff the same too.”
And then again, maybe he wasn’t. “You haven’t seen his dick yet, kid, calm down,” Phil said dryly. “Look, all I am here to tell you is, don’t give up on YouTube.”
Dan stared at him, and Phil reached down and clamped his hand over Dan’s, where it was inching once more towards his upper thigh. “I’m not on YouTube. That’s Phil’s thing.”
“Oh. Oh wow. OK, well, start YouTube and stick with it.”
“I don’t know that Phil would like that,” Dan said doubtfully. “Like I said, it’s his thing.”
“Fuck Phil!” Phil said, then realised the opening he’d given Dan. “Not that way. Just make a video. We can do it now!”
Dan perked up, licking his lips and shaking his fringe out of his eyes. How did the kid see? “Yeah!” he said enthusiastically, and then his eyes dropped to Phil’s mouth. “You could totally show me how to use the… equipment.”
“…Right.”
**
“So in the long run, you’ll need a tripod, but this stack of books is fine for the time-being,” Phil said. It was half an hour later, Phil had gone through in painstaking detail all the equipment Dan would need. They’d booted up Dan’s laptop and waited for the free editing software to download. Dan had tried to sit in Phil’s lap once or twice but had, for the most part, behaved. Phil had made the horrifying discovery that he could actually pick up nineteen-year-old Dan and dump him on the bed a safe distance.
Definitely a talk about consent and boundaries.
It was weird; Phil had been attracted to Dan for what felt like most of his life. But there was a world of difference between the Dan he had had the hots for at twenty-two, and the Dan he fell asleep next to at thirty-two. This Dan was awkward and endearing and so eager to please, and Phil felt absolutely nothing for him other than concern and mild claustrophobia. It was like he’d turned off the Bluetooth in his cock.
“And honestly, content isn’t too important in the first video, just whack something up so it’s there.” Phil had considered steering Dan away from beginning his YouTube career with Hello Internet but then decided that that would be depriving the universe of a heritage event and himself of a lot of entertainment.
“Sure,” Dan said absently, chewing a nail and narrowing his eyes at Phil. “Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind. You, uh. You said you’re from the future.”
“Yes,” Phil said patiently.
“You said you had a – another version of me.”
“Yeah.” God, Phil missed Dan.
“What’s the deal? Are you guys, like, in love?”
“Yeah,” Phil felt the awful, soppy smile spreading across his face, the one he found himself wearing whenever he talked about Dan and how happy they were, how things had worked out. “Big in love. We’ve got a flat. And we work together a lot of the time. It’s nice, y’know?”
“Nice,” Dan repeated, thoughtfully. “That’s cool. I’d like that with someone. You know. Eventually. And you, you know. Actually like me, right?”
Phil’s heart softened all at once. For a moment, this Dan sounded like his Dan, who might be bad at it but asked for reassurance at least once a week. He would always wish that Dan was happier and more confident in himself, but it was still nice to know that Dan really wanted Phil to like him.
“Yes, Dan,” he said gently. “I actually like you. I love you very, very much.”
Dan shifted and the light fell across his face at a fraction of an angle’s difference, and for a brief second, he looked so much like Phil’s Dan that Phil’s stomach swooped. Then he looked up and the moment was gone, but his eyes were huge and liquid and full of hope. He looked young and vulnerable and rather scared, and Phil braced himself for whatever heartbreaking thing this young baby Dan was going to say.
Dan opened his mouth. “But we bang, right?” he said.
And there it was.
“Yeah, we bang, kid,” he said. “Like a screen door in a hurricane. Which you and I will not. Because you’re nineteen and I’m thirty-two.”
“But I’m overage,” Dan said hopefully, like the mere fact that it was no longer statutory rape would mean Phil would want to tap that in a heartbeat.
“I don’t care,” Phil said, slapping his thigh briskly and standing up. “You’re nineteen. D’you never think about how weird it would be for a thirty-two-year-old to want to date a nineteen-year-old? Because it doesn’t say anything good about the thirty-two-year-old, that’s all I’m saying. Make a YouTube video, Daniel. You’ll go far. I’m gonna go and find a timewarp. I bet it’s in your freezer.”
**
Dan stared at his computer, up on the pile of books, and wondered if maybe he’d been too obvious. Sometimes he came on a bit strong, but he really liked Phil.
Still, if this very strange afternoon had taught him anything, it was that Phil really liked him too and Dan was intrigued by this mention of etchings.
Idly, he switched on the webcam on his computer, and stood off to the side for a couple of seconds, staring out of the window and gathering his thoughts. From somewhere behind him in the house, there was a crow of glee and a strange whooshing noise, and then silence descended again.
Finally, he braced, and edged sideways into the frame.
“Hello, internet,” he said.
**
Phil fell out of the timewarp and staggered into a dining chair. Dan was on the sofa in the kitchen, arms crossed, staring at him.
“You know, the fact you just fell out of nowhere is the only reason you’re not getting the ass-whooping I’ve been preparing all day. That and the fact I’ve suddenly got a whole bunch of memories I didn’t have when I woke up.”
“For the record, you haven’t got any smoother,” Phil said, tipping his head back against the chair.
“You take that back,” Dan said sternly, and came over to pull Phil into a hug. “Long day?”
“Uuuuugh,” Phil groaned into his shoulder. “About a decade too long.”
Dan jostled his head until Phil pulled back, then kissed him gently. “You were really sweet to fetus me,” he said quietly. “I love you.”
“Love you too. Wait, you’re still a YouTuber, right?”
“As opposed to…?”
“I don’t know! A house husband, or an ASDA manager or a lawyer or something! I have been bounced around the universe today and all I want is my Dan.”
“D’awww,” Dan cooed, gently mocking, smooshing Phil’s face between his hands before letting go. “Yes, Phil, I’m a YouTuber. We’ve been on two tours and did the laundry to prove it, and we’ve won awards together and I love you. You’re my Phil.” He dotted a kiss on Phil’s nose and pulled back again. “So, about those etchings…?”
**