Work Text:
If he can keep walking, if he can keep moving, he’ll be alright. He just can’t stop. If he does, all the rushing anxieties Caleb is trying to outrun will surely catch up with him. But it’s nearing four in the morning, and he’s so fucking tired…
The flashing, neon, 24-hour sign in the restaurant window across the street is as welcome as the gates of heaven could ever be. Not that Caleb expects to ever see the gates of heaven. Even if he believed in them, he surely wouldn’t be welcomed.
Dan’s holding his head in his hands, elbows on his desk, eyes staring at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of him while nothing but the equivalence of radio static sounds in his mind. His eyes are burning. He should have turned a lamp on; he’s bathed only in the light from his monitor, and the room around him has long fallen dark.
First, it darkened when the sun had set. Then it darkened when Phil said he was heading to bed, and Dan nodded and said he’d be down soon. But that was hours ago, and he has only an additional 672 words to show for it.
Not even good words.
Words that will all probably be culled when he edits.
He’s changed his mind so many times on what the fuck this story is. He’s changed setting and genre and medium so many times he’s hardly sure he can even call this the same story anymore except that one thread remains— this is the story he needed. The story he needs to tell now, sure, but more than that it’s the story that Dan from however long ago deserved to read.
Dan feels a hand on the back of his head. It jolts him awake. He’s not sure when he fell asleep, but his neck hurts like hell from slumping onto his desk like he had.
Phil laughs a gravely, sleepy, deeply familiar laugh because Dan had jumped. Dan moves a leg to try to kick him, but just hits the wheels of his chair.
“C’mon,” Phil says. “Into bed while you still have use of your spine.”
Dan looks to the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Half-past two isn’t a time he sees as often as he used to. He sits up and stretches, and when he stands all the blood rushes too quickly to his long limbs. Phil seems to know, because he wraps his arms around Dan’s waist and holds him close.
“Get some good progress?” he asks.
Dan shrugs. “It’s morose. It’s flat.”
“It’s a first draft,” Phil reminds him.
He grunts out an affirmative sound. He lets Phil lead him down the stairs and into the welcoming warmth of their bed.
*
There’s terror in the fact he’s never done this before.
Sure, he and Phil can put author in their bios thanks to TABINOF and DAPGO. Sure, he churned out something surprising with “The Urge.” But original fiction, a story that has to stand on his own merit and abilities— something he doubts so intensely sometimes— it’s scary and new and different.
The writer’s workshop he’d attended in the summer taught him enough to feel a little more qualified. At least in the sense that he never so much as took a creative writing class and merely spent his formative years poking around fanfiction sites. Something one of the speakers mentioned sits heavy in his chest, even now: “To decide you will write, is to decide that you are entitled. It requires entitlement to say that your words are worth someone’s time and money. But this isn’t a bad thing so long as you can stand behind those words.”
He feels so behind in terms of craft, education, practice. All he’s running on is a raw need to be known, to share some thoughts.
*
There’s also a tremendous amount of relief in the fact he’s never done this before.
It’s not something the world is waiting for him to do, not something they’re sitting with a countdown for. It’s not a video he’s shamefully behind on posting. It’s not a weekly-or-so tweet. It’s something that, right now, is just his. It won’t be just his forever, if he can ever finish it to a state he’s proud of. But for now, he’s the only one holding himself accountable. He’s the only one holding himself to a standard. He’s the only one who he has to answer to.
And that’s a really nice change of pace.
He does let Phil see it, of course. When he’s unsure about something. It works the same as a video, asking Phil to take a look and being told “that bit’s boring, cut it” in the way only someone who really loves you can say without qualms.
But Phil doesn’t often say “that bit’s boring.” More often, he says things like “mood” and “will this detail come back?” and “hurry up and write more, I want to keep reading!”
*
“You must really love breakfast food,” the smiling waiter says when Caleb makes his third late-night visit of the week. He’s tall, and Caleb wonders if he’d have to tilt his head back to speak to him even if he wasn’t sitting so low in the booth.
“More like, I can’t sleep and you’re the only place open, bud,” he smiles back.
There’s a sickening combination which Dan fears all his drafts will hold— entitlement and self-indulgence.
The entitlement of saying: Me, Daniel Howell, a YouTuber who can’t even YouTube properly, is trying to be an author. And the self-indulgence of saying: not an author of some philosophical work or tell-all memoir or even a sci-fi adventure with distinct worldbuilding, but an introspective little nothing. With a meandering plot and too much time spent in the protagonist’s head and a happy ending that can be seen a mile away.
But he’d tried to write the other stuff. And he hated every word of it.
This feels better, this feels like the words that are always bouncing around the walls of his head like the bouncing DVD logo that only very occasionally hits the corner of the screen perfectly.
So he keeps writing it. A few hours a day. A few thousand words a week. Slowly, very slowly, he chips away at what he’s generously picturing to be a marble slab. Maybe he should just think of it as a block of ice— less expensive, less self-aggrandizing— but he doesn’t think he could handle the time crunch implied in the fact that it’s slowly melting.
*
Dan can’t sleep. He’s trying; he’s mimicking sleep. He’s laying in bed with his eyes closed and the heat of Phil’s body beside him, the night too quiet despite the whirl of thoughts refusing to shut up. He remembers hearing somewhere…? Mythbusters, or therapy, or the second page of a Google search? Somewhere, that having your body at rest when you can’t sleep is like, better than nothing. Which makes sense, but he thinks he heard somewhere that there’s actual science behind it too.
Phil is letting out soft— sometimes not so soft— rhythmic snores. It’s a metronome by which Dan can mark passing time, as he’s sure the moment he opens his eyes to look at a clock he’ll lose whatever nonexistent momentum he might’ve built towards falling asleep.
But soon he can’t help it, because some nebulous thought comes to the forefront of his mind, and he needs to capture it before it’s gone forever.
He opens his eyes and sends his hand among the sheets to search for his phone. He squints at the terribly bright light telling him it’s even later than he thought, and pulls up the notes app.
hoodie symbolism, coffees in the park, email wrongly sent to spam
Fuck, he hopes he still knows what all that means in the morning.
*
Dan doesn’t remember what the hell that note was supposed to mean in the morning.
He fell asleep for a solid two hours, more than he had been expecting really, and woke up with the relief of thinking the key to what’s been causing him writer’s block the last month was in his notes app from a late-night epiphany.
He thinks he kinda knows where he was going with the email, and has mentioned hoodies before in the story but not with any intended symbolism, and definitely has no idea what coffees in the park is supposed to mean outside the obvious. He can send his characters to the park with coffees in their hands all he likes, but if he doesn’t know why then what’s the goddamn point?
But he tries it, here in bed before the thought leaves him even more than he already has. He clicks over to Google Docs, and on his side with one eye open and the other pushed into the pillow, he starts typing.
“It’s weird to see you in the daylight,” Caleb says. He can feel in his cheek that he’s smiling, though he’s trying hard not to. He wants to try to keep some of that moodiness which Ollie has come to expect. He can’t help it though, because even if it is weird to see Ollie outside of his collared work shirt and free from the particular glow of fluorescent light, it’s also nice. Nice to see that he exists outside of those unreal hours between midnight and six in the morning. Nice to walk with him in the city’s designated green space with a strong coffee trying to make up for another sleepless night.
He doesn’t hate it. He doesn’t love it. If all that fucking marathon training he’s put himself through has taught him anything, it’s that he can take his time with things. He did so with his coming out video. He can do so with whatever this writing project turns into. There are enough threads in what he’s written this morning which he can pick up after getting some breakfast, which he hears Phil attempting even from so far away.
Dan steals a sip of Phil’s now-lukewarm coffee when he stumbles into the kitchen. He sees Phil pushing a spatula around a pan of his famous scrambled eggs, and smiles.
“Morning,” he says. Though he was sure Phil had heard him come up, Phil jumps. Then they both laugh.