Work Text:
Dan’s feet are dangling over the side of Phil’s bed when he wakes up. His feet and his legs from the knees down, and the rest of him is tangled either in sheets or limbs.
It isn’t morning yet. It’s too dark for that. But Dan’s woken up anyways with a middle of the night craving for water and what looks like two options: untangle himself in time, or die of thirst.
He works slow. He’s got time. And he has seen— once or twice— what a grump a freshly woken-up Phil can be. So he gets the arm around his waist moved. And he gets the sheet wrapped around his calf moved. And he sits up despite Phil’s fingers still in proximity to his sleep-rumpled hair.
He scoots to the foot of Phil’s bed, and steps on the green fluorescent carpet trying to avoid the spot he once heard creak.
The blind and barely familiar steps he makes down the Lesters’ stairs and into their kitchen go quick, as does finding a glass and turning on the tab. He gulps down a glass, fills it up, and gulps it down again before he takes a proper breath. It feels good. It feels good to have met a very basic human need.
It also feels good that he didn’t wake up Phil’s parents, or even Phil himself who is still sleeping soundly and curled up into himself when Dan gets back to his room. He shuts the door and crawls once again from the foot of the bed and is back in the place where he started. The sheets he leaves alone, other than wiggling his feet under them. The limbs come back around him though Phil is sleeping so heavily that Dan has to assume it’s something innate in Phil’s brain telling him to do that. Either because Dan is always warm, or simply because he is Dan.
One of Phil’s arms gets under Dan’s neck and the wrist lays in front of Dan’s face, though not close enough to smother him.
Not close enough to make him feel like he needs to untangle once more.
Just familiarly close.
He cranes his neck the extra inch it needs and kisses Phil’s wrist in front of him. He imagines something about Phil’s pulse though he doesn’t think he could actually feel it from one brief peck. Phil sighs softly in his sleep behind him.