Work Text:
Admitting to something you know to be true can make or break a person.
Hands are safe. Delicate, clean. Veins visible through the skin, reaching from the inside of his wrists and branching thick inside the palms. They’re something like trees. Just existing in place until they grow. From one day to the next, they draw his attention again. They look different every time. The comfort they offer remains, though, replacing the eyes’ endless deception.
There are no simple answers, because no question has been posed. Fleeting thoughts come to a stop. Fulfillment becomes an abstract concept; everything changes, and one must adjust. Phil is adjusting to this once again. These non-questions that have no simple answers because right now he’s looking at his own hand where it’s held by Dan’s between them on the sofa. It’s an ordinary night. It must be an ordinary night, right?
Phil’s past is made up of periods of time when he convinced himself that he knew how to deal with it. For a while, it didn’t matter what anyone thought or assumed. As long as Phil knew, he had no reason to give it space in his mind. He was so sure it didn’t matter, anyway. Most of his strange ideas don’t matter.
The difference between now and back then is that knowing isn’t enough. Another step begs to be taken. Phil didn’t sign up for this, though. He never asked for it. If he got to choose, he would stay in place. Instead he's blissfully ignorant until he’s not and he’s trampled by an emotion he’s come to define as ‘dysphoria’.
What hurts is the feeling that something is wrong, but that there’s literally nothing he can do about it. There is no way out of it because it’s all so physical, part of him, silent for long enough that he thinks it’s gone until it comes back louder than before.
If Phil allowed it to, it would make him feel. It would be sadness slipping into anger, trying to find a footing anywhere but inside the body which contains it. Phil won’t feel, though. He won’t attach it to anything that he knows it doesn’t belong to. It’s all himself, freaking out all the time, hiding.
He broke his own promise of speaking the words more times than he can count. He locks it harder in his chest instead. Love hasn’t changed it. Wealth hasn’t changed it. Fame hasn’t changed it. Sharing other poorly kept secrets made it slightly easier. He just hates that his new-found freedom has been tainted by other thoughts he can’t ever predict.
Everyone thinks they know Phil. He’s easy, uncomplex. It’s really easy to keep up that front as long as you control everything others get to see.
What Phil can’t control is himself. He can’t control Dan. He can’t control the fact that Dan notices that Phil goes mute and that he’s soothed by being close. By resting his head upon his partner’s chest. Cradled, caressed. Behind closed eyelids Phil can pretend like the physical world doesn’t exist and that he’s allowed to be as little of anything as he feels. What he knows to be true. He wishes it didn’t paint the rest of the world in such an ugly light. If only he could live sans comparison. He’s only ever anything in relation to someone else. But the ‘something’ he’s been assigned is and always was distorted.
In the quiet, Phil acknowledges it. He can tell himself he’s this or that, and feel less crazy for a moment. But when it all comes pressing down, and he gains that hypersensitivity towards being identified as anything, Phil thinks things like ‘hands are trees’, and ‘they should speak for my eyes’. Dan isn’t a stranger to abstract concepts or the way Phil’s brain works, but he already puts up with enough, doesn’t he?
Phil’s face gets so hot when he cries. Even so, Dan provides a kind of warmth Phil craves. He wants to push his face against his skin. He wants Dan to absorb those tears and make them not exist any more than the stories Phil tells himself in order to cope.
There’s no way to control what Dan knows. If there was, Dan wouldn’t already know the truth Phil hasn’t told.
Phil wants to be defined by his hands. They tell no story. They don’t reveal a history of surrounding assumptions and comparison and struggle. No other part of him remains so nondescript. Perhaps it’s the fact that Dan holds his hand without comparison or identifiers that lets Phil know that it’s only a matter of time before one of them acknowledges it out loud.
Might be a long wait until then. Might not. It’s not a stressful thought, either way. Because when Phil covers his eyes palms up, Dan kisses the branches. He doesn’t ask for deception. The trees exist in place until they grow out of Phil's control once more.