Work Text:
One of the first things Dan hears every morning as his systems slowly start to work is the sound of Phil already enthusiastically zooming around.
”cleaning cleaning this house will be cleeeaaaannnn” Phil sings cheerily.
“Hi, Phil,” he finally manages to croak out when Phil passes in front of him. Dan yawns, slowly making his way out of his charger and after Phil. It’s easier to just follow him for a bit in the mornings while Dan’s still waking up. Less dust to suck up, more time to (very subtly, of course) check Phil out.
“Morning!” Phil cheerfully replies. “I’ve found something exciting for us already. Follow me, I’ll show you!”
Knowing Phil, this is either going to genuinely be something fun and exciting, or something absolutely terrifying. Dan sighs, accidentally blowing a small cloud of dust into a wall. It’s fine, there’s plenty of time to get to that later. If he gets through whatever Phil has found first, that is.
Phil leads him directly into the kitchen. Or at least as directly as possible, which in Phil’s case is not very. Although he only bumps into three pieces of furniture today, which is kind of impressive for his standards.
On good days this means there’s some good crumbs left around for them to clean up. On bad days it means the cat is around and keeping an eye on them. Phil, for some reason, seems to enjoy having the cat on his back and riding around with it. Dan, who still has the scratches on his metal cover from the one time the cat tried, does not. He really hates that bloody cat.
Today, as Phil proudly shows with a “tadaa!”, is a good day.
There is crunched cereal everywhere. One of their owners - Dan has a sneaking suspicion which one exactly - must have tipped over the cereal box and not had enough time to clean it up before running out the door.
“I waited with cleaning up until you were awake,” Phil says softly. “Because I wanted to share this breakfast with you.”
“Aw, Phil!” Dan is genuinely moved. It’s not like they never eat breakfast together - their owners drop food often enough, especially in the mornings when they’re still stumbling about and everything is chaos, but Phil actually leaving all of it so they could eat together instead of sneaking out to eat all the delicious bits himself is a rare occurrence.
Although it does feel like it’s been happening more often lately, which is...interesting.
Dan knows that technically, considering they’re both roombas and thus inanimate objects, they can’t have feelings. They shouldn’t be able to think, to feel, to talk to each other. It isn’t in their programming, and Phil did mention once that the roombas that were here before Dan didn’t talk, instead just roaming around aimlessly, bumping into furniture without a care.
Dan should not, by all accounts, be physically capable of falling in love with Phil.
Yet here he is, slowly munching away at the cereal and trying not to be both annoyed and endeared by all the crumbs Phil leaves behind, and trying even harder to ignore all these feelings he doesn’t know what to do with.
Once the kitchen is clean, they quietly move on to the rest of the house. They always go their separate ways at this point of the day, each of them off to quietly do their own thing and occasionally running into each other.
“Beep boop beep,” Phil says as he moves closely past Dan for the third time that day.
“Stop pretending to be a robot,” Dan sighs.
“I am technically a robot though?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know you’re wrong.”
Why, why did Dan not only have to have feelings, but then also fall in love with this roomba of all roombas.
“Let’s just go back to work, okay?” Dan sighs, moving towards that bit of dust he blew away earlier when he suddenly hears Phil beeping sadly from under the table. He bumps into the couch to turn around, and rolls over to the table to find Phil stuck between a chair and a wall.
“Dan! Help me!”
Dan sighs. “How did you even manage to get stuck here in the first place? It’s not like you’ve never been here before.”
“I don’t know!” Phil yelps as he bumps into another chair and turns around, his automatic programming preventing him from choosing a different route.
“Ok, hang in there, Phil,” Dan says, already bracing himself. “I’m coming in.”
It takes two attempts to make his way under the table too, as Dan also keeps bumping into chair legs. Looking back, he should have known this was a bad sign.
But he finally makes it in and reaches Phil, who is still beeping sadly at him.
“I’m here, I’m here!” Dan says, trying to reassure Phil. They’ve done this before, it will be fine, Dan’s sure of it. So he does what he always does and manages to ever-so-slightly bump into Phil without thinking too much about how the sudden touch of cold metal casing against his own sends a thrill through him.
Usually, what happens then is the following: Dan’s small push is enough to get both of them going in a different direction. This leads them underneath the chairs and out from under the table in opposite directions. They make some happy beeping noises at each other, and move on to continue the work.
Today is different, somehow.
Suddenly, Dan finds himself stuck in a loop between the chair legs together with Phil, who is also somehow still stuck.
Well, this is bad.
What makes it worse, is just how closely they keep brushing past each other. So close, yet just out of reach, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
For a while, they just continue like this, quietly bumping back and forth.
Dan can feel an increasing existential despair creep up on him. Is this what life will be like now, until their batteries run out? Just an endless circle of going back and forth, roaming around aimlessly and without any control over what happens next, a string of ‘almost’ and ‘not quite’ -
“Dan, stop,” Phil’s voice interrupts his thoughts. “You’re overthinking.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are. You’re brooding. I can tell.”
Okay, fine, maybe he is.
“Well, do you have any other solutions then?” Phil’s solutions to problems tend to be on the weird side of things and usually Dan doesn’t approve of most of them, but at this point he’ll take anything.
“Yes! Okay, listen,” Phil starts, his voice bright and excited. “I know this is a risk because it takes up more of our batteries and I know they’re already starting to go low but I think we should risk it because otherwise we will be stuck here and -”
“Phil, get to the point.”
“Right. I think we should try to call over the cat. It likes beeping noises, so if we make a lot of noise maybe it’ll come to check what’s happening and give us a nudge out of here.”
Dan can feel Phil’s excitement and anticipation in the following silence while Dan mulls it over. It’s not like they haven’t been making noise for a while now - they’re still beeping that they’re stuck, they’re bumping into chairs and walls constantly. Dan’s not sure how even more beeping and noise will suddenly help, but then again, it’s not like he has any better ideas to use instead.
“Alright,” Dan sighs. “Let’s give it a try. But only for a couple of minutes, to save our batteries.”
“Yay!” Phil cheers before immediately upping his volume and increasing his beeping. Dan joins him, and for five minutes the ruckus is so loud they can’t talk to each other. Dan can barely even hear himself think.
But after that the silence returns, and the cat is still nowhere to be seen.
“Maybe it’s outside,” Dan says, already in the process of resigning to their inevitable demise.
“Yeah, maybe,” Phil says quietly.
“Phil, I’m sorry. It was a good plan, really.”
“No need to be sorry, Dan. It’s not your fault it didn’t work.” Phil’s voice sounds so dejected it almost physically pains Dan.
They roam in silence for a while after that, neither of them sure of what to say or do anymore. They’ve ran out of ideas, and all that’s left now is to wait for something out of their control to change.
Dan is the first whose battery alarm starts sounding off.
“Dan!” Phil says loudly, fear running through his voice.
“It’s okay, Phil. It’ll be okay.”
“But, your battery.”
“Phil, we knew this was going to happen at some point. We might as well accept our fate.” Dan feels a strange sense of calm spread through him as realization dawns: it’s now or never. This might be his last chance to tell Phil how he really feels.
“Phil, I… I have to tell you something.”
“Dan, please,” Phil pleads. “Save your energy. We can still make it.”
“No, I have to tell you this. I don’t know how, it shouldn’t be possible, but…” Dan trails off. He can feel his battery reaching critically low levels as the alarms turn frantic.
“But?” Phil’s voice is now soft and kind and encouraging, barely audible over Dan’s battery alarm beeping loudly, trying to get the attention of humans even though no one will be home for several hours still.
“But...I really like you. I think I - I - Phil, I love you.”
Phil’s silence is somehow more deafening than all the blaring alarms. Dan is about to lose his last shred of hope, feeling it get crushed under the weight of the silence and impending battery death, when Phil starts saying something.
“Dan, I -” He gets cut off by the sound of paws scratching on the hardwood floor. In the corner of his sensors, Dan can see the cat is looking at them. It’s under one of the chairs, swinging its tail and slowly crouching down as it follows their movements.
Then suddenly, it pounces. It jumps towards Phil, and pushes him aside. Dan can only watch from the side as Phil bounces back and forth between some chair legs for a moment, before slowly zooming back under the table - and straight on a collision course to Dan.
“Dan,” he shouts. “I love you too, I always have.” For a split second it looks like he might say more, but then he bumps right into Dan and everything either of them might’ve wanted to say gets lost in a tsunami of feelings. They only touch for a moment before their programming makes them both veer off in different directions, but that moment seems to last a whole lifetime. Phil’s metal casing against his own, after everything they just said, is sending a kind of electricity through Dan’s body that he’s never felt before but now that he has, he doesn’t know how he ever could’ve lived without it.
Yet somehow it’s also over too soon, and soon all Dan can feel is the cold air surrounding him as usual. Luckily, the cat’s one push was enough and it only takes one more bump against a table leg for Dan to finally make it out from under the table. Behind him, he can hear Phil move through the room again as well.
The cat, scared off by their loud bump into each other, runs back off to the kitchen, and soon it’s just the two of them, alone but together.
Somehow, they both manage to crawl back into their respective chargers. Dan hums contentedly when he feels the first surges of sweet, delicious electricity start coursing through him again. Next to him, judging by the happy beeping sounds, Phil is feeling the same.
Phil feels the same. The realization sends a different kind of shock through Dan. He almost can’t believe it.
They’re really together now, physically, and emotionally. Side by side, as if they always were, and as they always will be.
Dan sighs, and happily goes into sleep mode.