Work Text:
Dan can feel the beads of sweat falling down the line of his back. It’s awful. He shuffles in the lift, trying to get his shirt to soak it up, but now the black fabric is sticking to him and that’s almost as awful.
“Pure hubris,” he says, letting out a long exhale and looking up at the glossy reflective ceiling.
“Hmm?” Phil asks without looking up from his phone.
“Pure hubris,” Dan repeats. “Building a city out here in the middle of the fucking desert.” Phoenix is hot: unbearably, inhumanly hot, and Dan hasn’t forgiven it for that yet. “ Forty-six fucking degrees!” he groans.
Phil smiles at Dan and looks like he wants to give some sort of wry response, but then the lift stops and the doors open and they’re on the fifth floor. They make two right turns and stop in front of room 541.
“You first,” Phil smiles, leaning his shoulder against the door.
“Okay,” Dan says. He tilts his head and scrunches his face. “Ugly armchair.”
Phil shakes his head. “More specific.”
“Armchair with an ugly pattern,” Dan shrugs. “Like, public bus seat pattern.”
“Alright,” Phil laughs. “I think the water cups are gonna be actual glass.”
Dan lets out a low whistle. “Swank!”
“One more.”
“Something with birds, like bird decor.”
“Okay,” Phil starts to dig in his pocket for the room key. “I’m going with a full-length mirror.”
“It’s your funeral,” Dan laughs.
They’re getting good at this, a dumb game they made up on the last tour. A bet, kind of. What’s the hotel room going to look like? How similar yet subtly different can temporary dwellings look?
The stakes are low and high at the same time. Loser has to answer the door for room service. If someone gets both guesses right, they also get to ask for a favour— “And that’s open to interpretation!” Phil had said with a wink when he made up the rule because he wanted a backrub.
“Hurry up,” Dan starts to whine, but thankfully Phil opens the door at the very same time. A blast of cool air hits Dan’s face, which feels amazing. It’s like the blast of cool air which had hit when they entered the hotel in the first place, but even more so. Whoever had been in this room last had left the aircon blasting.
Dan tilts his bag against the wall and steps into the bathroom. Next to a pyramid made of rolled flannels is the ice bucket on a little tray, and two plastic cups wrapped individually in wasteful plastic packs.
“You got one wrong already, bub!” Dan calls out.
“Well, so did you,” Phil calls back. “This armchair is ugly, but it’s just plain brown.”
“That’s not fair! You told me to get specific.”
“It’s totally fair. I— ahh!”
Phil’s squeak of surprise makes Dan jump. He runs around the corner over towards the beds immediately spooked.
“I thought it was real,” Phil says, still partly in meerkat mode. He is pointing at a stiff-looking green bird figure placed in some weird little nook in the wall. Dan can see how it might’ve looked real for half a second in Phil’s peripheral vision, but he can’t help but cackling out a laugh. Phil laughs too and his shoulders lose their raised tension.
“Guess I win, Philly,” Dan says, taking a quick look around the room and seeing no full-length mirrors.
“No way, you can’t have guessed that!” he points at the unexpected fixture in their room. “You were thinking like a bad painting or something.”
Dan brings his hand to his chest and drops his jaw in mock offence. “I resent that! Of course I thought there’d be two giant empty jars and weird metal sticks and a pea-coloured felt bird.”
“And I thought that mirror would count as full-length!” Phil points to the mirror beside the bare, polished desk.
“Goes down to mid-calf at best,” Dan waves his hand.
“We’re just really tall,” Phil tries.
“That makes it even worse!” Dan pulls Phil closer by getting a finger into a belt loop. He gives him a quick kiss, and realises that was the first one of the day. So he goes back in for a deeper one, and Phil hardly complains. “Face it,” Dan says. “I won. I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. You’re asking for all my extra dips.”
“I hate you,” Phil huffs. “And your weird green bird.”
“Oh, it’s my weird green bird now?”
“Dan and weird bird,” Phil sing-songs, “sitting in a tree.”
“I won, you lost, hee hee hee,” Dan sing-songs back.
Phil’s lower lip folds in a theatrical pout. “That’s not how it goes.”
“I forgot who I’m dealing with,” Dan leans forward toward that teasing lip. “Phil, King of Idioms.”