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It starts with curious fingers— gentle, delicate—skating over all the ginger.
“What’re you doing?”
“I want them.”
“What?”
“Ears.”
“You have your own ears, can’t have four.”
“Why?”
They’ve been through all this before, laid awake for hours discussing the logistics of removable body parts, why they don’t exist.
Dan’s a stray, of sorts. Someone Phil couldn’t leave behind because he has a habit of trying to help, of bringing people home— of trusting too easily. It was easier at uni, when he could hide away his habits, but now he’s got someone in his mum and dads house and it’s a lot harder to stow away a whole person.
They’ve noticed, because of course they have. Having someone over to stay for a couple of days is obviously a complete lie when it’s now been four months and Dan’s still here, Dan is still in his bed with a soft smile— being everything Phil never knew he wanted.
“Cos.” Phil laughs, tucks his head beneath Dan’s chin just because— because it’s annoying, because Dan will complain that his ears are too twitchy. “I think it’d hurt if I tried to cut them off.”
“I could put you to sleep.” Dan murmurs, and he complains but he still wraps an around Phil’s waist to pull him in close. Phil thinks this is huge, this is too big for anyone else to comprehend, that this is love— or sometimes he thinks this is a new type of emotion that only him and Dan have ever felt.
“Am I gonna fall asleep tonight and wake up in the morning with no ears?”
“No.”
“Daniel.”
“I just think— my ears have like a bite out of them. You gotta swap so I can have the shiny ones.” That’s how he’d found Dan, in an alleyway with teeth marks, with scratches— with dull eyes, and an even duller heart. Born to entirely human parents, an anomaly they hadn’t expected and easily gave up. Phil thinks it’s unreal, that they could look at Dan and decide they didn’t love him.
“They’re cute.”
Phil thinks his own upbringing—all the love he had—is what had pushed him to do this. This is why he invites strangers to get too close, why he wants to give all the love in his heart away to someone who’s never known what’s it’s like to experience it.
It started with animals—with a bird living in his wardrobe, a dog barking from beneath his desk.
Now he’s got a whole Dan laying in his bed, brown tail soft between Phil’s fingertips.
“You’re biased.” Dan murmurs, presses a kiss between his ears because he can’t help himself. “Phil, did you know it’s my birthday tomorrow?”
“No!” Phil wants to be mad, wants to get up and leave Dan behind— but just so he can go out and buy him a present. “Dan, you should’ve told me.”
“I’m gonna be nineteen, that’s well old.” He whines, sprawls out across Phil’s single bed like he owns it— he may as well, Phil thinks he’d give him anything.
“Shut it, i’m older than you.”
“Yeah, gonna start getting some grey? What’d you think will go first? The ears or the fake hair?”
He’d been teased endlessly by Dan at the beginning, when he’d taken off his hat to reveal a head full of black hair with gingers ear poking out. Then it’d grown on him, then he’d gotten obsessed with everything that was Phil.
He spends hours just curled up on the bed whilst Phil sits cross legged on the floor doing his editing, content to just rake his fingers through where brown meets ginger.
It’d done a little bit of something to Phil before—made him a bit too excited, bit too eager to lean into the touch— but now he’s used to it, now he knows it’s a comfort blanket to Dan.
“You’re so evil to me.” He sits up, back pressed against the headboard. Content to just watch Dan, to take note of the barely there freckles on his cheeks—count his eyelashes to pass the time. They’ve not established whatever this is, just know they both like each-other and that they both helped each other.
Phil honestly doesn’t know where he’d be right now if Dan weren’t by his side, spiralling about the fact he doesn't have a proper adult job yet—about being a disappointment. And that might be less obvious to people than the ways in which Phil has helped Dan, but its still there, it’s still just as big.
Sometimes Phil struggles with it, wishes he could give Dan more than he’s already given. A proper place of his own, somewhere he can roam around freely without the worry of walking pantless into the kitchen and finding a set of parents.
“You like me.”
“I do.” Phil smiles, holds out his hand until Dan grabs ahold of it. “What’d you actually want?”
“You.”
Phil tries to be—stupid. Tries to roll his eyes, tries to gag on the soft thoughts, but his body doesn’t react that way. Instead he feels all soft inside, just wants to drag Dan up into his lap and promise him the world—the world that isn’t his to give.
“You have me.”
“Mhm.” Dan rolls over, rests his head on Phil’s thigh—the world’s biggest hint. He doesn’t think twice about playing with his curls, think twice about tracing the outline of his ear—fingers dip when he reaches the spot that isn’t quite there. “S’nice.”
Phil goes quiet, mind-racing with everything he wants to give. Right at the top of the list is himself, he wants Dan to properly know that he isn’t joking when he talks about how his heart is no longer his own. He can’t quite bring himself to put a name to it, not when his heart is so against his head—tells him Dan might not feel all this so strongly.
“I’d give you my ears if I could.”
But he also really doesn’t want to at all. Dan’s suit him, nestled pretty atop of curls, neatly black but in the sunlight they’re brown—a brown Phil’s obsessed with, can’t stop looking at.
“You could.” Dan replies, cheeky as ever—been nothing but cheek since he stepped through the front door. “You’re just unwilling to go through all the surgery.”
“I don’t like pain.”
“You like biting.”
Phil smirks, tries to hide it behind the sleeve of his jumper but Dan’s grabbing ahold of his wrist. Sometimes he thinks they might share a brain, that they can both predict what the other is going to do too easily. And he always used to think too similar was bad, but now he thinks he couldn’t live with someone who wasn’t this in-tune with him. That Dan has spoiled everyone else by knowing him so damn well.
“You like me biting, proof is on your—god. What’s it called? I forgot.” And he hasn’t forgotten at all, just needs the excuse to run his fingers down the side of Dan’s neck, to elicit the reaction he loves so much—the catching of breath, the shuddering.
“You fishing for something, Lester?”
“Me? Never?” But he replaces his fingers with mouth, goes as far as making Dan hiss—making him slip his fingers up a t-shirt that belongs to him.
“Fuck. Stop.”
So Phil stops, pulls away with eyes and an apology ready to go. Dan stops him with a shake of his head.
“I just heard your parents come home.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh, can’t have them know their innocent little boy is fucking the vagrant.”
“Dan.” Phil sighs, pulls him in close—ready for this conversation again. “You know they love you, if I wasn’t literally in—if I didn’t like you so much, i’d probably suggest they adopt you.”
And he wonders if he’s being selfish, if his love isn’t actually enough—what Dan wants at all—if he’s denying him something proper just because of his own feelings. His parents can offer a lot, more than him.
“Ew.” Dan wrinkles his nose, and it’s so painfully cute that Phil knows he’s going to have to continue being selfish—he can’t give up how this makes him feel. And he desperately hopes Dan feels the same, at least a fraction of all that Phil does.
“Don’t wanna be my brother?”
“Shutup!” Dan whines, pouts until Phil kisses the pout away. And they work just how they are, there’s no need to put any labels on it, because they’re humans and not jam jars—or something.
“Make me shutup.”
“They’re still downstairs.”
“So we’ll be quiet.”
Dan giggles, and even that’s loud. “You know that’s impossible for me. You touch my nips and I lose it.”
“Ugh, don’t say nips.”
“Nips, nips, nips.”
“Your birthday is cancelled.”
“So, I don’t get you anymore?”
“You always get me.”
Dan’s tail swishes, and it sets Phil’s heart alight. He’s got all these little tells, body language constantly betraying him. If he’s trying to hide something his ears will twitch, if he’s happy his tail can’t help itself. He can’t even begin to explain the rosy patch that appears on his jaw— that might just be Phil’s favourite.
“Not to, like, be a demanding little turd… but i’d really like a cake. I’ve never had birthday cake.” He sounds unsure about it, tucks his tail back between his legs. “If that’s do-able?”
“Yes.” Phil answers, and it’s too quick and too obvious and—Dan just deserves everything. Phil would buy him an entire bakery if he had the money. “I mean, yeah, course. I can even bake you one.”
And this tell is his—it’s the evil one. The way his entire face screws up when he really hates an idea.
“You want to give me food poisoning on my birthday?”
“Yeah, wanna go back to being the favourite.”
He gets a shove for that, then he gets a lap full of Dan and a kiss he really wasn’t expecting. It feels—different. Feels full of fond, full of something that he’s secretly been hoping for. “You’re my favourite, doesn’t that count?”
“It counts, counts the most.”
Dan rubs their noses together, stays where he’s sat until Phil can’t take it anymore. Until he thinks he does want a label, because then Dan can’t be labelled by anybody else.
“What’re you staring at?”
“You.”
He thinks now would be the right time, to spill his heart out and hope Dan catches it. To drag this on any longer would be torture, for the both of them. For this beautiful boy sat in his lap, giving him every ounce of trust, giving over the thing Phil thinks is too fragile to be handled by someone with such clumsy hands.
Sometimes he thinks he doesn’t know what he’d do with someone else’s heart, so afraid of accidentally dropping it—shattering it when his only intention was to look after it. He’s too quick to talk, to put his foot in, to jumble up what he wants to say and say the opposite instead. Too awkward and childish to be given so much trust. To break a heart accidentally, may be worse than to break a heart on purpose.
“Should we talk?” Phil asks, eventually. After an awkward minute of complete silence, of Dan just staring at him, waiting for a response. Apart from him probably wasn’t waiting, because Dan is good like that, never expects anything.
Dan’s ears flatten, half buried in his curls and Phil wants to swallow the words back up. He hadn’t meant it like that, and this is why he meant by all the accidental.
“Why?”
“I— Dan, you know you mean a lot to me, yeah?”
Dan’s hesitant, nearly escapes off Phil’s lap but he manages to catch him at the last second—hold him there. He just needs—needs Dan to stay. To stay and listen to all the serious that’s about to come out of him, to all the love he needs to admit to feeling.
“If you want me to go just say, you don’t have to be all fucking nice about it.” And it’s vicious, more so than Phil’s ever seen. It shocks him a bit, enough to let go of Dan, but for some reason Dan decides to stay—to not move.
“I don’t want—no. You’re not going anywhere.” He garbles out, then realises how that sounded. “I mean, unless you want to. I’m not forcing you to stay, obviously.”
“I don’t.”
“Right, good.”
And it’s knocked his entire plan sideways, he wasn’t expecting a grumpy—almost angry— Dan in his lap for this, for his grand confession. He tries to recover his thoughts, to make up something that sounds almost poetic, but it’s useless. It happens how everything in Phil’s life always seems to happen—heavily, clumsily.
“I want you to stay forever.” It’s rushed, not what he wanted to say—apart from maybe it is. “Erm—if you want.”
Dan softens, can see his shoulders visibly deflate, tail stops looking quite so ready to—well—start a fight. Phil thinks he might’ve actually said something right, for once.
“What’d you mean?” Dan asks, tilts his head to the side like he doesn’t quite understand—or does understand and wants clarification.
“I mean… you know.”
“I know?”
Phil makes a little noise, partly frustrated and partly—no, it’s just frustrated. He hates having to use so many words, try and form a sentence that actually means something—so used to using touch to demonstrate everything.
“I like you.”
“Yeah.”
“But—more?”
“Mhm?” And Phil thinks he does know, just wants to hear it out-loud. He’s looking at him with big, fond eyes—all excited and ready for whatever it is Phil is about to say.
Phil reaches up, fingers touching where Dan’s ear dips in—an injury he feels like he fixed up almost a lifetime ago.
-
He’s walking back from the shop when it happens, a kinder egg in his pocket instead of the thing he actually went for. He hears a noise, an awful noise that makes him feel physically sick, makes his gut churn and his heart lurch.
Phil, being Phil, runs towards it. Someone in danger and he can’t help it, kicks into saviour mode and forgets that he could be hurt in the process.
There’s only one figure there by the time he gets to the alley, they’re stood but then suddenly they're not. There’s a thump, and then a body pressed up against a wall—Phil tries to catch them but misses.
“Hey, hey.” He tries, gentle and soft because the last thing he wants to do is startle him, to make him bolt. “Can you look up for me?”
And he does, eventually. Looks up with wide eyes, and the fear he was expecting is actually more… defeat. Like he’s waiting for Phil to just finish him off. And it makes his heart feel funny, he wants to do something stupid like pick him up and carry him home.
“I’m—you don’t have to believe me, but i’m not gonna, like, hurt you.”
His hand reached out without permission, and his fingers come back stained with blood. He immediately pats his pockets down for his phone, uses the torch to illuminate the man’s face. And—he’s just like Phil. Exactly like Phil. A set of ears on top of his head, has a long tail curled protectively around his own body.
“God. Erm—tell me if i’m allowed to touch? You just…your ear.”
He gets a barely there nod, something that looks like it took all the effort he had left. Phil’s often been told he gives of this aura—you can trust me—and up until now he hadn’t quite believed it. But sat here, with this stranger, he thinks maybe those people were right.
“I’m just going to clean, yeah? See if it’s, like, aesthetic or needs something proper.”
There’s no fight, but there is something else in the eyes now—more alert than the dull nothing Phil had first seen. He watches carefully, blinks a little too slow. Phil thinks he might pass out, he really might have to carry him over his shoulder. But then:
“You promise?”
It nearly makes Phil topple backwards from where he’s crouched down, but he manages to catch himself last minute, and so does this man. There’s a hand around his wrist and it’s keeping him steady.
“I promise what?”
“That you’re not going to hurt me.”
“No, of course, i’d never.”
-
“I love you, or something else, something more.” Phil can’t catch all his thoughts and pin them down, translate them into something that’s easily palatable. “I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like, but I think it has to be this.”
Dan just—he beams. He’s shiny white teeth, he’s clawing at Phil’s shoulder, he’s—happy, properly happy.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” Dan sighs, but the smile is too obvious—too obvious to mean anything but I love you right back. “I guess I will stick around, i’ll put my little fabric tied to a string satchel back in the cupboard.”
Phil just rolls his eyes, prods Dan in the sides until he gets a proper laugh. “Fine, fine. Yeah. I love you, or something more, too.”
And he feels like he can breathe again, deflates like a fucking balloon under Dan’s weight. All boneless and limp against his mattress. It feels like the proper start to something that actually started a long time ago, started with gentle hands in an alleyway—started with two trusting hearts.
Sometimes he doesn’t get why Dan chose him, chose him to be the person to let in, chose him to be— his person. He’s sat and listened to Dan talk about his past, all the people he trusted, how he one day stopped trusting completely.
So this feels even bigger, this is more than love—this is complete and utter trust in another human, this is giving over your heart quite literally. And Phil thinks that, maybe, he should have a bit more faith in himself. That Dan’s trust in him means something—that he’s not as clumsy as he once thought.
“Well, that was a birthday present.” Dan’s still smiling, and Phil wants to wipe it off his face with his own mouth—but that’s too tempting, that’s too much of something that could lead to something else; His parents are still downstairs.
Phil nods, then decides if he’s being brave he might as well go all the way.
“And I was thinking, maybe, if you want… we could live together? Somewhere not here, somewhere of our own. I’m getting some money in from youtube, and stuff. It’s like… it won’t be anything amazing, but it’ll be ours?”
Dan’s tail gives everything away, swishes without him meaning it to. “Just me and you? So… I can always be loud?”
Phil snorts, and he’s glad of the joke—the tension doesn't feel like them. “You say that like you’re not loud all the time here.”
“Did I, or did I not, just cancel sex?”
“Wanna un-cancel and prove your whole point about being quiet.”
Dan thinks for a moment, thinks until Phil’s fingers are back on his neck and he can’t help himself—lets out a noise.
“Fuck, fine, whatever. I’m a loud boy.”
“My loud boy.”
“Yeah.” Dan smiles. “Your loud boy.”