Work Text:
Phil tips his head back to look at the bare limbs of the tree above him, smiling when he notices tight buds of new leaf growth on each branch, which are not quite ready to burst open yet, but instead are just waiting for the tree to aim all its energy at them when the time is right. It’s how Phil feels too—poised to unfurl—especially now that the move-in date for his and Dan’s new house looks like it might actually be happening.
When they got the news this morning from the house contractor, they decided to take a bit of a farewell stroll through the neighborhood. Now they are paused at the wide pond in the local park, watching some birds fight over a knot of waterlogged bread at the shore edge. Dan has been quiet, and Phil has been too, waiting for Dan to work out whatever he’s been ruminating on.
Phil takes in a deep lungful of cold air. This is his favorite time of year, when it becomes clear that spring will, in fact, come again. Even though the days are more dark than they are sunlit, it is almost like his body can tell that there are a few more seconds of light wedged into each day, as if the sun were a winking child jamming her foot into a door to keep it open.
“Does it bother you what I’ve said about commitment and marriage in the live shows?” Dan asks, as they stand side-by-side looking out across the water.
Phil shrugs, hearing his jacket crinkle with the movement.
“I agree with what you said about people wanting public couples to live life at a fast pace, to follow a certain prescribed path,” he says. “House, dog, marriage, kids, bam, bam, bam. Sure, there are milestones I want to reach in my life, but on my timeline, not anyone else’s.”
“Milestones,” Dan says. “More like millstones around my neck.”
Phil glances at Dan’s profile. He knows how much labels and other people’s expectations feel like a box for Dan, how he fights instinctively against anything that makes him feel like he is being dictated to or flattened to fit a mold. He chafes against anything that feels like other people’s rules.
“It’s not that I’m not committed to you, to us,” Dan sighs. “Just I’m not convinced that signing a marriage certificate means anything more than buying a house with you. Or that getting a dog with you is some indelible sign that we’ll be together forever, like either of us can predict that.”
Phil looks down at the ground while he listens. There’s a little mound of small gray stones near the water’s edge, probably left from a landscape project. He likes their jumbled variety, and how they peek up at him with something like a reassuring solemnity. He bends to pick up a smooth oval stone streaked with fine white lines of some sort of crystal and then straightens, feeling the slight weight of the little stone in his hand as he balances it on his palm to show Dan.
“Milestones. Miles of stone,” Phil says, closing his fist back over it. “There are paths on the Isle of Man where you can come across rock cairns that people have built as waymarkers to tell them where they are or how far along they are on the path.”
He opens his hand to look again at the stone.
“It’s true that I like having markers or symbols that remind me of where we were and where we are now,” he says. “Buying the house is like that. And I do like the idea of marriage, but not because of a ring or because it’s next on the list of things for us to do, but because it’s just one more way to say that I love you and that I still am happy to be walking the world with you. Well, that, and I just really want a big party.” Dan snorts next to him.
Phil inspects the stone in his hand, liking how it seems to grow lovelier the more he looks at it.
“But the milestones can be whatever we want them to be, things that mean something just to us, not what other people say is important,” he says.
He thinks that he doesn’t know when he’ll be in this park again, so he slips the little stone into his jacket pocket.
“Hey, that’s theft,” Dan says, but he’s toeing at the little mound of rocks with his foot, loosening the pile so that the rocks hidden underneath slide into view.
Dan squats down and picks through a few of the stones until he finds a relatively flat one with sharper corners and a more irregular shape than the one Phil had chosen.
Still crouched next to the stones, Dan looks up at Phil, squinting a bit against the sun.
“I’m here because I want to be here and I’m excited about whatever comes next, you know that, right?”
“I do know that, Dan, I do,” Phil says.
Dan stands back up and Phil feels him tense beside him, and then Dan winds his body back and sends the stone out across the water, where it skips and skims across the surface too many times for Phil to count, driven almost to the other side of the shore with the strength and speed of Dan’s throw, a fine spray of water rising up behind it, before it sinks out of their sight and the water gathers the disturbance back into itself, becoming smooth and calm and unbroken again.
Phil puts his hand in his pocket, closing his fingers around his stone, and then he knocks his shoulder against Dan’s, and Dan pushes back against him, solid and warm and steady.
“Ready?” Phil asks.
“Yeah,” Dan says. “Let’s go.”