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Thirteen hours is too long to be on a plane. They'd done as much preparation as they could, packed things to stay entertained, a blow-up neck pillow for Phil, Dan picked up snacks in the departure lounge. Even Bryony swapped her usual elaborate style for something comfier. Kind of. It's still in multiple shades of pastel.
Phil's eyes are closed as they descend and Dan catches the flex of his fingers against the armrest, a sharp shot of white over his knuckles the same shade as the clouds they're dropping through.
"Are you alright?" Dan asks.
Phil doesn't open his eyes, just nods, and Dan presses their shoulders together just to feel him breathe.
It had been a topic of conversation for a while, whether this was going to be too much. But Phil has been through rounds of doctors and tests and multiple medications before they found one that stems off the worst of the dizziness, but that doesn't mean he's fine, it doesn't mean that this entire process hasn't been gruelling.
"I'm not going to let it stop me," Phil had said.
He'd been defiant in that way he had, stubborn yet affable, like when he doesn't want to answer someone's question at a party and conjures firm deflection in his agreeable smile and the twitch of a brow.
Dan knew not to argue, and so he hadn't.
He does have extra migraine medication in the front pocket of his backpack though.
By the time they're on the ground, Phil has opened his eyes, inhaled stale air deeply through his nose, and set his shoulders. They wait until they are almost last off the plane before standing and shuffling out of their seats but Dan kind of likes it that way.
Not least because he hates tugging his luggage out of the overhead compartment and fearing his lacklustre muscles are going to fail him just as the point that gravity takes hold and makes him swing his bag into the face of a fellow passenger.
Phil smiles closed-lipped as Dan holds out a hand for his bag. "I got it," he says, and shrugs it onto his back.
Dan knows he's doing too much, but he really wants Phil to be able to enjoy this trip, and pushing himself too far on the first day is the last thing he needs.
"I know," Dan tells him. "Just—"
Dan shrugs and Phil rolls his eyes, and they both follow Bryony's pale hair out of the plane.
-
Dan tries to stay in the moment. He notes all the details he can, the crisp edges of the sheets in their hotel room, the scent of street food cooking as they wander out, even the rise of bubbles in the brightly coloured soda Phil orders when they finally stop for lunch.
It's been an important focus for him, to get out of his head and appreciate this, here, now, rather than what could be. He likes to think it makes him worry less, and maybe it does fend off his own doom spirals for the most part, but it doesn't stop his eyes sliding sideways to see Phil's lids pinched against the sun.
"Are you alright?"
"Stop," Phil says.
He doesn't even look at Dan, just picks up a plushie from the basket outside the fourth shop they've visited, Bryony leading the charge. She's somewhere inside, eager footsteps, guidebook slipped into her bag, smiles permanently fixed on her lips. It's probably what they looked like the first time they came here.
Not that they're not just as excited this time, of course, but there is a little bit of familiarity now that they're here for a third time.
"What?" Dan asks. He glances down the busy street, acting like he doesn't know what Phil is talking about.
But Phil knows him better than that, knows him all the way down to his bones and out through the other side.
"You're… hovering."
"Hovering," Dan scoffs. "I'm not a mother hen."
Phil gives him a grin then, both eyebrows up at his hairline. "Really?"
Dan waves a hand in his face and Phil pitches the plushie at him. Dan only barely catches it, sucking in a shocked breath as his pinkie curls, the only digit holding fast.
"You shit," Dan says.
Phil chuckles, and relief sinks into Dan's gut. He sounds fine, normal, nothing like the months he'd spent unable to spend too much time on his feet, when the laughs have been few and far between, his voice flat.
Dan thinks about throwing the little…. Cat? Rabbit? Something with ears, back at Phil, but he drops it back in the basket with the flick of his wrist.
"Dan," Phil says.
Dna picks up the plushie again and throws it at him after all. Phil doesn't catch it, it bounces off his chest, hands flailing, and Dan has to pitch forward until he almost crashes into him, retrieving the stuffed animal before it hits the floor.
"I had it!" Phil protests, reaching for it again.
"You did not, it—"
"What are you two doing?" Bryony says, coming out of the shop with a pink carrier bag in her hand.
"Nothing," Dan says. He side-steps away and sets the toy back down on the pile. "Ready to go?"
She eyes them, shaking her head minutely as if mentally calculating whether it's worth it and deciding not.
Phil snorts, bumps their shoulders together, and falls into step with her. Dan stays a couple steps back, peering up at the buildings and the electrical wires strung between them above their heads. When it gets dark, the lights will illuminate with stretch of road and the shops will wind down into quiet, and even though it's so different from London it still feels a little bit like home all the same.
They've talked about it, moving here, and they haven't entirely taken it off the bucket list. It all depends on family, of course, and whether Phil can really be this far away.
Dan can do it easily, but having just tested the theory over the last few months, he knows he can't be parted from Phil for too long before he starts to go a little mad. And so, where Phil goes, Dan will follow, like a homing beacon. Or, just, like home.
-
They take photos. It's Phil's idea to take one on the same steps they did previously and even though Dan acts like that's sappy and ridiculous and he's above such saccharine nonsense, when Bryony holds the phone up to take the picture, he can't help but turn his head to Phil, marvelling at him.
It strikes him that they keep coming back here, that in between each visit they grow and change and morph into new evolutions of themselves and yet there are constants, fixed points that do not bend to time's will.
They always return together, never apart.
With all of that in his head, Dan smiles. At this Phil and the one from the two visits before, as the one who had never sat on these steps but had dreamed of it, at the version of him that had laid side by side in a too-small bed with Dan and shared this wish with so much magic that it became Dan's wish too.
The first time they touched down Dan had grinned with a rising bubble of we made it and Phil had looked back at him, the same thought in his own head, as clear to Dan as if it had been his own.
"That's a keeper," Bryony says, turning the phone.
Phil laughs, getting up from the step a little too fast so that he sways on his feet.
Dan is right there, a hand on his arm, fingers curled around his bicep. "Phil?" he says, "Are you okay?"
It's the third time he's asked, three times he's worried about Phil and had no satisfactory response. He's coming to the end of how much worry he can tolerate.
Phil's eyelids flutter, but he nods. "I'm fine, stood up too quickly. You know how it is."
Dan does know, from his own experiences of crashing through a coffee table, and from watching Phil's body undulate with the constant dizziness that seems to plague him.
"We should go back to the hotel," Dan says. He's already looking at Bryony, already mentally planning the fastest route back.
He's found, through all of this, that the best way to deal with the rising panic that overtakes him, is to be useful. Without it, his energy has nowhere to go, manifesting as anxious pacing and tearing at his own hair while Phil's world spun around him.
"I don't think—" Bryony says, looking at Phil.
"It's too much," Dan insists. "Let's go back. We can just rest for a bit and then go out for dinner."
"Dan, I don't need to—"
"Please," Dan says. The hand on Phil's bicep is trembling, a cloying fear in the pit of his stomach.
He hates when he gets like this, but his anxiety doesn't know what an appropriate moment is, never has, and so it shows up when he least expects it.
Phil looks at him, places his hand overtop of Dan's and says. "Alright. We can go back."
They have to drop their hands to start walking, but Dan doesn't stop giving Phil nervous glances the entire way.
"You have to relax," Bryony says, quietly, pausing outside of the lift in the hotel as Phil walks in and holds a hand over the beam to keep the door open. "He'd tell you if it was too much. You've got to trust him."
"I do," Dan says. He doesn't know how to tell her that it's himself he doesn't trust. That he's scared he'll miss something, that Phil will come to harm if he isn't attentive enough.
"Okay," Bryony nods. "Then stop being a little bitch."
She's blunt, as ever, and while it doesn't stop the panic flooding sour in Dan's veins, it does at least pierce through the haze and settle into his brain.
-
"Just lay down," Dan says, the door clicking shut behind him.
"I don't need—"
"Phil," Dan says, his voice on edge, the last nerve frayed out of it. "Please."
He's sick of begging. But right now he just needs Phil motionless and safe. He wants to stop worrying that this trip is going to be too much for him. It hadn't been all that long ago that Phil had to cancel joining him on tour, that he'd been passed around by their friends in Dan's absence so that he could always be under a watchful eye, and Dan can't shake that. Not just yet.
"Aright, Dan." Phil backs off, an empty palm raised, and drops down to sit on the edge of the bed.
Dan takes a breath, two, and Phil shuffles back until he's sat against the headboard.
"Go shower," Phil says.
He knows that Dan needs to get out of his head. 'Go shower' has been code for 'get it together' for a while now.
"Do you need anything—"
"Dan," Phil says, a little sterner. "Go and take a shower and don't come back until you stop being so flappy."
"Flappy," Dan repeats, but takes himself off to the bathroom anyway, just as Phil has instructed.
He keeps one ear out for any sound from the adjoining room as he showers, but it's miraculous the effect the hot water has on him, bringing him back to the moment, steering him away from the dark descent of doom his thoughts have fallen into.
By the time he climbs out he isn't quite as manic, able to run through the routine of brushing his teeth and applying his skin care, breaths coming easier as he goes through the familiar movements by rote. He's used to doing familiar things in unfamiliar rooms, living his life in locations that aren't home.
He much prefers having a tiny piece of his home right there in the next room, though.
"You realise," Phil calls, voice carrying through the wall. "That I was fine for months while you were away,"
Dan finishes rubbing moisturiser into his cheek and comes back into the bedroom. There's no glass wall in this room for him to look through this time.
"I hated it," Dan says.
"No you didn't," Phil laughs. "You're only that happy when you're on tour."
"Fine," Dan says. He flops down onto the bed beside him, grateful to see that Phil seems to have capitulated to his urging and let himself sink into the pillows. "But— I hated being away while you were sick."
"You're acting like we didn't talk about it, Dan. We did. A lot. I told you it was fine."
"And I told you I was going to worry," Dan shrugs.
He shuffles over until he can put his head against Phil's shoulder, and Phil lifts his arm the way Dan had known he would.
He can still smell the faint notes of Phil's cologne, his nose pushed to the warm creases of his shirt. He smells as much like home as he does of here, the two combined.
"I don't mind that you worry," Phil says. "Even though it's annoying, I do understand it. I just hate it when you act like I'm… a kid or something."
"I don't—"
"You do," Phil interrupts, his arm tightening for a second. "But, like, I've been dealing with this for a while and I do know what my limits are even if you don't think so."
"I don't think— Aright, I'm a mother hen."
"You can't just pronounce yourself Mother," Phil says. "I think the community has to give that to you or something."
Dan looks up, A grin tugging at his lips. "Did you—"
"I know memes," Phil says.
"You repeat things you hear," Dan corrects. "I'm not sure you always know exactly what you're talking about."
Phil shrugs, jostling Dan's head from his comfortable position. He grouches, rolling his neck until he can find the angle again.
"I'm sorry," Dan says. "I will try to chill."
"I promise I'll say something if it gets too much," Phil says. "I just— I really don't want all of this to ruin things. I finally feel like I've got it as under control as I can but you know what they said, could stay like this forever, could get worse, they don't know."
"Exactly—" Dan starts, but Phil shakes his head.
"All the more reason to not let it ruin things now," Phil says. "I want to do stuff while I feel good, grab life by the tit balls or whatever it was you said that time."
"Oh my god," Dan says. "Don't quote young me to me."
"Why?" Phil laughs, pressing a light kiss into Dan's hair and inhaling. "I liked him."
"I didn't," Dan says.
Neither of those things are a secret. That Dan hadn't always liked himself, but that Phil always had. Every version, every evolution. Phil has looked at him the way Dan looked in the picture Bryony took nearly every day for thirteen years and Dan doesn't think that's going to change any time soon.
It's constant.
"I'll back off," Dan says. "Promise."
"Not totally, I hope," Phil says, running a hand up Dan's side.
Dan hooks a leg up over Phil's knee and grin lasciviously. "Oh," he says, voice dropped down to a growl. "Yeah? You sure you're feeling up to it?"
Phil rolls his eyes, chuckling at Dan's inability to keep his promise for even a second. Then he tugs Dan closer, pushing their bodies together so that Dan can feel just how 'up' to it he's feeling.
"I'm feeling great," Phil tells him.
And Dan believes him.