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It was the most beautiful, breathtaking colour there was. When the unforgiving British clouds manage to part once in a while, that first sign of real sky was a sight for sore eyes. The hue of the ocean, the tone of forget-me-nots in the spring. It was magical.
Or so Dan heard. Over and over, for eighteen years.
People had good intentions when they’d attempt to describe this colour to him, the lucky shits whose soulmate had duller eyes. But in the end, they were just words. The stories his mum would tell every night about crisp azure sheets and twinkling Sapphire treasures left him feeling empty as a tiny child. Fortunately for her, his dad’s eyes were gray. Who would be sad about never seeing gray? And to top it off, his parents met when they were twelve. Dan had never been that lucky.
Did he hope that he would’ve met his person by now? Yes. Did he stupidly think it would be easier to fall in love, considering all he had to endure to finally accept his ambiguous sexual identity? Yes. Was it idiotic of him to keep dating a girl for so many years as they both forced a connection? Yes. Yes. Fucking yes.
But everything was fine, he often convinced himself. It’s just that nothing ever went beyond “okay.”
There were other colors, of course; the sweeping reds, the piercing greens. And there was black. Burrowing himself in dark, stormy colors, the gloomy sounds of the music scene in the 2000’s, and the safe haven of MySpace and YouTube was what got him by.
On one of his desperate escape attempts to the Internet on a particularly terrible day, (one that involved the pathetic jackasses at school being their usual selves) he clicked on a YouTube video entitled Sebastian: Universe Defender, in which this cute-and-ridiculously-cool-but-also-dorky guy drank a soda and talks about time travel. The guy—AmazingPhil, as he called himself—was the reason Dan laughed for the first time in days, laughed so hard that tears formed at the corners of his eyes, so hard that he couldn’t will himself to click away. This led him to devour the rest of his channel until he passed out.
The next day, to his absolute confusion, little things started to change.
Dan noticed the cakes by the bakery he always walked past had pale blue icing and teal sprinkles, whereas they were always a dull gray. The jeans his mum always wore, he realized, weren’t black at all, but were a darker shade of cobalt.
Weird.
Did he somehow meet his soulmate while being completely oblivious? Was it the shy girl, that hot guy, someone he just brushed on the street? Unlikely. The lake, the blue jays, the summer sky—they were still frustratingly colourless.
Maybe, Dan thought to himself, he was just so messed up that even such a basic part of his biology gets screwed over.
***
Dan still insists that he is in the Matrix. Or dead. That’s a million times more likely than his actual situation. A million times more likely than the fact that he is in Phil Lester’s room. Not AmazingPhil, not the guy on the screen with the impressive jump cuts. Not AmazingPhil, the famous YouTuber he’s stalked for such a long time. Not AmazingPhil, the Skype username he’d wait to come online every night.
Just Phil, a guy who’s so naturally funny and smart that Dan is running miles to catch up, a guy who has the biggest blue eyes—which, thank god for his screwed up biology, he can somehow see.
He feels himself getting more and more elated as he laughs and yells louder than the whole of Manchester, so much so that he’s not even distracted by all the colour he’s somehow getting to see—Phil’s socks, the squares on the sheets. All he’s marveling at is the boy in front of him. Everything else was beyond them, which, they realize, included the time.
“How is it already light outside?” Phil mutters while they took a “nap” on the floor (as if Dan could sleep in this situation.)
“What? What time is it?”
“Four? Five?” the older boy replies as he draws the blinds.
As Dan flinches from the light, he sees the sky.
The first thing he realized was that everyone was a giant liar. Blue wasn’t magical; it’s not some sort of potion or something that comes out of a unicorn’s ass. It was...the feeling of waking up. It was the color of the world. It put the orange of his bedroom walls or his favorite shades of black to shame. While the sky used to be a never-ending cloud, it’s now a sprawling, unworldly landscape out the window. So bright, so different from everything else, that he didn’t even realize he’s been muttering to himself right in front of Phil.
“Dan?” He hears him ask tentatively.
He looks at Phil’s eyes—really looks at them—for the first time. He doesn’t want to look at any another pair again. “Does anything seem...different to you?”
Phil smiles. The kind of smile where his whole face comes alive. “I really love the colour of your hair.”