Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sitting on the edge of the Sky Top Tower makes Dan feel like he’s sitting on the edge of the world.

The sky is violet around him, and the ground far down below is dirt brown. The people move along, tiny and insignificant and ant-like. On days when the rain falls down fast like salted tears, Dan likes to brave the water falling down the back of his neck, an icy twinge against his spine as it slips down his shirt, and watch the passer bys pull out umbrellas, big and brightly coloured. And he watches the circles of pink, and green, and yellow, open up like the flowers that blossom by the blue stream in the spring time, and then he really feels like he’s looking through a microscope, because the people huddle together in crowds of colours and look like bacteria squirming through the spyglass.

Dan thinks everything is a little more fun, when you take the mundane and make it into art in your mind.

::

Some rules:

Don’t go out after ten pm alone, it’s not safe. Not these days, not in hard times. Things must be sacrificed, and better the view of the stars, and moonlit cascades down the Winter Pools, and trips to haunted woods where ghosts are said to stalk craters in between the crooked trees, than causalities, and death tolls, and black blood on burned flesh.

Say your prayers to the sun god at least once a day. For your mothers and fathers, and for the wars that rage above the sky.

Don’t leave the perimeters of the city for anything.

Dan breaks all three. He likes the night too much to miss, he loves the sight of the stars, so close, so big, strewn across the dark pools of indigo sky. They’re so big, sometimes, like strange-shaped balloons on the edges of silver strings, like he could reach out, and touch, and pull them back down to him.

The night isn’t as dangerous as they make it out to be, Dan thinks, but it’s precautionary measures. Dan supposes they have to take them. Now that the city is haunted by dark, nobody bothers to come down, and hurt, and harm. But if they didn’t all stay tucked up where it’s warm, where it’s light, where it’s safe through bulletproof glass windows and steel walls, Dan figures the shadowed streets would be as much of a target as it used to be.

He likes it better this way, anyhow. He likes the silence – save from the occasional explosion, the distant noise of a crash, and a clatter that’s probably miles up into the sky and yet resounds through the atmosphere, through the broken clouds, threatening to shatter stars that look so fragile.

Dan thinks if the stars explode too, he’ll reach down and pick up the pieces, and put them in his pocket for safe keeping.

::

For someone who lives in a world where the spaceships hang like clouds over the city and the sounds of voices can be heard from daybreak until dusk and the telecommunicators can create a projection call with your favourite person on the planet in a total of 3.5 seconds, Dan feels surprisingly lonely, sometimes.

::

Dan doesn’t believe in any god of the sun – the sun is the furthest star there is from Eslorix, and Dan thinks if he’s going to send his prayers to anyone, he’d prefer somebody a little closer to home.

Besides, Dan has always liked the moon a lot more. There’s something about the way it shines.

::

Eslorix is the planet of light. It has a hanging moon and the sky is more violet than blue. The clouds are heavy and dark grey, and the world looks somewhat ugly when the rain spits down, though it’s a pretty place, usually.

The West City, Dan’s home, is expansive, but contained; the buildings are made with unbreakable walls, the houses steel, mostly. The luckiest have windows. The Sky Top Tower is an exception with white walls made of stone that never seems to fall, and it’s Dan’s favourite place in the world.

Beyond the perimeters, the forest draws out for miles and miles. The first few have leaves on its trees all year round, blooming big and wild, but the further you get, you find trees gnarled and old, and bare and skeletal, always empty. The forest is littered with rocket wreckages and corpses, and large craters scarring the planet like the imprints of moons. And ghosts, if you believe the legends, from the wars fought. Dan believes them, but he isn’t scared of them, not so much. Beyond the forest there’s a wild sea leading up to the next city, and so on, and so on, until you reach the end of the world; back to the dead zone, and then the West City.

Eslorix is a small planet, and you stick within your perimeters. Dan has never seen the wild sea, has barely scoured past the first few miles of the forests, and isn’t quite crazy enough to risk setting foot in the dead zone where the war carries on as the citizens sleep.

At a time, it wasn’t like this, so closed off and so secure. And Dan knows it’s for the good of the people, and it’s for his safety.

But the safety is stifling, and he’s restless.

::

It’s deathly silent when Dan slips out of his bed covers, tiptoes across the metal flooring and pushes the exit button. The door lifts upwards, and he winces at the sharp noise it makes for those few seconds as steel shifts, though it doesn’t wake anybody up. It never does.

He’s carefully quiet as he moves through the passage way, down to the other end of the hall, and then he darts down the shadowed steps, knowing the way off by heart. He could do it with his eyes closed although it’s so dark here that he already feels as if he is. Once down on the ground floor, he moves forward, feeling out for the sensor, and presses his hand against smooth glass which fills the small landing with a bright white glow.

RECOGNITION SYSTEMS LOADING, RECOGNITION SYSTEMS LOADING, RECOGNITION SYSTEMS LOADING, the screen reads, the words appearing over and over in lines until the sensors load. Dan’s hand is already in perfect position, naturally in line from the amount he has had to do this. It only takes a second then for the sensors to read and match his palm to his file, and the front door opens.

Outside, the air is cool. The stars hang like portraits in a gallery, and on nights this beautiful, that’s where Dan feels he is, a museum, a gallery, in the night, when the world is dead, stopped, stilted, when it feels like he is frozen in time. Isn’t that what a museum is, after all, relics of time frozen in motion?

He breathes in the fresh air, gulping it in, sighing in relief at the freedom from stuffy chambers and metal and noiseless corridors that smell faintly of bleach, after his father’s last laboratory spillage on Tuesday. He wrinkles his nose at the memory, and then turns back to tap in the security code and lock his house again.

Dan doesn’t like to linger, for fear of a guard emerging, although he knows their time schedules by heart and has mapped out their routes like a freeze frame image in his mind, and knows that each of the guard will be clear of his path for at least another twenty minutes. Still, he flits through the streets, fast, lets the air fill his lungs, lets the stars shine down and illuminate his path so that his shadow can run with him and the world feels a little less lonely.

Dan loves the city, but it’s not safe for moonlit walks unless he wants to get himself caught by the guard, unless he wants to spend the entire night checking the time and darting into alley ways and hiding places, so he heads to the forest.

It might be haunted, but the ghosts won’t hurt him.

::

The war with Flieuthea began when Dan was seven summers old, and he can’t remember a world any different.

He has vague memories – coming home late with his mother when she was still around, when she’d hold his hand through the streets and point up and the sky and whisper all of the names of the stars, Trainult and Reozde and the Aruads, and his eyes would widen in wonder. He remembers watching the rockets and spaceships launch, the way they’d light up the sky and soar into the stars with a clatter.

There’s only one night a year now when the curfews are broken and the city fills up as the sun goes down. The festival of the moon, the annual celebration that would last from dusk until dawn on the dirt roads, even the children not sleeping. The people fill the streets, paint speckling their faces and glitter sticking to the markings on their skin. And for one night a year, there is laughter and light in combination with darkness and shadows and cold streets, and on reflection it seems like a balance, in opposition to this fear of anything separate from glittering lights.

Now, in times of war, the council are weary about even allowing the festival to continue, but Dan thinks they’re safe, at least for the next one coming. He’s going to make sure to make it last though, for fear the war might take even the one night of colour the land of light has left.

Dan doesn’t know much about Flieuthea – he knows that it’s close, the neighbouring planet to his own. They share a moon, even; when the sun shines bright through Eslorixian skies, the moon beams fall down against Flieuthean shores. It’s the world of the seas, Dan knows that much, knows the expanse of oceans that link up its cities and islands alike. The pictures look beautiful, but less so its armies, and soldiers, and rockets wreaking havoc in their shared sky.

He doesn’t like to think about it, the war. It makes little sense to him, fighting when you share a sky, fighting when you share anything at all. And yet, sharing is the entire cause of the problems and the conflict, as both believe that two worlds can’t share one moon, one light. Never mind that the god of the sun serves an entire universe. Never mind that all.

It doesn’t make any sense to Dan, but he’s a kid. No one is listening.

Sometimes he sits upon the Sky Top Tower and he watches the sky explode, and the nausea curls in his stomach as he realises in a year, that’s expected to be him. Dan won’t be an inventor, or a mechanic, or a scientist, or a healer, he doesn’t have the brain. He lacks the strength for labouring or farming, and he knows as well as anybody he’ll never have a place on the council.

That leaves only the guard. He hopes they’ll let him roam the city streets but the war ravages on and the guard is interspersed with the soldiers, and there’s no telling where he’ll end up.

He’d like to be an explorer, maybe, but he doesn’t have the resources.

He wonders how in the land of the light they’ve somehow lost sight of art. He’d like to do that, too, if he could. But he can’t.

::

The forest is dead, dying more every second as Dan wades further in, branches snapping underneath his feet and rustling as he walks. Proof of ghosts, he thinks, is the sounds the forest makes, though the deceased are silent. The spirits breathe through the wind that chills his bare wrists.

The view of the moon is perfect from here, splaying light out all over the land, and paling the sky from its utmost darkness back to purple. Dan feels like he’s watching speckles of daylight within the dead night sky.

Truth be told, he doesn’t know where he’s going, but Dan likes that best. To walk with no set direction, and he might be walking for hours. Tonight is not a good night for adventuring. He has to be at the Academy tomorrow for class, but Dan knows his mind is not up to standards, and he knows where he’ll be sent by the next spell of the sun god, and so he’s given up on trying somewhat.

No one will notice if the boy who thinks too much is not sat at the back of the room, not asking questions that he wishes someone could answer.

It sounds strange, cutting through the silence, a high-pitched whistle and the distinct noise of flames dragging through the breezy air. It lasts for seconds, drawing closer. Overheard, Dan sees fire in the sky, a tail of smoke stalking behind it. It looks like a comet, almost, or a star on fire. Not like a rocket leaving trails of scrap mental over the baron forest floor as it flies to a descent, a crashing ship on the violent seas of space.

Dan winces when he hears the devastating noise of a fallen ship. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before, but never this close, and his heart pounds despite himself. The noises of war are ones that you never get used to, surely, and Dan is no exception. It resounds in his ears, and the thick smell of smoke begins to tangle through the trees.

He should go another way. He should. He should turn around and go home and pull the covers over his head and be glad he has a place to sleep.

He doesn’t, though. Of course he doesn’t. Dan steps forwards, and then again, and then again. He walks forwards, and the noises of branches cracking and dead leaves tearing doesn’t sound so loud anymore.

::

Sometimes, Dan just feels like he doesn’t quite belong.

He sits upon the Sky Top Tower and he looks at the people passing by. In a world with twenty five hours in a day, he feels like he lacks the time. In a world of telecommunicators and a city divided into sections where everybody knows everybody, he feels lonely. In a world of sensor recognition robots and aerial sockets which will allow you to fly for a few moments at a time while the inventors take their time to fix the technology, Dan feels hopelessly unimpressed and even more so uninspired.

Dan thinks about how when he was a child there were stories told late at night, and he’d liked the feel of book spines over his fingers and tiny words in the curl of the Eslorixian language. But there are already stories, they said, when Dan thought he might hold a few of his own in the back of his mind. We don’t need anymore.

In a world of manufactured flying and robots that can read your palms, there aren’t really much need for stories, let alone new ones to replace the old, of different days with the scaled creatures under the wild sea and the winged beasts with too many limbs and too many tails.

He thinks of it bitterly, swinging his legs over the edge, back and forth, kicking at the dirtied white stone.

There are already stories, we don’t need anymore.

::

The flames are like a beacon of light, a call for help in the most desolate part of Eslorix, like putting a lighthouse in the middle of a desert.

Dan, though, is like the sailor who steers his ship through the watering hole rather than the ocean. Always in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong contexts. Somehow, the lighthouse may not be totally useless after all.

Dan stands back and watches the wreckage burn. Ashes and charred metal and split wood and spilled oil.

::

He watches the fire for a while, but the licking flames die down, and the burning ceases and for all of its danger and the burdens it carries with it, there is more of a beauty within red gold flames than there is in thick black smoke and spluttering for a breath.

And so Dan turns on his heel and begins to walk. And he takes approximately six steps before he hears a noise, and he freezes.

It’s a forest, a woodland, it’s full of noises. But Eslorixian ears are sharp and in tune, slightly pointed, and more than slightly sensitive. Dan can easily distinguish noises, can tell them apart, register them. And this noise is not one of cracking wood or melting metal. He pricks his ears and listens, and he hears… a voice.

A quiet cough, through the naked trees, a murmur of pain.

For a moment, Dan freezes, all defences up, on guard, swords bared, and he’s ready to dart back into the woods where he’d come from and find a way to sneak back silently into the city, because he’s convinced he has stumbled upon a guard. But the more he listens, the less likely it becomes. Dan has a strange inkling, a certainty valid in his heart but likely nowhere else, that it’s not a guard.

He should turn back, still. Go home. If it’s not a guard, it’s likely someone worse.

Then again, Dan’s never been very good at doing what he should do.

He hesitates for just a few moments, and then he turns left through the trees and follows the voice. He creeps quietly, making sure to create as little noise as possible, to go unseen. Dan is quick and quiet, thin in build, and he finds it easy enough to move speedily and silently, further and further into the wilderness, heart racing, wondering what he’ll find, the taste of adventure sharp and sweet on his tongue.

The voice grows louder as Dan grows closer, and he has to try hard not to step on any branches or make any noise that’ll give him away. He crouches down, watches his step, trying his best to move across empty ground, and then he leans against a tree to conceal himself and peers round inquisitively.

And there, on the ground, looking a little worse for wear but not entirely damaged, is an escape pad. Presumably from the fallen rocket, launched with desperation in an attempt to abandon ship. Thin veils of smoke billow into the air, but without sign of any fire, despite an occasional spark from the control panel which Dan sees is half ripped apart through the open door of the smaller rocket itself.

And on the ground in front of it is a figure, half flung out on impact, probably, and Dan sees holes and rips and tears in his suit and a bloody gash on his cheek, still raw and dirty.

But most importantly Dan notices the wisps of dark and pale gold smears along his skin, almost like scars, but Dan knows that isn’t what they are at all. They’re birth marks. A sign of species. And when the boy’s eyes flicker open again, moments later, like he’s struggling to hold onto consciousness, Dan is not in the least surprise to see eyes of the brightest glowing blue he could possibly imagine.

Because the boy, the shipwrecked survivor, the arsonist who had set Dan’s sky on fire for a moment, is a Flieuthean.

::

The god of the sun is the only god there is.

They say he sits in a throne in the middle of a thrall of flames. His own burn in coils attached to his head, and slither around his neck, his ankles, his wrists, but never catching light, never burning brown skin.

And you pray to the sun god, for fire is warmth and heat and safety but in a matter of seconds the white hot flames can destroy everything until there’s nothing left at all.

::

Dan feels like time is frozen.

It isn’t, of course. The thistle-birds are bustling in the trees, and Dan sees their black, pointed beaks peaking out through the trees, hears sharp wings fluttering. And the Flieuthean boy, man, soldier, Dan tells himself, is moaning faintly in pain as he tries to shift over and move.

But Dan feels like time is frozen because he, a boy who never stops moving, never stops thinking, is motionless and stood like ice in place with no sign of thawing. His fingers twitch. He doesn’t know what to do.

There are more rules.

If you see a Flieuthean anywhere on Eslorixian territory, you call the guard, and they’ll come with guns. There is no such thing as a fair trial for a Flieuthean, and the prison cells are reserved for more important people than insignificant soldiers who can’t fly a space ship. Unless they are a person of importance, someone who can be used, stripped of identity and shoved up for trade, (and even then the guards clamber for glowing light eyes to dull out and for mantis coloured blood to spill) the guard will kill them on instance. No burial, left to rot in the forests and join the haunt that floods from the wild sea.

If you can’t call the guard, and you are under threat, and you can, you kill.

You will not be persecuted.

If a Flieuthean is found in Eslorixian territory, they die, whether you pull the trigger or give the command is irrelevant. Dan carries no weapons. He should be pulling out his telecommunicator and calling the guard on instance, even if they do punish him for leaving the perimeters, but he can’t quite bring himself to. The boy is skinny and injured and weak.

Dan doesn’t see a threat. He sees a body, he sees flesh and bones and blood, just like him.

And he can’t bring himself to do it. He lets out a breath, and takes a step backwards, regaining control of his own limbs at last, and ambles backwards. He just wants to go home, though his head is spinning. The voice of the guard echoes that if he does nothing, and this soldier kills an Eslorixian, it’s on Dan’s own conscience, but Dan doesn’t see a soldier; he sees a wounded boy.

His thoughts throw him off, and Dan misses his step, tripping blindly over a tree stump sticking out of the ground surface like a headstone. He lets out a yelp despite his best efforts, and his hand flies up to cover his mouth but it’s too late and as his body crashes too loud, too loud against the floor and shoot an aching pain up his arms and legs, he can see the startled face of the Flieuthean boy, and glowing eyes widen as they rest upon him.

They’re both down, now, Dan thinks. They’re equals, almost, here on the dirty floor. And then he remembers that this man probably carries a gun. He remembers that he can walk and run while the man lays injured. He’s not quite sure what to do.

The dead don’t speak. The thistle-birds whistle, but otherwise silence floods through the gaps in the trees, and Dan raises his head to look at the strange boy with swirls of gold on his skin.

“Hello,” he says.

The outsider looks at him strangely, and his fear seems to subside slightly into weariness as he glances at Dan tiredly.

“Get it over with then,” he says, and Dan is almost surprised to hear him speaking in Eslorixian tongue rather than the native Flieuthean language.

It kind of breaks Dan’s heart a little bit, that someone so young accepts death in a heart beat, sentenced to an end the moment he fell through Eslorixian skies.

Something about it just seems sad. Dan does not like to think of his home as a death sentence.

“I’m not from the guard,” Dan tells him.

“I know,” the boy says. “But you’re going to call them, aren’t you?

Dan stands up, slowly. He dusts the dirt off of his body, patting down his trousers and his shirt. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t think so.”

The outsider’s head tilts to the side, questioning. The expression on his face asks Dan all of the things that he doesn’t need to say, but a voice never comes. It’s as if the boy is still waiting for death, and doesn’t bother to waste his remaining words on asking questions that he thinks he already knows.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Dan says. “I don’t – I don’t think that’s right.”

“A peace maker, huh?”

Dan shrugs. “Something like that, I suppose.”

He takes a tentative step forward, and the outsider flinches, clearly still not trusting. And why should he be?

“You’re from Flieuthea,” Dan states.

“Yeah.”

“You need to – you really need to go. Before someone else finds you. It’s not safe.”

“I can’t,” the boy says. “My ship crashed. I can’t fly it.”

Dan bites his lip. “Don’t you have some way of communicating with your people?”

“I had a transmitter, but it broke in the fall. Got crushed. It’s useless.”

Dan is quiet for a long moment, not knowing what to say. He’s breaking all sorts of rules right now, just by letting the Flieuthean remain here undetected. He shouldn’t be, he knows that. He should be – he should get the guard. But he doesn’t, and he breaks what he only assumes are a hundred more rules left unwritten because they seem obvious, by standing here, having this conversation. With the outsider, the enemy, as if the skies don’t alight every night in their conflict.

“I’m Dan,” he says. He’s not really sure why. He’s pretty sure pleasantries and politeness and conversations are not something spent on the enemy. Another rule broken, he presumes.

The boy looks at him strangely, he too probably perplexed by their entire interaction. He still looks distrustful, and Dan feels bare and naked as his eyes, the lightest Dan has ever seen, scan over his body and take him in as if searching for a hidden gun and a false sense of security.

Still guarded, the outsider replies with, “I’m Phil.”

“How badly are you hurt?” Dan asks, and Phil still looks suspicious.

“Not, like, too much,” he says. “Just. It hurts. Nothing is broken. I’m not paralysed,” he pauses. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Dan says, after a moment of prolonged silence of shifting uncomfortable beneath the burning gaze of an alien. That’s what the Flieuthean are to them, after all, aliens. And Dan knows that for Phil it is the exact same. “I think I want to help you.”

“Are you insane?” Phil asks, and Dan wants to laugh at the shock that comes with the very idea of helping somebody else. “Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Dan repeats, with a small shrug, and he folds his arm as if to protect himself, though what of he’s unsure.

“Aren’t you like, betraying your people, and your planet, and your leaders right now?” Phil asks coolly, but it sounds somewhat like an accusation. Like he still thinks this is a trick.

“I guess I am,” Dan says. “But maybe I don’t agree with what they’re doing. Maybe it’s their war, and not mine.”

Phil nods, like he understands, like he feels the same despite his Flieuthean soldier uniform, blue fabrics and gold metal. And maybe he does.

::

Dan remembers one night six years ago – everyone remembers it, how could anyone forget? Nobody does, and Dan thinks that is why the war will never end. You don’t forget debris and scrap metal and burning wood and rocket ship doors and worse, much worse, that Dan doesn’t want to name, the remnants of soldiers, falling from the sky and onto the dirt city ground.

Dan remembers the sky being on fire when the Flieuthean star ships sent missiles souring through the indigo sweep of night. He remembers they’d looked pretty, for a moment, until the bullet hit target and all hell broke loose and the sky began to scream.

Mostly he remembers Flieuthean ships circling over the city in the aftermath like vultures.

::

“Ouch, that hurts!” Phil yelps, wincing visibly, but he doesn’t try to pull away from Dan or stop the process.

“I’m sorry,” Dan says apologetically. “But there’s no other way. I need to clean the wound, or it’ll get infected, and then-”

“And then I’m in trouble,” Phil finishes quietly. “Yeah. I know.”

“It won’t be much longer,” Dan says, and he drags the antiseptic wipe along one of the long cuts across Phil’s arm that Dan had found upon further inspection of his bruised body. Dan has stopped the bleeding at least, and Phil’s blood is dried and congealed, looking strange, the vivid green colour against the gold wisps along his skin. It’s a deep cut, and as Dan cleans it the wound reopens and trickles down his skin. Phil shudders slightly, but he doesn’t complain.

After the cut is clean, Dan places a bandage around his arm. It’s the third bandage he’s used, for Phil, though luckily without broken bones or any serious injury, had got pretty bruised up in the rough landing. Dan just thinks Phil must be lucky for the fact that his medical supplies hadn’t been destroyed in the process like he’s transmitter.

“The moon must be looking out for you,” Dan tells him.

“The moon?”

“I think it’s more trustworthy than the sun.”

Phil considers this. “If I’d crashed during the day, your people would have found me, probably. Wouldn’t they?”

“Probably,” Dan doesn’t bother to lie.

“And they’d kill me.”

“Yeah.”

“And you wouldn’t be here. In the day. Would you? You’re out here at night for a reason. And it’s not because you’re from the guard.”

“Yeah.”

Phil looks contemplative for a moment. “You might be right,” he says, gazing upwards at the moon, framed before a backdrop of dark skies and bright stars. “Maybe the moon is trustworthy.”

“Maybe it is,” Dan says. When he brings an antiseptic wipe up to Phil’s cheek to clean the fresh wound, Phil gazes at the brightness in the sky and he doesn’t flinch.

::

As the lights of the day begin to wake, fading the sky to the colour of flowers, and the tamarins and macaws and the jackrabbits begin to wake up within the depths of the wilderness, Dan knows he has to go home. He needs to make it back before the city wakes with the wild and the guard become alert and it becomes impossible to slip through the perimeters and back into the regular world.

Somehow, in the past few hours, the world has become painfully irregular.

But Phil, in any case, is in better shape. His wounds have been clothed and cleaned and bandaged, and he’s in pain, but he’ll be okay. Dan had bagged his gun when Phil wasn’t looking and placed it inside his own backpack, so he can’t harm anyone, if he had the incentive too. Dan doesn’t think so, but he knows he can’t wholly trust an outsider.

The bulk of Phil’s supplies and emergency equipment had been destroyed in the fall of his original ship, but some of the launch pad’s managed to survive the fall. He sips only the minimal amount of water, stating that he needs to save it and Dan finds him slightly stale bread and a handful of brinberries.

“I have to go,” Dan says, and Phil studies him carefully.

“I figured as such,” he says.

“I’ll come back. Tonight. I promise.”

Phil looks at him, weary and unsure, as if he still can’t trust him. Not entirely, as much as his heart may be clambering for him to do so whole heartedly, he still can’t quite. Dan doesn’t blame him.

“Will you?”

“I will. And I’ll bring some more supplies, if I can. We can figure out a way to get you home.”

Phil nods, slowly.

“Will I be safe here? Are the guards going to come?”

Dan shakes his head. “They wouldn’t come this far into the forest for any kind of patrol. They prefer not to pass where the leaves begin to fall and the trees die.”

“I don’t blame them, I guess.”

“So unless they have a reason to come out here, they won’t,” he pauses, and gives Phil a lingering look. “So don’t give them a reason to.”

Phil nods, and Dan gives him a small, tight smile. He’s tired, and he doesn’t know quite what he has gotten himself into. He takes a step back, and turns to begin his retreat through the woods.

It only really hits him in that moment, sinking in through his thoughts and cutting at him like a knife through butter. He is a traitor. If the guard found out, they could put him in a cell for the rest of his life. They could put him to death, probably. They could…

“Dan?” Phil’s voice speaks up again, and Dan turns his head to look at him.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Sincerity shines in those glowing eyes.

Dan doesn’t regret what he is doing for another single second.

::

Dan is back in his bed just half an hour before the rest of the world begins to rise.

He spends his day lethargic and sleepless. At the Academy, he sits in the back of a dark room and tries his best to copy onto his tablet the words that are projected onto the glass pane at the front of the room, but the black print blurs and all Dan can think about is the alien boy asleep in the woods.

::

Dan’s father is a scientist. He spends most of his time in the laboratory, either the one that he has in the Tower of Exploration in the middle of the city, where he has unlimited access to all kinds of solutions and robotics and all of the science he could ever hope to explore, or the one in Dan’s own home. It’s less savvy and expansive, but there are still towering steel machines and systems that operate entirely through the process of magnetism, and chemistry apparatus like beakers and cylinders and tubes that carry hot liquids across the room.

His father is ambitious and eccentric and Dan doesn’t think he’ll step away from his science and his apparatus and his mismatched clumsy interests until he’s finally figured out a way to fly.

It doesn’t bother Dan, that his father is always so immersed in his own explorations, especially now that he’s taken his brother as his apprentice. It just allows Dan to do the same with his own, and to slip through the corridors, unnoticed.

And hey, he figures, maybe they really will learn how to fly.

::

Dan returns to the forest again that night, a backpack heavy on his shoulders. It contains bottles more of water, because Dan assumes having Phil die of dehydration would be slightly counter-productive and an assortment of food stolen from the back of his kitchen cupboards. Dan’s father and brother don’t eat much, often finding themselves too immersed in their work. Dan doesn’t think they’ll notice.

“You came back,” Phil says, when Dan steps out into the small clearing where Phil’s launch pad had crashed and torn down a couple of the skinny tree skeletons in it’s wake. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

Dan scoffs. “Yeah,” he says. “Because I saved you last night just to leave you to rot in the forest. That makes a lot of sense.”

That actually elicits a smile from Phil.

“Okay, you’re right,” Phil says. “I’m just finding it hard to process why you’re here, helping me at all.”

“I wish I could give you an answer,” Dan tells him. “But I don’t know myself.”

Phil nods, going quiet for a moment before he says, “you’re risking a lot.”

Dan says, “I know.”

“What happens if you get caught?”

“There’s something I don’t know,” Dan replies. “But nothing good. Imprisonment, maybe. At best.”

“At best?”

“It’s not exactly a common crime. I don’t really have anything to compare it to.”

“I guess that’s true,” Phil muses. “It just makes it hard to trust you.”

“I know.”

They don’t fill in the blanks, the part where Phil says, but I don’t have any other choice, although they both know it’s true. Even without Dan’s help and supplies, the forest might be survivable, for a little while. But not forever, and he would certainly have to say goodbye to any and all hope of ever making it out of here, too. Phil doesn’t hold much hope for ever restoring what was left of his launch pad, but on his own it really would be impossible.

Dan wants to break the silence. He doesn’t want to talk about conflict and war and the criminality of what he is currently doing. He looks at Phil, takes him in. Those blue eyes – Dan wonders why the Eslorixians hate the Flieutheans, really, when they love the light, and the eyes of the aliens are the lightest things Dan has ever seen – and the drop of messy black hair over his head. And his skin, pale, patterned with brushes of gold, and pale lips.

Dan thinks the Flieutheans look strange, but not ugly.

“How do you speak my language?” he asks, suddenly, the thought coming back to him, because he knows that they speak in different native tongues and even more acutely he knows that Phil is speaking fluently in Dan’s own Eslorixian. He’d noticed this the night before, but it hadn’t seemed right to ask him that, when Phil had been weary and defeated and waiting for Dan to kill him.

“They taught us it in school, when I was a kid,” Phil says. “Like, before the war and everything started. And there was all this talk about, like, intergalactic based communications, with Eslorix and Treynides and Flayenus, you know?”

Dan knows. There was peace before the war, and communications, talk of sharing resources and intelligence. But now Eslorix and Flieuthea fight and the people of Treynides and Flayenus refuse to get involved with any communication with either for fear of being drawn into the conflict.

“I remember,” Dan says.

“They kept teaching us Eslorixian for a while, when the war started. They stopped when I was fourteen. And then I just kept learning the language.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to understand it.”

“What, so you could have a hearty discussion with us before you killed us?”

Phil snorts. “I didn’t exactly grow up wanting to be a solider.”

“No?”

“No. I wanted to work in intergalactic communications. I had done since I was a kid,” Phil smiles, tight and hard, the kind that doesn’t reach his eyes and seems bitter and brittle. “There’s not much market for it now though, is there? I thought the war would be over by now.”

“Me too,” Dan says.

“Now I don’t think it’ll ever be over.”

Dan sighs, and moves closer, without even realising it. If Phil notices, his body language doesn’t give it away.

“Me too,” he says again.

::

Days later, when the topic has changed and no discussion of intergalactic communications and different languages and the war of their two worlds has been present since the first time they discussed it, Dan, strangely, finds the words in his mouth to respond to a question that Phil never asked.

“I understand what that’s like, you know,” he says, quietly. Phil looks up, perplexed, and before he can say anything Dan continues. “I don’t want to be a soldier either, but I’m going to have to be, I think.”

“Why?”

Dan shrugs. “Not right for any other job. There’s no market for what I want to do, either.”

“And what’s that?”

“Write stories. Make art,” Dan gestures. “They say they’ve already got stories, and nobody cares about art when there’s a world to be fought. I was meant to be a scientist, I think, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I try to find answers and end up with more questions, and I’m too impatient for it.”

“That’s sad,” Phil says. “That you can’t tell your stories. I’d like to hear them. I bet other people would too, if things were different.”

“If things were different,” Dan agrees. But they’re not, and he’s not even sure if they would then. “But people care more about technology and robots and defying gravity than they do to focus on worlds that never were and people who never existed.”

“It’s sad,” Phil repeats. He looks at Dan, and gives him a small smile. Not quite trusting, but a token of kindness, for the boy who bandaged his wounds instead of making more. “You know, in a different world, I’d like to hear your stories.”

Dan says, “I’d like to tell you them.”

It’s quiet for a moment, with neither of them really knowing what to say.

And then Phil says, “well, I can’t imagine you as a soldier in any case. What are you going to do? Shoot your enemy and then apologise and offer them a bandage and a cup of brinberry juice?”

Dan grins, and shoves him playfully. “Hey,” he says. “I’m very threatening and hostile.”

“Sure you are,” Phil says. “And I’m a praying mantis.”

::

Dan’s life has become a mess of midnight rendezvous’ outside of the city’s perimeters and forbidden walks home in the early hours of the shadowed mornings, and then trying to keep himself awake for his duration of the hours at the Academy, before sleeping in the evenings before night falls.

In the mean time, he wonders. About Phil, and his ship, and how they’re ever going to get him back into the sky. It’s been just over a week, and his people will presume him dead by now. No one is coming to rescue him, and so it’s Dan’s job. He won’t let him die in the depths of the forest.

He’s giving Phil supplies. He makes sure to go out there every night to give him food and water, but he’s slipped him other things, too, when he can. Basic things, like for hygiene, and tools. He slips his gun back into the back of the launch pad, too. And perhaps that is stupid and reckless but should the guard come, Dan doesn’t feel right leaving Phil unprotected. He doesn’t see it as a threat. If he’s sure of anything, it’s that Phil won’t use the gun for harm unless he has to.

Somehow, Dan has learned to trust the enemy.

::

“What’s wrong with the ship, anyway?” Dan asks. He fears that he’s not exactly going to be a particularly big help. Engineering and mechanics have never been his strong point, but he’s not too bad.

“It’s the engine, mostly,” Phil says, frowning as he studies lines of wires exposed from where the control panel has become detached from the surface. “It needs reconstructing. Or better still, a new engine altogether. And the controls need to be rewired. Like, a fixed engine will get me into the sky but I’m still fucked if I can’t fly it.”

“Are you any good at mechanics?” Dan asks hopefully.

“I’m not the worst?” Phil offers. “My dad’s a mechanic, he builds engines and ships like this, but I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t think I can.”

“Think positively,” Dan urges. “Because I don’t see many other options out here.”

Phil sighs, and he lies back onto the dirt and he stares up into the sky. Dan considers for a moment, and then he joins him, lying down by his side and looking up at the moon. It’s big and full tonight, and the stars are glittering, lighting the sky with purple tints. It’s beautiful, and Dan wishes not for the first time that he was confided within perimeters and rules and a world built on lack of choice.

For safety, he knows. But the safety is stifling and what’s life without risk?

He wishes he could take his own ship someday, and launch from the ground into the sky at full power, split through the atmosphere and up through the clouds, past everything and into space. But he doesn’t want to do so as a soldier going into war, and that’s the only option there is.

“I wish I could go home,” Phil murmurs. “I miss them, everyone. Everything.”

“I know,” Dan says. “We’ll get you home.”

“Will we?” Phil looks doubtful. “How, though? There’s no way for me to communicate with them, and I don’t think we’ll be able to get the engine running again-”

“What if there’s another way? Could we fix your transmitter?”

“It smashed into pieces,” Phil says, shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll think on it,” Dan promises. “We’ll think of something. I promise. You’ll get to go home, and see your mum and dad again. You will.”

“Thanks, Dan,” Phil says into the darkness. “I never knew an Eslorixian could be so nice.”

“You’re not too bad yourself,” Dan teases, nudging him. “For a Flieuthean.”

::

Phil begins to think about things and Dan draws upon the concept of him leaving.

The transmitter is completely destroyed, so there’s no hope there, with even the locaterchip lost. They’re back where they started. Dan knows after almost three weeks of being here, on a strange planet, away from home, Phil can’t be feeling good at all. He wishes he could help and feels entirely useless.

Phil talks about homesickness and Dan talks about the moon and they’re good enough, maybe.

::

Dan spends most of his day at the Academy scouring through the library, collecting armfuls of every book on rocket mechanics and spaceship engineering he can possibly find, and almost falls asleep with the paper as his pillow. He misses his actual lessons, but he thinks that it doesn’t matter anymore. He knows where he’s headed, to space as a soldier, and there’s no pretending that that isn’t the case. There’s no point.

Dan wonders what would be if their roles were reversed. If he’d washed up on the shores of Flieuthea. If Phil would do the same for him.

Phil is a good person, and he’s an alien but he might just be more Eslorixian than anyone Dan’s ever met. And so he tells himself, firmly, that it’s a yes when really he doesn’t know at all.

He uses his tablet too. He finds it easier to gather the information then when he can grab it with his fingers and pull chosen pieces of information into different windows and documents. It’s a lot easier than sifting through the books, in any case.

But it’s no use. Everything he finds points to the one factor that Dan already knows: the kind of technology and equipment they’re going to need is nothing that Dan will be able to sneak into the depths of the forest and even if he could, the procedure is so difficult he has absolutely no faith in the two of them being able to get the thing off the ground, let alone into the sky without it exploding while Phil is still in it.

Dan sighs, and he closes the book and slides his tablet back into his backpack. It looks like it’s back to the drawing board.

::

Dan’s in the kitchen and he’s filling the third of his bottles up to the brim with water from the dispenser. His backpack is already filled with other things for Phil that he’d grabbed from the cupboards and is hoping will go unnoticed. Phil hates admitting it, when he’s running low on supplies, because he hates being dependent on a stranger who quite honestly owes him nothing.

But Dan can always tell, and he’s not going to let him starve. Letting Phil die is not an equation that comes into his plan at all.

He doesn’t, however, notice that he’d forgotten to close the great steel door behind him, nor the sounds of his brother’s footsteps moving towards the room

“What are you doing?”

Dan almost topples over in surprise, falling backwards slightly and letting some of the water spray out and onto his face. He turns around and glowers.

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s none of your business, Kieran.”

Kieran has his arms folded, and he’s leaning against the dark metal wall, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Well, now I’m not suspicious at all,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm, and Dan rolls his eyes and turns away again to seal the cap over the bottle. “Dan. Don’t ignore me. What are you doing?”

“Getting a drink, what does it look like?” he snaps.

“You really need three bottles of water that big?” Kieran asks, almost amused, and Dan wants to hit himself for forgetting to conceal the bottles in his bag. More so, he’s furious with himself for forgetting to close the door behind him. If he had, he’d have heard his brother coming. The sound of metal scraping as it slowly clamps down or pulls upwards is not one easy to ignore.

“Did you miss the part where it’s none of your business?”

“Dan, come on,” Kieran says. “What’s been up with you lately? You’ve been so strange. Dad thinks you’re ill.”

“You’ll both be pleased to know that I’m perfectly fine,” Dan says dryly, and then he pushes past his brother and back to his room. Kieran doesn’t follow him, but Dan can’t shake the uneasy feeling that now he’s made his brother suspicious, he’s going to have to be more careful.

::

Sometimes the sun burns so bright it reminds Dan of explosions in the sky and war and battleships bursting into flames. He waits the falling debris but it never comes.

::

“Why were you here in the night?” Phil asks.

“Mm?” Dan barely hears him, distracted. He’s tired, half asleep beside Phil and he wonders when he let himself this vulnerable.

Vaguely, he considers the fact that Phil has the upper hand here.

He thinks back to the first time they met, and the imbalance of power as Phil struggled on the ground and Dan picked himself up and brushed away the dirt rust. Now, it’s the opposite, and as he lies with both eyes closed and colour smudges blinking in the darkness, he realises that Phil could kill him, right now.

Phil could hold a gun to his head and drag him to the city and threaten to splatter Dan’s blood all over the Sky Tower unless they got him a rocket to get home. He could do that. And Dan, in this position, would be defenceless.

It would be a shitty idea. The guard would probably rather let Dan die than lend rocket fuel to a Flieuthean, but he could do it.

He could do it.

And yet Dan doesn’t move, and he doesn’t flinch, and Phil doesn’t grab a gun and force Dan’s head against the dirty ground.

Dan opens his eyes.

“The night you found me,” Phil says. “You were out here in the middle of the night. Not because you were coming to see me, you just were. And you weren’t part of the guard, and you’ve told me all about the rules. You were breaking them on that night. You weren’t supposed to be here,” he pauses. “Why were you?”

“Haven’t you figured by now I’m bad at following the rules?” Dan says.

“I have, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious.”

“I-” Dan pauses. “I don’t like the city, sometimes. And I prefer the night to the day. And sometimes I just need to come out here where the stars are the clearest – and have you noticed here, even when it rains, you can always see the moon? And sometimes I just need to be out here or I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“You told me they say these woods are haunted,” Phil reminds him.

“I did.”

“And you think they are?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I like to think so. It makes it feel less lonely.”

::

Flieuthians are tall, and their skin is a little too white and they have wisps of colour streaking their skin, like paper. Light gold brushes like flicks of paint and curls of dark gold in swirls, and Dan studies the colours against Phil’s skin in awe.

They have pale lips, and long short fingernails, and thin hips. And their eyes are like blue light.

Dan doesn’t have much to go on. He’s only ever stood close to one inhabitant of Flieuthea. But from his limited experience he reserves the right to say they are kind of beautiful.

::

“I wish I could go home, but I’m glad you’re here,” Phil says.

He sits close to Dan. Their thighs brush and Dan wishes he could light a fire and warm his hands and place them on Phil’s, maybe.

He’s not quite sure where that thought comes from, and pushes it to the back of his mind. It’s cold in any case, but a fire would draw too much attention, and he doesn’t want to risk it. He doesn’t want to risk Phil.

“I’m glad you’re here too,” Dan tells him. “I wish you weren’t trapped, though. I wish you could come here and go home as you please.”

“You know that would never work,” Phil says, and he does. And there’s a sadness that sits on the both of their shoulders and they pretend they don’t feel it.

::

The morning air is too cold and wet and thick with the threat of rain and Dan doesn’t like it. He hates it when it rains, making the ground soggy against his feet and blotting out the stars like a sweep of spilled ink in the form of dragging clouds, even if they can’t quite contain the moon.

The walk to the Academy is a depressing one after no sleep. Dan’s found lately he’s had even less than usual, with his brother and his dad popping up all the time and preventing him from sleeping during the afternoon. Dan scowls at the thought of them, kicking at the dirt below him. Sometimes he wishes his mum was around, still. She always brought the calm, like the moon.

The thought of the moon has Dan looking up at the sky, grey interspersed with violet. He studies it for a moment, longing for it to appear from behind the face of daybreak, and he feels a pang in his chest as he draws his eyes down.

(Phil has eased the loneliness, but he can’t take it away. Sometimes, Dan feels like nothing can take it away, and there’s nothing worse than feeling lonely when there’s fire in the sky.)

But his half drawn gaze catches something, and tugs blindly at a corner of Dan’s mind. He rests his line of vision upon it, properly, and takes it in, this big steel building before him that towers over the rest of the city and sends shattering sounds into the sky at least once a day.

It’s the Sky Guard Centre, and it launches all of the rockets and spaceships in West Eslorix.

::

Phil’s eyes are wide and bewildered and Dan is talking too fast but he can’t seem to slow down.

“…and I know it would be hard, but I can’t see another way. And we could manage it, me and you, we’re like, what, the dream team? We must be at this point. And I know it’s dangerous and risky, but we can’t build a spaceship and we can’t bring one out here, so we’ll have to go to it. Of course, we’ll have to conceal you, though, it wouldn’t be too difficult normally, but, well, you don’t look like us. You look-”

“Like a Flieuthean, yeah, I get it,” Phil says, wearily. His voice is quiet.

Dan has been pacing for the past five minutes rambling nonsensical ideas about how they can smuggle him into the city and, even more insane, into a spaceship and out into the skies. He’s been repeating himself and falling over his words and contradicting his own ideas, but the truth is, he hasn’t got an idea. Not a clear one. He’s got a starting point and an ending point and not the slightest clue of how to get from A to B.

He stops, though, when Phil speaks. Stops spitting out trail-off sentences and stop pacing around like he’s three minutes away from having a breakdown. He stands still for a moment, and then he sits down beside Phil on the makeshift bench they’ve created out of shuttle remains.

“I’m sorry,” Dan says. “I know it’s all kind of crazy. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Fuck, Dan, you don’t need to apologise,” Phil says. “You never need to apologise. You… you saved me, you know. You’re the only reason I’m still here, and the only reason I have any hope of ever getting home. You’re…”

“An inspiration to us all? A living legend? The first real wonder of Zeta Miriandynus?” Dan jokes, hoping to ease the mood and lighten the tone.

For some reason, his heart is fluttering a little too much in his chest for his liking.

Phil cracks a smile. “Something along those lines, to be honest, yeah.”

That catches Dan off-guard, and has him unsure of what to say. It doesn’t do much to help the butterflies, either.

“I…” he stutters out, and Phil laughs.

“You’re cute when you shut up,” he comments, teasingly, and Dan doesn’t really know what in hell this feeling is but it’s catching him unprepared.

“You should shut up,” Dan huffs. “I’m always cute.” Because feigned egotism is obviously the solution to everything, Dan thinks.

“I wouldn’t say always,” Phil says. “You weren’t cute the first time we met when you fell flat on your face-”

“I had to clean your blood up with antiseptic products,” Dan reminds him. “You weren’t exactly looking your best either.”

“Details,” Phil wavers. He reaches over, and he takes Dan’s hand, and he squeezes down gently, and Dan fights back the urge to yelp out with the force of surprise of which he is taken. He barely manages to bite down his tongue, but he’s so sure that Phil can see the colours of his cheeks intensifying, even if he doesn’t make any comment on it.

“Dan? I mean it, y'know. You’re pretty incredible.”

“You flatter me,” Dan mutters. “It’s no big deal, Phil. Anyone would have done it.”

“Not anyone,” Phil reminds him. “Not most people. Very few people at all would have done it. You kind of took me by surprise.”

“You took me by surprise too,” Dan says. Which, yeah, it’s true. When Dan had seen the outsider boy on a crashed ship in the middle of the night, he’d had the shock of his life.

But it’s still true now, something in the back of his mind whispers. You still surprise me every day with things I didn’t know I could feel and things I never thought you’d say and -

And then Phil moves quickly and suddenly, in a matter of seconds, he’s got his arms wrapped around Dan, and he’s giving him the tightest hug he’s ever had and it’s sort of, possibly, the best feeling ever. Phil gives really good hugs. Phil is the best person ever to have his head buried in your shoulders. Dan imagines the reactions of everyone back in the city, if he said that, if he said that and they knew he was talking about someone from Flieuthea.

“Did that take you by surprise?” Phil mumbles, but Dan can hear the laughter in his voice, muffled in Dan’s jumper.

“Yes, and I hate you,” Dan replies, and Phil’s still grinning when he pulls back and away. And then it’s quiet, for a minute, and Dan thinks about how nice it felt having Phil that close to him.

And Dan’s eyes can’t help but fix upon the gold sweeps and swirls across Phil’s paper white skin.

“I hate that I can’t go home,” Phil says, and Dan’s pretty sure he’s said this before. “But I’m glad I got to meet you.”

::

The trouble is, Phil is Flieuthian with skin scoured with golden markings and eyes that look like they hold all of the lights of the moon, and the city and the Sky Guard Centre are full of Eslorixians, who have skin struck by the sunlight all the time and the swirls of faded crescent moons and spirals and planets against their skin, and ears a little too pointy. You can tell Phil is an outsider from his skin and from his stature, the way that he walks and moves. Everything about him in the eyes of an Eslorixian is abundantly wrong and out of place.

The Sky Guard Centre stands too in the middle of the city, led to by some of the busiest streets in West Eslorix, and Dan has no idea how they’re going to get Phil there.

::

Dan sits on the edge of the Sky Top Tower and he swings his legs back and forth and he looks at the people moving below him like ants scurrying across the dirt, and he thinks about how smuggling Phil through the city would be a lot easier if the whole world was watched from a bird’s eye view.

::

Dan has become so acquainted with the quietness of his home and distance between he and his father that when he’s approached one morning before he leaves, he’s more than a little taken aback. It takes not a lot not to show visible surprise when his dad sits down beside him, and Dan finds that he’s not really sure what to say.

“You’re getting older now, Dan,” his dad says. “What are you going to do when you’ve finished your studies?”

There are about five ways to say ‘I don’t know’, mingling in a mixture of 'decided’ and 'unsure’ and 'thought’ and 'haven’t’ and 'still’, and yet Dan can’t think of a single one to say. His father sits, expectant and patient, and Dan wonders just how much he and his brother have been discussing him down in that laboratory. Dan could give any variation of an answer that should leave his father satisfied enough because Dan is only seventeen and the lives in Eslorix last a long while, spanning out into the early to mid hundreds of your lucky. Provided you’re not killed in the war of the skies. That’s not an answer Dan’s willing to give, either.

He doesn’t say it because it’s not true. Dan does know what he wants to do; the thing is, no one wants to listen.

No one except Phil, and soon he’ll be flying through the stars back to his home planet and Dan will be alone again.

::

Since that one realisation Dan finds himself spending a lot less time thinking about how he’s going to get Phil through the city to lead him home, and a lot more time looking up at a sky that shines and thinking about what could have happened, maybe, perhaps. In another world.

::

“It kind of sucks,” Dan says. His voice is quiet, and he can see the first few breaks of daylight slowly tearing their way through night sky as it pales into morning, and he’s thinking about how he’s going to spend the day half asleep and wishing he was with Phil.

“What does?” Phil asks.

“That once you go, I’m never going to see you again.”

Dan turns his head to look at Phil as he says it, and he watches feeling wash over Phil’s face. He has the kind of eyes that tell stories and expose secrets. Dan might not be the best at interpreting emotion but he knows unhappiness when he sees it and he watches it flicker boldly in pools of glowing blue light.

“Oh,” Phil says. It’s as if he’d never considered it, though he talks about home so much that seems hard to believe. It’s as if he’d always thought, somehow, that when he went home to Flieuthea, he’d bring back Dan, too. That he wouldn’t be leaving anything. “Yeah.”

Or maybe he’s not leaving much. Maybe he’s not leaving much at all, and all of this is a story Dan’s made up for himself, because nobody else wants to know.

“I have to go,” Dan says, and he picks up his backpack before Phil can say a word and he turns and all but stumbles back through the forest.

Phil doesn’t follow.

::

Dan doesn’t go the next night. He doesn’t set an alarm for the break of moonlight, and tells himself that it’s because he really should get a good nights sleep one of these days. It’s been weeks since he’s slept through the night and he’s forgotten what it feels like not to see the moon. He can’t see it from his bedroom, his family not being one privileged enough for the hard, tiny windows they are offered, bulletproof and practical.

Dan feels more like he’s living in a cage than ever.

He can’t sleep, though. He fidgets and he turns and he kicks his covers off and on and he paces around the room and he changes the keycode for his bedroom door. He turns the room temperature down and then up again when it gets too cold and he misses the sight of the moon. More than that, he misses Phil. He’s not avoiding him. He definitely isn’t avoiding him.

But he is, and it’s so painstakingly obvious and the middle of the night is not the optimum time for denial.

And so caged within steel walls functioning with robotics as the onset of dawn arises, Dan pictures the moonlight and an alien boy, alone in the woods and waiting and he admits it to himself, finally, maybe just a little bit: he is so fucked.

::

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Phil says. His voice is quiet and hurt and full of questions that Dan doesn’t want to answer, when he emerges in the forest at the edge of Phil’s clearing and the ghosts whisper in the wind that Dan is an idiot.

“I’m sorry,” Dan says. “I’d always come back. I’d never leave.”

“Why didn’t you come last night?” Phil asks.

Dan is quiet for a long moment, not sure whether to lie or not. “I… couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

There’s an accusation in there somewhere, and frustration crawls at the inside of Dan’s skin and he thinks about space stations far away on other planets and the shared moon they should be fighting to the death over, and he snaps.

“I have a life outside of you, you know.”

Phil glares at him for a moment, stony faced and silent, and then he says, voice flat and hard, “oh yeah. Sorry.”

Dan stays angry for approximately three minutes, standing with his arms crossed, hugging his chest and shivering, even though he’s not really cold. And then the ice around his heart thaws, and the fire inside him stills, and he feels guilty.

“No, I’m sorry,” Dan sighs. He steps forward, hesitant, and Phil doesn’t freeze so he moves closer and sits down beside him on the wreckage bench. “I didn’t mean to lash out at you. I was being a dick.”

“It’s alright,” Phil says. “I was being clingy and stupid. You do have a life outside of me, and this, and that’s okay, you know. That’s not – I had no right to be that way.”

“You do, though,” Dan argues. “If I left you, that’d be awful of me. You have your own life, yeah, but on Flieuthea. Here, you don’t have anything but me.”

“Way to be egotistical,” Phil jokes, and Dan cracks a smile.

“For the record, I was at home trying to sleep even though I’ve long since ruined my sleeping pattern beyond repair,” Dan tells him. “I don’t have much of a life outside of you, either.”

Phil grins. “Well it’s a good thing I’m such great company, isn’t it?”

Dan has to agree.

::

Sometimes Dan looks at Phil and then he looks up at the moon and thinks about how two worlds would rip each other apart for it, and he thinks, I’d share this with you any day.

::

Dan spends a lot of time wondering how the hell you tell an alien boy you kind of want to kiss him. He tells himself that it’s okay, because if it goes wrong he never has to see Phil again, but somehow, that just makes it worse.

::

Phil stares at the ground for a few moments, eyes resting upon Dan’s bare feet and then he raises his eyebrows and looks at Dan incredulously.

“What?” Dan asks, unnerved. “What?”

“It’s just…” Phil shakes his head. “You Eslorixians have telecommunicators and hovercrafts and your people are trying to invent a way to fly, and no one has ever thought to invent a shoe?”

“Well, what’s the point?” Dan complains, confused. He’s never really seen the point in wearing shoes like the Flieutheans do. What’s the point in having senses to touch and feel with if you don’t use them?

“Maybe to stop yourself from stepping on branches and rocks and things that hurt?” Phil suggests, and Dan scoffs because you build up a resistance after a while, and so it never hurts all that much. “Or when the ground is wet and cold?”

“I don’t see people covering their hands or their faces when it’s raining. So why bother with your feet?” Dan asks, and Phil just rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “See, weaknesses like that are why we’re going to win the war.”

“No, you’re gonna lose the war when your discomfort catches up to you. You’ll regret the day you ever stepped outside with your feet bare, just wait and see.”

Dan thinks that nobody has ever made him laugh quite like Phil does.

::

Dan slips back into the house just after dawn as the sun just begins to rest over Eslorix. He’s quiet, padding bare-footed through the front corridor, and then he gasps and clamps a hand over his mouth to stop himself from crying out when suddenly, seemingly from the middle of nowhere, his brother pops up around the corner, arms folded, accusatory look on his face.

“Where’d you go?” he asks.

Dan groans. “Kieran, we’re not doing this again,” he mutters. “I didn’t goanywhere.”

“You think I can’t hear the door, Dan? It’s not exactly quiet. I know you went out. You know you’re not allowed out at night, no one is, not unless you’re a guard on patrol.”

“I told you. I didn’t. I just went outside for some air. It’s stifling in here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, congratulations,” Dan says sarcastically, walking away towards the steps. “That’s your funeral, not mine.”

“Did you go outside of the perimeters,” Kieran asks, following Dan stubbornly. “Is that why you won’t tell me?”

“No, what the fuck, do you think I have a death wish?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. You’ve been acting weird lately, for months now, and it’s not making any sense. I don’t know what’s going on with you.”

“Nothing is going on with me except my room got a little too warm, alright?”

“Then why didn’t you just alter the temperature? Why did you go outside?”

“Why are you giving me the Treynidian inquisition?”

“Can you just talk to me?” Kieran groans, following Dan into his own bedroom, and Dan glowers at him.

“Yeah, sure, when you start listening to me,” he snaps, and pushes Kieran outside of the door as he presses down on the button to lock it.

::

It hasn’t been long really, not when you put it into perspective, that Phil’s been here.

It feels like longer somehow. Like Dan can’t remember a world without him – or maybe he just doesn’t want to. Phil has become such a huge part of his life, he’s become so accustomed to seeing him every night, and having him in his life, that he doesn’t know how in the hell he’s ever going to let him go.

And that, probably, is exactly why he needs to do so soon. Or he never will.

::

“I have an idea,” Dan says. He coughs, once, twice, like the words are trying to stop themselves from coming out. He doesn’t want to say them. The sooner he does, the sooner he loses Phil. And Dan is selfish, but not selfish to the extent where he can keep Phil here forever knowing he’ll be happier in his own planet under his own sky.

(Under their moon.)

“About how to get you home, I mean,” he adds, and Phil looks caught off guard. As if he’d forgotten he was ever going home.

“Oh,” Phil says. “Well. Let’s hear it, then.”

“Next week it’s the festival of the moon.”

Phil doesn’t say anything. He sits, and stares, and he waits for Dan to continue. Evidently then the festival of the moon is not celebrated on Flieuthea, and it peaks his interest, for a minute. Sometimes he forgets the fact that he and Phil are from completely different planets, entirely different worlds. Dan’s people dance in the street with paint on their faces and celebrate the moon they fight for, and Phil’s wear shoes and speak in words that Dan can’t understand.

It’s strange. For a moment, he wishes he could go back to Flieuthea with Phil, to see what it’s like. He’d always dreamt of exploring. He just hadn’t quite anticipated the war.

“Yeah, well, anyway,” Dan says. “It’s the one night a year where we don’t have a curfew, and people are allowed to be out on the streets after dark. It’s… a pretty big thing. Everybody in the city will be out. It’s the busiest night of the year.”

“That… that doesn’t sound very safe,” Phil says.

“I know. But people cover themselves in colour and glitter and paint to celebrate,” Dan explains, and Phil’s eyes widen, just a little bit, as if he’s beginning to understand where Dan is going with this. “You know what that means, right? We can cover up the marks on your skin with colour and paint, the ones that we can’t hide with some sleeves. And we could, I don’t know, cover up your eyes with some glasses or something. And it’s – it’s a risk, I know, but I can’t see any other way. It’s the only context where you can get away with not looking like everybody else, the only chance we might have to hide you in plain sight, and get you home.”

“Wow,” Phil says, and he lets out a breath. “That’s, um. That’s – that’s a lot to take in.”

“I know,” Dan says, his voice apologetic. “But I’ve thought about everything I possibly can and I just, I can’t see any other way. And I want you to be safe.”

“It’s going to be scary.”

“Yeah.”

“Like, not even scary. Terrifying is probably more the word I’m looking for.”

Dan lets out a short laugh, hollow. “Yeah. Probably.”

Phil considers for a moment, biting his lip, and Dan wants to say don’t go, don’t go, please don’t leave. He doesn’t say anything at all.

“Okay,” Phil says quietly. “I’ll do it.”

“Yeah?” Dan’s heart drops. And it’s funny, maybe, in a way that’s actually not funny at all but it vaguely helps to cover your own hurt, that it’s his own suggestion that’s going to cause his own heartbreak.

“It’s my only way to get home,” Phil says. “Like, it’s my one chance. I have to take it, don’t I?”

“I guess you do,” Dan says.

The people say the forest is haunted, and that the ghosts whisper with the wind. The spirits say, but I don’t want to when Phil finishes speaking, and they chime but I don’t want you to before the words are even all the way out of Dan’s mouth.

::

Dan sits on the Sky Top Tower and he looks over the city and he wishes he could sit here beside Phil, and hold his hand flat against the stone, and they could swing their legs together and laugh at the accidental synchronisation.

And Phil could kiss him at dusk, and they could race back down to the ground to join the ants, and chase the sun up the streets until the moon guides them both home.

::

Falling stars don’t have a high enough frequency rate.

Dan takes to wishing on the explosions in the sky he sees distantly, on the sky’s clearest night when he and Phil sit together in silence and just breathe, and somehow that’s enough.

::

Three days before the moon festival is the first time it hits Dan that Phil is actually leaving, and he loves him, probably, and he’s never going to see him again.

Dan hasn’t cried in a long time, a really long time, not for years. But he’s alone in a steel box and it’s just gone dusk and in a few hours he’ll be with Phil and they’ll both know a countdown has started until the last time, and then it’ll be over, and Phil will be gone, and Dan will be alone again.

So he lets the tears fall down his cheeks, just a few at a time, and they leave his pillow tinted blue.

::

“I’m going to miss you.”

With the pale moonlight showering over them, Dan admits it quietly, and he’s proud of the fact that his voice doesn’t crack.

Phil stops humming, then, and he looks up and Dan thinks that for as long as he lives he’s never going to forget eyes that bright, eyes that blue, eyes so full of light.

“I’m going to miss you too,” he says. Dan doesn’t think he’s ever sounded so sad, and it makes him feel like he’s breaking into pieces and he can’t pick them back up again. He once wanted to fix up the stars if they ever died, and he wishes now that they’ll do the same for him. “More than you could ever know.”

Dan isn’t an awfully physical person, and he’s usually not too drawn to touching, yet when Phil pulls him into an embrace he hugs him tighter than he’s ever held onto anything and thinks staystaystay.

::

On the night of the moon festival, Dan skips the city while it’s still dusk.

He’s got a backpack full of paint and glitter and more colours than he knows the name of, and he’s very deliberately pretending that this isn’t the last time he’s ever going to see the alien boy who has become his best friend.

It’s a risky business, averting the guard when the city isn’t quite asleep, but Dan manages it, just barely. He was sure he’d felt somebody’s eyes on him, and his heart had been racing, and his palms had been sweating at the thought of being caught, of it all being over – and he’d paused, and stood, and waited.

And nothing came. It never came.

And Dan cursed his imagination and thought, this is why they don’t want to hear your stories.

::

“Hey,” Dan says. He is acutely aware of the fact that this is the last time he will stand here, on the edge of this clearing, on the edge of Phil’s clearing where the forest subsides for a while. And it’s the last time Phil is going to pop up out from his launch pad where he’d been previously, his hair messy from sleeping through the day, and Dan smiles so hard it hurts just at the sight of him.

“Hey,” Phil yawns. “You’re early.”

“Yeah, well,” Dan shrugs. “I thought it’d be best for us to do this early, you know? Get you sorted before we go into the city, and then we’ll have plenty of time to get into the Sky Centre, just in case anything goes wrong.”

“Will people be in there?” Phil asks, and Dan shakes his head.

“No. No one works during the moon festival. But just to be safe I hacked into the data base and there are no launches scheduled for today.”

Phil smiles wryly. “Yeah, that they know of anyway.”

Dan laughs in spite of himself.

“How are we going to get in, anyway? Won’t it be really secured?”

“Did you miss the part where I hacked into the data base?” Dan asks, and Phil blinks.

“Well, okay,” he says. “I can work with that.”

Dan grins. “I’ve created a bug that’ll cause the security systems as well as the cameras to shut down at midnight. Then, we just have to get in.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

Dan fishes inside of his pocket and pulls out a key card, presenting it to Phil like it’s some kind of gift. “I, um, stole it from my dad. I collected a fingerprint from his lab yesterday, too. They’ll have sensors in there.”

Phil stares at him. “You’ve really thought this through.”

“What, you thought I was gonna do a sloppy job of it and get us killed?”

“I just didn’t place you as a hacker, that’s all,” Phil says, shaking his head and smiling a little. “You know, I think back in Flieuthea, we’d have been friends. I’ve hacked a few things in my time, too.”

“I’d no idea you were such a rebel,” Dan says solemnly. “The Flieuthean government had better watch out.”

Phil grins. “Yep.”

“And what’s that about 'back in Flieuthea we’d have been friends’?” Dan asks. “Are we not friends now? I’m offended.”

“Oh, we’re a lot more than friends,” Phil says, and Dan blinks, not sure if he’s heard the words right, but he doesn’t have a chance to question Phil on what exactly he means by that before Phil is launching into an entirely new topic. Dan doesn’t want to interrupt. They’ve only got a few hours left. He wants to listen. After all, it might be his last chance to.

::

Preparing for the festival with Phil is probably the best thing Dan has ever done.

It’s a mess of paint and colour clouds, and crimson stripes and magenta splatters and emerald splotches across their skin. Dan takes a brush and delicately draws brightly coloured lines across the golden markings across Phil’s arms, and along his neck, and the smaller, softer wisps upon his face. Dan covers them generously, leaving no mark of who he really is, of what he really is.

“You look good,” Dan tells him. “Less like an alien. It’s a turn on.”

“Shut up,” Phil laughs. “Anyway, you’re the alien here.”

“Here? I think you’ll find we’re on Eslorix, mate.”

Dan gets paint in his eyes and on his clothes and on his tongue. It tastes disgusting, but somehow the atmosphere and the rising moon creates something sweet about it. Dan’s jaw aches from his smiles, and Phil complains about the unforgiving ground as Dan forces him to remove his shoes, and Dan pushes the thought that they’re leading him away from here to the back of his mind.

Phil pulls a black jumper of Dan’s over his head, and pushes some glasses over the glow of his eyes, and he doesn’t look Flieuthean. He looks like an Eslorixian on the day of the moon, and for a moment, Dan’s heart aches and his eyes sting when he allows himself, just for a minute to imagine what things could be like, had they been born on the same planet.

Once the laughter subsides, and the two of them are covered in paint, and they’ve sprinkled colourful glitter upon each other’s faces and smeared rainbows over each other’s skin, there’s a thick tension that layers the atmosphere and threatens to choke them both.

Neither of them acknowledge it.

::

“You ready?” Dan asks, voice soft, and Phil looks up, nodding.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think so.” He lets out a laugh. “I feel weird.”

“You’re gonna be okay,” Dan says, because in a vague translation he can piece together from Phil’s voice, and the way he stands, and the way he looks that I feel weird really means I’m fucking terrified.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I promise.”

“You make a lot of promises,” Phil comments.

“Have I ever broken any?” Dan asks, and Phil shakes his head.

“Dependable Dan,” he says. “No. I know. I trust you.”

“Good,” Dan says. “Because I’d never let anything hurt you, ever.”

He’s staring at Phil, and Phil, who has temporarily pushed the glasses back, is staring straight back at Dan. The gaze is thick, and long, and intense, and Dan is a little worried he’s going to freak out the only person he’s ever fallen for, but Phil is looking straight back the same way.

“The feelings mutual,” Phil says quietly.

There are a million things Dan wants to say: things about the moon and words about light and lists upon lists of reasons why Phil should stay. Crazy ideas and stupid propositions and reasons why Dan and Phil need to stay together, because they fit, somehow. Stories he wants to tell because Phil, from the beginning, has been the only one who will listen. Star names he wants to recite. Facts he wants to give. Information he wants to receive. There’s so much about Phil he has left to learn.

Dan finds it unfair that you can live to a hundred years and yet he’s been given just a few short months with Phil.

Dan swallows back every single thing he wants to say.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

And Phil says, “I am.”

::

Dan guides Phil through the woods carefully.

He knows that tonight, the guard will be even more observant and thorough than usual and if they get caught outside of the perimeters, it’s a sure fire way to get Phil caught and subsequently killed when they realise his name isn’t on any list and he’s not a resident of the city.

Dan has made this journey a hundred times before, but his heart is in his throat and his hands shake, even so. Phil takes his hand for a moment, at one point, just for a minute. Grips it, and he’s probably just trying to keep his balance amidst the tree branches reaching out to trip any unsuspecting victim, but it makes Dan’s cheeks heat up and he squeezes his palm and Dan kind of wants to cry, or kiss him, or both.

He does neither. Obviously.

But they don’t talk, not a word other than the occasional whisper, and Dan thinks they don’t need to. The wind is cool against their skin and Dan thinks that the spirits are saying everything they could ever possibly say.

::

It’s at the edge of the forest as the two of them creep through into the city’s perimeters that Dan feels, for one moment, like there are eyes on him.

He looks around, gesturing to Phil to keep quiet, and his eyes flit around and search, but there is nobody watching but the man in the moon.

::

“Wow,” Phil is in awe as he looks around at the city, at the lights, at the way everything is lit up and bright and glowing. At the paint that drips down everybody’s skin and over their faces, and the glass panes on the tall buildings reflect bright, beautiful colours, so there’s more than just metal.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Dan grins, and Phil snorts.

“What, are you the architect of West Eslorix or something?”

“There’s a lot about me that you don’t know, Phil,” Dan says loftily, and Phil laughs.

“Yeah, I don’t doubt it. I don’t even know your last name.”

“Howell,” Dan tells him. “So when you think back to the months you spent hidden on a foreign planet, you can know that the dashing Eslorixian boy who saved you was called Dan Howell,” he gives a mock bow. “It’s been a pleasure.”

“I’m Phil Lester,” Phil says, as if it’s the first time they’ve met. Dan feels a sharp pang in his chest as he thinks about meeting Phil in another world, another context. One that exists within the city’s perimeters so they don’t have to sneak and slip and hide anymore. “You can remember me as the hot alien you rescued.”

“I’ll remember you as a damsel in distress,” Dan tells him.

Phil scowls. “I was not in distress.”

“Pride really doesn’t look good on you, you know that?”

“Shut up. Everything looks good on me.”

Dan can’t get over how normal this feels, the two of them ambling down the paths while music plays and people cheer and yell and sing. The land of light is finally living up to the name, and Dan is far from disappointed. He feels freer than he’s ever felt. He feels well and truly alive here, so safe and happy, exploring the city dirt streets with Phil like he’s never seen them before, while the moon guides the way.

And he thinks: if this is how it has to end, it’s a pretty good ending.

It’s almost ironic that he is thinking this when it happens.

Someone shouts, “there they are!” their voice booming, overpowering the carefree cheer of the residents making their rounds. Dan turns around, interest piqued, and his eyes rest upon the guard.

There are several of them. Tall, bulky men, with hard eyes and unforgiving faces and thin lines for mouths. Dan catches sight of the guns in their hands and the way that they glare, that they glare at him and he immediately knows.

He’s frozen, for a moment. There’s a long, long path between them, with Dan and Phil close to the entrance of the Sky Top Tower while the guard stand at the foot of the Second Star Tavern, and Dan can’t move. And they don’t move either.

“Dan?” Phil asks questioningly, voice uncertain, anxiety clear on his face.

Dan’s eyes sweep the guard again; from the first of the large men to the end, and his eyes drop down to the smaller figure beside them, someone smaller, someone skinnier.

And his heart drops, because that’s his brother, that’s his brother, and he’s pointing with a shaking finger and there’s a strange look on his face that Dan can’t quite read from this distance, and that’s his brother.

“Phil,” Dan mutters. “Come on, we have to go.”

“What is it? Dan, please, what’s-”

“My brother sold us out to the guard, and they’ve seen us,” Dan says urgently. “We need to get into the crowd, okay, so we’re hard to see, and then – just follow me, alright?”

“Your brother,” Phil repeats dumbly. “How does he – okay. Never mind. Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. Okay. Yeah.”

Dan’s still studying the guard, their gazes aligned. There is a challenge in the way that they look at him, a you move first, and Dan knows that if he begins to run now they’ll have evidence to convict him for assisting an enemy even if Phil does manage to escape.

He can’t run. So he hides.

He grasps for Phil’s hand, threading their fingers together, and then as a gaggle of people pass by them, Dan thinks fast and darts into the midst of the crowd, pulling Phil with him, until they intersperse with the next crowd, and then another, as they step out into one of the busiest streets of West Eslorix and into the throng of thousands upon thousands of people.

Dan looks back, and he can’t see the guard, and he knows with complete certainty that does not, for a single second, mean that they’re safe here. He squeezes Phil’s hand, and as the crowd moves he jumps out into an alley way and drags Phil with him, making sure they stay far from any source of light, so they disappear into the shadows.

Dan waits with bated breath for a few moments, crouching down and pulling Phil with him, and he watches the guard pass by.

He breathes out a sigh of relief.

“Come on,” Dan whispers, and Phil squeezes his palm.

They make their way down the narrow alleys quickly, following darkened roads and their winding ways and shadowed corners, occasionally dipping out into the sea of people to carry them like a ship to the next shore. Dan is aware of nothing but the scanning for guards and eyes burning into his back and the feel of Phil’s hand against his own.

They move out into Moonpool Street, and Dan’s breath hitches with dry, choking anxiety, in case somehow his brother knows his moves and his plans and is here, with the guard, waiting to catch him. He doesn’t catch a trace of them, but he does see the Sky Guard Centre building, expansive and steel, and at the end of the long dirt lane.

They can’t go that way, of course – they’d be spotted trying to get in, and it’d all be over. But Dan had snooped his way around this part of the city and knows the right alleys to rush through and the right corners to take, and they find themselves on the outer north exit of the building, and though the noise carries over buildings and through walls, the people themselves aren’t in sight.

“This is it,” Dan says, and his fingers shake as he swipes the keycard into the door while Phil looks around anxiously, searching for any trace of the guard, ears pricked up to listen.

The keycard activates the sensor, and Dan fumbles into his pocket for the print of his father’s he was able to retrieve, and he places it on the screen, hoping, praying. It needs to work, it needs to –

Dan has never felt relief quite like what he feels when the huge door begins to pull itself up off of the ground, and the two of them can slip inside. Dan immediately clamps down the button to shut the door behind them and the automatic lights flicker on and wash the building with artificial white light.

The tiled floor is cold against Dan’s bare feet, and he is still holding Phil’s hand. Phil removes the glasses from his eyes.

“That was close,” Dan whispers. “That was so fucking close. Fuck.”

“How did your brother know?” Phil asks, voice quiet. “Why did he sell you out?”

“He must have followed me to the forest,” Dan says. “I don’t know. Waited at the edge of the perimeter until we came back out. And when he did, and when he saw us, and you – he went to the guard.” There’s a beat, and a breath of silence. “I’ll never forgive him.”

“Are you okay?” Phil asks.

“We’re still breathing,” Dan says. “So we’re fine.”

Phil nods, and squeezes Dan’s hand. “Come on,” he says softly. “Let’s find those ships.”

::

(Dan will never sit upon the Sky Top Tower holding Phil until dusk reaches dawn, but at least he’ll have the memories of nights spent alive, when the moon wasn’t lonely, just for a little while.)

::

They find them on floor five.

The rockets are large, and they’re tall, and Dan thinks about the sky being on fire. Phil seems to think the same thing, and they pass on by. The room in which they keep the spaceships is vast, with a metal roof that seems to part and open and let the sky flood inside upon the press of a button before the pilot launches.

Dan presses his father’s print against the sensors. His father is one of the highest regarded scientists in the city, and he has full access to the Sky Centre and it’s resources. For once, it seems to be working in Dan’s favour.

A drop down menu appears on the black screen at the back of the room, and Dan unlocks all accesses to the spaceships, and opens the entrance to the ship closest to the two of them. Phil is the one who presses down the button to open up the ceiling and let the moon shine in. They seem to drown in it, as it washes over the two of them bright and white, and Dan thinks: this is the end.

“Will you be able to launch the ship from inside?” Dan asks, and Phil nods.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I will.”

“Okay,” Dan says, and he feels like he is about to cry, suddenly. He doesn’t want to cry. Phil is looking at him with those light eyes and Dan wants to tear the moon from it’s canvas sky and hide it away so that no war can continue. So that nothing can keep him from Phil anymore. “Fuck.”

“I know,” Phil says. His voice is thick. “I don’t – I don’t want to leave you.”

“You have to,” Dan says. “You can’t – they won’t let–”

“I know.”

Dan takes a breath, “You’re the best person I’ve ever met in my life,” he says in a rush. “You know that? You’re a fucking alien, and you’re the best person I’ve ever met. You’re the best person in my life. You’re the best fucking thing that has ever happened to me.”

“I love you,” Phil says, suddenly. He blinks, and Dan thinks that he can see a blush on the white spaces of Phil’s cheeks, and the world is frozen. For a fraction of a second. “I didn’t, like, mean to, or plan to, and I don’t know how I do because I haven’t known you that long but, like, I just. I know. And I do. And I love you. Um.”

Dan doesn’t say anything for a moment. He stares at Phil in shock and then he moves forward, quicker than he ever has before and he immediately captures Phil’s lips with his own and kisses him.

He kisses him hard, like he’s somehow saying all of the words he won’t have time to say from now until the end of everything, kisses him like he’s whispering the secrets of the moon, kisses him as if it’s the only way he remembers how to breathe, and Phil kisses him back, and his arms wrap around Dan and pull him closer, like he never wants to let go, like he can’t let go, and Dan smiles against his lips. He breaks apart for air but only for a moment and then he kisses him again like it’s the only thing he knows how to do, and Dan wishes it was. This is all he wants, this is everything, right now, right here.

Phil brought the moon. He brought the moon and gave it meaning, and he took the sad, lonely space boy and gave him a reason to want to tell stories again.

Dan kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him.

They pull apart eventually, and Dan’s heart is beating too fast and Phil’s lips are pinker than he’s ever seen them and neither of them can stop smiling, big and wide and dopey and in love.

“I love you too,” Dan says, and Phil laughs.

“Bit late,” he says.

“Sorry, I got distracted by wanting to kiss you.”

“That’s okay,” Phil says. He looks a little dazed. He’s beautiful like this with his lips kiss swollen and rainbow colours smeared across his face and his eyes bright. “You can do it again, if you like.”

And Dan does.

And he tries not to think: this is the last time, but the ghosts followed them from the haunted forests and they whisper it in the wind that flows in from the open ceiling, carried with the noise of the people, and Dan isn’t stupid. He knows people will have noticed the Sky Guard Centre opening up for launch, and he knows the guard will be on their way.

“You have to go,” he says, in between kisses. “I don’t want you to, fuck, I want you to stay here forever and never leave, but the guard will be here soon, and I can’t let them get to you.”

“Will you be okay?” Phil asks, wide-eyed. “Please, Dan, don’t get hurt because of me-”

“They can’t prove I helped an enemy,” Dan says. “There was no proof you are you, or that I was with the person who stole the ship, and there’s no proof I was here at all if I get out in time.”

“Then you’d better get out in time,” Phil says, and he leans forward for the hell of it and places another chaste kiss on Dan’s lips. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Dan tells him. “I love you so much and I don't–” he trembles a little. “I don’t want to leave you. It’s not fair. It’s their war, it’s not us, so why are we the ones suffering for it?”

“I know,” Phil says, and he looks like he’s going to cry, and Dan wants to hold him forever. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Me neither,” Dan says. He swallows back his hurt, and his longing, and his burning urge to jump inside of the spaceship with Phil and never let him go. He tells himself something, and then he repeats it to Phil out loud. And maybe if he says it enough, it’ll come true. “We’ll meet again. Some day.”

“You really think so?”

“We have to,” Dan says fiercely. “If we found each other like this, and if we’ve really got this far – then there has to be a chance, right?”

“It seems kind of impossible.”

“What about the two of us has ever been possible?”

“That’s true,” Phil says. “I’ll find you, then. Somewhere in the galaxy, I’ll find you.”

“When the war ends, I’ll find you,” Dan promises in return.

“When I look to the moon, I’ll find you,” Phil says. His words are quiet, and soft, and Dan’s heart breaks at those words, in those moments, as the moonlight drowns around them and there’s a clatter somewhere in the Sky Guard Centre building that lets them know they aren’t alone.

“You have to go,” Dan says. “I won’t let them catch you.”

“I wish I could stay,” Phil tells him, as he edges towards the open spaceship, and Dan follows until they both stand at the edge of the entrance.

“I know,” Dan says. “But remember. We share the same moon. So we’ll never be that far apart.”

Phil kisses him one more time, gentle and soft and he tastes like the stars.

“We’ll never be that far apart,” he repeats. “Goodbye, Dan.”

“I’ll never forget you,” Dan tells him. And it’s a promise. “You’ll always be my favourite alien.”

Phil smiles. “And you’ll always be mine.”

The noises are getting louder, and Dan knows they have to go. He gives Phil one last smile, reaches forward, and takes his hand, just for a moment. He squeezes down gently on his palm, and he knows his touch will say all of the words he doesn’t.

After a moment, Phil moves towards the other end of the ship, out of sight, and Dan moves backwards to close the ship door. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, he thinks, pressing down on the button which drags the door shut and makes him lose all sight of Phil.

And he can hear the guard approaching, but he doesn’t move. Not as the ship’s engine begins to shudder with preparation, making Dan shake with it, and the noise is so loud that it’ll ring in his ears for hours.

Dan watches, still, as the spaceship begins to move upwards. And it hurts so fucking much as it lifts off the ground and slowly, so slowly, moves upwards towards the opening, but Dan is smiling.

He’s smiling because he knows Phil loves him, even if he’s not here to say it. And he’s smiling because he’ll always have the memories of long nights and indigo skies and laughter waking up the sleeping dead of their forest.

And he’s smiling, because they’ll always have the moon.

Dan stays and watches the sky until he can no longer see the spaceship, and he knows that Phil is safely away, beyond the reach of the guard, and the council, any anyone here who can hurt him. Until he is safe.

But by the time the guard appear, Dan is gone.

::

Dan sits upon the Sky Top Tower as the sky darkens to dusk, and the sun goes down.

And he thinks about a boy with the brightest of eyes, and a broken down spaceship, and he looks to the moon.