Work Text:
Dan presses a kiss onto Phil’s lips, wrapping his arms around his neck as they both shift on the couch. The room is quiet but for the hum of the radiator and the sounds of mouth-to-skin contact.
“Hey--mmph--have you seen that email I forwarded you?” Phil mutters, lacing his fingers through the other’s hair.
“Mm-hm.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
Dan is now working his way down to Phil’s neck, firmly grasping the back of the other’s head and not even bothering to respond.
“Dan.”
He pulls back and gives Phil a pointed look.
“The email?”
“Not a big fan of your new approach to dirty talk.”
“No, wait, I’m gonna forget if I don’t tell you. Your mum says they want to come over in a few weeks for your birthday. They’re thinking of coming on the fourth.” The look stays cemented on Dan’s face. “That’s all.”
“Now will you let me go back to making out with you? Without bringing up my mum?”
Phil grins. “Okay, okay. You may resume.”
Dan’s facade breaks and he chuckles, smiling into the crook of Phil’s neck. “Thank you.” He continues his trail of kisses throughout his boyfriend’s collarbone.
“Oh, we need to call Ronda tomorrow morning to--”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Sorry! Last time, I promise.” Phil’s eyes flutter close at the feeling his boyfriend’s chapped lips on his skin, finally feeling himself relax. His hands rest on the other boy’s hips and starts to slowly inch up his shirt. He feels a shiver when Dan starts to nip at his ear, forgetting everything else around him and sinking deeper into their own galaxy, somehow feeling lighter as the pressure of the other’s weight on him increases. A throaty groan escapes his lips when he feels Dan palming his cock through the thick black denim, his mind shutting off and tuning out the world and--
His eyes suddenly fly open. “Shit, the rent’s due tomorrow.”
The other boy halts. During the moment of silence that follows, Phil stays unmoving, unsure of how Dan is going to react. He then hears him snort, gradually escalating into his high-pitched, manic laugh, complete with his thrown-back head. The laughing continues as he clumsily rolls off Phil’s lap and collapses next to him on the couch. “Oh my god, are you kidding me? Are you serious?”
“Sorry! You know we can’t forget again.”
“Jesus christ, Phil.” Dan is losing it, resting his forehead on Phil’s shoulder with no sign of the laughter dying down. “Oh my god, right, right. Get this: twenty-three-year-old Phil would be appalled by what you just did.”
Phil, too, is starting to snicker. “One of us has to keep us from getting kicked out, you horny twit,” he retorts, shoving the other with his elbow.
“Oh god, what is happening? Are we doomed to this fate? Is this what old married people do?”
Both of them freeze, feeling the weight of the. word being thrown into the air around them. Both boys blush deeply, having never seriously spoke of such a hefty topic.
When they turn their heads toward each other, however, their bodies suddenly double over in frivolous laughter in perfect synchronization. The guffaws don’t stop until tears were forming on the corners of their eyes and until their faces are completely flushed.
Without any visible sign from the other, Phil and Dan grab hold of each other’s hands, hair, neck, re-establishing their blissful intimacy, effortlessly switching dynamics, and thus immediately letting go of the tension. “Don’t you dare open your mouth again, you loser.” Dan mutters.
“Yeah, yeah. Now go suck me off.”
--
The constant humming noise that airports engrain into your mind only gets worse as the hours pass, and the brutal queue they’re currently enduring is not helping the situation. For the seventeenth time, Dan unlocks his phone and browses its most mundane corners--re-checking his reminders, calendars, photo albums. Turns out, nothing has changed since he last opened them six minutes ago. “Remind me again why airports don’t have wifi,” he sighs.
“It’s either checking twitter or planes colliding into each other, I’m afraid.” Phil responds. He doesn’t seem to mind the glacial pace of the people in front of them. He’s focused on reading Ready Player One, his thick frames (Dan’s favourite) perched at the tip of his nose.
“I’m gonna go on a killing spree if we don’t get on a plane in ten minutes.”
“You said that an hour ago.”
“Yeah, well an hour ago we were supposed to be boarding, and guess who’s still in line after five years?” His fingers start tapping an erratic beat on his legs, his feet rocking back and forth. Dan looks around the rest of the Departures floor in desperate need of something interesting to look at. After observing a tiny child jiggling keys, a fluorescent green suitcase shaped like a star and a man with a snake tattoo on his head, his ears grab hold of a conversation at the front of their queue. He discovers it’s between a young, touchy couple and the airport employee at the counter.
“Oh, congratulations!”
“Thank you. We’re really excited.”
“And Orlando is perfect at this time of year.”
“Yes, we heard!”
“Well, let me see what I can do,” the employee smiles. After a minute of typing into the computer, she beams. “How would you two like to sit first class today?”
Dan’s eyebrows shoot up. “Phil,” he whispers, nudging his side.
“What?”
“That couple just got upgraded to first class.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah. They’re on their honeymoon, I think.” When Phil doesn’t respond and turns to his next page, an idea springs up in Dan’s head. He feels the giddiness of the thought spread over him as he takes the book from the other’s hands and leans in close. “We should tell them we’re on a honeymoon.”
Phil snickers. “What?”
“Come on, let’s do it.”
“Are you insane? You wanna tell her we just got married?”
“Yes. Come on, first class, Phil!”
“People are gonna find out.”
“What, that we lied to a woman and that we went on an airplane?”
Phil stares at him in disbelief. “You’re actually serious.”
"First. Class. Come on! Just pretend you're in love with me."
“Ah, that’s a tall order.”
Dan’s face breaks into a grin. “Fuck off.”
“You know, I reckon we could get arrested for this.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the UK police force has an alert on fake-married boyfriends flying to Florida.” He looks at the queue. They’re two spots from the counter now. “Please? It’ll be hilarious.”
After running through all other possible excuses in his head, Phil huffs out in defeat. “Okay. Fine. One of these days, though, you’re gonna get us killed.” He slides his hand into Dan’s back pocket. The younger boy gives him a confused look at their rare instances of public affection. “What? We have to sell it.”
“Easy there, Daniel Day-Lewis.”
When they settled into the lush seats with champagne flutes on a sleek white surface twenty minutes later, Dan murmurs, “am I the best flight companion or what?”
Phil rolls his eyes, stuffing their shared backpack in the compartment. “You now owe me a diamond ring.”
He chuckles. “Oh, suddenly I’m not so hard to love anymore?”
--
When it finally happens, it was ridiculously, stupidly, comically simple.
It came suddenly and with force, like a new clasp in his brain or an ocean crashing on land. A click.
The build-up was there, of course, but it was disguised. Intertwined throughout bedsheets, piano keys, plane tickets to their dream vacations.
In hindsight, Phil likes to blame the altitude. He’s convinced that he can’t be the only one who had an annoyingly-clichéd flash of self-discovery on Mount Fuji. Extra bonus points to him for having a picture of its landscape as his desktop background for years to add to the sentiment.
After the impossible climb up to one of the peaks (“You know, I think I’m gonna stay down here. “No, years of climbing up to our flat has lead to this moment!”.), the view was bare, cold and smothered in fog. It was perfect.
It was the kind of beautiful that couldn’t be duplicated onto a camera; the picture would always turn out to be monochrome and grainy. Instead, it was poetry that left space for something personal, memorable, real.
While the other tourists looked around with an aura of disappointment, Phil and Dan understood. They stayed at that spot for hours, saying dumb things like what could possibly be living on that shack down there or behind the rocks up here. They never seemed to regain their sense of time when they were around each other.
“Christ, I’m cold.”
“Me too.”
“We should head back.”
“Yeah.” Neither of them move. They laugh.
“Ugh, can’t we just stay here?” Dan whines, gesturing all around them. “Are you, like, getting that feeling where you wanna stay somewhere and never wanna leave?”
Phil looks at the clouds, the sky, the thousands of feet below them. The black earrings, the round almond pupils, the slightly curling locks. It dawns on him that the majesty of the mountain, the sparks throughout Japan were not new feelings at all. It was not the natural wonder that made him feel like he was flying over the world. Unlike the mountain, he can stay with his own embodiment of that feeling for as long as he wants. Forever, even.
“Yeah, I am.”
His mind starts to race. He’s got to get creative.
He wants to ask Dan Howell to marry him. Mount Fuji told him so.