Archive of Our Own ^beta

Supposedly the road trip had been Nobody’s Idea. It had simply presented itself as an option and neither of them had vetoed it, although Dan had said, I wouldn’t trust you to drive us down the road, Phil, let alone across the country. That wasn’t a direct veto, so the idea of a road trip had settled comfortably in the backs of their minds, perhaps with a duvet or two. It wasn’t until three months later, post-UK tour, that it began to creep up again.

Phil was making coffee in the kitchen. The past two months had involved a lot of sitting in vans and taking short domestic flights, so it was nice to be back in their kitchen again, even if the cracked tiles were forever a testament to their inability to physically hold on to household objects whilst half naked in a post-orgasmic haze. You were prone to dropping kettles and woks, Phil would argue if anyone was to bring it up, if your boyfriend had just fucked you with the award-winning enthusiasm you would never expect from somebody whose main source of self-esteem came from his ability to lead a mostly sedentary lifestyle and not die.

In a small, weird way, he’d missed making coffee. On tour the coffee had mostly been provided, and they’d scalded their tongues more than once on sips of what surely must’ve been local ditchwater. (Or an Americano, which was never a wise coffee choice, but one that felt the healthiest - which usually meant it didn’t contain dairy, for Phil’s sensitivity or Dan’s sporadic bouts of vegan guilt.) It wasn’t as if the coffee was better or less injurious at home, but there was something to be said about injuring yourself in the comfort of your own sofa. It was just better. Inexplicably so; it just was.

“Maybe we should go on that road trip,” Dan said. He hadn’t put a shirt on and he looked like he could’ve used another seven years in bed. He looked soft and warm, and suddenly Phil couldn’t care less about the coffee. Seven years in bed with Dan sounded a lot more pleasant than a cup of Nescafé.

“We just did a road trip,” Phil said. The tour had been a glorified road trip after all, although not as fun as independently-produced movies would have you believe. The tour had been a lot more practicing lines and falling asleep on each other’s shoulders than listening to folk rock and declaring themselves kings of the world with their heads stuck out the window.

“Yes, but it’s different,” said Dan. “The tour was work, and stuff. And like, a road trip is different, you know what I mean? We’d be alone, at our own pace, driving along -” he paused, wincing. “Alright, maybe not. I’m not driving us across the country.”

“I can drive,” Phil said, a little absently. He was still focused on the mark on Dan’s neck he’d left last night. It looked like it could use some touching up, and Phil was itching to do that. “We could switch off.”

Dan wrinkled his nose. “As if you could even start a car.”

“I could! You’ve just got to turn the key in the ignition, or something. It’s not rocket science,” Phil said. “Honestly though, we’ve been everywhere in the past two months. I don’t think there’s anywhere else I would ever want to go. Within England, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Dan said. The idea was kicked away easily. He ran a hand through his already distressed hair. “I think I’m going back to bed. Join me.” It wasn’t so much an invitation as it was a direct order.

“I’ve got coffee,” Phil said, raising his mug. Admittedly, the idea of curling up with Dan in their slightly too-cold house was a lot more enticing than a mug of what Dan called pleb’s brew, but he had just made it.

“Bring it to bed,” Dan said, nonchalant.

Phil did. The cup of coffee sat, cold and forgotten on their bedside table, as Dan whimpered into the groove of Phil’s neck while Phil got him off, slow, sleepy and warm.

Despite the tour’s majestic end, there was still so much to be done. Their very last (planned) encore had lasted seemingly forever, and they’d teared up a little from the bright lights and the applause that threatened to burst through the roof of the London Palladium at the end of it all. It had felt well and truly like An End (not The End, no - the Dan and Phil brand would stay for at least a while longer), but there were still things to be done. Preparations to be made for the Worldwide Tour, talks of a DVD recording for those who hadn’t been able to make it, more and more hosting projects - it would never truly end, at least not for a while.

“We have to film PINOF,” Phil said, whilst Dan rearranged their rapidly-overcrowding bookshelf. From where he was sat on the sofa, Phil had a wonderful view of the strip of skin that his shirt never managed to cover on Dan. “And we have meetings tomorrow. And my mum called to ask if we’d see her before Christmas.”

“One at a time,” Dan said. He reached for their Supernatural box set but fumbled. It toppled to the ground with a loud protest.

“Leave it,” Phil said, when Dan groaned. It’d been an impulsive midnight online purchase, really, fueled by a GIF on Phil’s tumblr dashboard of one of the angsty-looking guys looking particularly angsty. They were never going to watch it. He should probably give it away to Oxfam, if they liked that kind of thing. He resolved to find out if they did.

“At least it wasn’t Kill Bill,” Dan joked weakly. Phil looked at the highest shelf. Kill Bill, Titanic and Wall-E. DVDs that Phil expected they would own forever. Perhaps even be buried with. He’d heard stories of couples dying one after the other in rapid succession. Perhaps they’d be quick enough to have a joint funeral. A Dan and Phil casket, with enough room for the three DVDs and maybe their disgusting animal hats. Perhaps the casket would have pixel print.

“Earth to Phil Lester,” Dan said, waving the hexagon clock in front of his face. “Hey. What’re you thinking about?”

“Our deaths,” Phil replied.

Dan wrinkled his nose. “I suppose I’m not really surprised,” he conceded, and went back to sorting out the bookshelf. “We could get a Dan and Phil casket,” he added after a pause. “Reckon the royalties we paid allow us to get a pixel people casket, too, if we die within the next ten years.”

“Great minds,” Phil said. “Do you need help?”

Dan didn’t, and Phil was sent away to clean the kitchen. It desperately needed a cleaning after the solid two months of being neglected while they had been gallivanting across the UK. Phil wasn’t even sure the dishwasher still worked. They’d had takeaway last night, unable to muster up the courage to test it.

“I made a new kitchen-cleaning playlist,” Dan called from the lounge. His sentence was punctuated by the sound of several more box sets hitting the ground and a string of expletives.

Phil went to retrieve Dan’s laptop from his room and pushed up his sleeves. There was a kitchen that needed to be deep-cleaned, possibly with a mixture of three parts water and one part vinegar - his mother’s handiest tip, other than never go to bed angry.

He was checking the expiration dates on their tinned tomatoes when it hit him. It was a weird, aching longing to be out of the house, to see new things. The tour had been spaced far too closely together to allow for much sightseeing, and in a way Phil felt unfulfilled. They’d been everywhere, and yet it seemed as if they had been nowhere at all.

Perhaps Dan’s road trip suggestion hadn’t been too bad after all. Phil shook it away for the time being. He was a man on a mission - he had a kitchen to clean, and the inexplicable burst of wanderlust in his bones could wait for longer.

Lunch was a delivery of pasta; vegetarian for Dan, meat fest for Phil. Phil took great pleasure in leaning over and bursting the thin film of the egg yolk in Dan’s dish and watching it spill all over his macaroni.

“I was thinking about the road trip,” Dan said, apropos of nothing. Phil licked egg yolk off his plastic fork and looked at him expectantly. He’d known that Dan wouldn’t let it go without more convincing - they were often on the same mental page, after all - but it was still a surprise that Dan, of all people, wanted to go on a road trip.

Holidays were fun - usually stressful - but still fun. Road trips were self-made holidays. There were no hotels, no room service breakfast. No first class airline tickets with comfortable, reclinable seats. Road trips were your own responsibility.

“What about the road trip?”

“We should do it.”

“I thought we just did,” Phil said. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, not really. The prospect of driving seemed tedious, that was all. He hadn’t driven since he reversed his Dad’s car into poor Ms. Dwyer’s minivan in the Asda parking lot at age twenty-one.

“Yeah,” Dan said slowly. “Within the UK.”

“We’re not driving to France,” Phil said, because the dangerous glint in Dan’s eye - appealing as it was - was never really a good idea.

“Oh, come on, Phil!” The puppy eyes were in full force. It’d been six years and Phil still hadn’t built up any immunity towards them. Privately, he hoped he never would.

“We’ve got meetings! And plans! And things to do. And people to see, and videos to make, and -”

“Yes, Phil. We’re very busy people.” Dan had an irritating habit of validating Phil’s points and then completely ignoring them. “We could do with a week. Surely we’re allowed a week.”

They were. They could always take off for a week, nobody would really mind. The deadlines they had to meet were open to postponement, Phil’s mum would be happy to see them at Christmas anyway, PINOF could be filmed today and edited later - it was doable.

Doable was terrifying.

“When’s the last time you drove?”

“My grandma makes me drive her to the store every time I visit her.”

“Oh. Quite often then.” Phil wondered why he hadn’t known that. Surely they knew everything about each other at this point. He could probably line up Dan’s underwear in order of how frequently he wore a particular pair. It seemed odd that he didn’t know Dan could still drive.

“We could drive to France,” Dan said gently. Then he went back to his pasta as if the conversation had been adjourned.

Phil was still thinking about it even as he crushed the containers to fit them into the recycling. On one hand, traveling with just Dan always seemed like a good idea. On the other hand, Phil was accustomed to comfortable flights and nice hotel rooms. He supposed nice hotel rooms weren’t necessarily negated by a road trip, but they seemed to juxtapose each other. The idea of a road trip seemed dressed-down. Phil imagined a small motel with rough white sheets and a shower that either ran too hot or too cold.

Dan had a habit of saying Phil would be somebody from the Capital if they were ever in the Hunger Games. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Phil liked comfort. Nice things. Convenient travelling arrangements.

Google Maps told him a drive from London to Paris took five hours. A flight would take an hour and any malfunction wouldn’t require handy mechanic skills that Phil most certainly did not have.

Phil went back to deep-cleaning the kitchen. In the lounge, Dan was whistling Frère Jacques.

By evening the lounge and kitchen were practically pristine - by Dan and Phil standards, anyway. Dan was scrolling through Twitter on Phil’s phone, his own phone somewhere under his duvet.

“People are asking about PINOF,” Dan remarked. “We should probably film it tomorrow. After our meeting?”

Phil hummed in non-committal agreement. PINOF videos had never been hard to film. Even in 2012 when they’d been hyper-vigilant, the rhythm of answering ridiculous questions and flopping onto Phil’s mattress had been easy to fall back into.

“Are you okay?” Dan asked, suddenly. He was draped across the sofa with his feet in Phil’s lap like the personification of calmness, but the slight edge to his voice belied his ridiculously neutral exterior. Dan was never one for hiding his emotions anyway, that was really more of Phil’s area of expertise.

“I’m asking Martyn about driving to France.”

“Oh,” Dan said. He sounded pleased. Phil watched him from the corner of his eye. Dan had a small smile he kept just for Phil - whether or not this was intentional was debatable. Either way, it got Phil every single time. Phil was pretty sure he would’ve agreed to destroying the entire universe if Dan kept looking at him like that.

“Love you,” Dan said quietly.

They didn’t say it quite often enough. Phil had grown up in a household that was absolutely soaked in verbal expressions of love, so it shouldn’t have been a problem, but for some reason they still signed each other’s birthday cards with hyphens: Phil and Dan. Love was a far too private word. Phil suspected they’d sooner have sex on a balcony than tell each other they loved them.

Phil supposed there were just some things that were kept special. It was easier to think about it as a feature rather than a flaw. It worked for the most part, there was no reason to fix what wasn’t broken. Or what they could pretend wasn’t broken, anyway.

“Love you too,” Phil replied, perhaps slightly a little too late. Nevertheless, Dan smiled. The corners of his eyes softened and crinkled, and he set Phil’s phone down onto their coffee table a little unceremoniously.

The sofa had seen better days, so Dan tugged him towards their bedrooms, slipping a warm hand underneath Phil’s shirt.

“Yours or mine?” Dan asked. Then, he peeked into his bedroom and winced. “Yours,” he said firmly, directing Phil towards his bedroom. He took his time with the buttons of Phil’s shirt, too focused on getting it off to distract Phil with well-placed kisses. Phil found himself staring at the swift motion of Dan’s fingers, and wondered, not for the first time, what a ring would look like where his fourth finger met his knuckle. It seemed too frivolous a thought, so he chased it away. It was too silly to think of marriage when they were still tiptoeing within their fragile glass closet.

“Stop thinking,” Dan said, and Phil’s shirt was being pushed off his shoulders. Dan’s sweater was thrown somewhere in the direction of Phil’s television. Dan pulled him in by the belt loops of his well-washed jeans, and Phil felt his knees tremble.

Meeting Dan Howell had been an amalgamation of many things. Circumstance, Phil’s desperate need for validation at the time, a deep interest in Muse and several university friends constantly posting their disgustingly romantic photos on Facebook. But most of all, meeting Dan Howell had been pure luck. If Phil believed in a system of karma he would’ve thanked his past self for whatever good he must’ve done to have ended up with Dan in this life.

“Stop thinking,” Dan repeated, kissing the spot on the underside of Phil’s jaw where hickies were easier to hide.

Phil did.

The sun was streaming in through the open blinds when Phil’s phone rang. Phil shifted Dan’s arms around so he could retrieve his phone from the lounge. They were late for their meeting, and a quick glance in the mirror above their fireplace confirmed that they were going to be even later, if Phil was going to attempt to cover up the smattering of kiss-induced bruises on his neck. He suspected Dan might’ve been worse for wear. They usually steered clear of the neck area, but yesterday had been something else entirely. Phil willed his phone not to stop ringing before he got to it.

“You’re late,” Emily said, when he picked up. “Should I reschedule for twelve thirty?”

“Sorry,” Phil said. He really was. They were usually more professional than this. Behind his reflection in the mirror, Dan was shuffling into the lounge, looking sleep-addled and guilty. “Something came up.”

“I’m sure,” Emily replied. She’d been spearheading their management team since early last spring, and they’d been frank enough with her about their situation that it was easy to let things go unexplained. She could draw her own conclusions, it didn’t matter. “See you at twelve thirty.”

“I’ll buy you lunch,” Phil promised.

“Oops,” Dan said, when Phil hung up. His neck was significantly worse for wear, though Dan favoured concealer over collared shirts. Phil, with his skintone, had it considerably harder. “On the bright side, that blue shirt really brings out your eyes.”

Phil made coffee while Dan took a shower. The faint sounds of Dan singing in the shower floated up the stairs. Phil wasn’t sure he knew how to live a life without mornings like these anymore. He’d forgotten. There was a question that burned in the back of his mind and he chased it away. Things were good, but were they that good?

It wasn’t as if they had never talked about marriage - Dan had been adamant when they first met that he wanted to be married “someday”, but as he’d gotten older his disdain for marriage had only grown, and the prospect of marriage had only seemed to get further and further out of reach as their popularity exploded. Sure, they could keep that a secret, but Phil had always privately thought it was better not to have it than to worry about having to hide their wedding rings.

Dan had been less than enthusiastic the last time they’d talked about it - we don’t need it, Dan had said, as if marriage was a new blender or a Netflix subscription. Phil hadn’t really had an opinion at the time. But now, it seemed like something he wanted desperately, without an adequate reason as to why.

(They had ended up getting the new blender, and the Netflix subscription, per Phil’s requests. Somehow, Phil felt marriage would not be delivered as quickly, and certainly not by Amazon One-Day Delivery.)

Martyn had texted him the number of a friend who had a car rental business, so Phil focused on that instead. France would be good for them. In the admittedly shitty Elite Daily article somebody had shared on Facebook, somebody had listed “take a road trip” as one of the ten things to do before marriage. Phil supposed it made sense, in that odd, try-hard hipster way that Jack Howard favoured. Road trips were hard work. There were bound to be challenges and they’d have to work through them. 

Then again, they’d worked through their fair share of challenges. It seemed ridiculous to take a road trip as a pre-marriage test, especially when Dan clearly didn’t think much of marriage. It would be unfair to him if Phil spent the entire time ticking boxes off a metaphorical prenuptial checklist.

The singing had stopped, and Dan was stepping into the kitchen, towelling his wet hair.

“Hi,” Dan said, bumping into Phil as he reached for a mug for his coffee.

“Martyn has a friend who rents cars,” Phil said, setting his half-empty coffee cup in the sink. “I’ll call him tomorrow if we get to convince Emily to give us a week off.”

“Emily doesn’t control us,” Dan said, but he looked excited at the prospect of their road trip. Dan caught him by the elbow as Phil made his way out of the kitchen and Phil turned, surprised.

“You do want to do this, right?” Dan said, his lower lip wedging itself between his teeth between sentences. “Like, you’re not just putting up with this for me?”

The hot water had made a curly, damp mess of Dan’s hair. Phil wanted nothing more than to thread his fingers through it and kiss Dan in the comfort of their kitchen, their twelve thirty appointment be damned.

“I do,” Phil said. “I’d go to the ends of the Earth with you. Chase the sunset across the universe, or something.” He’d meant to be joking, but somewhere between his brain and his mouth it’d lost its mirth. The sincerity in his own voice slightly scared him. It felt like it’d been slightly Too Much to say, so he hurried to the shower, all-too-aware that Dan was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking like he’d been struck by lightning.

Emily had barely protested when Dan asked for a week off. Granted, her protests might have been muffled by the extra large muffin they’d ordered to share as dessert. Still, after promising to keep their phones with them and to be careful and discreet, they were waved off with an enthusiastic bon voyage and a wink that suggested far more.

“D’you think she thinks it’s a honeymoon?” Dan said, when they were sat in the taxi. He was scrolling through his twitter again, but he wasn’t really taking anything in.

“Emily thinks lots of things,” Phil replied. “Not all of them are entirely rational.” 

“Right,” Dan said. “Still, it’d be nice to get away.”

That, Phil could wholeheartedly agree with. While the idea of driving for five hours straight in a small, cramped car didn’t necessarily seem like the best thing to do after four weeks of touring, the idea of being alone with Dan, without managers and agents and assistants who kept going over agendas and asking if they needed coffee, was the best thing Phil had heard in weeks.

They sat through the rest of the ride home in companionable silence, Dan nudging him once or twice to show him a picture of someone’s dog. That was another thought that had been abandoned. The permanence of it had been too intimidating at the time.

“We should get a dog,” Phil said. If he was being honest, it felt like getting a shared pet was a bigger question than marriage. Marriage was relatively unimportant, a label, a piece of paper. Phil had read every word on the Citizens Advice webpage on the benefits of marriage. They hadn’t appealed to him in particular. A dog, on the other hand, was something more. A shared responsibility beyond a character in a computer game. Regardless of how attached they were to Dil, a real-life pet was a million times more serious.

The dog issue had been easily abandoned after VidCon. They were busy, the landlord wouldn’t allow it… there were thousands of absolutely valid reasons. They hadn’t been too disappointed initially, but the issue had been exacerbated by the constant premium messages they received during live shows that begged them to get a dog, as if it was under their control.

(Phil supposed it technically was, but circumstantially it was out of his hands.)

“We can’t,” Dan said. The sadness in his voice was mostly for show, Phil could tell by now, but it still stung.

“We could always go to the shelter and pretend,” Phil said, and Dan knocked his shoulders against Phil gently, laughing.

Martyn’s car-renting friend was called Artie. He sent Phil pictures of six different cars, and erroneously, one of a very beautiful, incredibly naked woman, which Phil graciously deleted. Phil let Dan decide, he figured Dan had more expertise when it came to cars.

“Do you know how to change a flat tire?” Dan asked, looking up from his laptop when Phil entered the lounge. “Also, did you know that the Honda Accord has an electric steering system?”

“Which one’s that?”

“The black one.”

That didn’t actually help, but Phil nodded anyway. Dan was bound to spend at least three days reading all the reviews on at least the first page of the Google search results. Phil settled onto the sofa next to him, Dan automatically making room for Phil to curl into his side.

“Did you figure out what you were thinking about?” Dan asked.

“Huh?” Phil was just stalling, really. “Was I thinking about something?”

“Were you?” Dan glanced at him, gauging his expression before turning back to the laptop screen. “Seemed like you were.”

“I haven’t figured it out yet,” Phil said eventually. He pulled up Twitter on his phone and scrolled through his notifications, hoping to find something that would distract him from thinking about it. Dan wouldn’t pry, he never did unless it’d reached a certain tipping point. In the six years they’d been together it’d only ever happened once. Phil never reached tipping points. He compartmentalised it or let it go.

He was getting the sinking feeling that this thought wouldn’t do particularly well compartmentalised and placed in a bunch of tiny little boxes in the back of his mind. It was a thought to see to the end.

Whatever the end was. Phil was reasonably sure it would be a good end. But he’d been almost too lucky so far. Perhaps this was the universe taking it all back. Phil didn’t know how the system of karma worked. He should probably have Googled that at some point.

“Let me know,” Dan said, reaching the end of a wordy Honda Accord review and closing the tab. “I’m here.”

Dan smelled like laundry detergent and warmth. Phil watched the scenic wallpapers on the Chromecast change smoothly and buried his face against the warm slope of Dan’s shoulder. There would be time to think tomorrow.

“Here’s the thing,” someone was saying, and Phil jolted awake, blinking at the sudden brightness. They were still in the lounge, he realised, and he probably hadn’t drifted off for long, judging by Dan’s position on the car review article. Dan himself was frowning in the direction of his phone, where somebody was going on about something that sounded important.

It’s Artie, Dan mouthed, when he caught Phil’s confused look. Artie was on speakerphone, and very passionate about their road trip, apparently.

“You don’t want to take the M20 and the Channel Tunnel route, that’s just too boring,” Artie said. His voice crackled over the line. “If you want to get to Paris fast and you have a terrible phobia of planes and the Eurostar, sure. But why waste five hours driving to Paris from bloody London, when you can actually take a proper, scenic road trip?”

“How long would that take?” Dan asked.

“As long as you’d like, really! It’s a road trip, it’s all about the road! It’s not about the destination, it’s about the guys who wrote Don’t Stop Believing. Look, you could take a trip down to Devil’s Dyke, spend some quality time with the greenery, move to Brighton, then to Newhaven, take a ferry to Dieppe and make your way to Paris from there.”

“That sounds terrifying,” Dan said, punctuating it with a sharp laugh. “God, it sounds amazing though.”

“That’s a proper road trip for you,” Artie said. “Take a comfortable car, take a friend, make a proper trip of it. My wife and I take the same route every year. It’s like a pilgrimage.”

“We’ll think about it,” Dan said. “Thanks, Artie.”

“I’m just saying,” Artie added before he hung up. “I left London with a girlfriend and came back with a fiancée.”

The room felt incredibly silent without Artie’s booming voice. Phil rubbed his hands over his eyes and tried to focus.

“So that -” Dan started, glancing nervously at Phil. “I know you weren’t keen on the five hour drive in the first place -”

“I’m sold,” Phil said, because Dan’s eyes were shiny with excitement and that was impossible to ignore. “It sounds like a better plan, we could stop in Brighton to see PJ and Sophie -”

They resolutely ignored Artie’s parting words. For all the inconvenience their popularity had brought them, it’d given them an incredible ability to ignore the elephant in the room.

This elephant was a pretty big one. Phil was surprised they’d managed, but they’d been through worse.

“I’m going to start dinner,” Phil said. There wasn’t anything in the fridge, which would give him an excuse to get out of the house and clear his head.

Dan let him go easy. Was it disappointing? Phil couldn’t really tell.

The lady at the till was familiar - her name wasn’t really Janice, but Phil didn’t know what it was. He’d never read her name tag. Today, he glanced at it. It was blank.

“Cooking for two?” she asked. He wasn’t sure if she recognised him, her smile was detached in a way that only checkout girls and waitresses had. Friendly but distant.

The walk home seemed momentous for some reason. Phil half-expected somebody to jump out from behind a street light and murder him. It seemed like the kind of night for murder.

It was freezing, but the time alone had been good for clearing his head. He was being silly, Phil decided, and overly sentimental. Their official anniversary was coming up, he realised. They’d never really put a name to whatever they’d been doing in 2009 until mid-November. People celebrated the 19th of October as if it marked the beginning of all things, but it was just a date, really. If they were talking dates, their first Skype call had been in the muggy middle of July. Perhaps that had been the beginning of it all.

The sudden obsession with marriage could be chalked up to sentimentality, Phil decided. Their anniversary was coming up, they’d just finished an immense, energy-draining project, he was approaching thirty quicker than he liked - the mind would wander. It was hardly preventable.

It was temporary.

He reached their house sooner than he expected. Dan let him in before Phil could get his keys out.

“Got chicken,” Phil said, raising the paper bag.

“Those for me?” Dan asked. He gestured towards the bouquet of flowers Phil had forgotten he’d picked up by the till. They were pansies - Phil had known a girl named Pansy in primary school, she had largely kicked at his shins and joined her friends in mocking his hair, but she’d been pretty. Nice eyes. Phil had always been a sucker for nice eyes.

“I love you,” Phil said, and if Dan was surprised by the desperate inflection of his voice, he didn’t show it. Marriage didn’t matter, Phil decided, as they made their way up the stairs. What mattered was that they loved each other, and there was more than enough in the world to show for it.

(His mum would be disappointed. She’d always wanted a spring wedding from him. Something about florals.)

Dan found a jug for the flowers and sat them on the side of the kitchen sink. They settled into an easy rhythm, bumping hips in the tiny kitchen as they moved around. As he passed by, Dan peeled back the collar of Phil’s shirt and peered at his handiwork.

“Sorry,” Dan said, sheepish. “They’ve faded a bit, though.”

Phil had forgotten all about them. He glanced at Dan’s neck. The foundation had largely rubbed off by now and the marks were still ridiculously visible.

“Maybe we should be a bit more careful,” Phil said, but he didn’t mean it.

The thing about living with Dan was there was never any real silence. He hummed as he read, typed loudly and looked up to ask Phil questions once in awhile.

“We should film PINOF before we go,” Phil said. A good half of the replies to his latest tweet had been about PINOF. “Tomorrow?”

“Sounds good,” Dan said. “Might need to bust out the collared shirts though.”

“People will talk,” Phil said. To be fair, they did little else. Everybody talked, no matter what they did. It didn’t matter anymore. Once they’d made peace with the fact that everyone would find a way to twist things into a homage sculpture to the idea of Phan, things had been easier to deal with. “Maybe the blue plaid shirt, that should do.”

“I’ve always liked that shirt on you.”

“You like taking it off more than you like watching me put it on.”

Dan grinned and held his hands up. “Okay, guilty as charged.”

Phil turned back to his laptop, where he’d been hovering his cursor over the bookmarked property websites for a while. Their lease was up in six months, which gave them plenty of time to look for a new place, if they wanted. It wasn’t time to move yet; Phil was reasonably certain they’d live another year or two in this house. He wasn’t complaining, he loved their house with its cracked tiles and smudged walls.

The PINOF tweet was reasonably easy to craft, all things considered. It was tradition. He watched the responses roll in, taking screenshots of the ones he liked.

“Have you started without me?” Dan said, clutching his chest in mock-outrage. He set his laptop aside, hastily minimising the windows. “Move over, I can’t read with your fricking shoulder in my eye.”

This was good. This was familiar. The idea of marriage and Phil’s tiny internal crisis was rapidly fading into the background. Maybe he could box it up after all. Seal it and leave it for the next two years to fester. That sounded like a solid game plan.

The next two days flew by in a haze of coffee, filming and editing. Dan had to physically wrench the fourth cup of coffee of the day away from Phil before he royally screwed up his sleep schedule for the hundredth time this year. In compromise, Phil gave his coffee up for an hour of quiet cuddles on the office sofa.

PINOF 7 had been well-received, as it was bound to be. Phil had skipped that week’s live show in favour of editing it in a dark room, leaving Dan to deal with the aftermath of PINOF excitement. Through the open door of Dan’s bedroom he could hear Dan promising to look for bloopers.

“Phil and I,” Dan said, when there was a lull in interesting questions, “we’re going to be having a pretty busy week, so expect some radio silence. We’ll try to tweet and keep up with the latest memes, but for the most part we’ll be a bit busy.”

Phil supposed it was easier to listen to Dan if he pulled up his Younow page and watched the live show like a regular person. But the entire idea was that he wasn’t a regular person, he had Dan twenty feet away, in real life. A warm, living, breathing Dan that wasn’t just a few hundred pixels on a computer screen.

“What are we doing? Oh, you know. There’s lots left to do after the tour. Lots of videos to film.”

This wasn’t entirely a lie, they did have to film more gaming videos tonight before they left. Stretching the truth was inevitable and an incredibly useful skill.

“Exciting things will come soon,” Dan promised. “Or, at least, in time for Christmas.”

Phil wondered what he meant by that. Probably Christmas baking, they’d skipped out on Halloween baking this year because they’d been on tour.

“Is it a dog, said somebody. Well, you’ll just have to wait and find out. No, no. I’m joking. It’s not a dog.”

Dan joined him in the kitchen when the broadcast ended, leaning over Phil’s shoulder to steal a piece of celery.

“You shouldn’t hype them up so much,” Phil said.

“They could make wedding announcements out of pure silence,” Dan replied.

He wasn’t wrong. Phil’s heart itched at the mention of weddings, but it subsided almost as quickly as it had appeared. He finished slicing the carrots and moved on to the onions, thankful for something to occupy his hands. He’d been unreasonably restless lately, feeling the need to reach out and touch Dan to make sure he was real. Was this part of the settling process? He resolved to phone his mother in the morning if he could. He suspected she’d know what to say, but he was also pretty sure he’d be disappointed no matter what she said.

“We should get a dog,” Dan was saying, moving to close the cupboard doors Phil had inevitably left open again. “My grandma texted me a photo of her friend’s new puppies. They’re not shibes, but we could still get one.”

“We’d have to live on the streets,” Phil said, grinning. “Worth it, though.”

“What do you say, Phil? Me, you, and Dog Susan?”

It surprised him that Dan remembered, though he supposed it shouldn’t have. It’d been a murmur at four in the morning, a conversation fueled by exhaustion and several hours wrestling with Final Cut Pro trying to get everything imported correctly. Dan had asked him what they’d name their future pet, and Dog Susan had been the only thing on Phil’s mind. It seemed like such a weird thing to remember, when Dan forgot things like socks and his mum’s birthday.

“Sounds like a plan.”

They filmed a gaming video for the road after dinner, and if Phil looked over at Dan too often and too intensely, Final Cut Pro was always available to scrub that out.

Artie dropped the car off in front of their doorstep at six in the morning, which meant Dan had the honour of prodding Phil out of bed with a cold toe.

“You’re good with the small talk,” Dan said, voice muffled into the pillow.

Phil surreptitiously gargled in the bathroom before he opened the door. It wasn’t worth getting changed out of his pyjamas just to take a pair of car keys and make small talk with Artie, but the least he could do was wash his mouth out. He’d picked up the shirt Dan discarded last night and put it on too, surely that was enough of an effort.

“Hiya!” Artie said, when Phil opened the door. “Phil? Aha, knew you were - definitely a relative of Martyn’s, can always tell by the cheekbones! I’m Artie.”

Artie was definitely a talker, and Phil found himself nodding along as Artie brought him around the car to show him the spectacular restoration job, whatever that was. Most of what Artie was saying flew completely over his head.

“Not a fan of cars?” Artie said, when Phil took too long to hum appreciatively at the wheel caps, or whatever he was supposed to be doing.

“That’s more of Dan’s thing,” Phil admitted. It wasn’t entirely true, Dan’s interest in cars didn’t extend beyond semi-religiously watching Formula One, which was out of sentiment and a slightly more than patriotic love for Lewis Hamilton than anything else. 

Artie nodded sagely. “Good to have separate interests,” he said. “Keeps the relationship strong.”

“It’s not -” Phil faltered. What was he going to say? It was. They were always too careful about this, and even though it’d been his idea to keep it all on the downlow in the first place, it was starting to grate on him.

“Oh, sorry!” Artie actually managed to sound quite sorry about it. “Didn’t mean to assume. Don’t mind me, my wife says I talk more than I think.”

It was too late to salvage the situation now, so Phil nodded and let Artie talk his ear off about the extra features. Eventually, Artie passed him the keys and a clipboard for him to sign the contract on, and wished him well.

“Do you need a ride?” Phil asked. He wasn’t sure he could still drive, but he could probably make it to the station in one piece.

“I like to walk. Keeps the blood circulating. Have a safe trip! Lots of beautiful sights to see.”

Not all of them are scenic, Phil thought. Dan was a sight to marvel at, and in the privacy of the car he would be able to do exactly that.

Dan was asleep by the time Phil got back into bed. Not for the first time, Phil wondered why they bothered keeping up pretenses. Logically, he understood that it was better to keep a clear line between private and public. And the expanse of Dan’s naked shoulders, half buried under Phil’s duvet, was something Phil definitely wanted to keep to himself.

There was nothing wrong with that, surely.

But it was starting to get old. The ambiguity was beginning to seep into their lives - they separated themselves so easily that one morning Phil had caught himself moving away from Dan as he approached. It’d been an honest mistake, muddled by a lack of sleep and caffeine, but it’d hurt nonetheless.

Still, it wasn’t as if this was a problem signing a marriage certificate would solve.

And the marriage thoughts were back again with full force. Phil looked at Dan and watched the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Dan murmured, when Phil went to brush his fringe off his forehead. “I can hear you from over here.”

Dan wasn’t awake - not really, anyway. He would forget they’d even talked by the time he woke up for real when the alarm rang.

“Maybe we should get married,” Phil said. It was a selfish question, Dan wouldn’t remember this in a couple of hours. He probably wasn’t even listening.

Dan caught his hand as it brushed his fringe aside. “Maybe we should.”

It seemed like an eternity before their alarms went off. Phil had been wide awake the entire time; he’d brought his laptop to bed so he could begin the first rough cut of the new gaming video. Beside him Dan hardly stirred, and Phil found himself pausing his editing process to reach out and trace aimless patterns on Dan’s shoulder blades solely because he could.

It felt like he’d been transported back to October 2009, wide awake in his bedroom whilst Dan slept, face buried in Phil’s pillow. He remembered that morning with a strange clarity - there had been dust motes in the air, illuminated by sunlight. There had been small, faded freckles on Dan’s shoulders. He’d reached over to touch them lightly, wondering briefly what it would be like to join the dots with their cat face pen. 

Things had been simpler then. Phil suspected if he had the ability to time-travel and the misfortune to meet his younger self, they would’ve argued over who had it harder. Young Phil would’ve burst with pride at the thought of living with Dan, building a life with Dan, and their YouTube success. Phil found he now missed the days when the hardest thing in the world was the fact that Dan’s Internet connection sucked and more often than not he was a mess of blurry pixels that lagged every ten minutes in the most unfortunate positions.

Hindsight was 20-20, they’d say. Still, he wouldn’t have swapped this for anything in the world. He’d never been one to dwell in the past - if you did it, you’d done it, and everything would move on. The world’s always turning, his mum would say. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself where you’re meant to be, how you get there is hardly a problem.

Phil watched as Dan sleepily shut the alarm off. Mornings gave Dan a softness that reminded Phil of when they were younger. Dan had mellowed out over the years in some ways, sharpened in some. Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the two versions of Dan that he’d come to know and love.

“Morning,” Dan murmured, cracking an eye open. “You look like you’ve been productive.”

“Maybe,” Phil said. “I put the kettle on.”

“Did you?”

“Gotta get my workout for the day,” Phil said. “Walked and everything.”

Dan snorted. “How are those quads coming along, Phil?”

“They’re definitely growing,” Phil said, as Dan dug his toes against his calf. “Do quads grow? Muscle grows, I suppose.”

“Yes, Phil. We all know you’re a hundred and sixty-five pounds of muscle.”

“You love it.”

“Do I?”

Mornings were easy like that. The kettle beeped faintly and Dan groaned, stretching as he climbed out of bed with all the grace of an elephant.

“Get up,” Dan said, grinning at him. “We’ve got adventures to go on.”

Coffee was made and butt-grabs were exchanged. In the comfort of their kitchen, Phil felt like he’d never truly been more at home.

Dan played the piano whilst Phil stressed over whether or not they’d packed enough. Dan had taken Artie’s advice to heart and was refusing to put an actual length to their holiday. Phil had grown accustomed to packing to the backing track of one of Chopin’s Études - Dan had graciously informed him once that there were more than one, oh my god Phil - and today was no exception.

By the grace of whichever omniscient being, Dan was hauling their shared suitcase into the backseat of the car by the end of the hour. Phil had raided their kitchen cupboards for every possible snack and was attempting to balance them in his arms to avoid having to make two trips. The bag of Doritos threatened to make a valiant effort at escaping, but Phil caught it with picoseconds to spare.

“Got keys?” Dan asked. He was wearing one of Phil’s sweaters today - risky, but not something they couldn’t explain away or ignore completely if anyone brought it up - and it made Phil’s heart ache.

Phil tossed the keys at him, and he caught them with impressive dexterity. Across the road, one of their neighbours was getting the newspaper and scratching at his crotch. He raised his hand in greeting when he noticed them.

“Didn’t know you owned a car,” he said. “New purchase?”

“Rental,” Dan said.

“Going on holiday?”

“Something like that.”

“Ah. Cheers then.” He disappeared back into his home, and Phil let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

“Thought he was going to come over and shake my hand,” Dan mumbled, and laughed, fumbling with the keys as he unlocked the car. Artie had said something about the car needing to be manually unlocked, and Phil was starting to regret not listening more intensely.

“This is terrifying,” Dan admitted with a laugh, when they were finally in the car. He’d started the engine and it hummed lowly in the background.

“Don’t kill us, Dan.”

“I won’t, I won’t.” He took a deep breath and looked over at Phil. “One for the road?”

Phil kissed him, firmly shutting away the creeping anxiety that somebody was watching. It didn’t matter if their neighbour across the road was a bit of a voyeur. He’d probably seen a lot worse on summer nights when Dan forgot to close the blinds.

Dan looked visibly reassured when they broke apart. “Okay,” he breathed. “Let’s go.”

The drive to Devil’s Dyke was reasonably peaceful, all things considered. Traffic wasn’t too bad, and despite being robotic and terrifying, the GPS had a soothing voice that didn’t lend itself to being mocked. As they got into the groove of being on the road, Dan’s tense shoulders began to relax.

Admittedly, he had cursed several drivers to hell by the time they got to their first traffic light. As they waited for the light to turn green, Dan glanced over at him, looking sheepish.

“It’ll come back to me,” Dan said. “Though, considering the circumstances, I think I did reasonably well.”

“We didn’t die,” Phil conceded. Dan had a habit of stepping on the brakes abruptly and Phil suspected that it’d taken off a good six years from his life. “You’re doing great.”

“You’re just saying that,” Dan mumbled. “But thanks.”

Dan had been right though - he did get better. As they slipped past the half hour mark, they’d mustered up the courage to turn up the radio. The mid-morning show with Clara was on, a low soothing background noise.

“I’ll hand you the aux cord,” Dan said abruptly. “You’re in charge, Phil.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Dan laughed, deep and warm. “God, Phil. You’re getting old.”

He was. It seemed increasingly hard to keep up with the new meme vernacular, as Dan called it. More often than not, Phil found himself grasping on to the tail ends of them as they fizzled out. It reminded him of all the times he’d been frustrated with his mum’s inability to keep with the times - his dad had done a reasonably better job, if only for his obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“I’m not old,” Phil said anyway, because Dan liked to tease him about it, liked to pin him to the mattress and call him old man in a voice that was more fond than anything.

“Showing signs of delusion, possibly losing his memory -”

“Hey!”

“Old and grumpy.” Dan took his eyes off the road for a moment and winked at him. “You’re lucky that’s exactly how I like my men.”

“Thought you liked them with pale with lobster claws, or with a fondness for dark castle towers.”

“I’ll gladly take what I’ve been given,” Dan said, and then swerved suddenly as he narrowly avoided a man on a motorbike. “Shit!”

“What a jerk!” Phil strained forward in his seat to glare after the motorist. He wasn’t exactly sure whose fault it was - driver’s ed had been too long ago for him to remember anything beyond which side of the road you were supposed to drive on, and how to tell if your tyres needed more air. Odd, what the brain retained. Nonetheless, he dutifully glared at the offending biker until he sped out of sight completely.

“I appreciate you trying to defend my honour, Phil. It’s very romantic of you.”

“Anything for my -” Phil hesitated. This was always a goddamn problem. “Anything for you,” he finished lamely. If Dan noticed the slip-up, he didn’t mention it.

They’d never really figured out a label for themselves - Phil had never felt like they needed one; he’d never really thought of Dan as a boyfriend or a partner, more of just a Dan, his Dan. It seemed to fit somehow, better than any other label Hollywood seemed inclined to sell in their queer-friendly films. For the first year or so of their relationship they’d flitted between boyfriend and not, eventually settling on a weird nameless middle ground. Dan’s mum still referred to them as mates for whatever reason; and Phil’s mum preferred partner even though it made them both cringe. It seemed as if everyone had their own labels for them, and that was more than enough to assure that they’d never willingly use any of them.

It wasn’t as if the situation often arose. They had become startlingly adept at avoiding it all together, and lately it was just a given that they were Dan and Phil, no further questions, Your Honour. They existed firmly and contentedly in a middle ground. Phil wondered if there was a hierarchy to these things; you were boyfriends first, then partners, then husbands, maybe - if the stars aligned.

The thought of calling Dan his husband was shockingly not repulsive in any way. Phil chased that thought away before it stuck. He’d been over-thinking this for days, now was not a good time to continue.

“Are you gonna tell me what’s up, or -?” Dan kept his tone fairly neutral, and there was no heat behind it, which was reassuring. Was it worth Dan’s nerves just to not have this conversation right now? That was another internal debate Phil had to hash out with his conscience.

“It’ll go away,” Phil said.

“If you say so.”

They drove in relative silence, the Live Lounge playing softly in the background. Phil rested his forehead against the cool window and watched the surroundings fly by.

“Handing you the aux cord means putting you in charge of the music,” Dan said, after a moment. “I’m giving you full control of the music. In road trip terms, that means you’re my right hand man.”

Right hand man. That was a label and a half if Phil ever heard one. Slightly nautical. He’d always entertained dreams of becoming a pirate.

Tears for Fears seemed like a good choice. Phil put it on and Dan hummed along, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

“My Dad used to play this,” Dan said. Phil watched him - he had a beautiful side profile; times like these Phil wished he’d inherited his Dad’s ability to draw someone’s likeness. “He nearly snuck me into a Tears for Fears concert once, but my mum caught him before we were halfway out the door. She was so angry. I’d just turned five, I think.”

“My parents went to that concert,” Phil said. “It was in London, so Martyn and I had to sleep at a friend’s house that night. Martyn broke their garden gnome but we blamed it on the dog.”

“What a rebel you were, Phil.”

“Innocent child by day, devil spawn by night.”

Dan laughed. “Well, isn’t that the truth.” He punctuated his sentence with a filthy wink.

“Shut up.”

“I’d say make me, but I know you would.”

“I could think of a few ways.” Phil glanced around, and placed his hand on Dan’s thigh, high enough to be suggestive.

“Might not want to do that if you want to live another five minutes,” Dan said. Remarkably, his voice didn’t shake.

The road was empty enough. Phil could probably give him at least a handjob.

“I’m not joking, Phil. I don’t trust my driving skills enough to let you do that, even though I’m pretty sure the lost opportunity will haunt me for the rest of my sad, vanilla life.”

“Thought you were an opportunist,” Phil said, running his knuckle over the zip of Dan’s trousers in a final, determined motion before drawing his hand away.

“You’re literally the devil,” Dan mumbled, but he was smiling, the corners of his eyes crinkling even as he focused on the road. “Here I am, trying to ensure that we don’t die, and you come along like a satan snake and offer hand jobs while I’m driving like some kind of road demon -” He sighed, turning to look at Phil as he eased to a stop before the red light. “I hate you.”

Phil laughed. Dan reached over and brushed Phil’s fringe out of his eyes, fingers stilling at his temple.

“You love me,” Phil said.

“I do.”

Dan was still looking at him when the light changed.

“Do try not to kill us, Dan,” Phil said, when Dan pulled away reluctantly to resume driving. “I’ve got a whole bunch of things on my bucket list we have yet to cross out.”

“Trust me,” Dan said. They were nearing finally nearing Sussex, and Phil watched as the road signs were rapidly left behind.

“I do.”

As it turned out, Artie hadn’t in any way oversold the sights. Granted, Phil supposed Artie hadn’t been referring to Dan when he said there were sights to see, but the valley wasn’t too bad, either. The wind had made a mess of Dan’s hair as they stood on the hilltop.

One thing Artie hadn’t mentioned were the paragliders. They were scattered about the hills, bright spots of colour amongst all that green. It was further confirmation that they really were outside. Or, one with nature, as Dan had said.

“Up for a paraglide, Phil?” Dan said, nudging him with an elbow. One of the paragliders in question looked over and waved.

“No,” Phil said, surprising himself with his vehemence. “That’s terrifying.”

“I kinda want to,” Dan said, “but let’s be real - I’d probably die.”

“Try new things?”

“Try not to die, more like.”

The view was better without the threat of imminent death. Dan sent photos to his grandmother and in response received a photo of his grandfather about to start lunch, looking slightly displeased at being interrupted for a matter as small as this.

“She’s got him on a low-sodium tofu-based diet this week,” Dan read. “Maybe me and granddad can bond over the trials and tribulations of vegan eating.” He slipped his phone back into his pocket and grinned broadly. “C’mon Phil. Time to be one with nature.”

The trail was long but largely simple to follow. Phil suspected Martyn and Cornelia would laugh at how much they were still struggling. They weren’t the only ones on the trail; there was a family with a dog that raced past them.

“I feel like having a dog would be good for our stamina,” Dan said, as they watched the rest of the family chase after it. “Maybe we should get one for our sporadic runs.”

Phil looked at him. “You really do want a dog, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. You know that.”

“I thought you meant-” Phil waved his hand as he searched for the right words. “In the abstract future.”

“I feel like I’m done with the future being abstract,” Dan said. They were alone on the trail now, the family had raced beyond their line of vision. “I know, I know, the world is our oyster, sky’s the limit and all that. Remember when I took that year off uni and we sat on the sofa and had absolutely nothing to do on a Thursday afternoon? Maybe it was Wednesday, I don’t really remember. But the point is, the future was literally abstract at that point in time. We had no idea what we were doing. Nothing was set in stone.”

Phil stared at his shoes. He remembered that day with a startling clarity. There had been celebratory sex - Dan’s words, not his - that felt a lot more like a consolation. Dan had rolled off in the middle of it and forgotten how to breathe because oh fuck, Phil, what am I going to tell my grandma? D’you think my mum told her? I said I’d tell her myself but oh my god I can’t bear to-

“Anyway,” Dan said, when Phil looked up at him again. “My point is, we didn’t know anything then. There was so much potential everywhere that settling on one thing seemed like a stupid thing to do, y’know what I mean? We kinda just had to roll with it. But we’ve got some things figured out by now, y’know, and the future is more tangible than it is abstract, Phil. We set a path, we started walking, we’re on it, the destination seems pre-determined in one way or the other.”

“You’re losing me here, Dan,” Phil said, and Dan laughed. The sound was bright in the air.

“Sorry. I guess what I’m trying to say is, there are parts of the future, our future, that have become a constant, and for me, I really want that to be you.”

Phil glanced around surreptitiously. They were still alone, thankfully, so he pressed a kiss to Dan’s mouth, feeling himself smile as Dan let out a surprised noise before kissing him back thoroughly. There was something magical about this moment - they were alone in seemingly the middle of nowhere, Dan was in Phil’s sweater and he was kissing him like it could save planets from destruction.

At the very least, Dan’s words had slightly soothed the tear in Phil’s heart he hadn’t been completely aware of. Dan wanted him, it would always be an us, the future was tangible. Phil knew logically that he shouldn’t be worried, but Dan was picking up solo projects left and right and it was hard not to feel slightly abandoned, even if Phil had willingly turned down solo projects of his own. It had seemed for a while now as if there was an expiration date to their partnership, and Phil constantly felt as if he was caging Dan behind an illusion of kid-friendly friendship. It still gnawed at him in the dark whenever Dan had to fly off to film in Europe, a tough fly of a thought to swat away even though Phil knew he should. They would have to talk about this at some point, but this road trip wasn’t the time for it.

“Somebody’s going to see,” Dan murmured between kisses, but he didn’t pull back completely.

“Screw it,” said Phil, and kissed him again.

They had lunch at the pub, where they’d had to take a few selfies with a couple of people before they could actually begin eating. It wasn’t unexpected, but Phil felt himself slightly resenting it, and then feeling guilty about his irritation. He’d felt similarly resentful when they had been at the Isle of Man, but somehow that had been lessened by the fact that he had a bunch of convenient excuses: his parents lived there, they needed a break, it was good to spend time with Martyn… He supposed a few of the same excuses could be repurposed in this situation, and their cover couldn’t have been kept for long anyway. The alternative would’ve been to eat in the car, perhaps, and wear disguises, but there was nothing criminal about what they were doing, so there shouldn’t be any reason at all to hide.

People were bound to speculate anyway, no matter how careful they tried to be. Being resentful was redundant. Attempting to outsmart thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who were ridiculously invested in their private lives was a fool’s game. They’d decided not to play it anymore, and for the most part, it worked.

He stepped away to phone his mother after the third interruption. He’d promised to call, after all. Using it as an excuse to escape taking more selfies was just secondary.

His mum picked up on the third ring - never the fourth, because the fourth was unlucky for whatever reason. Superstitions were accepted without question in the Lester household. Phil suspected his mum had come up with more than a few of them just to get her way.

“Hi mum. We’re at the Devil’s Dyke. Just walked for two hours, can you imagine? Dan nearly fell over. I actually did fall over twice, but our trail was weirdly empty so thankfully nobody caught that on camera.”

Talking to his mum was safe. It was comforting. He’d never been one to shy away from family, unlike Dan, who was a fan of a phone call every month, preferably not dialed himself. He’d always been a mummy’s boy, so much so that it’d been the general theme of his childhood bullying. Now that he was older, it felt silly to have worried about it at all.

He needed to talk to her about Dan, about everything, but this wasn’t the right place for it. And, with Dan confined to the car with him for hours, it seemed that there wouldn’t be a good time for a while yet. Phil hoped the issue could wait, although he had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t.

They were just bad at keeping secrets from each other. Dan wore his heart on his sleeve and Phil froze everything out until it broke. Keeping secrets was never ideal.

Dan was scrolling through his phone by the time Phil came back into the pub. He looked up when Phil sat down, and grimaced.

“They already know we’re here,” he said, voice low. “They’re getting faster.”

“We’re not running,” Phil reminded him.

“I know, I know, but it doesn’t feel very different from it.”

It was a comfort to know that Dan felt it too. Phil sipped on his drink and caught his breath.

“D’you want to drive, Phil?”

Phil blinked. “What? Me?”

Dan shrugged, setting his phone down. “You can’t avoid driving forever.”

“I know, but -”

“You reversed into that car seven years ago -”

“It was a minivan, actually.”

“Nobody got hurt.”

“As I recall, the apples were more than slightly bruised, and all the eggs were smashed. The headlines were devastating. Undeveloped chicken fetuses meet early demise as clumsy man reverses into old woman’s minivan.”

“Bit of a mouthful,” Dan said, but he was smiling. “I’ll have you driving at some point.”

Phil had no doubt that he would. Dan could be very convincing if he wanted to be.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Phil said, raising his glass.

Dan met it with his own. “Deal.”

PJ and Sophie were excellent hosts. This was simply an undisputable fact. They had both the culinary expertise and courage that Dan and Phil lacked to actually attempt to cook properly fancy meals. Maybe it was the Brighton air. They’d considered moving to Brighton once, but ultimately their entire career was based in the heart of London and they were far too deeply rooted to move.

Phil set up his laptop to resume editing the gaming video after a round of drinks and King of Tokyo. They were desperately due one, the last gaming video had been nearly three weeks ago, and it had been pre-filmed.

“You always play nice when we’re not home,” Phil mused, as Dan sat the cup of coffee next to him and peered over his shoulder at the gaming video he was editing.

“I’m a considerate flatmate,” Dan said, leaning his chin on Phil’s shoulder. “Are you keeping that bit in about the showers?”

“Think so,” Phil said. “I’m almost done, don’t leave.”

Dan pressed a kiss to his temple. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” He pulled up a chair and reached for Phil’s phone, keeping an arm draped over the back of Phil’s chair.

Phil put his headphones on and resumed editing. There were a couple of moments that needed some fine-tuning, a couple of jump cuts that were too sudden. It was nearly nine, he was running out of time if they were going to upload this today.

“Phil,” Dan said urgently, pulling his headphones to the side so he could hear him. “Phil, there’s a really creepy photo of us on the trail.”

Phil almost didn’t want to look, but he tore his eyes away from the laptop screen and glanced at where Dan had pulled up a blurry photo. It was just their backs, thankfully, but it was unsettling nonetheless.

“I’ve checked their Twitter. Doesn’t seem like they saw anything they weren’t supposed to see,” Dan said. There was a detached edge of calm to his voice, almost mechanical. Phil hated it. “Should we call Emily just in case?”

“Emily would’ve called us if it was serious,” Phil said. “Leave it, we got lucky.”

“Too lucky,” Dan said shortly. Phil felt a headache beginning to form in his left temple. It seemed as if all the good things that had happened today had been completely wiped away by one stupid, blurry picture.

“Fuck,” Dan groaned, and Phil took the phone away from him before anything worse happened. “That was so fucking close, Phil - oh my god. We shouldn’t have taken that risk -”

“We did, it paid off. Time to move on.” It wasn’t as if this was the first time something like this had happened, they’d been in risky positions before. There were even photos of them asleep on the train, for Christ’s sake. This wasn’t technically the worst, but shit - it felt like it.

He was thankful that they’d shut the door for privacy to edit the gaming video. He couldn’t argue in someone else’s house, and the last thing they needed was to get upset with each other. Dan was still volatile in situations like these and Phil was no better.

“It’s fine,” Dan said, after he’d had a moment to calm down. He didn’t reach for Phil’s phone again. “That’s enough internet for today, I think. D’you want me to finish up the gaming video?”

It was a plea for something to do, Phil knew, so he stepped aside and picked up his coffee. Dan immersed himself in it with forced determination, and Phil settled onto the bed.

Marriage was out of the question, then. As much progress as they’d made, as comfortable as they’d become with their ambiguity, the only thing marriage would do would be annihilating that ambiguity. There was no practical difference between what they were now and legal husbands, other than wedding rings and labels that they hardly cared for anyway.

Wedding rings would be hard to hide, and what point was a wedding ring that had to be taken off more often than kept on, anyway?

Phil had expected some kind of relief with this realisation, but instead it made his heart ache. It was something they couldn’t have, it wasn’t even an option. It didn’t seem fair to have options like these crossed out by mere, unavoidable circumstance.

He sipped on his coffee, wishing it was hot enough to drag him out of his hole of self-induced despair. Dan was still watching the video, but his shoulders had relaxed slightly. They would be fine, they always were.

By the time Dan had uploaded and tweeted the new gaming video, Phil had finished his coffee and was genuinely considering a second cup. It was decaf, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t be sleeping much tonight. Dan dealt with crises like these with touch, as if he had something to prove. With every part of their relationship that people thought they owned, there was still one thing left unsullied.

He wasn’t wrong. In the eccentric, purple mood-lighting of PJ and Sophie’s guest bedroom, Dan wrestled with the button of Phil’s jeans and sank his mouth down on him with a feverish enthusiasm Phil hadn’t seen in awhile. Phil buried his face in his forearm to muffle himself. It was probably really rude to have sex whilst you were a house guest, though Phil could hardly be bothered with manners at a time like this.

“I’m sorry,” Dan gasped when he pulled off to take a breath. The corners of his eyes were watery and his cheeks were red. “I’m not ashamed - it’s just fucking terrifying.”

“I know,” Phil said. God, he bloody knew, and he wished he didn’t. He wished they didn’t. In times like these, tiptoeing on the line between real and not real always seemed like such a pointless thing to care about, but when push came to shove he knew they were better off as they were, smack in the middle of the spectrum of ambiguity.

All things considered, Phil supposed it genuinely was the best compromise.

They were piled with waffles late the next morning by PJ and Sophie, who’d insisted on making breakfast at eleven in the morning. Phil lived by the principle of never turning down waffles, so he let Sophie stack them on his plate in rapid succession. PJ had dyed them purple for whatever reason, but Phil felt like it fit into the atmosphere of Brighton in general. Brighton was colourful and bright, it seemed fitting to have brightly coloured waffles. The whipped cream was lavender - Phil leaned over to rub it off Dan’s upper lip when no one else was looking.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Dan said, once they were alone in the car.

“Can’t say I would’ve reacted any better,” Phil replied. “The world just isn’t ready for that.”

Dan snorted. “Pretty sure they are, Phil.”

“We’re not, then.” Phil sighed. They’d had this conversation several times. Phil was sure they talked about it at least once a month. Sometimes with Emily as a mediator. It felt like business, and that was a shame. Phil wished all they had to fight over was whose turn it was to water the cacti or whether or not they should buy another blender. Those were dreadfully boring arguments to have, but it was better than debating how public their relationship needed to be.

“It’s just - a slippery slope,” Dan said after a long silence. “We tweet something slightly ambiguous and by Friday they’ve already deduced that we’re adopting several children. It’s too risky.”

“I know.”

“Sorry, I know you do.”

Phil sighed. There was no alternative. They’d approached this problem several times from several different angles over the past few years, and each solution involved sacrificing something else. The current one involved sacrificing public displays of affection, which they weren’t keen on anyway, therefore it was the best path. It was no longer worth pursuing alternatives.

They spent the day with Felix and Marzia, who had promised to give them the full Brighton experience, whatever that was. Knowing Felix, Phil was rather certain it would entail some questionable clubs ‘for the joke of it’. He suspected Dan would’ve happily and willingly gone, had Phil not been present.

Dan was a sucker for dancing boys in shiny underwear. Phil preferred tweed.

The day had passed almost too smoothly. It was too kid-friendly for a day out with Felix, and Phil tensed a little in anticipation of the final activity to check off their itinerary. At the tail-end of their Brighton adventure, true to Phil’s suspicions they found themselves in an extremely questionable club. It was early enough in the evening that Phil didn’t feel too old to be here, and he allowed himself to pretend that that fact made it all better.

He elected to stay at the bar with Marzia, where the burly, heavily-tattooed and bearded bartender seemed to have taken a shine to Phil.

Dan, on the other hand, had let Felix lead him to the stage, where there were certainly shiny boys in underwear. Phil realised quickly this wasn’t anywhere near what Emily would call discreet, but they were grown adults. As long as they kept their hands to themselves and nobody took creepy pictures, they might be able to get away with it.

The music threatened to give Phil a blinding headache, but Dan was grinning at a half-naked man who seemed to have used up an entire year’s supply of body glitter in one night. Beside them, a man in half a fireman’s outfit was giving Felix what seemed like a very interesting show.

Phil dragged his eyes away from Dan to take his drink from the bartender. They were secure enough that none of this really mattered, but to be completely honest Phil had enough of a voyeuristic streak in him to enjoy watching Dan appreciate shiny men.

“This doesn’t bother you?” Marzia asked, though she didn’t seem fazed either. She raised her eyebrows at him over her appletini.

“Not really.”

“Do you like it?”

Phil spluttered ungracefully, coughing as he choked on an unfortunately-timed sip of his drink. “More than I should,” he wheezed, as his chest burned.

Marzia winked. “I know, right?”

She was good company - she knew how to hold a conversation with the right amount of sarcasm, and had sharp wit that reminded him of Dan. A tongue that could stab you through the heart if you made a wrong move. 

The man in the half-ruined fireman’s outfit had moved on to Dan by now, grinding against the pole in front of him. GlitterMan had left the stage at some point - good riddance, Phil privately thought, he’d been a bit too shiny for Phil’s comfort. Dan seemed to be enjoying himself still, and Phil checked his phone for the time. The club was beginning to fill up, which meant they had to leave soon. The ferry from Newhaven left at eleven. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t slightly relieved.

“Are you leaving me for a shiny dancer?” Phil asked, when Dan returned to his side to steal Phil’s complimentary lemon water. Dan was sweaty and grinning, red-cheeked with his hair plastered to his forehead.

“Never,” Dan proclaimed, leaning into Phil. He smelled like clean sweat, and Phil really just wanted to take him to bed. Jealousy was a cruel beast.

“Not even for a night?”

Dan raised his eyebrows. “Getting a bit voyeuristic, are we?”

Phil winked. They really did have to leave soon before they missed their surprisingly expensive ferry to France, but he could’ve easily pressed Dan against the walls of a toilet cubicle and sucked him off. He had enough alcohol in his system to override the panic at the possibility of being found out. 

Still, he gathered his self-control and let Dan pull him out of his seat. France awaited. Alcohol-fueled blowjobs could always be postponed.

Dan hadn’t been drinking, so he was more than sober enough to drive them to Newhaven, where they boarded the ferry. Phil wondered if seasickness affected you while you were sleeping. He hoped not. Coupled with the cocktails he’d downed tonight, he wasn’t entirely sure the contents of his stomach would travel safely to Dieppe with them.

They made it in the nick of time, and all the tipsiness had bled out of Phil by the time they checked in. Dan had taken the liberty of booking a cabin for a precious four hours of sleep and a shower.

“Don’t get seasick,” Dan warned, as he stripped out of his clothes. The cabin was tiny; in the space of it Dan looked like a Titan. “If you do, stick your head out the window.”

“I’m not going to get seasick,” Phil protested.

“If you say so.”

Phil rolled his eyes. There was a naked Dan in front of him, that was enough to occupy his mind. He trailed his gaze along the line of Dan’s arms, across his shoulders, down his chest and back up again. Dan had lost some of his softer edges at the expense of being overworked during the tour, and Phil mourned them slightly.

“Pervert,” Dan said, but his eyes were twinkling. He turned around, reaching for their overnight bag on the wall shelf, giving Phil a perfect view of his back. Phil was almost certain he was flexing and stretching on purpose.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Phil groaned, when Dan bent over to pick up a discarded sock. “You’re actually trying to murder me.”

“Gotta run away with my new shiny man somehow,” Dan said.

“Bring him into bed with us, I don’t mind.”

“You’re an absolute pervert, Phil.”

“I like shiny men too.”

Dan laughed, shaking his head. He leaned over to brush Phil’s fringe off his forehead and stopped abruptly. “Phil.”

“What?”

“The window’s open.”

Phil turned to look. It certainly was. And, by the look of it, there was no way to close it.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I think I just flashed several mermaids.” Still, Dan looked more amused than frustrated, which was a good thing.

“I’m sure they appreciated it,” Phil said. “It must get lonely on these cold winter nights.”

Phil checked through Twitter while Dan showered. It seemed their club visit had gone unnoticed, which was comforting. It’d been a risk, but he felt like they deserved to take risks this time. They were always too careful. The universe had to give and take.

And this, Phil decided, the universe could afford to give, and he would gladly take.

The four hours of sleep was a blessing indeed. Despite how desperately Phil had wanted to dig his blunt nails into Dan’s thighs and go to town on his cock, sleep had reigned supreme. Perhaps this was a sign of old age. It was tiring to think about growing older, so he didn’t.

Phil sat on the edge of the mattress, pulling on socks and shoes. It seemed almost laughably ridiculous that they had made it this far. A road trip? To Paris? They were docking soon, the announcement had said, voice crackling through the surprisingly old-looking speakers. A road trip seemed like something people would fantasise about them doing - like a spring wedding and having children and kissing in public. Not entirely implausible, but just a tiny, tiny millimetre or so out of reach.

“I can’t believe we actually did this,” Dan said. “I think it’s just hit me that we drove to Paris.”

“Technically, we parked the car in a ferry basement.”

“True,” Dan acquiesced. “Y’know what I mean, though.”

Phil did.

Nothing was happening in the world of Twitter - a rare, quiet moment was good in the evening, but bad in the morning. If things were quiet in the morning, it meant that they had to be on guard for the rest of the day. People got excitable. On quiet mornings, a selfie with a fan would spark a Twitter war. Phil had learnt to be weary of days like these.

“Quiet morning,” he said. Dan hummed, scrolling through his own timeline. “Got your game face on?”

They were bound to be recognised in France - Phil knew enough from his European adventure sponsorship that they wouldn’t be left alone today. It didn’t matter, it was second nature to stop and say hello.

There was complimentary coffee on a tiny, overladen table a few feet away from the reception counter. Dan returned their keys and Phil filled two tiny styrofoam cups whilst he waited.

“Phil?”

The voice was small and timid. He recognised that tone - sometimes he heard it in his sleep.

“I’m Rowena. I’m a huge fan,” she started, when he turned around. She was older than a typical fan, more poised, less starstruck. “I really love your videos.”

“Hello -” Dan was heading towards them, car keys in hand. Phil hoped he’d notice the fan before he made any missteps. Dan was always hyper-vigilant, but there was something about this morning that scared Phil. “Thank you, that’s so nice of you to say.”

Dan raised his eyebrows at Phil over Rowena’s head. Fan? He mouthed. Phil nodded.

“Hey there,” Dan called. Rowena whirled around, her ponytail nearly smacking Phil in the face. “How are you?”

It was easy to slip into the meet-and-greet mode and Phil relaxed as the conversation drew to a close. There was never much to say during these things -- hello, how are you, are you on holiday, would you like a selfie, thank you, have a great day… everything was second nature. He could probably do meet-and-greets in his sleep.

That had been his dream when he’d first met Dan. Doing meet-and-greets. He’d practiced his autograph on the back of crossed-out essay drafts. Smiled at his reflection in the mirror and pretended to say hello to people. It seemed funny that he’d ever found a reason to want that. Past Phil was a mystery to him, too. They felt entirely separate, as if Phil had been sent down by alien overlords some time in 2012 to replace who Philip Michael Lester had been.

It was a weird feeling. Oddly surreal.

A bitterness burned in the base of Phil’s throat, and behind his eyes, at the bridge of his nose. Where did it come from? He couldn’t tell. All he wanted was to be home in Dan’s bed, curled up against him pretending ten in the morning was a completely normal, human time to still be in bed.

Dan was perceptive, but he was distracted today for whatever reason. It was fine; if Dan noticed the sudden change in Phil’s demeanour it would mean inescapable conversations in the constraint of a rented car.

Phil just wasn’t up to dealing with that today. There was a headache building from the base of his skull that threatened to eject the coffee from his stomach.

“Okay?” Dan said, as he started the engine. Shit, he had noticed after all.

“Don’t know,” Phil said. They’d promised to be honest about their feelings, after all.

“Okay.”

Dan put the car in gear and reached over for Phil’s hand.

“I’m not five,” Phil said. The edge of his voice was watery and he hated it. There was no reason for this. It’d sneaked up upon him and it wasn’t at all fair.

“Alright, grandpa,” Dan said. Still, he didn’t let go. Phil found himself thankful.

Dan left Phil to think in blessed silence. Dan’s hand was large and warm in his own - had Phil been feeling less clingy today he would’ve said something about Dan driving with only one hand. It was fine, Dan was a competent enough driver and Phil needed that hand to himself, for whatever reason.

Everything was new. The sky was starting to lighten, and in the weak grey light of morning Phil could make out the tiny French signs he couldn’t understand. It seemed so unassuming and quiet; it was almost easy enough to pretend that there was honestly no one else in this tiny little town. Dan’s hair was curling slightly around his ears, and Phil itched to push it back, but he resisted.

There was a gentle ache in his bones that he couldn’t quite blame on the cheap foam mattress. It throbbed like an overworked muscle and squeezed at his heart. It was all so unnecessary; Phil hated it.

They ate breakfast in the car, Phil’s feet pressed against the dashboard. Dan had nipped into a tiny cafe and bought them pre-packaged fruit salads with condensation clouding the cheap plastic containers. Phil pressed his tiny plastic fork into a strawberry and contemplated it.

“Should tweet about this,” Dan said, mid-berry. “Healthy breakfast, and all that.”

“It’s too early for Twitter,” Phil replied. The headache hadn’t disappeared, but it had faded into a manageable throb. He stabbed his melon cube a little too violently. Dan’s hand was on his thigh, his thumb rubbing absently at the denim.

“It’s too early for life,” Dan said. The clock on the dashboard blinked 05:13 - Phil tried to think about the last time they’d been up this late together, but all that came to mind was the time they’d rushed the pilot for the BBC, eyes watering at the corners, breath stale with coffee. They must’ve stayed up several times after that, but despite how hard he was trying to remember them, all that came to mind was the crick in his neck and the way Dan pressed a hard, congratulatory kiss on his forehead when they’d finally finished.

“I haven’t figured it out,” Phil said, almost apropos of nothing. Dan would get it, he always did.

“I know,” Dan said. He didn’t seem upset, which was surprising. He didn’t seem like he felt too sorry for Phil either. It was just A Fact. Phil couldn’t decide if Dan’s apathy was irritating. Everything felt foggy and awful.

“I just --”

“Need space?” Dan’s laugh was a little hollow, Phil could tell that much. “Bit inconvenient, considering we’re on a fucking road trip.”

“I don’t need space,” Phil said, but he wasn’t entirely sure he was being completely honest with himself. “I just - you love me.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” It hadn’t helped, and Phil would have been lying if he said he hadn’t thought it would. He’d been hoping it would be the magic switch that put a rest to the itch in his chest, but disappointingly nothing had changed.

A furrow had appeared between Dan’s eyebrows. Phil reached over and smoothed it out with his thumb. Dan’s face softened, and he caught Phil’s wrist as he drew away.

There weren’t any words. Maybe that was the problem. It was getting harder to articulate what he felt; he couldn’t make sense of it himself. Everything was twisted up inside, he was oscillating between needing Dan and wanting space, it seemed so juvenile. Phil would’ve thought that they were over this by now; over the cold shoulders and fuck off, god I’m sorry, I love you, just - I need space. They’d left those in Manchester, a firm promise over three glasses of champagne.

“You wanna get a motel?” Dan asked, suddenly. “We could find a motel.”

Words or not, it seemed Dan did know what to say, after all.

Dan’s two-minute Google search led them to a tiny 24-hour inn where the receptionist looked so bored it was almost funny. It was almost six in the morning, which definitely accounted for the bleary-eyed greeting. The form-filling was best left to Dan, so Phil left him at the counter and surveyed the framed photos in the lobby.

“We should get a feature wall,” Phil said, when Dan reappeared by his side, motel keys in hand. For the house we’ll never get. It wasn’t entirely fair, he was being bitter - they would do all these things in time, but Phil was rapidly approaching thirty and suddenly it just seemed as if they were stalling.

It was a selfish thought, and Phil hated himself for it.

The bedsheets smelled like factory-processed, chemically-generated lemons, but they were surprisingly soft against his skin. The bed was barely big enough for two, but it was possible, so Phil waited patiently for Dan to kick off his shoes and slide under the covers next to him.

“Hi,” Dan said, when Phil turned to look at him. It was a little too cold in the room, but the heating panel was three feet too far away for Phil to consider turning the temperature up. It was more reason to snuggle, anyway - back in Rawtenstall all those years ago Dan had been a fan of accidentally forgetting his hoodies just so there was a justifiable reason to curl up against Phil, and Phil had picked up a couple of convenient tricks from that experience.

Phil buried his face against Dan’s chest and willed everything to go away. They needed to talk about this, but it was hard to allow himself to think about it because he was absolutely terrified that he’d reach a horrible conclusion.

He couldn’t run away forever, he knew. But there was a tiny, tiny part of him that still held out hope that this would go away if he stopped thinking about it.

What was this? Phil couldn’t even begin to explain what he was feeling, and he hated it. It reminded him of writing last-minute English essays with absolutely no clue what he was even droning on about.

Dan kept a hand on the small of Phil’s back, like he was keeping him there. Phil appreciated it a lot more than he let on.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Dan murmured. His chest rumbled against Phil’s cheek. “Are we okay, Phil?”

Phil nodded.

“I guess that’s kind of a stupid question to ask, sorry. I’m just worried, I don’t know why, god I feel really stupid -”

“It’s our anniversary,” Phil said, because it was; he’d forgotten, but it was.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did you forget?”

“No, not really.”

“Dinner tonight?”

“Escargots?”

Phil wrinkled his nose. “Ugh.”

Dan laughed. It vibrated against Phil’s cheekbone, a thousand times more comforting than anything else in the world.

“C’mon, Phil. Just one tiny snail.”

“Oh god, no.”

The tension had mostly bled away, but it was rapidly returning like flies to a carcass. It was unavoidable, they needed to talk about it, whatever it turned out to be.

“Dan,” Phil started, unsure where he was going to go. Phil had scripts for a lot of things. Meeting new people, accepting gifts, apologising for rejecting sponsorships. He’d never been able to script anything he needed to say to Dan. With any luck, it would be a bigger advantage in this situation than it was a risk.

It was a pretty big risk.

Phil took a deep breath. Beneath him, Dan was waiting expectantly.

“Marry me,” Phil said, words blending together in a rush. “Not at some point, not in the future, not in five years -” He paused, squeezing his eyes shut. This was such a bad, bad, awful, horrible idea, but he couldn’t stop now. “Now, right now, in this moment, marry me.”

He waited for a response. There was nothing.

Dan’s silence was hardly unexpected or unjustifiable. For the first time in a very long while, Phil realised this was exactly what his mum had meant when she’d opposed - or strongly discouraged, rather - their relationship all those years ago. The age gap would mean nothing in ten years, or twenty, but the difference between eighteen and twenty-two, and twenty-five with twenty-nine, was stark. Inescapable. They were at different points in life. Things like these were to be expected, and Phil would have to wait it out.

He felt as if he’d been transported back into his old kitchen in Rossendale, tea on the table, his mum looking as serious as he’d ever seen her. Phil swore he could almost see himself standing beside the faded, 2009 versions of him and his mum, listening in on their conversation.

Dan’s a lovely boy, but -

Is Dan sure he’s done with university?

Becoming a commercial duo? That sounds like a big commitment, what does Dan think? He’s a bit young to be pigeon-holed, not that I - I mean - you know what I mean, Phil -

Phil scrubbed a hand down his face, and the kitchen from his memories seemed to vanish as he did. Beside him, Dan was still silent. Phil hated it, but he had to wait it out.

He’d never been very patient.

“I think,” Dan said eventually, and Phil tried not to get his hopes up. “That’s just not the best idea.”

It stung. Of course it wasn’t the best idea, and Phil would’ve been surprised if Dan went through with it, but some part of him had wanted Dan to agree, to say fuck it, let’s get married in Paris, however illegal and unrecognised within French law that might’ve been.

“It’s not a no,” Dan continued, but there was a lump in Phil’s throat that threatened to overflow. Dan wasn’t looking at him, which was a small mercy. They were both staring at the cracked ceiling, and Dan wasn’t touching him anymore, which made everything a thousand times worse.

He’d messed it up. After letting this stew and fester for days, he’d lost control and messed it up. Phil wished there was a redo button. Restart from last saved checkpoint. Whatever that was.

“It’s not a no,” Dan repeated, with a little more conviction this time. Phil couldn’t tell if it was genuine or out of a desire to make Phil feel less jittery. “It’s just that we -”

“We’re at different points in life,” Phil supplied. He hated the way it sounded, ugly and finite and exactly the way it had sounded when his mum had broken it to him over tea.

Dan huffed a little. “Maybe,” he conceded.

Part of Phil wanted to bring up what Dan had said at Devil’s Dyke, but he knew it was a different matter entirely. Dan had said he was tired of the future being abstract, but he hadn’t meant that he wanted to get married right now, or anytime soon. Getting married wasn’t a condition for having Phil around forever, they both knew that. They were in it for life, marriage certificate or otherwise.

It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.

Perhaps the worst part was how clearly he knew it was a bad idea. He’d been ruminating this for days and days on end. He’d drawn up hypotheticals, he’d extrapolated fantasies, he’d expanded upon what was real in this current moment. He’d thought this out to the best of his ability, and absolutely none of his conclusions had been: Dan and I should get married right now.

There wasn’t any reason to be upset, and that was exactly what hurt the most. Dan was twenty-four and he was starting to be picked up by more and more television companies for longer and longer documentaries. He’d hit five million YouTube subscribers. Everyone wanted Dan; he had the entire world at his feet waiting to offer him more job opportunities. More reasons to stay lowkey about his relationship with Phil.

Phil, on the other hand, had gradually begun to slide towards a comfortable plateau. YouTube was slow and steady, he wasn’t interested in hosting any documentaries; from a commercial perspective, nobody really cared for Phil outside of Dan and Phil. None of this hurt - taking a step back from being overly involved with all of this was a decision he’d made himself with absolutely no regrets - but knowing that Dan wasn’t ready to settle down hurt like a motherfucker.

They well and truly were in different points in life. Mothers always know best had once again proved to be true, but for the first time, Phil felt bitter that her intuition had been one hundred and ten percent accurate.

The bed felt too small, and almost as if he was on autopilot Phil found himself pulling on his shoes and reaching for his phone. He didn’t know where he was headed, or what he wanted. Dan didn’t seem to be making any effort to get out of bed. Maybe space was a good idea. Phil had lost the plot at this point, all he could focus on was the way his heart ached all the way down to his fists.

Had he really needed to blurt this out on today of all days? Had he ruined every subsequent anniversary? Would there be any more anniversaries? Had he well and truly fucked it up?

It was too much to think about.

“Hey,” Dan said, as Phil wrenched the door open. “I - come back, okay?”

Phil wanted to laugh. As if there was any doubt in the world that he would come running back here. He suspected he’d follow Dan to the ends of the Earth, if it ever came to it. That thought alone was terrifying, given their current situation.

“I just need five minutes,” Phil said, and tried not to think about Dan as he closed the door behind him.

There was a tiny garden beside the inn, and it was early enough that the only other people present were an elderly couple in the midst of what looked like tai chi. Was it tai chi or yoga? Phil had never learnt to tell the difference.

His mum picked up on the first ring, because she had some kind of freaky, alien-esque intuition, Phil was sure of it. He hadn’t thought this conversation out either, but he needed to have it. How were you to begin to have a conversation about something you can’t even articulate? It was one of the mysteries of life, Phil supposed.

“Hiya, Phil. You’re up early! Maybe you should take road trips more often, you’d start the day a lot earlier!”

“I’ve been up since four,” Phil said. His mum’s voice was comforting. The bench he was sitting on was large enough for him to pull his legs up, so he did. A few feet away, the elderly couple was continuing their tai chi routine, oblivious to the outside world.

“Something wrong?”

“Dan and I had a talk,” Phil began. He wasn’t entirely sure this was the best place to begin, but he’d racked his brain trying to figure out a good jumping-off point. “About marriage.”

His mum whistled lowly. “Is it good news?” Her cautiousness hurt; was Phil the only one who would’ve expected good news? It seemed so unfair that he was only finding out now that things weren’t as concrete as he’d hoped.

“Not exactly,” he muttered.

“Oh, Phil.”

Oh, Phil, indeed. He felt tears sting at the back of his eyes but he blinked them away. It was all so ridiculous.

“What happened?”

“I asked him to marry me and he said no.”

“Is that all?”

“Should there be more?”

“Didn’t you talk about it?” His mum sighed. “Phil, you can’t just ask somebody to marry you without first being absolutely sure that you’re at the same point in life. If you’re at a place where you both want very different things, Dan’s not going to be jumping at the chance to plan a wedding.”

“We - “

“You can’t start with a question like that.”

“He said -” Phil glanced around. The elderly couple were taking a break, and not so surreptitiously eavesdropping. “At Devil’s Dyke, Dan said some things that sounded a lot like he wanted me in his life. He said he was done with the future being abstract, I - what’s the difference between that and getting married?”

“Well, that’s a question for him, isn’t it?”

It was.

“We’re always on the same page,” Phil said, even though it sounded weak, even to him. “I thought he’d be on board, because I was.”

“Things don’t work that way, Phil.”

He was realising this now. They’d had it relatively easy for years; everything Phil had suggested had already been in the back of Dan’s mind. They rarely split ways. Even when Phil had decided to cut back on gigs, it’d been understood. It seemed so ridiculous that after years of mental synchrony, this was the one hitch in the plan.

“I’m sure Dan loves you very much.” There’d never been any doubt about it, Dan wore his heart on his sleeve and proclaimed his love for Phil in every way possible, those three words notwithstanding. There wasn’t any insecurity over how much Dan loved him, it was the one sure thing Phil could count on.

“Maybe I’m holding him back,” Phil said. They’d had this conversation before, him and his mum, the October before they decided to launch the Dan and Phil brand. They’d sat on the gaming room sofa with the door opened barely an inch.

“You need to talk to him, Phil. I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

“It’s just -- god, it’s embarrassing.” It was; beneath all of the confusion and initial disappointment, there was the burning taste of embarrassment. He’d been turned down, it was a rejection, it was embarrassing. “It’s our anniversary,” he said. “Um, I guess I ruined it.”

“Dad tried to end things on our first anniversary.”

“Guess that didn’t work out.”

“No, but he’ll never forget it.”

It wasn’t very comforting, but there was nothing else to be said about it. The only way out was talking, and that was the one thing Phil couldn’t figure out how to approach. He’d messed it up; he’d misstepped. If the eavesdropping elderly couple were teaching him the tai chi of proposing to your boyfriend, he’d be face-flat on the ground right now.

He sat out in the garden after he hung up the phone. Going back in meant talking about it, and for as long as he feasibly could he wanted to nurse his bruised ego. He’d forgotten about the weather again; his thin T-shirt wasn’t doing him any favours. Everything had gone to shit remarkably quickly, and all he had to show for it were pointy nipples.

Phil would’ve laughed if he could’ve managed it. The couple had resumed their tai chi, though they shot him sympathetic looks every so often. It was making him a lot more miserable than it should have.

It didn’t surprise him when Dan sat down next to him. Mary and Joe, as Phil had named the eavesdroppers, had completely lost all sense of pretence and were openly staring now. He might’ve waved satirically, but Dan was solid and warm beside him, and he was holding out their shared green hoodie. It almost seemed like a peace offering. Phil took it.

“I feel like I didn’t quite contribute to the conversation,” Dan said, when Phil pulled the pullover on.

“It wasn’t really a conversation,” Phil admitted.

“Okay, fair.” Dan narrowed his eyes at Mary and Joe, who didn’t seem in the least bit chastised. “I was caught off-guard, that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Phil echoed. “I suppose it is.”

“You’re not being very fair to me, are you?” There was no heat behind it, but Phil wished there was. He wanted a reason to be angry at Dan for saying no. Dan was right, Dan was right as usual, it sucked.

“Hey,” Dan said, when Phil said nothing. “It’s definitely something I want. I did tell you - okay, maybe not in so many words, but I want you in my life -”

“We couldn’t pull off a secret wedding.”

“I don’t know, Phil, making the book did teach us a lot about being sneaky.”

“You’re supposed to tell me we couldn’t do it.”

“We could.”

“You don’t want to.”

“Not right now?” Dan didn’t sound very sure himself. Phil sighed. “It’s just not very feasible, is it?”

It seemed funny to him that their roles had reversed after these years. Phil used to be the voice of reason, but today he’d given it all up. Relinquished his control.

He was quickly beginning to realise that it was not a good idea.

The romance of France wasn’t lost on Phil, despite how miserable he felt in the present moment. They’d opted to walk their way through the streets - Dan had gently suggested it over some incredible room service crepes, and Phil had relinquished control, after all.

The silence wasn’t as awkward as Phil had anticipated. They always bounced back, sometimes a little slower than they should, but it always happened nonetheless. Maybe the fact that it was their anniversary helped.

It wasn’t not helping, at the very least. For that, Phil was grateful. Maybe his mum had been right after all - it wasn’t the end of the world, they’d figure it out, they’d be fine. If he tried hard enough, he could almost pretend he hadn’t tried to propose to Dan at all.

“We could vlog this,” Dan was saying. His shoulders were bumping gently against Phil’s, like gentle waves against the beach. They were heading towards the sea. It seemed like a great plan, Phil would be able to drown himself swiftly and painlessly.

“Vlogs at the beach never work,” Phil said instead, when Dan looked at him expectantly for a response. “The wind, you know.”

“Oh, yeah.” Dan didn’t sound too disappointed, but the perk in his tone was decidedly manufactured, and Phil hated this. It was unfair and awful and atrocious and all of the synonyms for horrible he could think of. 

It was another five minutes of pointless strolling before Dan sighed heavily.

“This isn’t working, is it?”

Phil looked up at him. He desperately wanted to beg ignorance - yes of course everything is absolutely fine, but he couldn’t.

“I just -”

“Right, okay.” There was a small stone bench ahead, empty save for a pigeon who meandered across the cold marble. Dan steered Phil towards it with the determination of a man on a mission. “We’re talking about this,” Dan said, when Phil sat obediently. The pigeon flew off the bench and landed near their feet, pecking hopefully.

“We’re gathered here today,” Dan said, gesturing towards himself, Phil, and the pigeon, “to discuss the issue of holy matrimony -”

“Stop,” Phil said. It seemed disgustingly cynical when Dan said it, as if it was all a big joke Phil hadn’t been in on. It stung, and in the crisp almost-winter air, his nose threatened to run.

“I’m sorry,” Dan said. “It’s not over though, is it? The conversation. We kind of just left it.” Dan’s insistence to talk things through was relatively new - Phil remembered when Dan would rather fuck on it than talk about it, and for a microsecond he missed it; it just seemed so much easier to forget things ever happened, to go back to casual sex, celebratory sex, congratulatory sex. There was sex for every occasion.

Maybe that was what they needed. Post-proposal rejection sex. Phil snorted at the thought of it.

“I just need time to think about it,” Dan said. “I mean, the last time we talked about getting married, we kind of just agreed that it was pointless. You’ve got to give me some time to rewire my thoughts.”

“You don’t have to,” Phil said. “It was just a suggestion.”

“That didn’t sound very much like a suggestion.”

“I’m not forcing you to marry me.”

“No,” Dan agreed. “You’re not.”

Phil was being stubborn and unfair, he knew. He shook his head to clear it, and groaned. Suddenly it seemed as if all of the stress of the past three months had just hit him like a boulder to the head. He dropped his head in his hands, propped up by his elbows in his lap.

Mercifully, Dan allowed him the time to think. As far off on different pages as they’d been today, it seemed the most important things never changed - Dan could still read him like a book. A difficult, stubborn book, that was for sure.

“I’m sorry,” Phil said, when his lungs cleared and the sharp pains in his head dulled to an almost gentle throbbing. “Don’t worry about it, I was just - getting antsy.”

“I just need to think about it,” Dan replied. “Honestly, Phil, I’d just never actually considered it, because it’s so terrifying and implausible and I convinced myself back in 2013 that it was never going to happen.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Yeah, well, I did a lot of things in 2013 that I didn’t have to.”

The issue wasn’t settled, and Phil had a sinking feeling that it would never really be for a while, but it was the best they could do in this situation. All Phil had to do was wait and pray that whatever deep self-reflection and deep thinking Dan was going to laboriously make his way through would end up in a happy conclusion.

What Phil really wanted to do was say, forget about it, and compartmentalise everything and pretend that it could all go back to normal, but they’d done that before and it never worked - nine times out of ten it ended in blown up fights at three in the morning and either one of them frustrated and sleeping on the sofa.

“You mean the world to me,” he said instead. The pigeon had long abandoned them, unsatisfied with their lack of pigeon-feed. “Marriage is just a piece of paper, anyway.”

“I was wondering if you’d forgotten,” Dan said. He cracked a small smile, which was a victory. “But really, it’s not, is it?”

“No,” Phil agreed. “Just - look, I love you, you love me, whether or not I get to introduce you to my mother’s friends as my husband is really just arbitrary.”

“See, when you put it like that -”

“What, my husband?”

“Yeah, that.”

Dan’s tone was almost bashful. Phil didn’t know how he felt about that. It was better not to consider it too deeply. In times of trouble, they had to live moment to moment.

Despite Phil’s best efforts, it was still a hard pill to swallow.

If Dan was thinking about it, he didn’t seem to show it. Phil managed, with his horrible, horrible French, to wrangle a restaurant recommendation from the bored receptionist. It was their anniversary, after all, and despite how badly Phil had already ruined it, he had a small feeling that it was still salvageable.

The place they had been recommended was small, but elaborately-furnished. It reminded Phil of his old house in Lancaster, with the mantles piled with useless porcelain figurines, and try-hard faux vintage wallpaper. There was a candle in the middle of the table, which Dan deemed a fire hazard and had to be persuaded not to blow out.

The waiter handing them their menu had a British accent and promised them no snails. He brought them a bottle of wine that was, apparently, one of the best. Phil couldn’t tell the difference between wines, but it was the gesture that counted.

In the intimacy of the overdone decor, it seemed as if nothing had gone wrong at all. The wine dusted the highs of Dan’s cheeks red, the food was exceptional and indeed snail free, and Dan’s foot was running surreptitiously against Phil’s ankle.

If there was anything to be said about Phil Lester, it was that despite his stubbornness and horrible tendency to shove his foot in his mouth, he knew how to woo a man.

Dan’s fancy shirt ended up on the floor of their lemon-scented hotel room, along with their lemon-scented duvet on the lemon-scented carpet.

“I fucking hate lemons,” Dan murmured, when Phil went to kiss him. They weren’t too full from dinner for sex; they’d made this mistake far too many times before, and had, it seemed, finally learnt from it. Phil kissed his way down Dan’s sternum and paused below his navel, taking a moment to fumble with Dan’s belt, and his awful, overly-zippered trousers.

“I hate your trousers,” Phil said, sitting back to watch Dan get them off. It generally always involved a lot of wriggling, which was usually an entertaining sight, if nothing else.

“They make my arse look good.”

“Your arse looks good anyway.”

“Flattery is the best way to get me into bed.”

“Is it?”

“Well, I’m in it, so it must be.”

Sex was easy. Sex was familiar territory. More often than not they laughed and bantered their way through it; it was a comfort, a way to unwind after a long day. Phil had never particularly enjoyed sex until he’d met Dan. Pre-Dan, sex had been mechanical at best - a chore sometimes, if it was a particularly tough day, or a particularly boring person - but with Dan things were much simpler and required less thought; with Dan it was a benefit rather than an obligation.

Phil took his time with it as best as he could, pausing to watch Dan squirm impatiently.

“You’re horrible,” Dan said, and then, in an impressive show of strength and agility, flipped them over. Phil’s glasses on the bedside table were knocked unceremoniously to the floor, but it didn’t matter, because Dan was grinding down onto him and deftly undoing the button on Phil’s jeans - one-handedness always impressed Phil a lot more than he cared to admit - and suddenly it didn’t matter that they’d made a mess of the morning, it didn’t matter that there was so many conversations to be had, and so many hours to be spent agonising over every single, awful minute detail. What mattered was that Dan was pressing a kiss to the base of Phil’s neck, cradling the back of his head with a hand, and reaching for his cock with the other, and in the lemon-scented hotel room in the middle of a tiny French town, Phil had never felt more at home.

“When we reach forty,” Dan said, setting his croissant back onto his plate, “is that when people start having sex once every two months?”

“That’s when the marriage collapses because the kids are too stressful and Joe won’t stop working overtime and Mary’s overwhelmed by the groceries and taking Bobby, Susan and Katie to karate classes -”

“Wow, so heteronormative, Phil.” Dan grinned, handing Phil the butter knife. “Is that what our marriage is going to be like?”

So he was thinking about it after all. Phil had been slightly concerned that Dan had merely swept it to the side, as he was wont to do with things like these, but it seemed that Dan was actually thinking about it. Was it a good thing? Phil was relatively sure Dan wouldn’t decide at the end of his thought process that he should pack his bags and leave him, but the tiny, tiny possibility of it gnawed at the back of his mind like a small rodent.

“Are we signing our children up for karate?”

“Wushu is much cooler,” Dan said decidedly. “Maybe piano classes, but we’d have to vett the teacher first because I was horribly scarred by mine and no child of ours is ever going to go through that sort of emotional abuse.”

He was talking about potential children. This was a good sign. Phil willed himself to stop analysing every word. Dan would be ready when he was ready. There was nothing Phil could do but wait patiently.

Phil Lester wasn’t a man of patience.

Driving to Rouen later that morning was to be the last thing on their itinerary before they made the return trip. Had it really been a holiday if most of it had been miserable? Phil wished he knew. He didn’t think they were any less stressed than they’d been last week.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen was the one thing Dan wanted to see - Phil’s compromise was the Rouen Cathedral afterwards, because it’d looked pretty on Google. Phil cringed a little inwardly at the thought of having to explain that yes, they did technically drive for days to Rouen just to see an art museum and a cathedral, but soon realised that there was no necessity for him to explain any of this to anyone. Perhaps the Philip doth worry too much, after all. 

The drive to Rouen was silent, with Dan lost in thought. Phil sketched an atrocious rendition of Dan’s profile on the complementary (and thankfully not lemon-scented) writing pad from the inn. He’d never been blessed with his father’s artistic abilities, nor the patience to learn it, and not for the first time he wished he had.

Phil tried his hardest not to try to read Dan’s mind. It was a futile exercise, and it would do neither of them any good. He focused instead on Twitter, who was buzzing with old tour stories, begging him to do a breakfast liveshow, and once again declaring him their father.

Some things would never change.

“What’re you drawing there, Philly?”

Phil looked up from his pitiful sketch and tried not to laugh.

“Is that me?”

“Yeah.”

“God, I’m either hideous, or you’re absolutely horrendous at drawing.”

“I think it’s quite good! Good likeness.”

“You would.”

They were nearing Rouen now. Phil flipped through his camera roll - they had a couple of short clips here and there that could be mashed into a vlog if he tried hard enough, or a Lessamazingphil video, if he really cared, but somehow he felt as if he would rather keep this entirely to themselves. It wasn’t the kind of trip you would take your fans on - if anything they’d been trying to ditch their fans this time.

He wasn’t well and truly done with the YouTube life yet, although he toyed with the idea of quitting from time to time. There wasn’t any real reason to quit - he wouldn’t, he would never - but it crept up in his mind once every so often and presented itself for consideration. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do without YouTube - the weatherman joke got older and less applicable as time passed.

“D’you think I could still be a weatherman?”

“You could be anything you want to be.”

“Wow, Dan. So inspiring.”

Dan snorted. But perhaps he was right, perhaps Phil could chase his dreams of becoming a weatherman, perhaps they could get married and have seventy-two children. There were a lot of perhaps, and Phil wasn’t entirely sure he was ready to seriously consider any of them.

The museum was nice, if not mind-numbingly boring. Dan seemed to enjoy it though, and Phil tagged along to listen to Dan waffle on about the delicate sculpting, the fine detail, the passion behind it… It wasn’t as if Dan knew anything more about art than he could read off the label next to the pieces, but something about it made Phil’s heart ache in the best way.

It seemed so needlessly middle-class, spending an afternoon in a French art museum with high ceilings and large windows. If Dan had been a lawyer, and Phil a weatherman, would they have lived the same lives? Phil resolved to find an alternate universe fanfiction to that regard to see if it would.

Phil retired to the café to grab them lunch. Dan seemed content to ponder the art alone for the next hour anyway, and from his position in the queue Phil could see him studying the paintings on the far left wall. There were children beside him, seemingly arguing in French. Phil willed himself not to think about having children; one hurdle at a time was more than enough to cross.

It was nearing late afternoon when they finally made it to the Rouen Cathedral. The sky had darkened considerably, but it was still incredibly beautiful, and slightly haunting. Dan picked up some educational pamphlets by the entrance and announced Fun Facts to Phil as if he was a tour guide.

“Richard the Lionheart was buried here,” Dan read, as they made their way through the building. “So was John of Lancaster -”

“The John of Lancaster I knew was a bit of a prick. Tried to steal my goldfish when I was eight. We don’t speak of that anymore.”

“Alright.” Dan laughed, bumping his shoulders against Phil’s. “The first cathedral at Rouen was built in 396 by a bloke - he was a bishop, actually, Bishop Victricius. The Normans invaded and destroyed it, and then replaced it with a larger cathedral -”

“You should be a tour guide.”

“I should! I’d be a great tour guide. I’d tell everyone where the wifi spots are and then give them a web link and that’d be me done for the day.”

“Lazy or resourceful? I can’t tell.”

Phil made up stories for the monuments and relics Dan couldn’t find an info label for in his multitude of pamphlets. It was almost tradition by now; they’d done this since Portugal, since they started their yearly Greek adventures with Wirrow and Bryony. It was a tradition Phil held close to his heart, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could carry it forward with anyone else, as lovely as they might’ve been. This was a Dan-specific tradition, and Phil felt as if he’d accumulated so many of those at this point that it would seriously hinder his ability to have a stable relationship with another person if Dan decided that Phil wasn’t #4lyf.

And there it was again, the horrible thought that Dan would pack up and leave. It was incredibly ridiculous, Phil knew, but he couldn’t help it as it invaded his mind, clawing at the corners where he was the most vulnerable.

He shut them away firmly. They continued to hammer on the door he’d closed on them in his mind, but his resolve was absolute. Regardless of the outcome, he would have a wonderful day with Dan today, and there would be nothing to stop it, not even the hesitance and moments of worry that Dan might leave him.

The cathedral was beautiful. It was calming; regal and distinguished in a way that seemed to diminish all of Phil’s doubts. He surreptitiously took as many photos of Dan as he could, a stark contrast in his well-worn sweater against the regality of the cathedral’s structure.

If there really was a God in this universe, perhaps he did deserve a house this beautiful.

The drawing of the day to a close felt like their very last performance in the London Palladium: relief, sadness, wanting it to end, yet wanting it to stay on forever. The tour had absolutely challenged their limits and while Phil missed it - the rush of the audience’s cheers, the deep breaths he had to take before he started to sing - it had also well and truly felt like it was time for it to be over. In many ways, the roadtrip felt the same - Phil would miss the monotone of the GPS, Dan swearing at other drivers, having Dan to himself as much as was possible in their current situation, but it was time to go home.

Home was the best place to be. Traffic hadn’t been too brutal, so they managed to get home before it was too late to function. Sore backs and returning the car could be dealt with the next day; all they really needed now was to collapse into one of their beds and go to sleep.

The conversation on marriage might have been adjourned forever - Phil wasn’t entirely sure. They’d managed to talk about everything other than marriage on the trip home; they’d spent two hours trying to write a new song for the Worldwide Tour and it had felt very much like a desperate attempt not to talk about it. Dan had jumped from topic to topic with the kind of nervous fervor that he often had whenever he had to interview someone. They both knew that Dan was trying desperately to avoid the topic, but Phil let it slide. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

It seemed that in his valiant attempt not to use the road trip as a pre-marriage evaluation, Phil had managed to do exactly that. At the same time, it had been cathartic - they could move on from it now; go on with everything they had to do still and forget that it’d been an issue to be raised.

Put it on the back burner - they were champions at that.

“If we were to get married -” Dan began, and Phil jolted back into reality. In the darkness of Phil’s bedroom, Dan’s expression was impossible to make out, and his tone was so carefully neutral that Phil couldn’t bear to pick it apart, afraid of what he might find lying underneath.

“Yeah?”

“What would the difference be?”

That was a question Phil had never been able to answer. He supposed the only difference was that they would finally, finally have a label - a legal one, at that - and that was it, really. It wasn’t as if they really needed it for the security - Phil thought any relationship that needed marriage to secure it sounded doomed anyway - and the tax benefits didn’t exactly apply. It really, absolutely did not matter.

It was just a selfish, small thing that he wanted, purely because it was likely he would never have it. You always want what you can’t have - that, surely, was the basis of humanity.

“I just want to,” he said eventually, when the silence breached the threshold of too long to ignore. That was it, really - there was no point coming up with weak reasons and trying to find loopholes in their situation that marriage would fix; there simply weren’t any.

“Oh,” said Dan. “Me too.”

Phil thought about the one professional interview Dan had had without him. It’d been in the wake of the completion of filming his BBC documentary, and Phil had been invited but it had seemed more of a courtesy that begged not to be taken up, so he’d left it to Dan to handle it, despite protests. It was a Dan thing, they weren’t a duo a hundred percent of the time, as much as they made it out to be.

In the interview they had asked about “Dan and Phil”, air quotes included, of course - and it’d been an awkward silence, Dan had told him, because despite media training and several similar moments, questions like these were hard to answer. Dan had said, in the end, I think our relationship, business or otherwise, is something that is just incredibly difficult to explain - I mean, it seems simple enough; two weirdos, good chemistry - but I think it’d be impossible to say why it’s been so successful. If nothing else, it’s incredibly solid. That alone seems to be very reassuring, and I think we’re all looking for reassurance, in one way or another.

The interview wasn’t out yet - it would be out in January, and there would be more speculation, more to deal with. With every single day they lived it seemed that keeping within their closets was proving to be a harder and harder task. Dan had abandoned the idea of shutting himself in, and was embracing his tangled mess of a sexuality as far as he could without spelling it out. Phil was still on the fence about being that level of open.

To Phil it was an unspoken truth. Something that needed neither to be confirmed or denied.

“Marriage isn’t coming out,” Phil said.

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

It seemed that there would be absolutely no end to this. There were just as many pros as there were cons. Perhaps the cons even outweighed the pros. Phil couldn’t really bring himself to think it through. That was knocking on heartbreak’s door.

They were solid. That’s what they were. They existed in relationship limbo, maybe, but they existed all the same. Phil was nearing thirty, not fifty. He could afford a couple more years.

“Are you uncomfortable with… with the idea of being my husband?” Phil regretted the question the second it escaped his mouth. They couldn’t even wrap their minds around boyfriends or partners. They could barely spend Christmas together. Dan’s grandaunt still thought Phil was a good candidate to date her youngest daughter.

“Not exactly?” Dan let out a frustrated sigh. “It just seems so unnecessary. We only want it because we can’t have it. What happens when we have it?”

“We’d be married,” Phil said simply.

“I don’t know if I’m equipped to be anyone’s husband.”

Not just anyone’s husband; my husband. Phil couldn’t bring himself to actually say it.

“There aren’t extra husband responsibilities, Dan.”

“So why do I need to be anyone’s husband?”

Phil sighed. That was it then - that was the conversation concluded. No further questions, Your Honour. Dan wasn’t ready for this, plain and simple. Phil might’ve yearned for a silver band on his right hand, but Dan could do without, and would rather do without, it seemed.

“Yeah,” Phil eventually said. Beside him, tension seemed to radiate from Dan. It felt too close to what they’d fought their way, tooth and nail, out of three years ago, so Phil got out of bed.

“Where are you going?” There was a note of uncertainty in Dan’s voice that Phil hated - one that made him sound several years younger than he really was. It was something they were supposed to have left behind - in Manchester, in the orange-lit apartment, on the balcony where Dan went to pretend he wasn’t crying.

“Need a glass of water.”

The kitchen tap ran like cold daggers over his skin. Phil gripped the glass so hard he was slightly afraid it would shatter. It was rapidly overfilling, but he couldn’t bring himself to move.

Dan was slipping into his own bedroom when Phil made his way out of the kitchen. He looked up guiltily at Phil when they passed each other in the narrow hallway.

“Maybe not tonight,” Dan said. The door clicked shut behind him, and Phil thought about wrenching it open, about saying it didn’t matter, marriage didn’t matter, nothing mattered. But the door was firmly shut and Phil was holding a glass of water that he didn’t even need, and suddenly it seemed like far too much effort.

You don’t go knocking on heartbreak’s door. Perhaps it was finally time Phil started taking his own advice.

fin