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Dan was a Christmas man, and he liked his house the same way. Tree (small but undeniably present) already up and decorated in the corner, presents (perfectly wrapped) sent out, lights strung up everywhere he could reach, mistletoe (for the sentiment, entirely) topping every doorway, mulled wine and shitty Starbucks drinks whenever he went into town, the works. His half of the split-down-the-middle townhouse he lived in smelt of peppermint and chocolate and faintly of pine boughs and finally, with it thoroughly seeped in the spirit of Santa, he could sit and watch the snow fall out the window with Tumblr open in a tab on his laptop and a faint smile floating across his face as his mind wandered from reblogging dumb text posts to the white and flaky stillness slowly falling through the dusk of Christmas Eve outside.
THUMP.
Dan’s heart skipped a beat and he shot upright, scrambling out of his chair and pressing his face against the window, his hands cupped around his eyes as he peered through frosty glass to the still, dark shape lying in the snow, just beside the pavement that lead to the street. He flung himself away from the window as though it had burned him and careened to the front door, shoving his feet halfway into the pair of shoes by the threshold and slamming open the door, rushing out into the silence of the snow to find out if his neighbour/housemate was still alive.
“Are you okay? Jesus Christ,” he called, panting, as he struggled across the yard. The snow was already ankle-high and filling his shoes. The man on the ground slowly pushed himself to his elbows, wincing.
“Yeah, I reckon,” he called back, his voice strained from pain and drenched in a Northern accent. Dan made a skeptical noise and, once he was close enough, reached out a hand to help him up. The Northern guy, whom Dan had only spoken to briefly when he’d first moved in six months ago and had forgotten the name of nearly instantly afterward, gripped his wrist and Dan heaved until they were both standing. The man was nearly as tall as him, with high cheekbones and dark hair cut nearly identically to Dan’s own. He was a striking sight.
“What the f―what were you trying to do, exactly?” Dan asked, straightening his jumper (glad that the other man was, too, decked out in ugly Christmassy glory). The Northern guy grinned sheepishly.
“Christmas lights. I know, I know, not the best time, but―”
“You’re right about one thing there,” Dan told him incredulously, looking up at the nearly-finished strings of multicoloured lights spider-webbed across the edge of their shared roof. A ladder was precariously balanced against the side of the house that wasn’t Dan’s, but the lights were definitely creeping over into his personal roof territory. “Really? Putting up lights the night before Christmas?” He would’ve scoffed, but he was still mildly spooked. After all, it’s not every day a mildly (distractingly) attractive man falls from your roof and needs rescuing. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Honestly,” the man said, wincing again as he pressed a hand to his lower back, “I’m not sure. Do you mind if I come inside? Um, your place? I mean,” he went on, and Dan could see the flush settling over his pale face even as the wintry light dimmed with every passing second, “I don’t want to intrude on your Christmas plans, but if it turns out I’ve actually broken my back―”
“C’mon,” Dan interjected, reaching out again. The man gripped his forearm for balance as they set off and smiled again, gratefully this time.
“Thanks a million.”
“No trouble. It’s Christmas Eve, after all. Be a bit depressing to spend it on our respective owns.”
The man giggled at that, properly giggled, a lopsided smile taking over his face, and Dan had to forcibly keep himself from just trollishly ogling the person beside him the entire, slow way back up the front steps and into Dan’s side of the house.
Once inside, his neighbour shook the snow out of his hair and looked around, an expression of almost childlike wonder on his face. “It’s always so weird coming into this side of the house. Everything’s just flipped the wrong way round.”
“You’ve just fallen off our roof, no wonder you’re thinking like that,” Dan said, only half-teasing, and the man gave him a patronising look.
“I’m tougher than I look, promise,” he said, before looking through the lounge and the dining room towards the very back room of the house. “Do I smell hot chocolate?”
Dan followed the man into the kitchen, nearly failing to resist the temptation to make a snarky remark about how he should be the host here. Once they were both closeted into the tiny, half-arsed attempt at a room that barely passed as a place for meal-making the man introduced himself as Phil.
“Phil Lester, actually,” he added, making unrestrained puppy eyes at the packets of peppermint hot chocolate mix that Dan had accidentally spilled across the counter whilst removing them from the cabinet earlier that evening, “and I’m a huge fan of people who hospitably provide tasty holiday drinks to harangued Christmas maintenance men.”
“Could you be a little more obvious?” Dan tried not to laugh but ended up giggling anyway, and crossed the room in two paces to fill up the electric kettle. “I’m Dan. Dan Howell.” It was then that he remembered.
He glanced, surreptitiously, up and over his left shoulder and fought back a stream of swear words. Of course. Of course he had to go and put up mistletoe in every fucking doorway. Stupid, stupid, stupid. All in the name of trivial Christmas tradition, never once had Dan actually thought he’d be kissing anyone in this place, and now. Stuck in a tiny house with a tall, possibly injured, very attractive man whom Dan wouldn’t really mind snogging at all, except for the fact that if Phil actually saw the mistletoe he’d undoubtedly laugh at Dan’s preposterous sentiment of having it up in a house he lived in alone, and obliterate any chance of actual mouth-to-mouth contact of the non-resuscitating variety.
“Marshmallows?” Dan asked, fetching two mugs from the cabinet.Phil leant against the sink and huffed out a laugh.
“Always.”
“Maybe marshmallow can be our always,” Dan blurted out, his stomach sinking seconds later at the wholly block-headed assumption he’d just made that Phil had read the same book as he.
“You’ve read The Fault In Our Stars?”
His anxiety melted into warmth in the pit of his stomach. “Obviously,” Dan scoffed, hiding his relief rather too well, but Phil only smirked.
“How’d you like it, then?”
“Fucked me up, TBH,” Dan said without thinking. Phil giggled again, and Dan had to focus very hard on not spilling boiling water all over himself.
He handed one mug, dangerously full of marshmallows and cocoa mix to Phil, and made a grand sweeping gesture towards the tiny door, hoping against hope the mistletoe would go unnoticed. “After you,” they said simultaneously, and their eyes locked, entirely on accident. Dan tried to smirk nonchalantly and keep a cool exterior, but Phil’s eyes were really quite blue, and it was extremely distracting. He exhaled through his nose and swallowed, hard.
“Lounge?”
“Yeah, sure.”
It was only once they were settled down that Phil started a conversation and a mutual interest in anime was discovered, which led to an unearthing of their joint obsession with Sword Art Online, which culminated into Dan logging into Netflix on his laptop and scooting close enough to Phil on the sofa that their thighs were pressed against each other, the computer balanced between their laps and the hot cocoa slowly getting colder on the end table.
Phil was far too interesting to let leave, and every time the conversation lulled Dan scrambled for a new topic until he had a plethora of seemingly meaningless facts about his Mancunian neighbour Philip Michael Lester filed neatly away inside his head. He memorized the phrase “AmazingPhil” for later and (probably unwisely) kept looking back at Phil’s lopsided smirk instead of listening to the words coming out of it, imagining his stupidly blue eyes every time they were turned away, ogling the shadows on his cheek and under his jaw whenever he tilted his head and grinned at something ridiculous Dan had just said.
“Thanks for rescuing me, by the way,” Phil eventually managed to work into their easy back-and-forth, and Dan felt himself blush and looked down at his knees, unsure if he could open his mouth and trust his voice to say something even remotely not-mortifying.
“It’s only decent,” he ended up fumbling out, and Phil smiled at him.
“It would tarnish a record, wouldn’t it, if your neighbour fell off your roof on Christmas Eve and you didn’t even bother to lend them a hand,” he said, then added, “would you check my back for me, just quickly?” and Dan turned the approximate shade of a tomato.
“Yeah, sure,” was all he could choke out, and Phil grinned and stood up and winced, inhaling sharply through his teeth.
“Still hurting?” Dan asked, and Phil made a scoffing noise that almost sounded affectionate.
“I wonder,” he said, sliding his fingers under the hem of his jumper, lifting it up to bare a stripe of marble skin. Dan took a tentative step forward and let his hands join Phil’s.
“Fuck,” he hissed, watching great blotches of blue-purple and black and sickly green-brown emerge from the cover of Phil’s jumper as they slid it up together, until it was high enough that Phil had to let his hands fall back to his sides. “That looks kind of horrible.”
“I’m not broken, am I?”
“No, but you’re definitely bruised,” Dan remarked almost absentmindedly, wanting to touch but not quite daring. He went ahead and skimmed his fingertips over the curve of Phil’s lower back, and Phil choked out the same sharp inhaling noise.
“‘Fuck’ is right,” he said, his voice tight, and Dan clicked his tongue sympathetically.
“I don’t have the slightest clue what helps with shit like this,” he said, lifting Phil’s jumper up even farther. The injuries seemed to stop just below his shoulder blades, until they returned with a vengeance on his shoulders proper. The jumper and the tee Phil had on underneath were bunched in Dan’s hands, and he kind of just wanted to pull it all the way over Phil’s head. “You fell hard, Jesus Christ.”
“I feel so safe and loved,” Phil said sarcastically, flicking his hair out of his eyes, and Dan let the jumper drop back down to Phil’s waist as if it had scalded him.
“I guess you’ll just have to rest a whole damn lot and bear the agony like a good sport,” Dan said, shrugging and trying to not look as flustered as he really was as Phil turned around to face him. They were standing inches away. If either of them leant or stepped towards each other they’d be touching, head to toe.
“You’re shivering,” Phil told him, his voice barely more than a whisper, eyes flicking up and down Dan’s body, and Dan realized he was right. He was trembling and his heart was beating fast enough to power an entire street’s worth of bodies and Dan really, really wanted to kiss him.
“Don’t know why,” he replied, willing his voice not to break. Phil smirked his crooked smirk, letting out a breath of laughter, reaching out and touching Dan’s shoulders so tenderly Dan could barely feel it.
Phil’s hands slid down Dan’s biceps and he pushed him back two steps. Dan’s back and the doorframe met each other unceremoniously, and he forgot to breathe for a second. When he finally exhaled again, it was shaky and uneven.
Phil glanced up and his smile turned soft and mischievous. “Mistletoe, hey.” His voice sent chills down Dan’s spine, and Dan let loose a held breath and leaned forward in Phil’s grip. Their mouths collided softly, clumsily, and his eyes fluttered closed, butterflies swirling up through his stomach, his fingers finding Phil’s waist. Phil moved his hands up to cup Dan’s face, his mouth softening from a smile into a shape that perfectly molded with Dan’s lips, and all of a sudden they were both smiling too hard to really kiss properly and they were just pressing their foreheads together. Dan’s eyes were still most of the way closed, and he looked down at Phil’s waist, at his hands there.
“Oops,” he murmured, and Phil let out a soft breath of amusement and kissed him again, soft and slow, their damp lips clinging and pressing delicately. Phil kissed the corner of Dan’s mouth, brushed his thumb against the soft skin where his lips had just been, and Dan couldn’t resist fluttering tiny kisses along the regal line of Phil’s cheekbone, across and down his nose and the tiny, sparse freckles there. They were warm and pliant against each other, and it was slow and sweet and perfect and Dan didn’t really want to let go, so he didn’t.
“I’m really glad you put this mistletoe up,” Phil murmured once they’d separated briefly once again, “because I was on the point of just snogging you without an excuse.”
“Same, TBH,” Dan replied, and then they were laughing.