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Phil’s phone buzzes out of nowhere, interrupting his meandering train of thought. He’s been trying to script a video for an hour and nothing’s working, everything he writes down sounding stupid and forced. He grabs his phone and unlocks it, a grin blooming on his face when he sees it's from dan h <3 .
emma and i are done. is all that the text says, short and miserable. Phil stares at the screen for a second, not quite comprehending the message. emma and i are done.
Dan and Emma have been dating since they were fifteen. Phil’s heard loads about her, even talked to her once when she answered Dan’s phone in the car. So them splitting up doesn't make sense to Phil for a moment.
His phone buzzes with another text, this one a little longer.
dan h <3 : im literally dying. im shaking so hard i want to throw up i dont know what to do??? i love her i just want her to be happy but i cant lose her oh my god oh my god
Phil taps out a reply as fast as he can, his thumbs flying across the keyboard.
i’m so sorry dan that's so horrible :( is there anything i can do?
He waits impatiently as it sends, all thoughts of video-making pushed to the side. Less than a minute passes before another two texts come in.
dan h <3 : idk
dan h <3 : skype? u dont have to im sorry
Phil tells him yes immediately and grabs his laptop, booting it up and tapping his foot impatiently as it wheezes to life.
He opens skype as soon as it loads, then waits for Dan to come online. The minute he does Phil clicks call. Dan answers almost right away.
Their connection is better than usual, which means that Phil can actually see Dan’s face rather than a collection of blurry pixels. Normally he'd be thrilled, but now all he can focus on is how miserable Dan looks, red-eyed and pale-faced and wobbly.
“Hey,” he says, gentle, and Dan lifts his hand up in a halfhearted wave.
“Hi,” he replies. His voice cracks and Phil wishes he could push through his laptop screen and pull Dan into his arms. Hold him tight until everything stops hurting.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Phil asks. “Or, like, I could just talk, if you want a distraction, or.” He trails off. Dan shrugs and pushes his knuckles against his eyes, swiping away tears.
“She just. She's going to Bristol for uni so she said she didn't want to do long distance, said we needed to be able to like. Be our own people. But I don't, fuck. I don't want to.”
There's a long pause in which Dan slumps over and sobs, his narrow shoulders shaking. Phil doesn't know what to do. He's a physical person, the kind of guy who comforts best with a long hug and an offer of tea. He doesn't really know what to do now.
“I hate her,” Dan says, sitting up, his voice sharp and thin, and then his face crumples again. Phil’s chest feels very, very full, like his heart is going to crack and spill over. “Fuck. No I don't. I love her. I want her back.”
“I know,” Phil tells him, soft and gentle. He wishes he could be there. Skype isn't good enough for something like this. “I’m so sorry, Dan.”
“I just, like.” Dan scrubs the back of his wrist across his eyes and stares up at his bedroom ceiling. “I really thought she wanted it too, like a future with me? I'm so fucking stupid, fuck.”
“You're not stupid,” Phil tells him. Dan shakes his head. “You're not .”
He feels very out of his depth in this. He's never had a relationship like the one Dan had with Emma - never something that strong, never something that lasted nearly three years. It's not something Phil’s ever really wanted. He can't empathise with Dan in this situation because he has no idea how it feels.
But Dan is Phil’s best friend, and Phil thinks he'd probably do anything to see him smiling again.
“I am though,” Dan is saying. He's still staring at the ceiling like maybe happiness will fall out of it. “Like, I must be, for thinking we had a chance.”
Dan’s so young. Phil forgets that, sometimes. His girlfriend has been with him for some of the hardest and strangest years of his life, and for her to be gone must be terrifying. Not for the first time, Phil wishes he didn't live so far away. He'd give anything to give Dan a hug.
"I took her to Paris, you know,” Dan is saying, his voice small and fragile, shattered glass in a dusty windowpane. “Fucking. Paris . Like. I thought for sure she was it for me, like she -” He cuts off and drags his hands over his face, lets out a tiny shuddering sob. Phil swallows hard against the knot suddenly sitting in his throat.
“I thought about, like, marrying her sometimes,” Dan continues. He pulls his hands away from his face and takes a shaky breath. Phil nods and tries to make his face look soft and open. Dan’s eyes are red-rimmed, the skin beneath them dark and translucent. “How I would ask her and like. Vows even, sometimes. Is that stupid? To have wanted that?”
“No,” Phil says immediately. Dan frowns. God, he'd do anything to make this better. “It's not stupid. You loved each other for a really long time, that's not… Dan, that's like the least stupid thing ever.”
“I'm eighteen,” Dan mumbles. He looks so tired. “We’re eight fucking teen and I wanted to marry her.”
There's a long minute of silence. Phil doesn't know what to say without repeating himself.
“Sorry,” Dan sighs, a bitter little half-laugh falling from between his teeth. “You don't want to hear all this.”
“Yes I do,” Phil tells him firmly. “I want to help.”
The corner of Dan’s mouth quirks into a tiny grateful smile.
“Thank you,” he says, very quiet. “I really - thank you.”
Phil nods.
“You're my best friend,” he replies with a shrug. “I'm always going to be here for you.”
Phil spends a lot of time talking to Dan. They text and they talk on the phone and they skype for hours and Phil’s always left a little lonely when Dan signs off at the end of the night to go to bed. He's never felt this attached to someone, and he's certainly never wanted to protect someone this much. Sometimes he wants to tuck Dan into the space behind his ribs and keep him there, safe and sheltered and warm.
It's not that he’s in love with Dan, because that sort of love doesn't really happen to Phil. But he does love Dan. He loves him fiercely and ferociously. He'd walk to Reading for him if he had to. He'd walk to the moon.
“It's only 219 miles,” he says one night when Dan seems particularly lonely. “I could bicycle there in eighteen and a half hours, according to google maps. Although I am horrendously unfit so it might take me longer.”
Dan snorts.
“Do you even own a bicycle?” he asks, a little bit of something that might be happiness seeping into his voice. Phil grins and shakes his head.
“I might still have a skateboard somewhere?” he says. Dan rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, that'd be good, you rolling down the M6 on a skateboard from when you were fifteen,” he teases, and Phil laughs. It feels good to be joking with Dan again, to watch the tension in his shoulders and between his eyes ease a little.
“I could, like.” He's speaking before he has much of a plan. “I could come and visit, if you want.”
Dan’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Phil’s stomach is churning nervously. He's wanted to meet Dan properly for ages, and he hopes that Dan wants the same, but neither of them have ever talked about it outside of the hypothetical.
“Would you actually?” Dan asks. He shifts nervously, his fingers tapping against his knee. “You want to?”
“Of course I want to,” Phil says. Dan looks away, the corners of his mouth quirking a little. Then he sighs.
“Wokingham, like, properly sucks,” he says. “There's nothing to do. And my parents are - like, I dunno. They'd be weird about it, I think? My mum barely knows how email works, like, she doesn't… And my dad thinks the internet is full of predators, so. Dunno.” He sighs and pushes his hands through his fringe. Phil nods.
“I do want to meet you, though,” Dan adds, and something in Phil’s chest soars. “Like, soon? If you want.”
“Of course I want,” Phil says. Of course he wants. He'd do anything for it, he thinks. To have more than this, to be able to see how Dan tilts his head back when he laughs in person, in real life.
“You're -” Dan starts, and then his phone buzzes and his face goes slack as he looks down at it. Phil watches as he stares at the screen, his lower lip caught between his teeth.
“It's Emma,” Dan says without looking up, and nervousness starts back up again in Phil’s stomach. “She wants to know if I'm okay.”
“Are you?” Phil asks. Dan hasn't talked about Emma at all yet this skype call, hasn't even mentioned her in passing. He keeps gnawing on his lower lip as he looks down at his phone.
“I… I don't really know,” he says slowly. Phil frowns. “I don't feel like I'm dying all the time anymore, but I. I don't know. I feel like I should be fine by now and I'm not."
There's not a formula to this. Phil knows that even if he's never had a bad breakup. There’ll never be a surefire way to pick up the shards of sadness that Dan leaves behind him wherever he goes, never be a way to put him neatly back together. He just has to wait, ride out the ache and the loneliness until he starts feeling whole again.
“There's not a timeline for feeling okay,” Phil tells him. He has no idea what he's saying but he pushes forward anyway, tries to channel the calm logical way that his mum used to talk to him when he got upset as a child. “You don't have to, like. Be okay right now. It's okay to still be sad. It's okay to be angry.”
“I'm not angry,” Dan mumbles. His eyes are closed. “That's the worst part. I just miss her.” He exhales, long and shuddery. “I've never missed anyone like this before. I just keep… realising that she's gone forever, you know? We’re never going back and that hurts so much .” His voice is small but steady.
“I'm really sorry,” Phil says, and it's not enough, and he doesn't have anything else to give.
Dan has to leave then, his shift at work starting in just a few minutes, so Phil logs off Skype and opens up his browser.
how to help someone get over someone , he types. Nothing that comes up is exactly what he's looking for, but he clicks a few of the links anyways, skims over the articles about finding inner peace and learning how to be alone. None of it seems like it would be much help.
“Tell yourself it goes away,” Phil reads aloud, and he snorts. That’s the worst thing to say to someone who’s in pain. It goes away. It gets better. Knowing that heartache will go away sometime in the vague future doesn't help even a little in the now.
There are so many breakup songs. There are so many ballads about lost love and being so sad you might die from it, and very few about feeling okay in the wake of being left behind. Phil wonders why no one ever wants to talk about that, about how to heal. How to help someone be brave enough to walk out in the world alone.
He doesn't want Dan to feel alone, is the thing. Phil loves Dan so much he could probably write novels about it, about how special and clever and bright he thinks Dan is, and he never wants Dan to feel as though he has no one to turn to. He never wants Dan to be afraid that he's going to leave, too.
His phone buzzes and he opens the message quickly, reading it over and immediately typing out a reply.
dan h <3 : got to work, only two minutes late. sorry for being so shit lately :[
you havent been shit , Phil tells him. ur my best friend. ilu and i want to help <333
Dan doesn't text back for another two hours, but when he does it’s just a thank you.
Nerves have been bubbling in Phil’s stomach since Dan bought his train tickets to Manchester, but now that he's actually here, in Phil’s house, on Phil’s couch, Phil is surprisingly calm. Dan is as easy to talk to in real life as he is online, bright and funny and quick to laugh, and he fits in Phil’s house somehow. He looks natural perched on Phil’s bed, his eyes crinkling when he grins, and he looks happy.
“I'm so glad you're here,” Phil says as he sets up his laptop for them to watch a movie. Dan smiles at him, soft and fond.
“I'm glad I'm here too. Wokingham gets, like, suffocating sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah,” Phil says, because he feels that way sometimes about Rawtenstall. There's an itch under his skin to leave sometimes, to run away and not look back.
“Everyone leaves,” Dan mumbles, and a shadow of sadness falls over his face. “Everyone I ever wanted to be around at home left. I'm, like, the only one of my friends still living there. It sucks.”
Phil wonders if it would be weird for him to offer Dan a cuddle. It's the best way Phil knows to comfort someone, and it's always worked when someone cuddles him.
“Do you want a hug?” Phil asks, and Dan glances over at him through his eyelashes and Phil wants to protect him so much. All he wants is to keep Dan safe.
“Yeah, actually,” Dan admits, and Phil leans over and wraps his arms around him.
He smells of cinnamon and cologne and warm skin, and his hair is soft against Phil’s cheek. He sighs heavily and relaxes into Phil’s grip.
“You are like well good at cuddling,” he says, his voice muffled. Phil grins.
“Thank you,” he says. He rubs his hand slowly up and down Dan’s upper arm and Dan sighs again.
“Thank you ,” he echoes. He pauses, then takes a careful breath. “For like, everything. You've… I dunno, you've really helped me lately so. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” Phil says, gentle. He feels all warm and fuzzy, glowing with love. “Yeah, of course, anything I can do.”
“You're my best friend,” Dan whispers. Phil squeezes him tight.
“And you're mine. Forever, okay? Best friends.”
“Yeah,” Dan agrees. He sits up and smiles at Phil, his eyes only slightly watery. “That's the plan.”