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Dan can’t open his bedroom door. He sighs. “Phil!”
There’s no answer, so he yells louder. “Phil!”
Faintly, he hears, “Sorry!” and then the vines retract along the walls, curling in on themselves.
“Honestly,” Dan complains. As if in apology, a flower unfurls towards his face when he steps into the hall.
“Okay,” Dan says seriously, sitting down across from Phil that afternoon. “This needs to stop.”
Phil looks heartbroken. “It’s nice!”
“It’s ruining our furniture,” Dan says.
“I could make furniture,” Phil says hopefully.
“Lumpy and leafy and, knowing our luck, something you’d be allergic to,” Dan says implacably. “No.”
Phil gets that stubborn expression on his face. Dan resigns himself to carrying around shears for the next few days.
But honestly, if Phil wants to live in a forest that badly, he’s welcome to go off and find one.
Dan finds flowers on the bathroom counter the next morning. They’re all different colors, pretty, delicate things that he can barely feel when he touches them.
It’s cathartic, cutting them all to pieces. Dan’s in a good mood the rest of the day.
“They’re like leafy tentacles,” Dan says, watching Phil crack his neck and reach up to grab the pen one of the vine tendrils has brought him.
“We haven’t all watched as much hentai as you.” Phil sniffs disdainfully.
“That is a lie,” Dan says.
There are more flowers the next morning. These are leafy and arranged in bunches, and Dan has to admit they look kind of cool. Almost alien-like, except they smell nice. He’s never bothered to find out if Phil’s plants are real species or something Phil just invents, but he bets this is what flowers would look like, if Phil designed them. Dan likes them, so he feels a little guilty when their poor, rapidly-shriveling heads start littering the tiles around his feet.
“I could probably grow food, too,” Phil says unconvincingly.
“Go to Tesco’s,” Dan says. “I’m not eating figments of your imagination.”
“Bet I could make even Brussels sprouts taste good if I tried,” Phil says.
“I’m especially not eating experimental figments of your imagination.” Dan shudders just thinking about it.
“It wouldn’t hurt to try,” Phil says. “I could make up my own vegetables. Dan, they’d be like my brainchildren.” He sounds very pleased with himself.
“We’re going to eat your brainchildren?” Dan asks flatly. “And no, Phil, ew.”
A not-tentacle wraps around his throat in mock threat. Dan sticks out his tongue and tries to lick it, because that’s just where his brain goes, now.
The next day, the flowers are tiny and softly colored and form a layer so thick Dan can barely feel the counter when he presses down. Because these are Phil’s flowers, they spring back up after he’s done touching them, undisturbed.
Dan leaves them.
But really, there are limits.
Dan stares up at his plant-prison and wonders absently where the fairy lights are coming from.
Then he decides never to ask Phil, because knowing his luck, Phil would decide to try for actual fairies.
And Dan is well versed in fairytales, okay, he knows what bloodthirsty little bastards those things are.
“Would you stop,” Dan demands, planting a knee on the bed and glaring at a sleepy Phil, “putting me in a leafy cocoon overnight!”
“It’s called an arbor,” Phil says guiltily.
As if Dan doesn’t know that. “I am not a butterfly, I need air and space and to be able to get out of bed, Phil.” It does something terrible to his ego, having to shout for Phil every morning or talk nicely to plants.
Phil looks sad. “But it’s nice,” he says. “Protected. And it’s good for you! Plenty of oxygen.”
Dan stares around contemplatively at the branches curled across Phil’s bedroom walls. Because he never removes them from here, they’ve grown and thickened and aged. They’re solid and supportive, which is a metaphor Dan does not have time for this morning.
Phil gives everyone houseplants for presents.
“It’s the only plant I’ve ever been able to keep alive,” most people say.
Phil always just smiles. Dan has asked, but Phil insists he doesn’t control them once he puts them in a pot and they become ‘real’ plants, trusted to the care of friends.
Dan wonders what happens to the other plants, the ones that belong to people Phil is no longer friends with.
Phil has never given Dan a plant.
“You wouldn’t take care of it!” Phil says.
Dan would take excellent care of it. He’d complain, okay, but if Phil gave it to him—
“Okay, sorry,” Phil says, and sounds like he means it. “But, I mean, you know you can have as many plants as you want?”
Dan stares up at the fairy lights and realizes, he can have as many plants as he wants, can’t he?
“One arbor in this house is enough,” Dan informs Phil, shoving at his shoulder until he makes enough room on the bed for Dan to join him.
Phil smiles sleepily and scoots over without opening his eyes. Behind Dan, the branches twist closed.