Chapter Text
There was a thud on the kitchen table as Dan’s law book slipped from his grasp. He blinked, and then scooped it back up along with the object he’d been staring at. A parcel, still wavering a little from blipping into existence next to Dan’s elbow, and five minutes early.
Dan only relaxed his hold while leaning against the closed door to his room, a brown and beige cocoon that signalled privacy, and read the mailing slip:
To:
Dan Howell
Universe 10
Return Address:
Phil Lester
Universe 19
Dan sighed. It was the same as always. No matter how many times this happened, no new information was ever revealed about how this happened, or why. Try as he might to read between the lines, there just weren’t many lines to begin with.
Releasing the textbook to its usual habitat, the floor, Dan swung onto bed and leaned against the headboard. This was a ritual to him now, easy as breathing- carefully tear off the slip stapled to the packing paper (to live in the bottom of his bedside drawer with the others), rip the paper off to reveal the cardboard box, and open the box to see what was inside.
There had been many strange items in these boxes over the years. The bizarre animal hybrids and seemingly sentient household objects were hard enough to figure out what to do with, but the time he opened up a box filled with pressurized viscous liquid it had taken him a week to get the yellow-green stains out of his bedspread and carpet. The items weren’t the major appeal of these gifts, as he’d taken to calling them. The main draw was what happened when he took the little disc out of the strangely unharmed paper envelope taped to the bottom and set it on his bed in front of him, pressing play.
The main draw was AmazingPhil.
When the first parcel appeared, Dan thought it was a prank. And then he thought he was on drugs. And then he thought the little disc was drugs, when he pressed the single button and saw a video playing just before his eyes. Then he tried to find the black haired emo boy on the internet, but there wasn’t a trace of him anywhere.
But the parcels kept appearing. And Dan wasn’t about to look a gift horse up its butt, or whatever the saying was.
Dan looked inside the little box in front of him, and saw a cat ear headband. Not too bad. Technically, the gift with the least clean-up was the ferret apparition that had floated out of the box before he could open it, winked, and then vanished into thin air. But a headband was good, he could work with a headband.
It was a short video, and great. He loved when Phil gave updates on his life, real day-to-day stuff. It made him feel like they were friends, instead of two people from different universes, apparently. When the phantom screen flickered off and left Dan sitting staring at the beige wall in front of him, he felt a pang.
Dan wanted to actually be friends with Phil. He wanted to get to know him. He wanted to make him laugh.
He picked up the little disc and took it over to the pillowcase hidden in his closet, hoping the satisfying clink of it dropping into the pile of other ones would distract him.
It clinked. The ritual was complete. But the feeling hadn’t gone with it. Dan was just going to have to do something about it.
—
The library probably wasn’t going to give him any answers about the multiverse, but Dan couldn’t think of any better avenues. He figured if he just kept looking, he’d find something. Anything.
For what was probably the 100th time in two months, he typed AmazingPhil into the YouTube search bar. For the 100th time, there was nothing. He went through the list of synonyms- AwesomePhil, AstoundingPhil, IncrediblePhil, zilch, nada, zero.
Dan just couldn’t figure it out. In all of his reading and research and trips to the library (his parents probably thought he was spending his gap year becoming a law genius) everything pointed to this fact: If multiverse, therefore dopplegangers. Clones. Alternates. It just was not plausible that a version of Phil didn’t exist in Dan’s own universe. Of course, there’d be no way of knowing if he’d even like that Phil if he did. Probably, but probably wasn’t a yes.
He deleted TotallyRealPhilThatExists from the search bar. It didn’t tamp down his wild imaginings like he’d hoped. Was there a Dan in Phil’s universe?
(Was there a Dan missing?)
He closed the YouTube tab. Maybe he was doing this all wrong. Maybe it was time for a different approach.
Dan looked up the nearest large appliance packaging facility.
It wasn’t, it turned out, that hard to get a very large person sized box. The nights he spent as an emo kid hanging out in graveyards made him very good at skulking by unseen, even with his tall frame, even while carrying a huge slab of cardboard. Smuggling it into the house? No problem! Stuffing it in the back of the closet and hiding it with his t-shirts and cardigans? Piece of cake! The difficult bit was waiting.
The rest of the family had to be out of the house. He couldn’t risk them walking in on something he would not be able to explain, their son climbing into a refrigerator box like a kid playing battleship.
But after a week, finally, everyone else was on some trip or another, and he was home alone.
Suddenly confronted with an empty box and an empty backpack, Dan felt a little lightheaded. He didn’t know what he’d need to bring. Clothes? Food? He didn’t even know if it would work. Maybe it would turn out that he actually was crazy!
Dan grabbed a plaid shirt from his closet and stuffed it in the bag. That helped. He felt better. Whatever happened, he would have that shirt. Next was his tightest pair of black skinny jeans. He would look cool with those jeans.
A packet of crisps, a chocolate bar, and some headphones were all zipped in. “Probably best to just pack like it’s a long train ride.” Dan muttered to himself. Then he paused. He stared at the closet. “Oh, alright.” The pillowcase of discs clinked into the backpack too.
Dan forced the stapler through the cardboard. It would have to do. He read the sheet of paper he’d scrawled on. The writing was as clear as he could manage, which meant it was a little smudged.
To:
Phil Lester
Universe 19
Return Address:
Dan Howell
Universe 10
Dan had a half thought about the day’s date, but it washed away as he slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“Fuck it.” He stepped in, curled up, and closed the lid of the box over him.
—
The fish-dragon-square flopped around on her plate as the large package slid down the chute and landed in the mail bin with a thump.
“Ow!” it said.
The fish-dragon-square flopped her plate closer to the edge of the table she was stationed on. She peered down at the package. It had admittedly been a while since she’d brushed up on Universe 10 facts (there were 41 and a half to keep track of, after all), but she was fairly sure their equivalent of frigid-air-boxes didn’t speak. Or move.
A human hand emerged from under the lid, wriggling the box open. Then a human head popped up, squinting at the bright lights and butter yellow walls of the mail room.
“Ow.” It said again. “Where the fuck am I?”
“This is the Mail Room.” The fish-dragon-square flicked her tail in the direction of the sign that said Mail Room above the door. She spoke again before the human could decide to run out the door. “We are Between Universes, so it’s safest for you to just stay in this room. May I ask how you got here?”
“Oh, sorry, my name’s Dan. I… mailed myself here… I think.” Dan looked remarkably calm. “I honestly wasn’t sure it would work.”
The fish-dragon-square blinked. “Incredible!” Then she excitedly muttered to herself, “I hope you won’t cause a lot of paperwork.”
Dan shrugged. “I guess. Wait, what do you mean paperwork?”
“It’s nothing really. Just that nothing has ever been mailed by anything except Universes before.”
“What?”
She flipped over on her plate and sighed. “You’ve been keeping up so well, surely you know about the different Universes mailing things to each other.” She looked at the human curiously. If she wasn’t mistaken, Dan looked disappointed. Or what people in her own universe (37) would call “stuck in the Wednesday midday mud”, but that was almost the same thing.
“Oh.” was all Dan said.
“You didn’t know? The Universes love sending each other things just as much as they love making the things they receive the ‘center of the Universe’ for fun.”
“So Phil really wasn’t the one sending me his videos.”
“What?”
“I mean I never really thought that was the case anyway, but I guess I hoped-”
“You need to get you and your frigid-air-box in Universe 19’s outgoing bin immediately!” The fish-dragon-square’s plate almost teetered off the table at her urgency.
The human just looked at the cardboard he was still sitting in. “I thought the brand on this was LG…”
“For fire’s sake, use your human arms and legs, the chute will do the rest!” Her plate really did fall off this time as she jumped higher and higher into the air. Only then did Dan clamber out of the bin, ready to help.
“Leave me, I’ll be fine, just get to Universe 19 now!” She watched in relief as Dan’s offered hand retreated in favour of following her directions, dragging the box over to the right bin.
He got in, and held the lid above his head. “Um, nice to meet you, and thanks… I think.”
“Goodbye and good luck!”
The fish-dragon-square watched the chute long after the cardboard box disappeared, after the glowing golden light faded and the breeze stopped cooling her scales.