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“What would you actually do, though?” Phil’s voice cuts through Dan’s thoughts after he zoned out staring at the save screen.
“Do about what?”
Dan spins around in his chair, tired after about four hours of setting up, recording, and gaming. It’s fun to make longform content, but it can be exhausting sometimes. After a long run through the first part of Split Fiction, he has no idea what Phil’s on about this time.
“What you said earlier in the game. If we were in The Hand,” Phil explains.
“Like if we were Zoe and Mio, and we were also pregnant with Harry Styles?” Dan asks, conjuring up a stranger image of the game than even the pig storyline had been.
“Not as Zoe and Mio, like if it were actually the two of us in the story,” Phil clarifies. “Like what would you do if we went to the publishing company for a book deal or something and they sent us into our own stories together and we had to live through them all?”
“Uh, sue the publishing company probably. Pretty sure it’s extremely illegal to kidnap people and send them into an alternate sci-fi dimension. And like, copyright and all that.”
Phil sighs. “You’re being too literal, Dan.”
“You asked what I would do!”
“If I were pregnant with Harry Styles, your first thought is a lawsuit?”
“What do you want me to say, call the fucking army?” It’s what Phil always says, it’s only fair Dan gets to throw his own joke back at him once in a while.
“No, I want to know what you’d actually do if it were real. Imagine we’re in the story right now, Dan.”
“I dunno Phil, I’m too tired for this.”
“Think about it, though. Zoe and Mio got lucky in the story that they actually knew how to get out and not get shot by the cyberpunk cops.”
“We did get shot by the cyberpunk cops. About eight times,” Dan reminds him.
“Yeah, but we didn’t actually die.”
“That’s how video games usually work.”
“You’re no fun.”
Dan sees that stubborn look on Phil’s face when he’s trying to get an answer out of him, and he knows it’s too late to get out of this conversation. “Alright, fine,” he sighs. “But why don’t you consider that if an evil publishing boss were stealing all of our stories, published and unpublished, that we might just have a lovely time getting mental health advice from my book instead?”
“Do they canonically publish nonfiction or is it just sci-fi stories?”
“No idea,” Dan admits. “Imagine if they published horror and forced everyone to live through that, though.”
“Oh god, that’s horrible.”
“Forced to be your own final girl. You’d get some serious trauma from that; I don’t think I’d ever write again afterward.”
“Makes The Hand seem pretty nice in comparison, doesn’t it?”
“The Hand is horror, Phil.”
“No it’s not, I do backflips and get to live with Harry Styles.”
“Don’t you literally die at the end, though?”
“Okay, if you ignore that part.”
Dan rolls his eyes. He didn’t even remember the part about the backflips, but it’s entirely on brand that Phil would’ve written that way, especially in 2015. “You also have random body parts coming out of you and ripping you open, that’s the literal definition of body horror. I mean, pregnancy in general even without the weird shit is already kind of body horror.”
“I guess so,” Phil concedes. “But you still haven’t answered what you would do if I got pregnant.”
“Because it’s not a real thing that would ever happen! That’s like asking what I would do if the sky were green or if we lived on Mars! Even in a world where the science were possible for all the things that happened in the game, we might just as well end up in The Urge or your old Buffy fanfics.”
“Yeah, but in that world you have to go through all the stories to get out, so we’d have to face The Hand eventually.”
Dan has to admit, Phil has a fair point about how the stories work in the game, so he tries to consider the options without immediately rejecting the premise. It also doesn’t entirely slip his notice that Phil slightly changed the question from The Hand to if he were pregnant in general. It’s silly, but he can tell there’s something deeper behind the question that Phil’s after and he doesn’t want to entirely dismiss it, whatever it is.
“Well, assuming you can do backflips and shit you’d probably be pretty strong and can get by without my help,” Dan starts, actually making an effort to carefully think through the scenario this time. “But I guess the first thing is I’d be concerned? It would be a bit jarring if you managed to get pregnant and it wasn’t just like, a prank thing or a hypothetical roleplay scenario.”
Phil looks at him intently, taking in the answer as Dan feels weirdly embarrassed saying it out loud. “I suppose in The Hand it’s just you in this situation, right, so like a doctor probably wouldn’t know what to do about it. And so I’d just… be there for you? Support you? I don’t know, I don’t have any expertise in what to do if you’ve accidentally merged with a full grown Harry Styles.”
He doesn’t have a terribly helpful answer beyond that, there are no actual skills that would address anything in The Hand, and honestly he doesn’t really remember the entire thing after ten years except the part about Harry Styles’ arm appearing out of Phil’s abdomen randomly. Truthfully, he doesn’t have much more knowledge on actual Harry Styles-less pregnancy in general, but something about the possibility of Phil just being pregnant with a normal baby is easier to wrap his mind around than 2015 Phil’s version of the story with ego-boosting superhero powers and celebrity cameos.
“Ignoring the other stuff, I guess if you were pregnant I’d try my best to do all the things you’re supposed to do to help people when they’re pregnant. Be supportive and look up the health advice and all that. Help you out around the house when you feel sick.”
Dan knows that he should probably be a bit more informed on what goes on in pregnancy, but in fairness, it’s not exactly a topic he has to worry about with Phil.
“Would you feed me sweets?” Phil asks.
“Do you want to be fed sweets? Is that part of the story?”
“No, I was just wondering if you would if I asked.”
“If you wanted that, then yeah,” Dan tells him. He’s more than happy to bring Phil snacks when he’s sick or has a migraine anyway, it wouldn’t be all that much different. If Phil asked him to bring him food right now he’d probably still do it, even if he made a show of pretending to be annoyed at the request.
“Would you also bring me breakfast in bed? Bring my laptop to me so I could work in the bedroom if I didn’t feel comfortable in the office?”
Dan sees where this is going from the tone in Phil’s voice when he gets that need for validation, for Dan to tell him after all these years that he’d still do anything for Phil even if it seemed absurd. It might sound a tiny bit hypocritical coming from the man who would feed him to a magpie without a second thought if he were a worm, but Dan doesn’t care - he would do anything for Phil, and he’ll play into his cravings for reassurance any time.
“Yeah, I would. And I’d probably take on more of the sponsorship emails in the first place so you didn’t give yourself a headache.”
“Would you cancel your plans and stay with me because I couldn’t hide it anymore?”
“Of course.”
“Would you be extra careful with me so I didn’t get sick or stressed? Be nice to me even when you’re annoyed?”
“I can’t save you from your own clumsiness but I’ll try my best.”
“You’d lift heavy things for me? Fetch the delivery orders so I don’t have to get up off the sofa?”
“Yeah. I’d get the delivery orders for you. Whatever you wanted, even if you couldn’t make up your mind I’d buy you both,” Dan promises, offering more than Phil had asked him in the first place. Phil being pregnant might be just as unlikely as the sky being green or living on Mars, but in that unlikely world, behind the jokes and the teasing, he’d still be right there by his side willing to do anything if it made Phil feel better.
“And you wouldn’t leave me for Harry Styles in the end?”
“Would you?”
“No, that’d be weird after I… birthed him.”
“Eugh. But, obviously I wouldn’t leave you for Harry Styles. I think you know he’s not my type anyway.”
Phil smiles, like Dan’s finally unlocked the right answer.