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On their sixteenth anniversary, Dan wakes up slowly and blearily, blinking against the early morning sun that streams in through their uncovered window. The light casts rays over their bed, shedding gold over Phil’s bright hair and the Terrible Influence shirt that he sleeps in.
These days, Dan wakes up first more often than not. He can’t really feel like a person at four in the morning like he used to when he was twenty-five. Plus, Phil’s health issues made him struggle with a bit of fatigue.
Dan honestly kind of likes it. Not the part about Phil being sick, that makes him want to fistfight God. But he likes being the first to wake up. He likes to watch Phil sleep, which would sound creepy if Phil hadn’t already told him time and time again that he thinks it’s romantic.
They’ve never been one of those couples to snuggle each other to sleep, and they definitely aren’t now. Dan’s back-support strappy chair keeps him sitting up while he sleeps. But most nights, they fall asleep with their fingers intertwined anyway.
Dan and Phil like their rituals. Some rituals change, like the daily fourteen hours of couch scrolling, and some stay the same, like watching TV together during breakfast. And then there are the new parts of their routine, like visiting Frances, the elderly woman next door, or putting food out for the stray cat that frequents their alley.
Part of their 2025 routine is that Dan has started making Phil chamomile tea in the mornings. Being the shameless princess that he is, he likes a warm beverage to wake him up, but coffee aggravates his migraines, both because of the caffeine and because of all the sugary bullshit that he puts in it because, as Phil puts it, he had never hated himself enough to drink his coffee black. Dan has become very skilled at heating water on the stove. His university self would be proud. Of many things, but mostly of his boiling skills.
This morning, though, he can’t force himself to get out of bed. The sound of Phil’s gentle breathing soothes him like white noise. Phil has, once again, fallen asleep on his side, this time facing away from Dan. Dan, knowing that he won’t wake up, turns him over with a careful pull so that he’s lying on his back. Dan likes to do this sometimes; he likes to just look at Phil’s face. The crows' feet crinkling the soft skin around his eyes, his mouth slightly ajar, the faintest patchy stubble that he gets after a few days, the grey on the sides of his head that shows when he hasn’t re-bleached his hair in a while.
Phil doesn’t like it when his hair is visibly grey, but Dan thinks it might just be one of his favorite things. He enjoys the mornings when they both take ages to get out of bed because their bones are aching and creaking. He likes Phil’s laugh lines, and he likes to know — narcissistic as it may be — that most of them come from time that the two of them have spent together. He likes how much they’ve both changed. Phil, especially, seems to become more and more himself with every passing year, though he’s sure that Phil would insist the same was true of Dan.
The underbelly of it, the part that Dan is getting much better at acknowledging to himself, is that getting old doesn’t feel like a curse to someone who hadn’t really expected to get to adulthood in the first place.
He likes that he’s getting old. More specifically, he loves the fact that he’s getting old with Phil. He likes that they’ve managed to basically shapeshift while also staying so annoyingly consistent. The fact that he’s as in love with Phil as he was sixteen years ago feels both like a miracle and like the most natural, logical thing in the world. He wants to keep growing with and around Phil, like two trees growing around each other’s roots. And the most incredible thing is that he gets to. He gets to have this, in every way he never even dared to dream about.
For the first time since waking up. Dan glances over at the digital clock on their nightstand. 11:27 in the morning. He snorts. So much for early morning sun. It doesn’t matter, really. He knows what’s waiting for him outside of their little bubble. Anniversary wishes from fans and Phil’s family, and maybe his own grandmother, if she remembers. Photo album throwback reminders that feel like personal attacks. Maybe a sponsorship offer or two. It can all wait. It’s all perfect, and it can all wait.
Dan is not in the mood to make tea this morning. Sixteen years ago, at this exact time, he was about a half an hour out from Manchester, fidgeting with the seam of his socks to distract himself from how nervous he was. Phil, meanwhile, being Phil, accidentally went to the wrong side of the train station, leaving Dan to spiral for ten minutes until Phil found him. God, he’d been terrified. Terrified and tiny – they both were.
Then, they’d found each other, two stars erupting against each other in the void of space, and since then, nothing was ever quite so scary.
The rest is history. It’s not even history, really: it’s legend. It’s lore. How lucky is Dan? He hasn’t had to do anything alone for sixteen entire years.
He remembers exactly how he felt the first time he and Phil saw each other in real life, and ran at each other full speed, crashing to the floor of the Manchester train station. He’d been so in love that it had been physically painful, a fist squeezing around his heart. He feels like that now. He wishes he could say it’s the anniversary getting to him, like he gets particularly sentimental on special days, but it’s really not that. Sometimes his love for Phil washes over him in waves and he briefly loses his ability to breathe properly.
This motherfucker is not allowed to stay asleep while he’s making Dan suffer from cardiac arrest.
“Phil. Wake up.” He kisses Phil’s cheeks, the tip of his nose, his glabella, the space on his forehead right above each eyebrow, until Phil is giggling and half-heartedly swatting him away.
“Dan!” he whines in his deep, early morning voice. He grabs at Dan’s waist, and only manages to wrestle Dan down because Dan lets him do it. Phil lays across his chest, grinning, holding Dan’s hand and staring down at him with his wide, clear, multicolor eyes.
People like to joke about Phil being high-maintenance and bossy, which is all true. What they don’t realize is that Dan has been consistently getting everything he wants for more than a decade and a half.
“Happy anniversary,” he murmurs, syrupy-sweet, “You bitch.”
Phil angles down, getting his lips just close enough to Dan’s, but pulling away slightly every time Dan tries to lean in. “You wondering how you’ve survived this long with me?” he teased.
That’s the funny thing. Sixteen years. Not a short time by any measure. Dan has spent his entire adult life with Phil by his side. In two years, it’ll be half his life overall. And yet, “Honestly, I’m wondering how I survived eighteen whole years without you.”
“Truly a modern mystery,” says Phil, “Don’t be too earnest. You have a reputation to uphold.”
Dan snorts. “What reputation? Everyone and their dog knows that I’m obsessed with you.” Phil flushes. He’s always loved how easy it is to make Phil go red. “And even if they didn’t,” Dan continues, “I don’t care.”
Phil hums and falls back down to the mattress, snuggling into Dan’s chest. “Let’s not do anything important today,” he says, “Let’s just lie here and talk to each other about dumb shit until we get bored.”
“That sounds perfect,” says Dan.
“Hey Dan?” says Phil.
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
After all this time, it’s still the only goddamn thing that makes a bit of sense. Dan loves Phil, and Phil loves him back. He’s so grateful to live in a world where it really is as easy as that.