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Every time you catch yourself on a downswing, you find yourself praying.
You don't believe in God, per say, not anymore -- theres probably something, you can't disprove it, but the hateful, red, catholic God that your grandmother had taught you about can't possibly be real, because that god was supposed to be fucking merciful, and the universe has given you exactly one ounce of mercy in the last 35 years, and it was named Phil.
Perhaps that was why. Perhaps Phil was simply so great that his presence in your life fulfilled your karmic quota. Perhaps Phil's constant good luck at slot machines and games and the way the world fell into place around him was simply his own gravity, pulling the good toward him, and you were the single shitty piece of space trash that had gotten caught in his orbit.
Astronaut Feces in a jar. That was you, ejected from the spaceship of normality and trapped circling a sun that hadn't burnt you up quite yet.
You're greedy, though. Even if you spent all your universal wealth on getting Phil to reply to a tweet in 2009, you can't help but ask for more. You beg with God, not to make you straight as you once wanted, but to just let you be happy, to let your mind stop spiraling every few weeks months years, to let you just enjoy the life you led and all the blessings you felt like you didn't deserve.
In exchange, you try to be good. You raise money for charity and never smoke or do drugs. You love Phil, who is clearly some higher beings favorite, with every atom of your being, and hope its enough.
It never is.
It's been three days, you think, maybe four. Time is starting to lose meaning, which means this depressive episode is going to be a bad depressive episode, which you are frankly too busy to deal with right now.
You and Phil had planned for this, prepared backups for when life threw the next curveball at you. You were overdue for a crisis, at this point.
Phil flits at the edges of your vision on day three, four, whatever, and you can see the resignation come over him as he realizes that you're getting worse instead of better. He doesn't say anything, doesn't talk about work or offer comfort. He kisses your temple and presses a fresh bottle of water to your hand.
You think, I'm lucky to have him
You think, I don't deserve him
You think, god my head feels like its full of bees.
You close your eyes instead of trying to force open your mouth, and they burn.
When you were younger, before you admitted you needed therapy, Phil had sat you down and said, quite bluntly, that you were going to make an agreement right there and then about what Phil was supposed to do during your “bed days.”
That was a Phil-ism -- before him, you just called them laziness or wow I sure am fucked up huh? Moments.
You weren't sure what he meant, when he asked, so Phil clarified; When did he push and when did he back off? Was forcing you to eat okay? What about showering? Water? How did he know when to give space and when to stay?
You had shrugged, said I think you could murder me and I wouldn't get mad at you. Strangely, Phil hadn't liked that answer.
In the end, it had come from practice, and now time and therapy has made Phil familiar with the rhythm of your depression. Water and bland foods good, alcohol bad. If you didn't feel like your bones were made of lead, you'd be able to acknowledge that you're ultimately better than you once were, that your moods weren't as erratic as before, that you had learned how to speak to Phil instead of expecting him to read your mind. When you felt like you needed to escape and the only answer was a walk without the pressure of your phone in your pocket, you were able to leave a note instead of just disappearing into thin air.
Unfortunately, as you lay in your stupidly expensive memory foam pit of despair, you can’t think of any of that.
Instead, you think about the sun.
People made inane sun and moon metaphors about you and Phil, you’d even referenced it in the coming out video, but there was always debate about who was who. On one hand, Phil glows, has an aforementioned gravity to him, his smiles are warm and he gives life to an otherwise cold world, and you do tend to think of yourself as a mere reflection of his brilliance.
On the other hand, Phil’s fingers and toes are constantly icy, and he’s pale and covered in freckles, much like the moon and its craters. He’s serene, pulling the tides of your life, and ever shifting from phase to phase. You prefer the moon, as a celestial body, and you prefer Phil over every single human being on this stupid planet.
That leaves you with the sun. The burning, untouchable sun. Uninhabitable. You burnt up Icarus’ wings and melted ice caps and caused fires and someday, you would implode and become a black hole that would destroy everything, the moon included.
Yes, you think from the depths of despair, you’re the sun, and Phil should move away before he burns himself.
Phil cannot physically lift you, but he catches you heading to the bathroom and forcibly drags you into the shower before removing your sweaty, disgusting clothes. Black, always black, you’re the most uninteresting celestial body in the galaxy.
Your knees tremble, and Phil helps you sit cross legged on the floor of the shower. There are no windows in this bathroom, just low, warm light. Phil looks as golden as his stupid collection of animals, and you are a greased monkey.
Also, it’s fucking freezing in this house, did you forget to pay the heating bill?
You open your mouth to ask this, but your lungs burn with hydrogen gas, and all you croak out is the word “cold.”
Phil pauses in his quest to get towels and a rag, frowning at you. “You sound sick.”
You blink at him as he comes over and rests a hand on your head. “Do you feel alright?”
Your depressed, not dead, so you give him the most deadpan stare you can manage, and he rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean, does your throat hurt?”
Everything hurts, all the fucking time. You don’t answer him.
Phil sighs and turns on the shower. An apology blubbles in the base of your throat, but you can’t make it rise. You hate this, hate yourself, hate your skin and your bones and everything beneath and between.
You blink water from your eyes, and Phil lets you pretend its from the shower. He kisses the back of your head, the spot where a sniper could make your skull implode. The simple affection bites just as sharply as the bullet.
Of the two of you, Phil’s physical health has always been worse. The chronic migraines got debilitating at times, especially since his body decided to give him dizziness to go with it. If you lived in Edwardian England, Phil would have been written off as one of those lords whose humors were unbalanced and made to stay in bed all day. He's tiny tim. He’s a goddamn tudor princess, and you are the leech.
Because of this, you try valiantly not to complain about your health. Oh sure, everything else is fair game, no matter how many blessings you receive you never show gratitude for any of them, which is probably why God gave you Phil and then fucked off.
But you don’t tell Phil when you hurt. You don’t talk about the way your joints have ached for as long as you can remember. About the foot that you fucked up in your horrid, messy teen years that you never told him about. You only told him about the pain in your stomach when your appendix had already ruptured, a lifetime ago.
If you were a human and not a leech, maybe you would have noticed that your throat hurt before you entered the pit, a week, two weeks, a lifetime ago. Maybe you would have recognized that your body was tired and run down, that you had been pushing yourself too hard. Maybe if you were a human and not a leech, you would be more gentle with yourself, realize that you deserved rest and peace and all the things you preached in your stupid fucking book.
Unfortunately, you’re a leech, and the only way to deal with a leech is to burn them.
You think about God some more.
This is rare for you. You self identify as Agnostic but are probably more of a lapsed catholic, the times you’ve had to go to a church for weddings, funerals, book readings, or fake funerals for a sim, you feel the gaze of the jesus statues on you and pointedly ignore it.
You lay in bed. He’s there. He’s staring at you from heaven. He’s judging you, and judging you. You shiver, even though the bed is burning the same as the metaphor you and Phil made when you told the world about the thing you never deserved.
You’d apologized, in that video, to Phil.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing you gave Phil could ever be enough to make up for the things he granted you. An angel, holier than you deserved, one of the ancient ones with all the eyes that was considered indescribably beautiful and terrifying. A fallen angel, sinking in a pool of blood, cast out for loving you.
You were the thing, the man who damned the angel to hell. Phil fell for you, and Fell for you. Burning, burning, burning. His fingers are cold, Phil’s the moon, and you set him on fire no matter how many videos you made claiming otherwise.
You did that.
You lay in bed and cry, because Phil will be ash soon, and you won’t have him anymore, no one will. You are jealous and possessive, the devil who stole Phil Lester from the world and kept him in a cage and ruined him.
Phil appears in your blurred vision, and you realize that the fire in your bed is centered in your throat, and you are wailing.
Your ears ring as Phil speaks, blessed words, a choir of angels, an overwhelming wave of static. Your atoms rip apart and shatter in wave after wave of holy fire that travels along the soundwaves of his voice.
You want to burn. You want to disintegrate. You want to combust.
You close your eyes and embrace the flames.
Cold presses against your neck, and you flinch away. You want to be an ember, a scorched log, and the cold cold cold is preventing that.
With your eyes closed, you can hear the angel speak your name, call to you from the pearly gates, curse you and say “-bring your temperature down, you brat!”
The cold presses against your other side, and you whine around the solar flare in your throat. It hurts, same as your knees.
“I know, I know,” the angel says. Philip was one of the twelve apostles, blessed by Jesus, who is burning him, but the apostle is taking pity, bringing him water and anointing him. They washed Jesus’s feet, and now this one is pressing a cold compress to your forehead.
“I’m sorry,” Phil says -- sobs, maybe, you can’t open your burning eyes and see, “I’m sorry, but your fever is really high, I have to get you cooled down or I’ll have to call an ambulance.”
You can’t understand that, because you’re a pile of embers instead of a human, but you want the cold, wet thing gone now. You try to breathe in, to say that, but your lungs are filled with smoke and you start to cough.
Fuck, that hurts. You’re the sun, imploding into a black hole. You’re Icarus, wax wings melting into flesh. You’re a leech, and you’re being ripped away from your food source. Your chest cracks into pieces like a blackened log. You can’t breathe, your head is in a vice, and you want--
When you were fifteen you got sunstroke, boiled your insides like a potato in morocco and then had to get on a plane and fly home in a pile of misery. When you were sixteen you took an entire bottle of painkillers and waited for death to come and then chickened out and threw up. When you were twenty a video made for you by the love of your life was passed around the internet and you felt like your world was ending.
You have wanted to die, before.
You don’t want to die. You want to be extinguished.
You spin into darkness to the sound of your name, and you hope that you’re being called by Philip the Apostle and not Saint Peter.
The next parts are only flashes.
There’s liquid on your brow as you are baptized. There’s a flash of holy light. There’s pressure in your arm. There are hands, countless hands, as you are gripped tight and raised from perdition.
Maybe it’s a dream, but you see Phil.
You see him from a distance, from above, from heaven, maybe, as he sits in an uncomfortable chair and holds your hand while he cries.
“Please be okay,” He whispers, prays to you as if you’re the almighty and not him, “you have to be okay, please, I love you. Not now, not ever, but especially not like this. I love you. Please.”
Phil has his own aforementioned gravity.
You don’t fight it as it pulls you in.
You wake to the sound of snoring.
It’s obnoxious, hoglike, and a day ago you probably would have called it blessed.
You do love it, because it means Phil is alive. You mostly just find it irritating to your throbbing skull.
“Phil?” you croak, voice thin and crackly, more fragile than spider silk. Phil’s snores cut off as his head snaps up, fast enough that you worry about his neck. He’s wearing his glasses and his WAD hat and his stupid minecraft PJs. He hasn’t shaved in at least three days, and based on the bags under his eyes he probably hasn’t slept in about that long either.
He looks at you like you hung the moon, scooting his chair closer. He grips your hand as if he's tethering you to the earth, rubs his thumbs over your scarred knuckles and says “Hi, hi love, how do you feel?”
“Lousy,” You admit, and his hand feels so good around yours that you squeeze, trying to make sure he keeps it there. “But. Human.”
“Good, that's good,” Phil says, kissing the back of your hand. You're in a hospital bed, you realize belatedly. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“What happened?”
Phil hums, playing with your fingers as he speaks. “The doctors think that when you got low you just so happened to have strep, and neither of us noticed, so we didn't treat it and it developed into rheumatic fever.”.
You like that he says we, as if he exists in your body and could have possibly known that you had strep when you didn't even know. You had strep a few times as a child, so you're not surprised you managed to get it as an adult, but-
“Whats roombattic-”
“Rheumatic,” Phil corrects, “it's actually pretty rare in adults, so. Good job Danny boy.”
In spite of literally everything, you smile. “I'm special.”
Phil looks at you with eyes that shine with tears. “The special-est.”
You squeeze his hand again. He squeezes back.
When a doctor comes in to talk to you, it becomes apparent that Phil had somewhat undersold the situation, just a tad.
“You had a fever of nearly 41 degrees when paramedics arrived.” She explains. “You developed some inflammation in your cardiac cavity, which will have to be monitored so you don’t develop heart disease in the future.”
Her tone is clipped, and her sharpness seems directed at Phil, who looks sheepish and a little bit afraid. You frown. “It’s not his fault, I didn’t tell him my throat hurt.”
She looks back to you. “Mr Howell, pain is the body’s warning system. If something hurts or feels wrong, you should seek medical attention.”
You don’t know how to explain to her that your body pretty much always feels wrong, in a joint pain kind of way, and also in a depression kind of way, and also in an imposter syndrome kind of way, and most notably in a gender kind of way that you have been staunchly ignoring for at least a decade and don’t plan to examine too closely until next year at the earliest. It’s very important to schedule your break downs, afterall, and this year is all about the hard launch.
“I have a therapist?” You say instead of any of that, and the doctor looks a bit like she just bit into a lemon.
“The most dramatic symptom of rheumatic fever is the swelling of joints, which can last for a while.” she continues, “do you have any prior issues with your joints?”
“No,” Phil says.
“Yes,” you correct sheepishly, and you make a mental note to encourage your followers to donate to the NHS, sometime, because this woman clearly does not get paid enough.
In the end, you’re sent home with a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, a referral to cardiology, and a strong recommendation to make a therapy appointment to explicitly discuss the importance of not ignoring obvious medical issues. Phil doesn’t ask about your joints, just holds your hand in the cab, makes sure you eat, and then leads you to the other bedroom so you can both sleep.
In your dreams, a figure made of light caresses your chest. When you tell it you have a boyfriend, met your soulmate 16 years ago and counting, the figure laughs.
“Oh Daniel,” the figure whispers, so beautiful you think you might cry, “when I blessed you with eachother, I never intended for you to see it as a slight.”
The light is absorbed into your chest, warm and comforting.
“What gives life can never destroy itself.” the light says.
You wake feeling strangely light, and grateful for the world around you and the man in your arms.
Phil asks you why you’re so quiet at breakfast, and you shrug. “I think I met a God last night.”
“Oh yeah?” Phil asks, “which one?”
“Dunno. Catholic, probably, Catholic God would wanna fuck with my head.”
“Catholic God is a bitch,” Phil agrees, “Can you remind them that you’re not allowed to leave my side next time you chat?”
You laugh, and instead of fire, you think the sound is filled with light.
Your family comes to visit, because you almost died and that’s enough to get your mum, your nana, your popsie, and Adrian out of wokingham, apparently.
They come with enough casserole to feed an army, and fuss over you and Phil for a solid half a day. Kath calls, and reiterates the doctor’s point about the importance of self care, and you snarkily tell her that you have an appointment scheduled, christ, your therapist will get a whole other five years of pay out of you by the time you work through this to the satisfaction of the people who love you.
As they leave, your Nana pulls you in for a tight hug, and whispers that she’ll keep you in her prayers.
Strangely, it doesn't sting the way it used to.