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2022 – dyed
Phil isn’t sure exactly what brings it on. Maybe his lack of acknowledgment for his own twink death is symptomatic of an ongoing midlife crisis. Maybe he’s really going insane without Dan to keep him busy, which is more pathetic than he can even put into words. Or maybe he’s just evolving, like a beautiful butterfly coming out of its shell. Which is not how butterflies work.
Regardless of the reason, Phil can’t change how he feels. It’s like there’s a fire under his skin that he can’t put out, and he’s constantly running around the closed room that is their empty house, bumping into walls, trying to get the flames to die down but nothing is working.
Somewhere out there in the great big world, Dan is having adventures, meeting new people, finding answers to the questions he’s always asked about himself, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. He calls Phil constantly, almost every day, and he’s glowing. He wears costumes and fluffs his hair and smiles until it looks like his happiness is going to swallow him whole. Phil is so happy for him.
He’s also painfully, blindly jealous.
Ever since Dan left, Phil has been thinking. As it turns out, thinking is a dangerous thing for a person to do. He’s been looking at his life, and he’s come to the conclusion that if he was in Dan’s place, he doesn’t know if he’d have the strength to claw himself out of the same hole. It’s a scary thing to realize.
When he thinks about it rationally, Phil can understand that he’s done incredible things. He’s gone on adventures that his little self never would have been able to imagine. He’s made millions of people laugh. His parents are both proud and profoundly confused. But he’s not the risk taker. Fundamentally, between the two of them, only one is currently taking on the world.
He wants Dan to come home. More pressingly, he wants Dan to bring him along. Even though he knows that that would defeat the entire purpose of We’re All Doomed. Maybe Phil is selfish.
He checks the digital clock by the bed, reaching over Dan’s side, which is cold, to turn it towards him. Three in the morning. He scoffs. It’s only around nine or ten where Dan is. He could get on FaceTime. Dan would pick up. But he’s not sure that Dan picking up would fix anything. What Phil really needs is to keep himself company. Calling Dan, or going over to P.J. and Sophie’s, or even visiting his brother, won’t solve the fundamental issue, which is that he doesn’t know how to feel okay on his own.
Phil jumps out of bed. Immediately, his stomach lurches, his head spins, and he holds onto the wall, using the little grip it gives him not to fall over. Because of course, his body picks right now to develop a chronic illness.
It’s as if the very fiber of his being is telling him that this is who he is. That he’s the guy who stays at home where he’s safe. He hates it. And even though it feels impossible to tell his body that it’s wrong, to argue with himself, he knows that he has to do it.
This is how Phil ends up walking the streets of London at three in the morning, wearing a mismatched outfit that he cobbled together and a pair of converse, his hair sticking up in all sorts of directions. He looks ridiculous. He looks insane. He needs to do something.
He needs to wake up and see that something is different and know that he did it, that he was brave enough to change something. About himself, about the world, it doesn’t matter.
For a brief, shining moment, he considers going blond. This is Phil’s default whenever he starts to spiral. Most of the time, he manages to talk himself down. He’s not even sure he would look good blond, and even if he did, what would being blond say about him? What assumptions would people make about him when they saw him walking down the street, blond? Is he even the hair dye kind of person? And what does that even mean?
Tonight, he wants to find out. The only thing stopping him is that it’s past midnight, and all of the hair salons and barbershops are closed. The only place that isn’t closed is the W.H. Smith in their neighborhood, and he ends up wandering the aisles like a ghost. The only other people in the store are a grandmother and a man who’s making the whole store smell like marijuana. Phil doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
An employee asks the elderly woman if she’s lost or needs help getting home. Phil almost feels guilty for not having done that himself, until the woman starts cursing the employee out for ageism or something and Phil decides that he’s tripped into some weird Twilight Zone-esque dimension where nothing makes sense anymore.
Phil sighs to himself. He feels a kind of pull to his cellphone, a constant reminder that tells him call Dan, call Dan, call Dan, beating behind his ribcage where his heartbeat should be.
“Shut up,” he says out loud. Luckily, there’s no one else in this aisle.
There’s no one else in this aisle because he’s wandered to the back of the store. The aisle that he’s found himself in can be best described as the beauty aisle’s ugly cousin. There’s an entire section of it dedicated only to sponges. Phil laughs, a quiet chuckle.
His gaze settles on the rows and rows of dye – not hairdye, but dye for clothes and fabric. It feels like a saner, safer alternative to his blond idea, one that’s less likely to end with him with chemical burns, or worse, bald.
In his defense, on the shelf, the green looks lovely. It looks crisp and deep and foresty like a fern. The kind of thing Dan would appreciate, actually, the kind of sophisticated color that he would tolerate on his towels, bathmats, and like four of Phil’s shirts. And his converse.
Should he know that supermarket clothes dye won’t look as good on his possessions as it looks in the marketing on the box? Yes. But it is simultaneously early morning and very late night, and Phil is so, so sad. He can’t be blamed, really. Dan makes up about 80% of his impulse control. Is impulse control overrated? He’s 35 years old, and he still doesn’t know. He’s about to find out.
He can tell very early on in the process that the green is not going to turn out as promised. Even when he dumps it into a bucket of water, it looks more like vomit, the aftermath of some partially digested olives, than anything else.
But it doesn’t stop him. Hours fly by. Three in the morning, four in the morning, five in the morning, six. His hands turn the same shade of objectionable green that colors his stuff, and he knows that it’s ugly. When he’s finished wringing everything out and hanging it up in the shower, the dumped water stains his perfect porcelain sinks, and that’s ugly too.
He spends another hour vigorously scrubbing the countertops in the bathroom that they’d had customized less than a year before. His skin takes on a slightly green tinge. His fingertips prune and the sensitive backs of his hands split. The dyed objects hang in the shower like ghosts, like reminders. Tarp around a house that’s recently been torn down.
All Phil can bring himself to think is that he should have bought a couple of those sponges when he had the chance.
He finally goes to bed around seven, although at that point, it feels less like going to bed and more like being put in a coma. He wakes up thirteen hours later. The world outside the windows is dark. He can’t see any stars. His hands feel clean and painful, scrubbed raw. He feels like he has a hangover. When he reaches for his phone – three missed calls from Dan – he can see that his efforts to turn his hands back to their normal color has failed. He wants to say that he looks like the Incredible Hulk, but that would be a lie of the highest degree.
Still, when Phil takes a deep breath and lets it out, he feels relief wash over him. He knows that when he goes to the shower, he will find himself with a new shirt, new shoes, new bathmat, new hoodie. Not new, not really. But different enough to pretend. As stupid as it may seem, things are different now. He is not waking up to the exact same house that he woke up to yesterday. A bit of initiative is still initiative. A tiny change is still a change. It matters. And for the moment, although Phil still feels a gaping cavern of uncertainty in his chest, he feels something come undone. He knows that it’ll be enough.
2024 – phlond
While Dan is gone – first gone from YouTube, then gone from their home – Phil does the brave thing. He keeps making videos. He babysits the kids.
At first, he doesn’t feel good about any of it. He doesn’t feel funny enough on his own, he doesn’t feel like any of his ideas are good enough to keep people entertained for long. Sure, he may have been a YouTuber before he even knew that there was such a thing as Dan Howell, but being a YouTuber meant something drastically different in 2008. He was just fucking around then, being silly. Even when he started having an audience, he didn’t feel the same pressure to make things that a wide range of people would enjoy. Now, he’s got millions of people watching, many of whom started watching solely for the chemistry that he has with an entirely separate person who is now gone. He doesn’t know how to do this version of YouTube alone.
Still, he tries. Basically, what he ends up doing is the exact same thing that he was doing as a teenager in his dorm at York: whatever the hell he wants. Sometimes, that means failing spectacularly at a Bob Ross tutorial. Sometimes, it means makeup inspired by his pet fish. Sometimes, it means altering a birthday cake recipe beyond recognition and then wondering why it doesn’t taste great. At no point in any of this does he feel like he has even the slightest inkling of what the fuck he’s doing, but he does it anyway, because he’s pretty sure that’s what it means to be alive.
And then, the most miraculous thing happens: people enjoy it. He gets hundreds of thousands of views and sweet comments from people telling him that he made their days better. He sees reactions online, laughter and tears and all the things that he knew he deserved when he was half of Dan and Phil, but that he hadn’t anticipated seeing now. There’s even a sizeable group of people who had never seen a video from him and Dan, and are watching just because they like his fun vibes. He would never give anyone orders about what to do with their own digital footprint, but he does want to tell those people to go watch the other videos.
Phil goes out on his own. He makes it work. But even as he carves out a space just for him, his own little house on the internet, he knows that he never wants it to be permanent.
All this being said, the day that DanandPhilGAMES is announced to be back from the dead is one of the best days of Phil’s life. It takes months of planning, from the day Dan returns from tour and tells Phil that he’s all in to the day that they’re standing in that church. It would be a lie for Phil to say that he feels like he’s dreaming. Rather, he feels like he’s finally woken up.
And yet. Behind the joy and the relief of being right back where he’s supposed to be, there’s some anxiety.
Here’s the thing. As much as 2022 Phil hated the idea of doing YouTube alone, 2023 Phil can acknowledge that it was good for him. And he had fun, even though he was constantly resisting the urge to look to his side where Dan was supposed to be. While the solo AmazingPhil era may not have been the happiest time of his life, he learned a lot, and he thinks that he’s a better person for it. He’s more confident, more willing to take risks and, well, try new things.
He’s a bit anxious that some of that might get lost if he gains back the ability to hide behind Dan. He doesn’t know if this is possible, but he wants to find a way to balance being half of a whole with the fun, more confident person that he became when he was on his own. And he’s not sure why this translates to him changing hairstyles, but it does. The way Phil’s mind works is a mystery even to him. Dan probably gets it though.
Besides, things haven’t exactly been easy for him as of late. A year after his dizziness started, it seems to have only gotten worse. There are words for it now. Complicated diagnoses and long acronyms that Phil can’t be bothered to repeat to anyone because they all boil down to there's no cure and you will feel this way for the rest of your life.
For a while, he wanted to fight it. He sulked his way to doctor’s offices and urged the medical professionals that he met to check again and again as if there was some better option hiding somewhere between the lines. He even picked fights with Dan once or twice.
And then, after a few weeks of misery, he came to the same realization that prompted Dan to go to therapy and seek help with his depression: I can’t live like this. Not only couldn’t he live like this, but he also came to the rather obvious but deceptively difficult decision that he didn’t have to.
Phil, like everyone, only has this one life. The fear that his sickness provokes in him didn’t soften that realization, scare him or make him want to hide. If anything, it just made him more defiant.
When Phil was little, he was that kid who could be in the middle of cleaning his room but would stop the minute one of his parents came in and told him to do it. He is stubborn by nature, as Dan loves to remind him. If anything, the fact that it’s now difficult for him to go out and have adventures is motivating him to go have more.
He wants to make decisions, not despite the fact that there’s a risk factor, that he might look or feel stupid, or get hurt, but because of that risk factor.
“I’m really gonna do it this time, Dan,” he says, flopping over in their bed like a fish so that he’s looking at Dan.
At this point, it’s past one in the morning. Dan groans. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m gonna go blond.”
Dan doesn’t even hesitate. “Mk,” he slurs.
Phil waits, one second, two. “That’s it? You’re not going to try and stop me?”
“Phiw,” Dan whines, “The only person who’s ever stopped you from going blond is yourself. I think you should do what you want.”
Phil blushes. “Alright.”
Phil’s favorite thing about the process of dying his hair is how many times he has a chance to back out, but doesn’t. When he picks out the exact shade of blond that he wants to go. When he finds a hairdresser who will come to his house. As he waits for the jet black to grow out of his hair so that he can dye it again, months and months. All of that time, Phil could have retreated back to the warm safety of his comfort zone, but he chooses not to.
And he’s glad, he really really is. Not only does his hair look good – Dan says that it brings out his eyes and he’s right – but he also feels better. Fresher, newer somehow. The hair makes him look younger, sure, but the rush that he feels isn’t about how he looks. It’s that increasingly familiar fondness for the things that make his heart race with both excitement and fear, and the pride that he feels for his ability to do them anyway.
But yes, on a purely surface level, he looks insanely hot, and feels much more confident. Can anyone really blame him for thinking that Dan was twerking with excitement?
2025: femme
Phil watches Dan’s reflection in the full length mirror on the back of their bathroom door, the way he moves with certainty through their bedroom, whistling to himself as he cleans pan after pan. And Phil just watches — Dan’s long, bare legs as he walks, his posture, not any less confident despite his usual slump, the way the dress flows around his mid-thigh.
A few years ago, after the end of the Doomed tour, Dan’s online shopping habits changed. Not in that he started economising or stopped buying black jumpers, identical in every way except for zip placement. Phil gave up on those hopes a long time ago.
What did change, though, was that Dan had a few dresses delivered to the house, a few skirts, a few tops that came from the women’s section of whatever website he was browsing, not that those categories were anything other than a cash grab and a way to make people feel bad about themselves.
Ever since Sister Daniel, when Dan realized that plus sized women’s clothing fit him, made him look gorgeous, and brought something out in him that he hadn’t had the freedom to explore previously, he’s been testing the line of exactly what’s allowed.
Of course, there’s nothing that’s not allowed. Dan is an adult living safely in his own home with someone who loves him unconditionally. Still, it’s not a surprise that the scared teenager that he was needs a little bit of coaxing.
Once, while he was playing with the hem of one of Dan’s skirts as they cuddled together on the couch, Phil asked Dan if he would consider wearing any of his more feminine clothes in public, or on camera. After a long pause, Dan had said quietly, “Yeah. Not now, but I think I’ll get there.”
Phil had asked out of curiosity, no other reason. He’s seen Dan do so much growing and exploring that he knows how much of a victory it is for him to feel comfortable in his own skin, even in their own home. And yes, he enjoys the extra views of Dan’s creamy thighs, his pretty collarbones. Dan looks good in “women’s” clothing, but the main reason that he looks good is that he looks happy.
Phil comes up behind where Dan is turned away from him over the sink. He snakes his arms around Dan’s waist and leans in, burying his nose in the curve of Dan’s neck. Dan hums, a satisfied sound.
“Hi,” he murmurs, “Whatchu doing?”
What is Phil doing? “Thinking,” Phil says softly.
“Anything interesting?” Dan asks.
Phil chuckles at the slight dig, despite the fact that the answer is unequivocally yes. Every time that he sees Dan wear a dress or paint his eyelids with sparkles, he hears his mother’s voice in his head. Specifically, he hears the story that she told when he brought her onto his channel in 2013.
We went in a very popular baby shop. You tried on all the little girly’s bonnets. And I said, oh, Phil, but you’re not a little girl, you see. He wouldn’t take it off.
He doesn’t blame his mother for something as stupid as telling him not to wear a hat when he was a baby. He doesn’t blame his mother for anything, really. He loves her and he’s so lucky to have grown up with a mum like her. He hasn’t called her in a few days, actually. He should do that later. He is thinking, though, about the years of life that caused her to think that her son couldn’t wear a frilly little hat if he wanted to. They’re probably the same cues that caused Phil to hide his face in his knee and complain that she was embarrassing him when she told the story.
Phil doesn’t know. He’s not a sociologist. He’s not even one of those obnoxious influencers who seem to think that they’re experts on feminist theory just because they’re gay and have a podcast. But still. He has been thinking.
It was a joke in their mutual coming out video, that Phil has less issues than Dan does. Objectively, and directly, it’s just true. But the bullying and violence that Dan faced didn’t exist in a vacuum. It came from centuries of societal brokenness that Phil would be naive to think himself entirely free from.
The point? He should have been allowed to wear the goddamn hat. But now, he, too, is an adult living safely in his own home with someone who loves him unconditionally. And he can do whatever he wants.
At some point, while Phil was tripping and falling into the existential void, Dan swiveled around, and he is now facing Phil. “God, you’re really going through it, huh?” he asks, somewhat teasing, but mostly so earnest that it makes Phil’s heart hurt. This man. This incredible man.
Phil opens his mouth, presumably to speak. He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to start. “I’m thinking about the 2026 calendar," he finally manages to get out.
Dan raises an eyebrow. “You came up behind me and latched onto me like a sloth because you were thinking about the calendar?” he says.
“Uh-huh,” says Phil, breezing right forward, “Have we solidly decided on the Phantasy theme?”
“I think so,” says Dan.
“We’re not still throwing around ideas?”
“Not unless you want to.”
“No, I’m good,” says Phil, “I was just thinking about the running joke between fans – and between us, I guess – about me being a passenger princess.”
Dan nods. “Several kinds of princess.”
“Shut up,” Phil protests, blushing, “Anyway. We could do something with that as a concept. Like a Rapunzel sort of thing, where I could be the princess and you could be – oh my god.”
“What?” Dan asks, laughing nervously.
“Oh my god!” Phil says again.
“What?!”
“Knight of wands!!”
Phil announces it like he’s yelling out his winning lottery numbers, expecting Dan to just get it, and of course he does.
“PHIL LESTER!” he yells, “YOU’RE A GENIUS!”
Phil melts into giggles. With too much pent up energy and nowhere to put it, he does his best impression of a hyperactive golden retriever and runs a few laps around their kitchen. Dan laughs, trying and repeatedly failing to catch Phil by the waist.
When he finally does succeed, he pulls Phil back close to himself, face to face, so close that their noses are nearly touching. “Philly,” he says, “Pibble. Meerkat.”
“What?” says Phil. He quits squirming when he catches the careful, serious way in which Dan is looking at him.
“Are you sure that’s all you want to talk about?” he asks, “I mean, just from looking at you, it didn’t seem like you were really lost in thought about the calendar.”
Phil opens his mouth and closes it again a few times, like a fish. He hesitates and stutters, and as he does it, Dan waits. Because Dan is patient and good, and sometimes he knows exactly what’s going on in Phil’s head before Phil even gets it himself.
“Okay,” says Phil, “So maybe I’m a bit curious about what it would feel like to dress up like a princess. To… to wear the pretty dress and everything.”
As much as Dan doesn’t recoil in disgust, he also doesn’t jump up and down with glee. He just smiles encouragingly. “Do you think that’s something you want to explore a little bit? Beyond just costumes, I mean?”
Phil shrugs, hoping to whatever’s up there that he looks more nonchalant than he feels. There’s no point, really. He can’t fool Dan and he knows it.
“I dunno,” he says, “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think I’ll really know until I try it out.”
Dan nods. He’s beaming with something that looks like pride, practically glowing in the morning light of their kitchen. Then again, maybe he looks the same as he always does. It’s rare for Dan to not be glowing, from Phil’s perspective. Regardless, he leans in and plants a little kiss on Phil’s cheek.
“I am going to find you the prettiest princess dress that you have ever seen.”
Phil laughs. “We do have a budget for these things, Dan.”
“I am going to find you the prettiest princess dress that you have ever seen that costs less than a hundred pounds.”
2026 – inked
Dan is at the hotel desk going over the payment details at the hotel restaurant with an employee who’s wearing a giant lily in her hair. Phil glances over at them intermittently, but he trusts that Dan is handling whatever it is that needs to be handled. Phil, for his part, is staring into an open pool full of fish that this fancy hotel has in its lobby.
Some guests have thrown coins into the tank, glittering things that catch the light. He can count currency from at least five countries just from a first glance. To be fair, he’s not glancing all that intently. His attention has been attracted by one of the fish, whose bright blue scales blend in with the water but stand out against his many orange counterparts.
He’s just a little guy, no bigger than a goldfish, but he’s moving with purpose like he knows where he’s going. Maybe he does. Maybe that tank is as big as a city to him. Phil hopes so.
The fish reminds Phil of the one he put in the back of his phone case to match his mood. More distantly, he reminds Phil of Norman.
“Hey buddy,” he coos at the fish, “Fancy running into you here.”
The fish says nothing, because he is a fish and does not possess the power of speech. Phil thinks to himself, distantly, that this feels like one of those moments in an animated movie, like the kid’s equivalent of Chekhov’s Gun, when a character sees an animal that’s somehow important or will become a motif or a symbol throughout the rest of the story. Most people would probably say that that’s ridiculous, and that this is real life, not a wholesome movie. Phil thinks that this vacation in particular is the perfect time to maximize his own whimsy.
Phil keeps watching him, so focused that when Dan puts a hand on his shoulder, he jumps.
“Hey, baby,” he says in earshot of the lobby, which Phil is still not fully used to, “You ready to go to the beach?”
“Yeh,” says Phil, “But first, check out this fish.”
Dan hunches down to get a closer look at the pool. “Oh yeah,” he says, “Looks a bit like the fish from the back of your phone case. Or like Norman.”
Phil feels so in love that he could cry.
He doesn’t think about the fish for a while, until, in fact, the last day that they’re in Vietnam. For most of the trip, they’ve stayed by the beach near the resort. The goal of this holiday was not to learn or to hike, but just to enjoy each other, to essentially live under one another’s skin and bask in the glory of not having to hide it anymore. But Dan says that it would feel like a waste to go to a new city and not take at least one curious stroll, and Phil agrees.
He half expects everything to be closed, since it’s past midnight, but the lights are still on in almost every storefront. They get some last minute banh mi and just wander by the water. And then they come across the tattoo shop.
Phil stops in his tracks to read the sign in the window before he even understands the implications of wanting to do so. His stop is so sudden that Dan doesn’t even notice it at first. Dan stops a pace ahead. He looks back at Phil over his shoulder, the streetlights casting hues of gold over his curls and his tall silhouette, and Phil can’t focus on that right now. His brain is telling him to make a decision.
Tattoos from 11 PM - 1 AM: 523,175 VND!!
Half a million Vietnamese dong, while it sounds like a lot, is around fifteen pounds. Not much at all. The inside of the shop looks clean, too, and the employees are going about their business, not standing outside trying to get tourists to come in. There are other people, Vietnamese and tourists alike, sitting in the chairs and making small talk with the tattoo artists.
“Phiw,” says Dan, breaking him from his reverie, “You good?”
He asks the question like he knows exactly where Phil’s head is, but he probably doesn’t. Phil is thinking once again of the fish. The fish that looked so much like Norman, but just a lighter shade of blue, his favorite shade.
“I think I want to get a tattoo,” Phil says. His voice is quiet, but steady. He means it.
He’s thought about getting a tattoo more often than he wants to admit. When he dyed his hair, when he cut a slit into his eyebrow. It always seemed like one of those aesthetic choices that were made by people other than him. But maybe that’s meaningless. Maybe he’s here, openly on a vacation with the love of his life, and he can get a tattoo if he wants to.
Dan comes up beside him and peers into the window of the tattoo parlor. Phil knows what he’s doing; he’s analyzing the place to make sure that it looks clean and safe and won’t give Phil Hepatitis. He’s being protective.
Without looking at Phil, he asks, “What would you even get?”
“I was thinking I could get the little blue fish from the hotel tank,” says Phil, “Something to remember this trip forever.”
He knows, of course, that they were going to remember this trip forever anyway, but the sentiment still counts. This week is one that he’d love to have a reminder of immortalized on his body. It’s not just about the trip, though. It’s about the fish in his phone case, and Norman. It’s about being so far from home and yet finding something so familiar.
Dan hums. ‘That’s a nice idea. Very aesthetically you.” Phil blushes, and Dan continues, “I like the idea of having a tattoo of a little creature.”
Phil takes a second to think, and then he does something that isn’t always instinctive to him: he voices his thoughts out loud.
“It’s not about what I get tattooed, really. I just want to get a tattoo.”
He just wants to do something outside of his comfort zone. He wants to have a moment in the palm of his hand, and grab it, and hold on.
It’s getting easier and easier. Especially after coming out. After all, he’s already done the scariest thing, and everything is so much better for it.
Dan smiles. “Okay. If you want to, then you will.” He glances pointedly at the door to the tattoo parlor.
Phil doesn’t move. A flurry of fears flood him suddenly. What if it hurts too much? What if he gets sick? What if he doesn’t like it? What if, what if?
“You okay, moon?” Dan asks, a concerned frown on his pretty face.
Phil gulps and admits, “I’m a little scared.”
“You’ll be alright,” says Dan, “I’ll hold your hand.”
An hour later, Phil has a new friend, a little blue fish swimming up his calf. It’s as easy as that.