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Dan woke up like he'd been dropped from a height.
Not a nightmare, nothing that dramatic, just the specific, lurching wrongness of his body. It was the feeling of having slept too long and too hard, limbs heavy in the wrong ways, mouth like he'd been sucking on a cotton ball. He laid there for a second blinking at the ceiling, trying to remember what day it was, what time it was, why the light coming through the curtains looked so aggressively midday.
Then it hit him. The deadline. The sponsor. The video he'd been up until- what, four? Five? The act of colour-grading and re-recording a single line of dialogue eleven times because he'd said "utilise" instead of "use" and it had bothered him on a cellular level.
He grabbed his phone off the nightstand. 11:42.
"Oh, no," he said out loud, to no one, voice cracked in half from disuse. "No no no-”
He was already halfway to sitting up when the second thing registered, slower, colder, underneath the first realization. Phil's side of the bed was empty. Not rumpled-empty, not just-got-up-to-pee empty. It was made. Cool to the touch when Dan's hand landed on it out of some ancient instinct.
And past it, against the wall, Aurora's crib.
Also empty.
Dan stood up quickly, before he could even think about standing up. His heart doing something enormous and stupid in his chest, the specific animal panic that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that his daughter and husband weren't they were supposed to be. He was aware, distantly, that he looked deranged in the moment. His grey t-shirt, hair flattened on one side into a shape that defied physics, boxers, and no rational thoughts.
"Phil?" His voice came out wrong and strained. "Phil!"
Nothing. The phouse was quiet in a way that made his skin prickle, and he was out the bedroom door and into the hallway before he'd fully clocked that he was even moving. His bare feet slapping against the wood floor, his brain supplying increasingly unhinged scenarios at a speed his body could not keep up with.
The nursery, he thought.That was where she went for naps, when it was properly daytime and someone was awake enough to keep half an ear out. There was an empty crib there too, the blankets folded over the rail.
"Phil, where-"
He caught himself on the doorframe of the bathroom, chest heaving slightly, and made himself actually look instead of just scanning for catastrophe. And that was when the details started arriving, one after another, like his eyes were only now switching on.
The bottles. The little rack by the sink, usually chaotic and half full of bottles waiting to be washed because neither of them ever got around to it, was full of clean ones. Drying upside down in neat rows, catching the light.
The living room, when he stumbled into it, didn't have a single toy on the floor. Not one. The basket by the sofa, normally overflowing, had a lid on it. A lid. Dan didn't know they had even owned a lid for that basket.
The trash bags by the front door, the ones that had been sitting there since Tuesday and he'd been silently resenting without doing anything about them, were gone.
He stood in the middle of his own living room, in his boxers, feeling his heart rate come down half a beat at a time, and thought, with real and creeping horror: Did I get abducted and sent to a much more competent version of my own home?
That was when he heard him. Phil's voice, low, coming from the kitchen, doing the specific pitch he used when he was talking to Aurora and not really expecting a reply. It was a sort of soft, unhurried narration.
"-and this one's a spoon," Phil said. "You know what a spoon does? Nobody really knows. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries. Right up there with the pyramids.”
Dan followed the sound of Phil’s nonsense and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Phil was standing by the counter with Aurora propped against his shoulder, one hand splayed wide across her back, swaying very slightly on the spot, holding a spoon in his other hand. He had a tea towel over one shoulder and a variety of eating utensils spread across the counter as if he was playing show and tell with the baby. His hair was doing something worse than Dan's and he looked, generally, like a man who had been up since six.
"There he is," Phil said, not even turning round properly, like he'd clocked Dan's footsteps three rooms ago. "Sleeping Beauty."
"Phil-" Dan's voice cracked again, differently this time. "Where were you?! I woke up and the crib was empty and I thought-" He didn't finish his sentence. Dan didn't want to say the actual words out loud, the stupid sleep deprived logic of them.
Phil turned then, and something in his face went soft and quick when he actually looked at Dan properly. The wrecked hair, the panic still draining out of his shoulders. "Hey. Hey, no, sorry, I should've- I didn't think you'd wake up mid-freak-out, I thought you'd just find the note."
"What note?"
"The note I left." A beat. "On the fridge."
"I didn't get that far, Phil, I was busy having a medical event-"
"You look very medical, yeah." Phil's eyes were doing the thing where he was trying not to smile and failing. "Good colour. Very hospital chic."
"I thought someone had taken her-"
"Nobody's taken her, she's right here, she's had a whole morning.” He looked down at Aurora, his voice softening, aimed only towards her. “Haven't you?”
She blinked up at him with the vague, magnificent indifference of a four month old who had no idea of what was happening. Phil pressed a kiss to the top of her head without seeming to think about it at all. "Tell Daddy you're fine, Star."
Dan's chest did something complicated and warmed, even through the leftover adrenaline. "You did the bottles."
"Mm."
"And the toys. And the- Phil, did you take the trash bags out? The ones I've been ignoring since Tuesday-"
"They were starting to become part of the decor."
“They were not- you can’t just- who does that at six in the morning?”
“They had started growing something, Daniel!”
“That’s not- okay, fine, that’s fair, but you also folded all her blankets, like we live in a hotel or something.”
“I wouldn’t say-“
“I thought I’d been robbed!” Dan said, the panic sliding sideways into something more theatrical.
Phil raised an eyebrow. “A burglar who does the washing up?”
“An extremely considerate burglar…”
Phil shrugged one shoulder, jostling Rory slightly, who made a small unbothered noise. "It wasn't a whole thing. She woke up at about half six, you were dead to the world, so I just… took her, did a bottle, and then I was up anyway, so." Another shrug, smaller. "Kept going."
"You cleaned the entire house at half six in the morning."
"I wouldn't say the entire house. I didn't touch the office. Your desk is still a crime scene." He hesitated for just a second, and when he spoke again the joking dropped out of it, just for a beat, clean and unguarded in a way Dan felt land somewhere under his ribs. "You were up till God knows when for that stupid sponsor thing. I could hear you still going at four. I just wanted you to actually sleep, properly, without her waking you up every two hours. That's it. Wasn't a big rescue mission."
Dan didn't say anything for a second. Just looked at Phil. At the tea towel on his shoulder, at his ridiculous hair, at Aurora's fist curling loosely around the collar of his shirt. Dan felt the last of the adrenaline drain out and leave something much softer and much more embarrassing in its place.
"You could've woken me."
"You needed it more than I needed you conscious." Phil crossed the kitchen and, without any ceremony at all, transferred the baby into Dan's arms. The automatic ease of it, four months in and it was already just muscle memory, her weight settling against his chest like she'd never been anywhere else. "There. Go on. She missed you, probably. She's very good at pretending she didn't."
Aurora blinked up at Dan with the same magnificent indifference as before, then grabbed a fistful of his shirt and put it directly in her mouth.
"Yeah," Dan said, voice gone thick and stupid and fond, pressing his mouth briefly to the top of her head the exact way Phil had. "Little bugger missed me loads, clearly."
"Rory's got an excellent poker face," Phil said, already turning back to the counter to put away the utensils. "Wonder where she gets it."
"Absolutely not from you. You cry at insurance adverts."
"That was one time-"
Dan didn't say anything else. Just stood there in the kitchen, in his boxers, holding his daughter, watching Phil tidy up the counter with the tea towel still over his shoulder, and thought that whatever he'd been so wound up about at four in the morning had apparently, somehow, entirely stopped mattering.