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Dan was sad.
Phil could tell, despite the other man having said nothing of it.
It was late afternoon, and the two of them were playing Mario Kart together on their sofa like they did every day. Phil was winning, which was odd—not because he was usually bad at the game, of course, but because Dan didn't seem like he was trying at all. After the course was over (Phil had won), he reached out to Dan and carefully plucked the Switch controller out of his grasp. He didn't resist at all, his expression blank like... something that was blank. A whiteboard, maybe. Or Dan's solo YouTube channel.
"Hey, Dan." Phil set both of the controllers to the side before crawling over and snuggling up beside Dan, just barely not falling off the edge of the cushions. "Are you okay?"
Dan only sighed quietly in response. Phil grimaced.
Dan has been in moods like this before, of course. He was diagnosed with depression, it was bound to happen. It was a lot better lately, but that didn't mean it stopped happening entirely. As much as Phil despised whenever Dan felt like this, he accepted it like he accepted every other part of Dan, and he was always there to do anything he could to make him feel better. At the moment, it seemed, Dan was enjoying Phil being close to him, and so Phil pressed closer.
"Do you want to talk to me?" Phil asked. Usually the answer was no, plain and simple, but he still liked to make Dan explain what he needed (even if it pissed him off most of the time). "Or do you want distractions?"
Eye contact was made, then broken. Dan turned his head to the side, his dead-looking brown gaze fixed on the television.
"I just...," he muttered out eventually, his voice thick with tears that had yet to be formed, "don't understand."
"What don't you understand, Danny?" Phil pressed in a softer tone. He shifted so that he was slightly on top of Dan and less in danger of falling off of the sofa, placing a hand on his partner's jaw and forcing him to once again meet his eyes. "Tell me."
"Why are you still here?" It wasn't asked with resentment or disgust, but rather genuine disbelief. Phil's heart broke a little in his chest as he realized what Dan was saying. "Why... have you stuck around for so long? You always say I'm so great, you're convinced I am, but I'm really not at all as perfect as you give me credit for. I'm not perfect at all, even."
"You're not perfect," Phil murmured in reply, "but nobody is, Daniel. I don't need someone who's 'perfect,' I need someone who's sweet and affectionate and intelligent and patient and funny and beautiful. I need someone who eats Pringles sideways and picks up his laptop upside down. I need someone who knows more about me than I even know about myself, someone who's stuck with me through every health issue and has let me do the same. I need someone who's stubborn and sarcastic, who can be annoying as hell sometimes but always makes up for it. I need someone who yells at me to close cabinets and stop eating all the cereal. And most of all, I need someone with freckles here—" Phil picked up his hand to poke at the freckle beside Dan's left eye before moving to the two on his right cheek. "—here, and here. Oh, and a dimple."
Dan was speechless, staring up at Phil with those chestnut-brown eyes like he was the only thing that existed. Phil smiled, to show that his words were for sure genuine if not his own happiness.
"You have... quite the list," Dan said after a moment. It may have been just a simple tease, but when Dan was feeling this way, sometimes a simple tease meant that everything was getting better.
"Your feelings are valid, Dan," Phil whispered, running his fingers through his boyfriend's dark curls. "They always are. But they can be valid and also misplaced. I love you, I don't care if you're perfect, I know everything about you anyway so, like, I'd know if you sucked, okay? You don't. Do you really think I'd have stuck around for 16 years if you were bad? Lad, I deserve better than that. Look at me. I'm here because I want to be, Dan. Understand?"
Dan nodded. Phil leaned in for a kiss, happy when Dan's lips easily met his own.
"I can't believe your way of making me feel better is to just compliment yourself until it gets your point across," Dan mentioned weakly against Phil's mouth.
"Hey." Phil pulled back to reply, looking down at Dan with twinkling eyes. "It works, doesn't it?"