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It's cold at night. The floor is cold where Phil sits on it, the air is cold around him. The chair is solid behind him, the ground is solid underneath. It's real, he thinks. This is real.
When he breathes in it feels like ice in his lungs.
"What are you even doing?" Dan asks.
He stands in the doorway to the lounge, rubbing his sleepy eyes. His mouth is petulant, slightly annoyed.
"I had a dream," Phil says. Why is his voice so hoarse? "I woke up crying."
The petulance flickers out of existance, replaced by something like understanding, something earned over the years.
Phil has these dreams, sometimes.
He can see the window from where he sits. That's why he's sitting here, on the floor in their lounge. Outside is the city and the stars and inside is home and and Dan. This is real, it is all real, even when his mind whispers things that he thought were real while he slept.
Dan disappears from sight. Phil hears him in the kitchen, hears his footsteps.
They're real.
It's not like he doubts the reality of it, exactly. It's just that sometimes he feels like maybe there are two worlds. Maybe there are more than two worlds. Maybe there are worlds in his dreams and they're just as real, too.
Dan, drowning, far away. His mum, disappointed. He can't even remember what was literal and what is just a feeling etched into his brain and his heart. They're all ghost memories now.
He shudders hard. That was not real. This is real. But if the outcome matters more than the process, then how he feels right now lends reality to the dream, and that's where his mind starts to scatter in a hundred directions again, each its own 'if' or 'maybe.')
Dan comes back. "Tea's on," he says, and then drops a blanket around Phil's shoulders.
"Your new one," Phil says, reaching a hand out to stroke the faux fur. He turns his cheek against it.
Dan sits in the chair by where Phil is perched on the floor. "You're only borrowing it," Dan says.
Phil turns his body so he can rest his head against Dan's leg. His whole body is heavy and tired. The sun will be up soon and they only went to bed a few hours ago.
"Coming after my brand, aren't you?" Dan asks. He starts to stroke Phil's hair. It feels nice and comforting. Dan's hands are not cold, but they are real. "Up all hours of the night, finding strange places to have your crisis."
"Not a crisis," Phil says. It isn't - not in the way Dan always says. Phil is not at odds with himself from within. It's everything else he feels at odds with. He can laugh off a lifetime of worry while his eyes are open but the minute he needs them to close everything is in revolt. He can't sleep and when he can it's this, it's dreams that are too real and too bright, that prick him like a needle on his fingertip.
He reaches up and grabs Dan's hand. He wants to leech the warmth from it.
"You should go back to sleep," Phil says.
Dan just rolls his eyes. Phil can't see it, because he's looking outside and not at Dan's face, but he knows Dan well enough to know without looking that he's rolling his eyes. "Not bloody likely."
Dan won't say: I'm staying up with you for all the times you stayed up with me.
Dan won't say: I'm staying up because I'm worried about you.
Dan won't say: I'm staying up because I know you don't really want to be alone.
Dan will say: "You've trained me, I can't even sleep anymore without those ice-blocks you call feet against my shins."
"Sorry," Phil says, out of an absence of anything else to say. He's very tired now, but the dream is still there. Tendrils of hopelessness and dismay are still wrapped around his mind.
"You should be." Dan's voice sounds tender, even though the fog.
Phil might cry, if he were that sort of person. In the light of the day he never would, but this is not a daytime hour and being jerked so abruptly out of sleep and chased from his bed by the urge to escape the bedroom walls has a funny way of making emotions feel very close to the surface. He is so intensely glad he has someone that will sit with him at four in the morning and not make him explain why.
He takes stock of those horrible feelings, for a moment: fear, exhaustion, impending sense of doom. But he takes stock of other things, the things surrounding him in this moment: Dan, still touching his hair. The blanket so soft of his skin. The kettle he can hear faintly whistling.
He feels warmer already.