Work Text:
they said yes, he sends.
He knows Dan won’t see it for ages, but he can’t help staring down at the words for a minute, rubbing a thumb over the edge of his phone case.
He finally gives up and goes down to help his gran with the bills. It’s a task and a half to stay focused, when half his mind is just waiting and waiting and imagining a notification that hasn’t yet come.
His phone buzzes an hour later. Dan must be stopping in at the house for something. He’s never really figured out his schedule in the afternoons, even after texting back and forth a million times.
come get me?
His first instinct is to say yes and jump in the car right away, but – he remembers what Dan’s said, haltingly, when they’ve talked about it. About how they can wait another few hours, after they’ve already waited for months.
six?
fuck you, Dan sends back immediately, but he follows it up with a heart emoji.
—
He drives up the hill just as the sun is setting. He hasn’t been coming up at this time of day that often – just earlier in the year, when Dan couldn’t drive, and then sometimes to check on him or to visit with his nan over board games.
He still gets a bit choked up, though. He doesn’t think Dan would be sentimental about it, but the air is glowing golden around their wall, and the field where they met, and nan’s flowers that they helped her plant by the turn that takes him towards the house.
Dan’s waiting not much past the flowers, off to the side of the drive, bag slung over his shoulder as always.
“That everything?” Phil says, as he clambers in and stuffs it in the back seat.
“Yup.”
“You tell your nan?”
Dan shrugs, fussing with the cuff on his jacket for a minute before he finally remembers to do his seatbelt, startling a little as the car starts moving.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “She’s okay.”
—
“We can’t get the Janinge chair,” Dan is saying, animated.
Phil’s not even sure if he’s still in this IKEA, like, spiritually. Physically he’s here, but mentally he’s floating along the ceiling, watching Dan have endless opinions, while he tries to measure the distance between them and the cinnamon rolls downstairs. In what measuring system, is what he can’t figure out. In distance? Minutes? Number of words Dan can say between here and the cinnamon rolls?
“No?” Phil says, mildly, trying to hide the yawn that escapes as soon as he opens his mouth.
Dan glances over and suddenly hesitates. “I mean – it’s your money.”
“But you hate them.”
“Yes.”
“Would you look at it every morning and think, god, I hate that yawn – ya – ja – uh. That chair we got at IKEA because Phil wanted it?”
“No.”
“Really?”
Dan glares down at the showroom version, reaching out to grab the back and test if it wiggles.
“I wouldn’t think about it every morning. I just would think about it most mornings, when I would sit in it and the bar on the back would be wobbly because it’s –”
“Okay,” Phil interrupts, rolling his eyes while Dan isn’t looking. “Okay, let’s pick a different chair.”
—
“How was work?” Dan calls from his spot on the couch.
They’ve talked a little bit about – Phil working, and Dan not, in the past week. How Dan has a bit of savings from the last auction, how he took on extra projects for the neighbors during the months they were waiting.
It worries Dan, he knows, but Phil loves this part. He loves coming home and knowing that Dan will be there, rested and warm and cozy under a blanket when it gets cold. He loves flopping down on the couch and closing his eyes when Dan plants a kiss on his head, napping until they have to go make dinner.
“‘S good,” he says, slurred against Dan’s chest. “How was being a house husband?”
Dan laughs at that, reaching up to tug gently on a bit of Phil’s hair.
“Rude. It was good, though. Oh – I think I forgot to do the dishes? I should go do that now.”
Phil shakes his head vaguely from where he’s wedged between Dan and the couch cushions. He’s already drifting, but he burrows closer and mumbles an mmmm no that seems to get the point across.
—
“Did you know there was a family of people in Switzerland who just made violins for hundreds of years?” Dan says, into the dark.
Phil put his book down ages ago. He’s just staring at the wall, now, listening to the quiet woosh and click of Dan scrolling through god knows what.
“Did you just discover the internet?” he finally says, rolling onto his back so he can tilt his head up and stare at Dan’s upside-down face, bathed in the dim glow of his laptop. “Is that why you’re reading everything at once? You’re catching up?”
Dan hums, forehead wrinkling while he reads some other bit of information.
“Never had time, I guess,” he says, eventually, “I gotta find out what everybody’s been up to all these years.”
—
“The forks go in the third drawer,” Dan repeats, pointing indignantly. “Phil! This is cutlery mayhem!”
Maybe it’s not the most productive way to end an argument, but Phil catches him around the waist and distracts him long enough that he forgets about the whereabouts of the forks.
—
“I’ve got it,” Dan says, hands falling warm on Phil’s tired shoulders, gently steering him aside with a kiss to the back of his head. “Go sleep, I’ve got the dishes. You’ll do them wrong anyway.”
—
Phil’s days at work get even longer as the days themselves get shorter, which is – horrifying. He’s most of the way to incoherent, some nights. He doesn’t say it, but he vaguely wonders if he’d have even taken this job if he’d realized what it would be like, how little he would see Dan, how little he would see the fucking outdoors.
“Food?” he says as he pulls off his shoes in their little entry. He’s not sure if it’s loud enough for Dan to make it out, but he hears a shuffling sound anyways, and Dan appears a moment later.
“Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t sure when you’d be home. You hungry?”
Phil – doesn’t mean to look grumpy, but he can’t help the frown that’s been stuck to his face for hours, ever since that stupid meeting.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “We have anything?”
“It’s – with the oven,” Dan blurts out. “I – well. You know? After last time.”
“Oh,” Phil says, squeezing his eyes shut and scrubbing a hand over his face to see if that does anything. That would do it, he doesn’t say.
“It’s fine,” Dan says, shuffling Phil towards the couch, “it’s fine. I’ll set a timer. Go nap and I’ll find something.”
—
Phil catches him standing frozen in front of the mirror, one night. He’d meant to brush his teeth and be asleep in five minutes flat, but he squeezes into their little bathroom and fits himself to Dan’s back, instead.
“Hey,” he says, mumbled into Dan’s shoulder.
Dan chews his lip for a minute, forehead wrinkled in concentration.
“I look different?” he finally says, like it’s a question and he’s not sure.
“Hot.”
“Different.” Dan repeats, shifting a little.
“‘S good, though.”
“That’s not – but it’s – I,” he tries, stumbling through a few tries before falling quiet again. He runs a thumb over the back of his other hand, like he’s looking for some old scab to tug at.
“I don’t… know this person,” he says after a minute, carefully picking through the words. “It’s not about you liking it.”
“You look, like, healthy, is all,” Phil murmurs, flattening his palm against Dan’s bare ribs. “Like you couldn’t get killed by a breeze anymore.”
“Well,” Dan says, “I guess I don’t recognize that.”
—
He still has bad days, sometimes.
Phil didn’t realize that, so much, when they were living apart. Dan always got up anyways, always went out to the fields despite himself. He’d come back to Phil tired and worn, worse some days than others, but – it blurred together, really. The bad days in his head, versus the days that were just plain bad, because the weather had gone wrong, or the work had been tedious, or his body had been sore, or the will of the world around him just hadn’t matched what he’d pictured when he woke up in the morning.
Now it’s turned into – days like these, when he asks Dan to hand him the pepper and he gets the coriander instead, and even a mild “oh, the pepper, please?” is enough to send Dan into some other world, dodging Phil’s eyes while shoving the pepper into his hands, abruptly grabbing the knife and cutting board out of the drawer in a rush, determined to find some way to prove himself.
“Dan –” Phil tries, more than a little bewildered, and not exactly sure that he can turn around and trust that he won’t cut his finger off when Phil’s not looking.
“I got it,” Dan mutters, painstakingly careful fingers moving as he chops. “It’s fine, I got it.”
—
“What’s all this?” Phil says, shuffling Dan’s random crap off the counter so he can fit the cutting board.
“All what?” Dan says from his spot on the couch. They can hardly fit both of them in the kitchen at once, and Phil finally announced last week that he has to be banished or they’ll trip over each other.
“The –” he picks something up, turning it to see the label, “– nail polish?”
“Oh, I – got that. It’s for nan. For Christmas?”
“Yeah?” he says absently, briefly glancing up from the task at hand. “That’s lovely.”
Dan catches his eye and smiles, wide, but it falters as soon as Phil smiles back.
“Sorry,” he says, putting the little bottle down and turning to pull things out of the fridge so he doesn’t have to look at Dan if he’s really mucked it up again. “I’m not, like, surprised you would get her a Christmas present. I just never remember mine until December 20th. Forget other people do, is all.”
“I know,” Dan says, fondly, and goes back to reading.
Phil doesn’t think much of it until they’re most of the way through dinner.
“They’re for me,” Dan says, interrupting Phil’s inner monologue about pasta.
“The – uh? The bread rolls?”
“No, Phil –”
“They’re not all for you,” Phil says, frowning. He snatches one from the counter and plops it on his plate, just in case.
Dan huffs and smiles, interrupting whatever his other thought was for a minute.
“The things on the counter, I meant,” he says eventually. “They’re – I read this – well. They’re not for nan.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Okay?” Dan repeats, slowly.
“D’you want help? I did my mum’s when she had a broken finger, once,” he says. He tries to stab a bit of broccoli with his fork, but instead it ricochets onto the table.
“No, thanks.”
“No?” Phil says, looking up from his plate. He doesn’t mean to look offended, but he probably does.
“Phil, you are so sweet, and you literally can’t use a fork, so. No thank you. Stay away from me with semi permanent colors.”
Phil shrugs, going back to twirling pasta around his fork.
“Fine. I’ll paint your whole face with sharpie when you’re sleeping,” he says. He tries to sound actually threatening, but Dan just squints at him for a minute, the way he does when he thinks Phil is stupid but he’s not meant to say it out loud.
“I’ll paint your dick with sharpie when you’re sleeping,” he mutters into his own pasta, finally. He pops back up with a wide smile as soon as Phil starts laughing.
—
“Is it the wrong color?” he says, leaning over the couch to check out Dan’s nails. He’s frowning at them, but – it actually looks like he did a pretty tidy job, from what Phil can tell.
“I dunno. I like the purple, I think.”
“Is it everything you dreamed of?”
Dan sighs, wiggling his fingers a little bit.
“It just looks like – I don’t know. Like I have a farmer’s hands and I’ve lost my mind and thought I could hide the dirt, you know?”
Phil emphatically doesn’t know, actually.
“You know there’s no dirt on there, right, Lady Macbeth?”
Dan snorts at that, but he still looks irritated. “Yeah, but my hands are – whatever. Big. And weird. I’m gonna go out-damn-spot these, I think. Maybe it’s just the purple.”
—
There’s a clattering in the kitchen when Phil gets home.
“You feeling better, D?” he calls absently as he takes his shoes off, drops his bag by the table. Dan either doesn’t hear him over the noise, or doesn’t feel like answering.
He rounds the corner into their little kitchen, stepping in behind Dan and wrapping his arms around him like he does most afternoons. He can hardly feel Dan under the comically puffy jacket Phil bought him for Christmas, and he can’t quite see his face enough, but he can feel a bit of heat coming off his neck.
“You’re still warm,” he murmurs.
Dan takes a breath, and Phil can hear that he’s just as stuffed up as he was this morning. There’s a fine tremor going through him, Phil thinks, even though it’s hard to tell with how he’s moving so much, viciously scrubbing at a sticky fork.
“I’ll do it,” he says.
He’s met with silence. Maybe he’s lost his voice, but he hardly seems to register that Phil’s there.
“Dan –” he starts, finally just making grabby hands at the sponge even though he can hardly see over Dan’s shoulder. The sponge goes out of reach, but he gets a flailing hand around Dan’s wrist and hangs on.
“Stop,” Dan finally spits out, voice cracking on the end of the word.
He’s suddenly writhing and squirming and fighting under Phil’s arms, yanking this way and that. He drops the fork back in the dirty water with a loud splash.
“Fuck,” he says with a certain edge of fury that Phil’s heard enough to recognize, even though his voice is absolutely wrecked.
“I’ll do it, Dan,” Phil tries again, even though he’s lost his grip entirely.
Dan pushes away from the sink, making Phil stumble back a bit, and then bolts.
“What –” Phil starts, blinking as Dan swipes his keys off the little plastic hook.
“I can’t,” Dan keeps repeating under his breath as he yanks his shoes on, voice straining. “I can’t, I can’t – I can’t, I can’t.”
Phil manages to get a hold of the edge of his jacket, but Dan twists once and then he’s gone.
—
“You’re exhausting,” he says, mildly, pressing a kiss to Dan’s wet cheek.
Dan doesn’t say anything, but Phil feels him nod a bit as he tucks his freezing face into the crook of Phil’s neck.
They pull apart eventually, once Phil’s sure that Dan’s still mostly whole, that he hasn’t lost any bits to hypothermia or something while he was out. He’s quiet and subdued as Phil pulls him towards the bathroom so they can brush their teeth.
“I can’t just lay here being useless,” Dan whispers, later, into the dark of their room, after Phil’s measured out the cough syrup and tucked the blankets around them, only for Dan to ruin it with his thrashing. He digs a hand into Dan’s sweaty curls.
“No?”
“I just – it feels – I can’t,” he says, slurring a little, punctuating each attempt with another squirm. “Can’t. Hate it.”
“Okay,” Phil says quietly, trying to tug the blanket back to his side.
He’s still awake when sleep finally wins out over Dan’s desperate fight against it.
—
It’s in February. Phil can’t forget that detail, after.
It’s dead silent, when he comes home. It’s happened before, when Dan gets mowed down by a headache out of nowhere and just sleeps until Phil gets back.
He finds him on the couch, curled in a haphazard-looking fetal position, blanket yanked tight over his shoulders, face down in a couch cushion.
“Dan, hey? Let’s get you to bed?” he says, leaning down to run a palm over his back.
He just barely registers the flinch and the hitch in his breath when they touch, followed by the fine tremor that runs through him whenever he’s in pain like this.
“Dan?”
He just gets a muffled huh in response.
“You sleepin’, there?”
Dan heaves a sigh and carefully uncurls himself, turning so Phil can look at him. He doesn’t look – confused, or anything, as best as Phil can tell, not on an express lane to the doctor’s, but he’s pale and drawn.
“Can I lay down with you a minute?”
“Yeah,” Dan finally answers, voice coming out raspy and strange. It’s a bit awkward, but he makes an effort to scoot over as Phil arranges himself on the couch, one arm slung over Dan’s waist.
“Hurting?” he says.
“No.”
“Sure?”
Dan takes a breath.
“I just – I can’t, with. Anything.”
“What part?”
“I can’t, like. Be alive.”
“Dan.”
Dan fidgets at that, with an irritated little huff. “Not like that. Not right now. It’s – the kitchen.”
“I can –”
“No,” Dan blurts out, interrupting. “I – Phil. I used to cook? A little bit, sometimes. And now I can’t, like, read them. The cookbooks. I can’t read, and it doesn’t make sense, and I can’t follow the recipes, because I can’t read, and I’m stupid, and I went to uni but I can’t –”
“Hey,” Phil whispers. “Breathe a little.”
“I can’t fucking read, Phil.”
Phil tucks his hand under the hem of Dan’s shirt, realizing as he does it that the little tremors from before have turned into Dan barely holding it together.
“Doesn’t help if you’re oxygen deprived,” he mutters.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s normal, Dan, they –”
“Fuck,” Dan bites out again, tugging on Phil’s arm and burrowing closer until he’s properly boxed in. “Fuck them. And fuck this. I just want to make some fucking muffins,” he says wetly.
“Okay. Then tell them that’s your goal,” Phil says, tightening his grip. “You can read Wikipedia, but what you really want is... muffin recipes.”
Dan goes quiet for a minute. There’s a little wet patch growing on Phil’s sleeve, squashed under Dan’s cheek, and once in a while he sniffles a bit.
“They’re gonna call me the muffin man,” he finally says, whining a little. “I’m gonna get bullied by all the nurses for liking muffins too much. They’re gonna think I’m a weirdo.”
Phil bites hard on his lip because god knows it’s not the time to laugh, but –
“Hey!” Dan squawks suddenly, flailing to try to roll over without sitting up, “I can feel you thinking.”
—
It keeps happening.
He comes home most days, now, to Dan silent and unmoving. Sometimes he’s on the couch, but Phil’s found him in the bath, or in bed, or just sitting frozen in the hallway with no particular explanation of how he got there.
There’s a stack of dishes by the sink now that Phil can barely look at. If he’s feeling particularly ambitious he’ll wash the plates and forks, even though he knows he’ll put them straight back in the pile in a minute.
“I just can’t,” Dan says out of the blue, one night, slumped into Phil’s side on the couch. He’s barely talked all day, and his voice has gone deep and rough with disuse again, like it was when they met.
“What part?” Phil says, automatic now.
“Any of it.”
“Okay.”
Dan huffs. They’ve had this conversation enough.
“Did you make it to the store?” Phil says, after a minute. He hates to ask, but – he has to find out, eventually, and at least Dan seems up for talking for the moment.
Dan takes a short breath, ribs catching. Phil knows what’s coming before he says it.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t – I couldn’t remember which store would have the good almond milk, and I – I went to two, but I forgot the almond milk, and I didn’t buy anything for dinner tomorrow, and –”
Phil shifts so he can get an arm around him. It’s more than Dan’s said in days.
“– I got home, and there wasn’t any sugar left, so no coffee, and – fuck, Phil,” he finishes.
“Okay,” Phil says mildly.
“It’s not,” Dan says, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment like he’ll lose it otherwise.
“It’s normal –”
“It’s not fucking normal,” he spits, “to not be able to go to the fucking grocery store to get some fucking food so your boyfriend doesn’t fucking starve. That’s not how anyone lives, Phil. You think – you think everyone else is out there, just –”
He’s thrashing in Phil’s grasp, suddenly high on adrenaline, breathing too fast to talk until it finally turns into miserable sobs.
“I don’t want this,” he manages at some point, but that just seems to make it worse; once it’s in the air he’s only more sure that it’s true.
Phil’s at a loss for words, if it’s normal and I love you and it’ll get better has never worked and won’t now. He shuffles awkwardly until he can draw Dan closer, whispering some pleasant nonsense under his breath every few minutes, until Dan’s worn himself out enough to stop shaking from it.
“This was supposed to be the easy part,” Dan finally mumbles, exhausted.
“I know, love,” Phil says. “I know it was.”
—
The next month is a blur of doctor’s appointments, of Dan bouncing around specialists and then having to revisit them again. Phil hurries home as early as he possibly can, trying to make enough time for them to talk.
“Do you think I forget to listen?” Dan says one night while Phil’s making dinner, absently rubbing the eraser of one of his new mechanical pencils around in a circle on the table.
“Um.”
“For the paperwork,” he clarifies, shooting Phil a wry smile. “I promise I won’t be that offended.”
“I mean… you don’t always, uh, pay attention for too long. But I think that’s just from the head bonk, right? It was worse when you first got home than it is now.”
“I didn’t do that before?”
Phil wavers for a minute, considering.
“I guess we didn’t know each other that long. Sometimes you were – I mean, maybe? You always kind of zone out. Not always. But sometimes, yeah. But you were always tired, then, so… I don’t know. Isn’t that normal?”
“Yeah,” Dan says, frowning down at the paper again. “Am I bad at organizing tasks and activities?”
“Yeah? But that’s definitely more recent.”
“I was always running behind, though. Before. I told you that, right?”
“You did. But it’s a farm, and you were doing most of it yourself – doesn’t everyone fall behind?”
Dan glares at the wall for a minute, considering, and then groans and flops facedown on the table. “Can we just give up on this and go buy ice cream? I’m actually dying.”
“Can we eat dinner first?”
“I don’t like this whole thing you’ve got going,” Dan whines, muffled by the table, “where you think dinner is more important than me, the love of your life, having a wild night with a bucket of ice cream.”
—
Dan’s fiddling, frowning down at the crumpled paper in his hands.
“What’s the first one?” Phil repeats.
“Um. So. She said I need to get a job? Not like, for the money, but just – to have a schedule, I guess. And to do stuff.”
“Are you up for that?” Phil says, slowly.
Dan sighs, puffing out his cheeks like a pufferfish.
“Not that I don’t think you wouldn’t be good at it,” Phil continues, “it’s just that –”
“I think – um. No. I don’t think I would be good at it, like. But she said that… it would be a routine, eventually, like the farm was. She thinks that part would be good.”
Phil frowns, reading between the lines.
“Do you think it would be good?”
Dan’s face twists into something even grumpier, for a moment.
“I’ll try it, I guess. The other one is, uh, kind of if you have time. She said to try cooking again, but I need to get the recipes from nan if we don’t have it, and – she thinks if I help you do it? Instead of just doing it all myself? Watching helps, I guess.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Dan’s face quirks into a little smile.
“She said to try not to get bossy when I can’t do stuff, so. Doctor’s orders. Um. And she said we should get a dog?”
Phil blinks. “Can she do that?”
“Well, kind of. She said some kind of pet. And a dog would give me a reason to go out, I guess, and there’s working dogs? Right? That work in therapy? Or something?”
“Your therapist told you to replace her with a dog?”
Dan heaves an exaggerated sigh and pokes Phil in the ribs, but he’s smiling again.
“They would work together, Phil. The dog doesn’t have a degree.”
Phil isn’t going to distract them more with the idea of a dog going to university. He’s just – proud, though, and he knows Dan would roll his eyes at that. Instead he takes a step closer and wraps his arms tight around him, pressing haphazard kisses wherever they land while Dan flails and squawks at the unexpected attention.
“You’re wiggly,” he says, planting a last one on Dan’s ear for good measure.
“You’re a menace,” Dan mutters, bopping him on the nose with the paper, before tucking his face against Phil’s neck so he’s properly out of reach. They stay there for a while, just breathing. Phil’s struck by how different they are now than they were a year ago, how warm and solid and whole Dan feels.
He feels Dan swallow as much as he hears it.
“Um, there’s one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“She said I should look into going back to school.”
Phil hums, nosing absently at Dan’s messy curls, breathing in the ridiculous cinnamon shampoo that he’s started insisting on, like they really have space for two separate bottles. “So the dog would get a degree,” he murmurs.
“Phil.”
“What?”
“I’m serious!” Dan says, “I actually think I want to, I mean. Not just because she said so.”
Phil shrugs, playing it up, but careful not to dislodge Dan from his hiding spot.
“And? I’m serious too. I want you and the dog to go to school. The dog should have a chance to pursue its dreams, Dan. What’s weird about that?”
Dan groans.
"You," he says, muffled and warm against Phil"s neck. "You"re the part that"s weird."