Chapter Text
2013
“How’ve you been, Dan?” PJ asks as they take a seat in the back corner of the pub. It’s nice having old friends that live in London, because Dan has spent a lot of lonely nights pacing around his dingy flat over the past months.
“Oh, you know. Busy with work,” Dan shrugs, because that’s really the only thing that’s been filling up his time lately. The only exciting news in his personal life that he could possibly bring up is that he’d switched laundry detergents and now his clothes are approximately 30% softer.
“Oh, yeah, congrats about the radio show!” PJ beams. “That’s brilliant.”
“Thanks,” Dan says, trying to grin, but the facial expression feels almost unfamiliar on his face nowadays. He’d started off as a BBC intern a last year and worked his ass off to climb the ladder there; pulling 70-hour work weeks, jumping at any opportunity to cover air time for radio hosts who were sick or out of town. And he’s finally been given his very own radio show. It’s everything he’d wanted when he’d moved to London, but it’s still not quite enough. “Yeah, it’s exciting news.”
PJ looks at him with such sympathy and understanding that it makes him want to cry.
“Peej, can I ask you something?” He says, staring quite hard at his pint of beer.
“Of course,” PJ says. He already knows exactly what Dan is about to ask.
Dan sighs. “How is he? Have you talked to him much lately?”
PJ takes a long sip of his beer. “He’s doing alright, Dan. He’s left YouTube, which I’m sure you already know—” (true, because Dan has had Phil on alert on all social media since 2009, and there hasn’t been a single notification since their break-up last year. It’s like he’s just fallen off the face of the earth, much to the confusion and dismay of all the fans, who still regularly get #WhereIsPhil trending on twitter.) “—and he’s gone for a complete career change. I think he’s as happy as he can be, considering the circumstances. Do you really want to know more?"
And Dan thinks about it—the fact that it has been an entire year since he’s last heard Phil’s laugh or woken up to Phil humming in the shower or spent an entire day just camping out on the couch watching anime with Phil, and the fact that he still misses Phil just as much a year later as he did the day after their break-up.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to know more.”
A week later, Dan posts his last video to YouTube, appropriately entitled ‘Goodbye Internet’, where he simply explains that he has a full-time job at the BBC and so he won’t be able to make YouTube videos anymore, but that people can tune in to hear him on the radio. The backlash is about what he’d expected—some people are sad, some people are angry, most are understanding, and many are worried he’s just going to disappear like Phil.
#WhereIsDan trends briefly, and Dan wonders if Phil is out there somewhere, also thinking about where Dan is and what he is up to. It hurts too much to think about though, and Dan finally goes through and removes his notification alerts from Phil for everything but Twitter and YouTube, because Dan still remembers being eighteen and getting his first tweet from Phil. And YouTube…well, that’s where it had all begun, and now neither of them are on YouTube so it doesn’t even matter anymore.
They make a strange, pathetic little procession the next day; Dan, Phil, and Ben—all suffering from varying degrees of hangover, slumping through the streets of Douglas on the way to Phil and Ben’s grandparents’ house. Dan and Phil aren’t really looking at each other much after—well, after whatever it was that had happened the two of them last night happened. Ben is still quietly dying over the fact that Dan had presumed that he and Phil were a couple interested in threesomes, so Dan isn’t really looking at him, either, because every time he does Ben starts shaking with silent laughter.
Mostly he just looks at his feet a lot as they walk, and he wishes he’d thought to take some acetaminophen that morning before leaving his hotel to meet Phil and Ben.
He can tell that Phil is still surprised by Dan’s presence on this outing. Earlier in the morning when Dan had appeared at the coffee shop that Ben had texted him the location of (how and when Ben had gotten his number, Dan doesn’t even want to know), Phil had raised one eyebrow upon seeing him willing and ready to go meet the Lester grandparents, almost as if in challenge.
But Dan hadn’t blinked or backed down, because he’s made it a point in his life over the past few years to do things that scare him or unnerve him or make him uncomfortable, and this little excursion is definitely going to do all three of those things.
He wishes he’d thought to make Aled or Alistair tag along with him, though, when they round a bend in the road and finally come upon the Lesters’ house, because it is literally the essence of what he wants to capture in this documentary—a simple country house tucked neatly away on a verdant bluff overlooking a rocky beach, tiny and isolated against the backdrop of the sea. Unfortunately he’d given Aled and Alistair a list of names from Ben’s party and told them to spend the day contacting people for interviews, and he doesn’t know that his iPhone camera could do the landscape justice.
“Wow,” he says, slightly breathless, stopping in his tracks to simply stare for a minute. Both Phil and Ben look over at him, unfazed by their surroundings, because they’ve probably walked this road hundreds of times before. But Phil’s gaze softens slightly when he sees that Dan is genuinely awestruck, and Ben grins and jostles Dan in the side with his elbow.
“Pretty epic, right? Here’s your answer for why people come back to Mann.”
And then they are at the house and Dan is suddenly being introduced to the grandparents and aunts and uncles and more cousins than he will ever be able to remember the names of. Phil’s parents are there too, which shouldn’t surprise him because he’d known that they had a house somewhere on the Isle. It’s still unsettling to see them again after so many years, though, and by the time lunch is over he feels thoroughly overwhelmed.
“I can wash the dishes,” Dan volunteers tentatively, needing a break from the table conversation, which is jumping from topic to topic in a very Lester-like manner. (So far he’s talked about growing perennials vs. annuals with Phil’s aunt, Zayn Malik leaving One Direction with Phil’s young cousin—who had shrieked so loudly upon hearing that Dan had met and interviewed One Direction that Phil’s grandma had threatened to take out her hearing aids for the rest of the meal—and dialectal differences between Mann and the rest of England with Ben, who keeps trying to make Dan quote posh lines from Winnie the Pooh.)
Of course, everyone immediately breaks into the typical ‘but you’re a guest; you can’t clean our house!’ protests. Everyone except Phil’s mum. (And Ben, too, who obligingly shoves all of his dirty dishes into Dan’s arms right then and there.)
“Oh, let him do the washing up if he wants to,” Phil’s mum says, waving everybody off. “You wash, I’ll dry, alright, dear?”
“Uh…okay,” Dan says nervously, because Mrs. Lester has to know that Dan had broken Phil’s heart all those years ago, and if anyone has a right to hate him, it’s her.
“Mum…” Phil says, a hint of warning in his voice.
“We’re just going to wash the dishes. Mind your own business, Philip,” Mrs. Lester says primly, collecting a stack of plates and motioning for Dan to follow her to the kitchen.
They unload all the dishes and then there is a moment where they have to just stand and wait for the sink to fill with hot water. Dan clears his throat three times and fails to think of any way to start a casual conversation with his ex’s mum. He’s missed Phil’s parents; he dimly recognizes that now. He’d spent a lot of time at their house during the Manchester years, going home with Phil for the home-cooked meals and the free cable.
Mrs. Lester still smells the same, vaguely like flowers and cinnamon, and it’s a complete shock to Dan when she turns to him after testing the water temperature and just holds her arms open for an embrace, not bothering to say anything.
He goes willingly into her arms, and his throat goes tight as she squeezes him in that way that all mums have of squeezing people. Dan doesn’t go home much, so his mum hasn’t hugged him in ages—actually, nobody has hugged him in ages.
“It’s so good to see you again, Dan,” Mrs. Lester says when she draws back, and he can tell that she really means it. “You’ve grown up so well—every time I hear your voice on the radio, I think to myself, ‘that’s my Daniel’.”
Her kindness, even after all these years, breaks something inside of him a little bit. He can only nod, unable to speak.
“You know, I can just as quickly wash these dishes by myself,” she says thoughtfully, studying his face. “Why don’t you go get a bit of fresh air? I know this family can be overwhelming, trust me—I was a wreck when I first started hanging around with them. And that Benjamin—well, don’t even get me started on him and the trouble he causes around here. Now go on; out of the kitchen.”
And he should really protest—it had been his idea to wash up in the first place, after all—but she is already shooing him away from the sink, and he can’t deny that having a moment to himself would be nice.
That’s how he finds himself sitting on a rocky outcrop, hugging his knees and watching waves crash onto the rocks below him.
“Mum said I’d find you out here,” Phil’s voice says from behind him a few minutes later. He walks to stand next to Dan slowly, and then takes a seat next to him, almost tentatively.
Dan just sighs, eyes focused on the waves. “Your mum is too nice to me.”
Phil doesn’t speak for a moment. “She misses you, you know,” Phil says. “I think she always thought we’d end up getting married someday.”
And Dan doesn’t have anything to say to that.
They settle into a long silence, but it’s not uncomfortable.
“I think I read somewhere that this entire Isle is only fifteen miles wide,” Dan finally remarks. “Doesn’t that ever make you feel trapped?”
Phil turns to the water, his gaze far away; fixed somewhere on the horizon, past all the rocks and stormy waves. “No. It makes me feel free, because we’re surrounded by the sea.”
A long pause.
“I told you that, you know,” Phil says, his voice neutral. “About the fifteen miles. On the phone once when I was here visiting my grandparents. You fell asleep as I talked about buying a house and building a future here.”
“I remember,” Dan says, his voice small, nearly lost to the sound of the waves.
“I wanted to buy that house for you,” Phil confesses, exhaling a bitter laugh. “But even back then, you wanted more than to live by the sea and make videos. You wanted the whole world. And I just wanted you—you were my whole world.”
He can feel the sleeve of Phil’s jacket brushing against his own arm, and yet, Phil has never felt further away from him than he does right now.
“Phil—”
“Don’t, Dan.” And then Phil is standing and walking away, leaving Dan to feel very small and very tired.
“Whatever Phil said to you, I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
Ben’s voice is the next to approach him, and he wonders what it is with the Lester family and reading him like an open book.
“Phil has the right to say whatever he wants to me after what I did to him,” Dan says honestly. “And he didn’t even say anything bad. It was all true, anyway.”
Ben takes a seat exactly where Phil had been not fifteen minutes earlier. “You need to lighten up, mate,” he grins, bumping his shoulder against Dan’s. “And by the way, Phil totally takes joint responsibility for your break-up. Naturally, it’d be nice if he actually told you this himself, but instead he just subjects me to hour-long soliloquies about it every time he’s drunk.”
“Phil talks about me? To you?”
“Jesus Christ, is that even a real question? You’re all I’ve heard about from him for six years now—honestly, it was a relief to finally meet you in person, because if I had to hear about how lovely your nose was or how brown your eyes were one more time, I swear—”
“Phil thinks I have a lovely nose?” Dan asks faintly. “And notably brown eyes?”
“Well, to be fair, the last few years of ranting have been more directed at all Phil’s regrets about your relationship, and less about your physical attributes—not that you don’t have ‘very brown eyes’ or whatever—if I ever start a crayon company I’ll name a color after you—but I haven’t heard much about that lately. I suspect I will the next time he and I drink together, though,” Ben explains, rolling his eyes long-sufferingly.
“Huh,” Dan says, startled by this revelation.
“Look, I don’t want to get involved or anything; I’m just telling you the facts. Now come back into the house, would you? I already know that you’re weird as fuck, but my family is going to start thinking you’re on some crazy hunger strike, sitting out here in the cold during dessert.”
It’s fairly offensive, but it’s said with such affection that Dan accepts Ben’s hand up and follows him into the house without complaining.
2014
Having job security and being free of YouTube gives Dan a lot of spare time to think in 2014. So he gives in to the existential crises for the first time in his life, and he finally figures himself out. He books a holiday to Japan because he’s always wanted to go, and sometimes, he decides, it’s okay to do nice things for yourself.
When he gets back from holiday, he officially comes out as bi. Well, sort of, anyway. He’s never going to be the type to make a big announcement out of his sexuality; to film a video about it or write a book about it. That may work well for other people, and he respects that, but it’s just not him.
Instead, he just starts seeing whoever he wants, no lies or pretenses, and it finally feels good and easy and right. If he goes to a party or a bar and wants to sleep with somebody and they want to sleep with him, he does it, regardless of gender.
Meanwhile, big things are happening in his career. His radio show is one of BBC’s highest rated, and he’s begun picking up a lot more presenting work as well—interviewing celebrities, hosting backstage events at awards shows—all of England is suddenly charmed by Dan Howell; the tall, awkwardly relatable guy from BBC.
He makes loads of new friends—there is still PJ and Chris, but there’s also Grimmy and Jameela from the radio, and Louise and Zoe and Jack Howard from YouTube.
"You know,” Louise tells him one night when they’ve been drinking heavily at Zoe’s book publishing party. “I really don’t know why you’re still single. You’re such a catch!”
“I had a really bad break-up two years ago,” Dan shouts over the music, honest in a way that is only brought out by alcohol.
“Two years is such a long time, though! Why don’t you get back out there and try again?” She asks, genuinely curious.
“It wasn’t really that kind of break-up, Louise,” Dan says, wondering how on earth to explain Phil and what Phil had meant to him to her in just a sentence or two. “It’s the kind of thing where I don’t think I’ll ever actually get over it.”
And Louise is smart—so much smarter than him, emotionally. “That sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing then,” she muses thoughtfully. “Maybe you should do something about fixing it before it’s too late.”
“Maybe,” Dan says, because he’s drunk and he can be honest with himself and admit that he’s come an awfully long way, but he’s still not quite there yet.
Time passes quickly after the trip to the Lester grandparents’ house. Dan spends his days interviewing Phil and Ben’s friends, and his nights hanging out with Phil and Ben at Phil’s flat.
He learns a lot about Mann—there’s no university on the island, so every person he interviews who is uni-educated had had to make the choice to come back at some point, for some reason or another.
Phil’s friend Sarah, for example, is one of the only people alive under the age of 30 who speaks Mann’s native language, and she spends her days teaching the language to the island’s schoolchildren in hopes of keeping it alive. There’s a young vet named George who’d singlehandedly stopped an operation to catch Manx cats and illegally smuggle them to be sold on the mainland. He goes to the news station where Phil works and interviews the anchors there, and they let him stay and watch Phil do his broadcast, and he marvels at Phil’s ease behind the camera; his focus and the way he somehow makes the weather report entertaining and vaguely engaging. He wouldn’t be out of place in the BBC Radio 1 broadcast studio, to be honest.
He also gradually learns that all of Phil’s friends know exactly who he is. Literally all of them.
“I’m just so glad you’re back in Phil’s life again, no matter if it’s only for a week or two,” Sarah gushes after he’s finished interviewing her, which is…nice? Odd? Creepy considering he’s only just met her? “Did he ever tell you that some friends set us up on a blind date when we first met a few years ago? The date was a nightmare, but we’re still really good friends.”
“Phil always stops by the clinic when he has a moment,” George tells him. “But he has to stand outside to look at the cats since he’s allergic…oh, although I guess you obviously know that already, right?”
“Hey, mate, if you’re looking to move to Mann, I could find you a flat right near Phil’s,” Brandon, Phil’s friend who happens to be a real estate agent, earnestly promises him literal seconds after they meet for the first time.
In the evenings, he and Phil and Ben sit around Phil’s lounge and drink beers and watch crappy TV programming that is clearly aimed at the elderly demographic of the isle. It’s weird how not-weird it is, returning to hanging out with Phil again.
Ben is there too, of course, but sometimes he mysteriously ‘has to go to bed early’ at night because he ‘has a thing the next day’, which means that he kicks Dan and Phil out of the flat so that he can ‘sleep’ in the lounge, and Dan and Phil are forced to go on long walks through the quiet streets of Douglas to while away the hours. (Ben can says what he wants about ‘not getting involved’, but Dan is totally on to him, because he’s on a break from school and has nowhere to be in the mornings, and he’s always still awake when they get back.)
He doesn’t mind, though—he and Phil ease into something that’s not quite friendship (because after all they’ve been through, they’ll never be able to just be friends), but the sexual tension that had been there the night of the party has dimmed into both of them being very sober and not quite knowing how to orbit around one another with this new dynamic between them. There is a lot of accidental arm brushing as they wander the streets, and once or twice Phil’s hand comes to rest on the small of Dan’s back to steer him somewhere as they walk.
It’s crazy how the simple momentary pressure of Phil’s fingers against his back can make him feel like his stomach is melting into his shoes; that this is the most sexual attraction he has experienced in three years in spite of having slept with roughly a dozen people in that same time frame.
He keeps his hands to himself, though, because he has no clue what the fuck is happening between the two of them, and he doesn’t think Phil does either. Instead, he tries to just be content and enjoy the time they have together. Being on bad terms with Phil has been quietly hurting him more than he’s realized, and now that that weight is no longer pressing down on his chest after three years, he feels a strange lightness with his every thought and movement.
But then comes the morning when he realizes that he has really interviewed everyone there is to interview, except for Ben and Phil.
“I’ve booked us all a flight for tomorrow morning,” Alistair tells Dan when he finds the two cameramen eating breakfast in the hotel lobby. “We’re due to meet with the BBC producers in the afternoon.”
“So soon?” Dan asks, stealing a packet of jam from Alistair for his toast.
“Soon? We’ve been here for just over a week and I think I’ve aged 70 years during that time,” Aled grumbles. “Not all of us are out here having a romantic vacation, Howell. Some of us actually want our contracts renewed for next year.”
Which…shit. It’s contract renewal time again, which is a tense time of the year for everyone. This is the first year that Dan honestly isn’t worried—he knows he’s a huge asset to the BBC—but he can understand why Aled and Alistair aren’t exactly thrilled to be here.
“Just two more interviews,” he promises them, not even bothering to address the ‘romantic vacation’ jab. They grumble good-naturedly as he drags them with all the camera equipment over to Phil’s flat that afternoon.
Ben’s interview is as interesting as Phil had promised it would be—apparently he’s doing a doctorate in history at Leeds and wants to return to the isle and start up a proper university here, which, if anyone can do that, Ben can. Phil isn’t around because his weird broadcasting schedule means he has to be at the news station for a few hours in the morning to do the morning report, and a few hours in the late afternoon for the evening report. He can sense that Aled and Alistair have no desire to spend their last night sitting around on Phil’s couch and waiting for Phil to finish reporting on the weather, so he sends them back to the hotel with the promise that he can conduct the interview on his own.
“Honestly, the BBC forgets that I got my start on YouTube—it’s not like I need either of you,” he says with a cheeky grin.
“Have a nice date—oops, I mean interview,” Alistair says sweetly as they pack up and leave.
“Stop the bullying!” Dan shouts after them, before flopping next to Ben on the couch to watch Jeremy Kyle until Phil arrives home.
They end up taking a walk in the opposite direction of where they usually wander. Phil had seemed unusually tired and down when he’d arrived back from the 5:00 news, and all he’d said was: “Storms predicted tonight. You want to go for a walk now before it rains?”
And Dan had nodded and grabbed his bag and wordlessly followed.
“So,” Phil says after they’ve walked for a good twenty minutes. They’re on the road out of town, and Phil seems to be walking with a strange sort of purpose. “This is your last night here, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Dan says quietly, because there’s really nothing to say beyond that. As nice as this past week has been, life outside is still spinning onwards, in spite of this private little world on Mann.
“I don’t think I really want to be interviewed,” Phil says. “Can we just…hang out tonight?”
“Okay,” Dan says easily, because they already have more than enough footage for the documentary and he's pretty much willing to agree to anything Phil asks of him.
“I want to show you my favorite place on the isle,” Phil says when they reach a small fork in the road. Naturally, Phil leads them down the rocky, muddy path and not the nice paved road. It’s getting dark and chilly, and yet there is nowhere Dan would rather be right now than following Phil out onto the beach as the sun dips into the horizon, unable to feel his fingers with the cold; shoes quickly filling up with sand as they traipse along.
“It’s…perfect,” he breathes when they come to stand on the ridge of a sand dune, overlooking the beach and the water. It’s a dark, muted sunset—Dan doesn’t need an advanced degree in meteorology to be able to feel the storm coming on—but it somehow suits the current mood of the little cove they are looking down upon. He can only imagine what the place must look like on a sunny day—the deep blue-gray of the sea, the bright green of the meadow surrounding them; the smell of salt and brine; the soft warmth of sun against skin. It all feels like somewhere that he’s visited in his dreams before but can’t quite call to coherent memory.
There is a little white house up on a hill, just off where they are standing on the beach. It’s quite similar to Phil’s grandparents’ house, but different at the same time—the whole place has a wild, lonely feel to it—as though the world outside could end and nations could crumble and human life could disappear, but this house and this bluff would still be here, untouched and unspoiled.
“You think so? My whole family thinks I’m crazy for being so interested in the lot. It’s been for sale for almost a year, and so far nobody’s expressed any interest, except Brandon. And that’s just because he’s the realtor and it’s literally his job to sell it.”
“You should buy it,” Dan says, blurting the words out before he is even aware that’s he’s thinking them. “If it would make you happy, you should do it. Who cares what other people think?”
Phil gives him a long, considering look. “Yeah?” He asks, and it sounds like a simple question, but it’s not, because the statement Dan had just made went against everything younger Dan believed in and stood for in wanting to hide their relationship.
“Yeah.” Phil’s cheeks have gone pink with cold, and Dan suddenly, arbitrarily wants dart forward and kiss them. “I came out, you know,” he remarks after a long minute. “I mean, I didn’t like…make a video or an announcement or anything. But everyone in my life knows I’m bi now.”
“See, I told you you’d get there,” Phil grins, nudging Dan’s shoulder with his own and sounding genuinely proud and delighted.
And suddenly Dan can’t take it any longer. “Why are you being so nice to me?” He explodes, throwing his hands in the air helplessly. “Seriously, this whole week you haven’t—” you haven’t tried to hurt me the way I hurt you, his mind supplies. “You’ve just…been nice,” he trails off lamely.
Phil, as always, hears exactly what Dan hasn’t said. “Look, Dan, you hurt me. But I hurt you, too—I know I did, you don’t have to pretend otherwise.” It is almost completely dark now, but he can see the seriousness of Phil’s words in the set of his jaw through the shadows.
“We both did things wrong, you know? So we can either be mad and hurt for the rest of time, I figure, or we can forgive each other—and I forgave you ages ago. So I mean…I guess the only question now is, can you forgive me?” Phil’s voice is frank; earnest. Full of promise.
And it’s so much more than Dan deserves, but he wants Phil’s forgiveness so badly, the same way he wants to breathe and to eat and to sleep in a warm place at night.
“Yes,” he says, and it comes out sounding like a relieved laugh. “Yes, of course.”
And naturally, because Dan’s life is like some sort of horrible Lifetime movie, this is the exact instant that the heavens finally break open, and then ice cold rain is streaming down Dan’s cheeks and plastering his fringe to his forehead and soaking through his clothes like a benediction, but it doesn’t even matter and he’s still laughing, holding his palms up to catch raindrops.
“Uh, Dan…I’m all for having inspirational moments in the rain,” Phil shouts over the downpour, shaking Dan’s arm. “But your camera—”
Which. Yes, the state-of-the-art camera that belongs to the BBC and is currently slung over his shoulder in a rather thin messenger bag is a cause for some concern. A messenger bag that also contains— “Oh, fuck, my laptop!” Dan shouts, taking off after Phil in a dead sprint for shelter in the white house. Phil is laughing as he runs, because the only time Dan will properly run is to protect his technology, and then they are darting into the house and slamming the door behind them as the gale picks up force.
“The door isn’t kept locked?” Dan asks, breathlessly rifling through his bag to check that nothing had sustained any water damage.
“Nah. Crime isn’t really an issue on Mann. I come here to think sometimes, and it’s always open.” Phil listens intently to the rain while timing it on his watch. “I think we might be stuck here for a while until this works itself out,” he says, his face apologetic.
“Some weatherman you are,” Dan says, mock-disapproving as he shrugs out of his wet jacket. The house is largely unfurnished—there’s a table and some rickety-looking chairs in the kitchen, and a well-worn couch tucked in front of the fireplace—but it seems clean and has working electricity. And it has Phil. So all in all, not a bad situation.
“Weather by the sea is always hard to predict,” Phil says mildly. He seems to be forcing himself not to look at Dan, and Dan realizes that the soaked, thin cotton of his shirt is clinging obscenely to his torso. “Here, there’s a bunch of blankets in the closet; you can dry off.”
“Sure,” Dan says easily, kicking off his shoes and stripping off his t-shirt as Phil rummages through the closet. He doesn’t know why, but this feels completely different to the night of the party, when Phil had looked at him and he’d run. He doesn’t want to run anymore; not after what they’d just said on the beach.
Phil turns around and visibly falters at the sight of Dan’s shirtlessness, almost dropping his stack of blankets.
“Is it warm in here, or is it just me?” Phil blurts out. “I’m going to go start a fire.” Which doesn’t quite make sense, but Dan isn’t going to protest any additional warmth right now. Phil thrusts the blankets into Dan’s arms and begins grabbing logs from a small stack of firewood that Dan hadn’t noticed earlier.
“You and fire? Should I be alarmed?” Dan asks, quickly drying off with the smallest blanket. He begins laying the rest of the blankets—seriously, why does one abandoned little house need so many blankets?—out on the floor in front of the fire, stacking them on top of each other to create a makeshift blankets-mattress.
“Hey, I’ve learned a lot in three years of living here! Ben even made me go camping with him. Twice,” Phil says, turning to grin at Dan from where he is crouched, coaxing small flames into life.
“It’s like we don’t even have anything in common anymore,” Dan deadpans, passing a spare blanket to Phil, who stands so that he can dry off too. The room instantly feels warmer as the fire builds, soft light from the flames dancing off the walls.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Phil says, his voice low and conspiratorial as he tosses his own t-shirt and the damp blanket over the back of the couch to dry. Dan steps closer, bridging the space between the two of them, and Phil visibly swallows before continuing. “I hated every second of it.”
“That’s not a secret, Phil,” Dan says, and he’s so close he can feel the heat from Phil’s skin radiating outwards.
“No?” Phil says, and his cheeks are flushed and his expression is slightly dazed as he meets Dan’s gaze, as though he doesn’t quite remember exactly what they’re talking about. He reaches out slowly and gently—so gently—brushes a damp piece of hair off Dan’s forehead. “Your hair is curling,” he murmurs, dark eyes flickering down to Dan’s mouth, and then they are both leaning in towards one another, like magnets, like plants stretching for the sun’s warmth, like all other inevitable things—life, death, heartbreak. Taxes. Small moments of happiness.
There is an instant before their lips meet where they both pause; just a hair’s breadth of distance between them.
“I’m sorry I left, for the record,” Dan exhales, barely a whisper.
“I’m sorry I let you go,” Phil returns, and then they are crashing together, nothing shy or tentative about it.
And Dan had thought, this entire time since the night of the party, that Phil touching him would feel like shattering and disintegrating and splintering apart all at once; an onslaught of painful memories and could-have-beens and misunderstandings, all from the slightest brush of Phil’s lips against Dan’s neck, or Phil’s fingers skimming over the skin of Dan’s stomach. But now that it’s happening, it’s the exact opposite; as though all his rough edges and jagged cracks have been softened and smoothed over and filled in with light; as though he’s been drowning in stormy black waves and a hand has closed around his wrist and pulled him ashore.
The pressure of Phil’s lips is somehow completely new and completely familiar all at once, and Dan just fucking melts into it; allows his lips to part and loses himself to everything but the way that Phil’s fingers tangle in his hair and the way their bodies still fit perfectly together, even if it’s in a totally different manner after all these years.
They kiss for long moments; not a desperate build-up, but more a deep and languid release. Phil eventually draws back for air and huffs out a laugh, breath warm on Dan’s jaw.
“This is honestly the worst place for this to happen; trapped in an empty house—I don’t have anything, and I don’t even know if this place has running water, much less condoms or lube—”
And Dan is feeling a little lightheaded on account of how much he cannot believe this is actually happening, but his mind seizes in on the key words of Phil’s sentence. “Toiletry bag,” he says, feverishly grabbing for his discarded messenger bag. “This is my travel bag for work; I never know how long radio events or award shows are going to last so I always bring toiletries just in case—”
He triumphantly pulls a condom and a packet of lube out, but then realizes the implications of the fact that he so readily has both available.
“I’ve had sex in the past three years,” he blurts out, suddenly feeling a need to explain himself. “Multiple times.”
“Okay,” Phil shrugs easily. “Me too. Only once or twice—it never felt right, in the end.”
“It was more than once or twice for me,” Dan says truthfully. “And sometimes it was really good, but at the end of the day, if I'm being honest, they were never you.”
“Well, here I am,” Phil says, pale and beautiful by the light of the fire.
And then they fall into the nest of blankets together, and Phil is so gentle and reverent as he opens Dan up and pushes inside, and as Dan shudders and comes undone beneath Phil's fingers, between whispers and feverish kisses, he thinks about how this thing between them feels like stepping across the threshold after a long journey away from home. And he thinks about things falling apart and then falling back together, being made whole again against all odds. And he wonders what it all means.
There is a brief moment of confusion when Dan awakes. He’s immediately aware of the fact that he’s been asleep on a very uncomfortable surface—a closer inspection reveals a rather flimsy pile of blankets on a hardwood floor—and that he is also, paradoxically, the most comfortable that he can remember being for a long time, in spite of an aching back, a desperate need to pee, and the unforgiving morning sun pressing against his eyelids.
The extreme comfort probably has something to do with the 6’2” of Phil Lester that is pressed up against his side. His confused shifting seems to have woken Phil as well, because Phil is blinking sleepily and staring at Dan as though he’s not totally sure if he’s awake or dreaming.
“You’re here,” Phil mumbles sleepily, sounding surprised. Dan is sure his own hair looks like a bird’s nest, but Phil’s has formed itself into a quiff overnight, and there is a hint of stubble along his jaw that makes Dan want to never leave this makeshift bed again, but—
“No, no, why are you getting up? It’s cold,” Phil grumbles, because Dan is jolting out of their nest of blankets, suddenly recalling that he has a flight to catch in—less than two hours according to his dying iPhone.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Dan mutters under his breath as he collects his scattered clothes and toiletry bag and makes a run for the bathroom, cringing as he pulls on his still-damp jeans and stiffly-dried t-shirt. He splashes a bit of water on his face and allows himself the indulgence of taking a minute to brush his teeth, because it feels like something had died in his mouth overnight.
Phil is more awake by the time Dan returns, sitting up and stretching. Dan has to look away from the way Phil’s muscles expand and contract as he stretches to work out the tightness in his back, because if he looks he’ll want to touch, and then he’ll never be able to leave.
“You’re going,” Phil says, and it’s not a question.
“I have a meeting with my producers in London this afternoon,” Dan says. He has a headache and he has no clue where he and Phil stand right now.
“Okay,” Phil says.
Silence stretches between them for a long minute. Dan suddenly, desperately doesn’t want to go—doesn’t want to return to life without Phil in it. Doesn’t know how he’s going to return to a lonely apartment and 50-hour work weeks now that he’s had a taste of life otherwise again.
“You should text me. Or tweet me. If you want,” Dan says suddenly. “I don’t—I don’t want it to be like it was before between us.”
“We could Skype,” Phil suggests with a grin, standing and pulling on his boxers.
“You and I are like a walking commercial for fucking Skype,” Dan says, shaking his head and forcing a grin onto his face. “I could visit again,” he offers tentatively. “Or you could come see me in London, if you ever wanted.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Phil says politely, and Dan can hear the underlying message; visits are nice, but kind of meaningless. You visit your mates at uni. You visit your gran on Easter. You don't visit your ex of three years. But Dan doesn’t know what else he can do—just refuse to ever leave this island again; completely abandon the BBC? Quit his job and start farming sheep here on Mann and spend the rest of his life trying to get Phil to love him again?
All of those options feel too huge and scary, and Dan has always been better at walking away than facing the big things. I would stay if you wanted me to, he wants to say. But instead he goes.
2015
There are initials carved into the wall of the Manchester train station.
Behind the vending machines, down the corridor from the Starbucks. Dan knows, because he’d been the one to carve them, all the way back in 2009, when he and Phil had ducked back there for a quick make-out session before Dan had to catch his train back to Reading one winter weekend. It had dissolved into a fifteen-minute grope, naturally, and then they’d just stood with their foreheads pressed together, counting the days until they could be together again. Those early days had been happy ones in spite of the distance, kisses stolen and entire lives revolving around when they could see each other next.
It’s 2015 now, though, and the Dan that visits the Manchester Piccadilly vending machines now is a different Dan, on his way to catch a ferry to the Isle of Man to film a BBC documentary.
The initials are still there when Dan stops to buy a soda, and they have been worn away slightly by time, impossible to see unless you know to look for them. The plaster of the wall crumbles slightly as Dan presses his finger over the indents, leaving dust on his fingertips. He is suddenly furious, incapable of seeing anything but the ghost of his younger self, happy and innocent, carving their initials here and thinking their impression would last forever in the wall; that he and Phil would last forever in the world.
He fumbles in his bag for a marker or a pen, ready to vindictively cross the carvings out; to scribble over them until they are illegible—when something else catches his eye amongst all the other bits of graffiti. In between all the other scrawled messages—‘fuck the police’ and ‘Meg loves Dean’—someone has written 'where you used to be, there is a hole in the world' with a steady hand and a black sharpie.
And Dan knows that quote—it comes from the correspondences of Edna St. Vincent Millay and it had appeared in an anthology of poetry and essays that Phil had kept from his uni days. They’d read it together one lazy Saturday morning in Manchester years and years ago.
“You read it,” Phil had said, his head pillowed on Dan’s lap as they’d idly flipped through the pages. “You’re the one with the nice posh accent; it’ll sound better.”
“No, I want you to read it to me,” Dan had said, making sad, hopeful eyes at Phil until he’d acquiesced.
And even now, all these years later, he can still hear Phil’s voice ringing in his ears, starting off shy and growing more confident as he read on. He can still remember how they'd fallen back to sleep at 2 in the afternoon that day, drifting off between lazy kisses just because they could. And, though he hadn't been aware of it until this exact moment six years later, he still remembers the entire phrase:
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
Dan traces over the words slowly, and then puts the marker away. He has a ferry to catch, after all.
There are initials carved into the wall of the Manchester train station. Behind the vending machine, down the corridor from the Starbucks. Dan leaves them be.
Dan is about to walk into his contract negotiation meeting—straight after getting off a flight and rushing to a meeting with the documentary producers; this day is the worst—when his phone starts blowing up with Twitter notifications.
He’s not unfamiliar with being a source of Twitter buzz—it’s happened often enough throughout the years, and it’s usually for some very weird and random reason (the time he ate a satsuma at a One Direction concert and accidentally became a meme comes to mind). But this is a Twitterstorm the likes of which he’s never seen before.
And as he warily scrolls through his notifications and realizes what had happened, he feels his stomach sink, because he and Phil have been caught out.
By a tweet from the Isle of Man news station, of all things.
He can understand why they’d posted the picture—they’re a small little studio, with less than a thousand followers on Twitter and absolutely no knowledge of Dan and Phil’s backstory and the significance of the two of them being photographed together after three years. To whoever ran the social media accounts at the station, it had probably been just a throwaway little promo tweet; one that would get ten favorites and maybe a couple of retweets. But now #WhereAreDanandPhil is trending, and the tweet currently has over 10K retweets.
At first glance, the picture looks completely innocent: it’s from the day that Dan had visited the studio for interviews, and Phil is standing in front of the camera and doing his weather broadcast like usual. The caption simply says ‘our weatherman Phil Lester had an old friend visit him at the studio today!’ and there’s the really incriminating bit of the photo: in the corner, Dan is watching Phil speak, an unmistakably fond smile on his face.
Dan can only imagine how the tweet had been unearthed from obscurity—probably someone’s grandmother or auntie who lived on the island had seen it and sent it on to a former fan with a ‘hey, aren’t these those two guys you used to be obsessed with?’ and it had all spiraled out of control from there.
The fans seem to have dissolved into a state of mass hysteria, and Dan consciously decides that he doesn’t care. Phil is important to him, and he’s not ashamed of that anymore. He just regrets all of this happening so suddenly, because Phil had never asked to be thrust back into the limelight again, and yet, here he is.
Dan is wondering if he should tweet something to calm everyone down, but then his manager John is calling him into the meeting and he can do nothing but put his phone on silent and follow John into the conference room.
When he finally has his revelation, naturally it’s in front of the entire board of BBC directors.
He’s sitting in his contract negotiation meeting, completely tuning out all the execs and financial advisers speaking to him; studiously ignoring John kicking his chair in an attempt to get him to pay attention.
It’s really simple, in the end: he thinks about crawling into an empty bed tonight alone in his London flat. And he wonders what the hell he is doing in London at this meeting, when he could be on the Isle of Man with Phil.
“This is so stupid,” he says.
And then promptly realizes that everyone in the room is staring at him. Across from him, John is glaring daggers.
“I mean…not this job. Or you people. I’m stupid. I’m the stupid one,” he tries to amend. John claps a hand over his face and looks like he wants to push Dan out the nearest office window.
“I don’t want to do the radio show next year,” Dan announces, and several pairs of eyebrows shoot up. “I want to go back to YouTube. Some personal stuff has come up in my life lately and I need time to figure it all out. I’m sorry if that puts you in a tight corner. Thanks for your time.”
Then he is standing and striding out of the room, never looking back once. John catches up to him in the hallway as he waits for the elevator.
“What the hell was that?!” John asks, face nearly purple.
“Thanks for all your help these past few years, John,” Dan says politely. “I don’t know if I’ll be needing your services anymore. I don’t really know anything yet.”
“Where the fuck are you going?” John calls as Dan turns and walks away.
Isle of Man, he wants to say. “I’m taking the stairs. Elevator’s a bit slow today, don’t you think?”
Just a few hours later, he is back on a ferry heading out to Mann, silently freaking out a little bit.
But then he gets his first Twitter notification from Phil in over three years, and it feels like a flashing neon sign from the universe and every single god out there that he is headed in the right direction.
Phil seems to have taken it upon himself to step in and address some of the madness happening on Twitter and Tumblr at the moment, but he’s only made it worse; suddenly returning from 3 years of dead silence. Dan scrolls through the endless stream of ‘oh my god this is the best day of my life!!!!!!111!!’ that is happening in his Twitter feed before finally working up the courage to read what Phil had tweeted him.
amazingphil:
@danisnotonfire PINOF 4 soon?
Which is so bittersweetly perfect that it nearly steals his breath away. And as he stands on the ship and looks out over the waves as the mainland grows smaller and smaller behind him, he thinks about how Phil had known exactly what to tweet, even after all these years. How PJ had looked at him with such compassion and been so gentle when Dan had asked about Phil for the first time after the break-up. How Louise had told him that some things are worth trying to fix, even if they’re big and scary.
And he thinks that there is something very important about the fact that he’s the one quitting his job and dramatically jetting off to Mann. Because he’d been the one to leave in the first place, it’s right that he comes back in the end.
He takes a deep breath.
And he tweets back.
@amazingphil already on my way.
He thinks about going to Phil’s flat—it would be the logical place to look for Phil, after all, since he lives there and all. But something stops him at the last minute after he gets off the ferry.
In the end, his feet know exactly where to take him, because maybe he has been floundering for the past week, trying to get a handle on the balance between himself and Phil, but Phil has been solid as a rock the entire time. Because maybe Phil had always known. Because maybe Phil had just been waiting for him this entire time.
“That was fast,” Phil says, biting his lip to downplay a grin when Dan crests the sandy ridge leading to the lonely little white house. Phil stands, dusting sand off his jeans and tucking a bookmark into the book he’d been reading before Dan had approached. The sun is beginning to sink below the horizon, and he can’t believe everything that has transpired between this sunset and the last.
“Yeah, well…I was already on the way when I saw your tweet. I think…I think I may have just quit my job?” Dan announces, his voice a little faint as the realization fully sinks in for the first time since he’d walked out of the BBC.
“I went to see Brandon after you left this morning,” Phil remarks, casually leaning against the door frame. “I bought the house.” His smile is radiant as he looks at the empty place where the ‘for sale’ sign had been just last night.
“That’s brilliant,” Dan says softly, stepping closer, because he has never meant any words more than he means these next ones:
“I want to try again.” A deep breath. In. Out. Like the waves. “I shouldn’t have left the first time all those years ago. And I shouldn’t have left again this morning. I’m tired of wasting time and fucking things up between us, Phil; I’m so tired. And I’d completely understand if you didn’t want me back in your life, but I can wait, in case you ever change your mind. I’m serious, I’ll ask Brandon to find me a flat here; I’ll wait for as long as it takes—”
“Dan,” Phil says, interrupting him before he can really get rambling. “Dan, why do you think I bought this house? It’s our fresh start.”
And he makes it sound so simple, like they can just forget all the hurt; pick up where they’d left off and keep going, just like that; their two lives growing back into one, eternally waxing and waning together like the moon and the tides.
“Do you really mean that?” Dan asks, his voice no more than a whisper.
“The house is for us, Dan. It was always meant to be for us, not just for me.” And Phil’s words have the sound of past and present and future all wrapped up into one, and Dan still remembers being 19 and listening to Phil spin dreams of them owning a house by the sea one day, and this isn’t how he’d ever imagined it all working out in a million years, but they’re both here now, and maybe they can still have all of that, today and tomorrow and all the days after that.
The moment is then completely ruined by something black falling from the sky. Phil grabs him and automatically yanks him away from nearly being clipped on the forehead by…a shingle from the roof.
“Er…yeah, this might be a good time to mention that the house needs a bit of fixing up? Apparently the pipes leak? And the shingles are dropping like flies.” Phil shrugs apologetically. “I almost got decapitated while I was reading earlier. Adventures in home-ownership, I guess.”
“Jesus,” Dan groans, watching in disbelief as another shingle falls with a light gust of wind. “Yes, ‘adventure’ is one way to describe this, I’m sure,” he snorts derisively, but he still smiles like a complete idiot when Phil reaches out and pokes him in the dimple and says “okay, can we make out now that we’ve done the spilling-our-emotions thing?”
And then he almost cries of laughter when Phil jokingly tries to carry him over the threshold—“it’s symbolic, Dan”—and nearly puts his back out.
And then he actually does cry a little bit later that night when they have an enthusiastic repeat of the previous night’s sexual activities, because he doesn’t have to leave this time, and the wind is howling outside and the beach is going to be littered with shingles the next morning, but it’s okay, because they can pick up and rebuild together.
2016
The BBC is calling.
Dan still works for them—he only does one radio show a month (the Monday Internet Takeover), but he still has some presenting work lined up for the coming months—awards shows, a new gaming documentary. He’s glad that they’ve been so willing to work around him suddenly uprooting himself and moving to an island, but Jesus fuck, do they have to call so early in the morning?
“Hnnnghhh,” Phil groans sleepily as Dan wrestles out of his arms to grab his obnoxiously jingling phone. It’s John, so he lets it go to voicemail—because sure enough, John has already sent him five texts explaining exactly why he is calling and exactly why Dan should answer.
He wants Dan to send him a tentative list of the music he’ll play on the radio next week by the end of the morning, and Dan hasn’t even begun thinking about it yet. Honestly, as fun as the Internet Takeover is, the radio isn’t his highest priority at the moment.
For now he and Phil are just trying to ease back into YouTube, to test the waters and see if they still have fans out there (they do) and if YouTube is even something they still enjoy doing (it is, far more than Dan remembers ever enjoying it before). But Phil has mentioned that he is open to the idea of eventually trying to break into radio work as well; that maybe in a few years they could move to London together and try out the Dan and Phil radio show thing that Dan had pushed so hard for back in 2012.
"Do you ever think that we’re doing things backwards?” Dan had asked Phil a few months earlier, sitting on the beach at night. “We’re basically living like retired people out here right now, and then we talk about settling down and spending our thirties and forties in London. It’s a bit mixed up, isn’t it?”
“I think,” Phil had said thoughtfully in response, skipping a rock and watching it hop across the surf before it disappeared, “that you and I have never done a single conventional thing in our entire relationship. So why should we start now?”
And they have plans; all sorts of plans—for collab videos, for a gaming channel, maybe even for a book or a tour someday. Phil would love living in London once he got used to it, of that Dan is certain. But for now, they also have this—quiet mornings in bed together, relearning each other’s bodies. Peaceful evenings walking along the beach, staring up at starry skies, hands intertwined. Busy afternoons restoring the house and filming vidoes; Sunday lunches with Ben and the rest of Phil’s family.
“Why are you getting up?” Phil whines.
“John wants to start planning for next week’s radio show,” Dan shrugs, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.
“That’s next week; tell him to leave you alone and let you sleep.”
“You are so grumpy in the morning,” Dan laughs, raising one eyebrow. “And why should I listen to you instead of John, exactly?”
“Because I can offer you a morning blow job, and he can’t?” Which, to be fair, is a pretty convincing argument.
"You’re the worst,” Dan says, but he laughs and falls back into bed, allowing Phil to grab his phone, silence it, and throw it into a pile of dirty clothes across the room. “Next time I see John, I’ll tell him you hold him in high esteem,” Dan jokes, before being silenced by Phil’s lips against his own.
“Stay,” Phil whispers against his mouth. Dan stays.