Archive of Our Own ^beta

The scent of sugar hugs the air with its cloying fragrance. To his left, a bright red wagon with bubbled yellow writing on the side offers popcorn, to his right a blue one with candyfloss. Dan feels sick.

"Hey." An elbow catches him in the ribs, tearing his gaze from the bright colours. "You okay?"

Dan would really like to be okay. Overhead, the big wheel turns slowly and someone far off shouts something unintelligible. A carnival is no place to be when he feels like this.

Inside his head has been a dead, flat, soggy chunk of nothing for about a month. Today, he'd woken up with the tiniest flicker of energised promise and let Nick and Ashley drag him here. He's starting to regret it, the shift to this technicolour hellscape is almost too much of a contrast.

"Dan?" Nick says. He doesn't elbow him this time but his face says that it's because he thinks Dan might break if he does.

"I'm good," Dan says.

"Sure?" Ashley is holding a toffee apple that is already starting to slip down the fragile stick it came on. Every now and again, she nibbles a bite from its side, clearly favouring the sweet, golden caramel over the innards of the fruit.

"Mm hm." Dan nods, squints at the bright lights sent up from the nearby hook-a-duck stall. Someone won something.

"It's good to get out," Ashley says, affecting a wide smile that shows a small piece of apple skin caught between her bottom incisors.

"What do you want to do first?" Nick asks.

Sit in the dark, Dan thinks. He scans the field, looking for something that is neither brightly coloured nor overly loud and settles on the photo booth tucked in between the waltzers and the haunted house.

"Let's take pictures," Dan says.

Ashley follows his gaze across the field and, just as Nick is groaning at the idea, shoves what is left of her toffee apple - which is basically just an apple and a slowly bending stick at this point - into the bin, and strides away in the direction of the booth.

"Come on then," she calls back over her shoulder. "Before someone takes it."

The grass underfoot is springy with rain that used to be here but had left before the fair arrived, chased out by bright lights as if unable to stand up in the face of such an insistent call for joy. Dan, unlike the rain, is finding it all too simple to persist in his dreary drizzle.

The three of them cram into the small photo booth. A light flashes, Nick's and Ashley's hands rest on his shoulders, and Dan tries to make his face into a mask that covers the truth of how he is feeling.

When it's over, they pile out again onto soggy, well-trodden mud patches and wait while the machine whirrs at them.

"Oh," Dan says, glancing down into the photo retrieval port where a glossy white strip of the previous user's pictures already sits. "Someone left their stuff."

It's just one guy. Dan lays the three vertical photos on his palm and glances down into an expression that has not tried to hide its emotions. It's an angular face, high cheekbones and a pointed nose but underneath a shock of black hair are the most fascinating eyes that Dan has ever seen. They're sad eyes, eyes that look like they know how Dan is feeling because they feel it too.

Dan is still looking at the mystery man when his own photos eject from the machine.

Ashley shows them to him before tucking them into her bag. They're okay, but Dan can't look at his own face for too long before the cracks start to show and he can see the obvious pain underneath his tight, forced smile.

"What next?" Nick asks.

"Ferris Wheel?" Ashley suggests, already tugging him in that direction.

Nick shrugs at him. It's a kind-of what-can-you-do expression that only someone in a long-term relationship can really do. It means this is my person and I'm going to do what they want because I want them to be happy. Dan doesn't have that, maybe he's never had that, not really.

Dan's shoes scrub into the dirt, wet grass slipping under his soles as he follows them toward the giant wheel and gets in line.

***

It isn't too long. Long enough that Dan's mind starts to wander to the photos he has slipped into his pocket. He doesn't really know why he'd kept them considering he doesn't know the subject within, only that he feels a kind of kindred connection to them. As if they understand him, somehow, without them needing to have met.

When he nears the front of the queue he realises there is going to be a problem. The cars- seats, whatever- of the ride are for two people and anyone riding alone is met by the operator loudly crying 'SINGLE RIDER' into the night air until someone in the waiting line of people answers and they move up to awkwardly join someone.

This is what happens to Dan. Nick and Ashley had climbed into their seats easily, waving at him as the wheel slowly rotated and the fair worker took one look at Dan, standing there all alone, and shouted up for some other single rider to move up.

"Here," says a voice behind him, laced through with despondency.

Dan turns to look at his would-be seatmate and is greeted by a face that should not be familiar given that he had only seen it for the first time today. The guy from the photos in his pocket.

He doesn't look as sad as Dan is used to.

They climb into the car, pulling down the metal railing which clicks into place a few inches above their laps and serves as the only thing to stop them falling to their deaths.

Dan braces himself, the ride never quite coming to a stop as they pull away from the entrance.

"I wish they wouldn't do that," picture-man says when they ascend enough that the noise of the fair has started to fade by the tiniest fraction.

Wind blows across the open carriage and Dan's fringe swings rebelliously into his eyes. "Do what?"

"Yell out 'single rider' like that. It's not like I need everyone to know that I'm all alone."

The guy from the photos isn't meeting his eyes. Not that it matters. Dan already knows his irises are a perplexing mix of blue and green and yellow. That feels like way too much information to have about a perfect stranger.

"I'm not," the guy continues before Dan can offer a response. "Not like… usually. I've got friends."

"Yeah."

The guy shifts in his seat. The carriage rocks and Dan's knuckles tighten against the bar. He makes the mistake of looking down. Shit. They're getting really high now.

"You sound like you don't believe me." Photo-man is looking at him now and yep, there are those impossible eyes.

"I believe you," Dan says. He squeezes his own eyes shut for a moment, trying to block out the knowledge that they're so high up. It wouldn't be a problem if this were some fancy ride, one of those ones you get in town centres with closed-in compartments and maybe a little background muzak.

"Hey," his fellow rider on this doomed mission says. "Are you alright?"

For the second time this evening, Dan wishes he had a better answer than simply humming a Mm hm, but he doesn't and so that's what he does.

"Sorry," his stranger says. "I talk a lot when I'm nervous, I'm probably freaking you out. I'm just going to…" he mimes pulling a zip at the seam of his lips.

"Don't," Dan says. "I'm sorry. Let's start over. I'm Dan."

Photo guy tips his head to one side and then breaks out into a smile. That's nice, Dan thinks. The frowning, sad guy in the photos is just one moment captured, smiles exist beyond them.

"I'm Phil."

"You didn't freak me out, Phil. I just got all weird about the heights."

"A ferris wheel is a bit of a strange place to be if you're scared of heights," Phil tells him.

"I'm not," Dan shrugs. "Not really."

He risks a glance down again and this time he doesn't need to shut his eyes.

Phil shifts in his seat and the carriage rocks. Okay. So maybe he isn't a huge fan of the rocking, but the mere heights he can deal with. The movement does bring Phil closer, his hip bumping into Dan's, and Dan likes the way his body heat is a warm salve against the night air.

"I'm just having an odd day."

They crest the top of the wheel and come to a momentary pause. The view from here is undeniably beautiful, inky blue sky, the fair below a dull mix of lights and sound, the velvet night and moonlight tipping the edges of trees and rooftops littering the horizon. He could stay here, he thinks, the world feels quiet and far away and it is just the amount of space he's been craving while locked away in his flat with his duvet the only barrier to the outside world.

"Me too," Phil offers. It feels like he's reaching out a hand.

The edge of the photo strip presses against his palm as Dan slips his hand into his pocket.

"Maybe I should save this for when we're back on the ground and you can run away from someone who is definitely some kind of freak, but…" he draws the photos out and holds them up for Phil to see. "I found these."

Phil doesn't take them immediately. He glares at the person in the frame as if it isn't him, his eyebrows drawn low and tight together.

Dan has to admit that the person next to him, the one who smiles and blurts things out, doesn't really look like the sullen person in the pictures. But the eyes, they never lie.

"I looked too sad," Phil says, finally snagging the shiny paper between his fingers and drawing it slowly out of Dan's grip. "So I left them."

"Shit," Dan says. "Sorry. You know, for giving them back to you if you didn't want to... "

"It's alright." Phil folds the photos over, creasing the middle one right across its centre, and shoves them into his pocket.

Dan's fingers twitch as if he might rip them back out of Phil's grasp and tuck them safely into his pocket again where they won't be damaged, but he hasn't quite gone mad enough to embarrass himself like that.

"Sometimes we need a reminder of when we're sad," Phil says. "So that when you're not sad you can appreciate it."

Dan looks out at the horizon again. They've moved backward one position, still up in the air but undeniably making their descent.

Dan doesn't like to leave any remnants of the sad days. As soon as the fresh spark hits he washes his sheets, throws out the trash. He's been known to delete tweets, rip pages from his journal, anything to avoid the thought of what came before and cling, as if to a liferaft, to the flicker of hope that dares show its face.

The complexity in Phil's eyes is lost to the dark of the night, only the blue you could swim in left behind. It gives Dan the courage to say what he says next.

"I'm sad too."

Phil doesn't do that thing where he asks Dan why he has reason to be sad, he doesn't nod hollowly as a way to avoid acknowledging that alien sentiment. Phil just lifts a shoulder and drops it again, a shrug, like he understands the inevitability of the sad, hard days but doesn't feel the need to dignify them by treating them like they are something that requires in-depth conversation. At least, not outside of a therapist's office.

"Fun fairs," Phil says.

"What?"

"Fun fairs are a cure for the sads."

The muscles at the corners of Dan's mouth crack. They're stiff, unpractised in the art of smiling and yet this one forces its way onto his mouth through the tension. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Phil tells him, sagely. "Did you see how sad I was in those photos? That was before the funfair."

Dan glances down at the bright lights, growing closer and closer as they fall toward the ground. He's almost reluctant to get off the wheel, right at the top he'd found a place in this fair that he didn't mind being and it would be so easy to stay in his seat, let the ride take him back up over and over. But isn't that what he's been doing? Just riding through his shit over and over getting far away for a while until the gravity of life pulled him back in.

Maybe it's time to get off the wheel.

"What do you recommend?" Dan asks.

They reach the bottom, the bar in front of them not so much unclicking as just falling away. It doesn't come to a stop, but Phil gets out of his seat and Dan finds the energy in his feet to follow. Nick and Ashley are waiting a few feet away.

"Waltzers," Phil says. "Definitely."

Ashley is giving him a perplexed look as Dan doesn't move to join them immediately. He's rooted to the spot, his feet refusing to move while Phil isn't.

"Did you want to?" Phil asks.

"Excuse me?"

"Waltzers."

It takes Dan a second to work out that Phil is asking him if he wanted to ride the waltzers with him. Before the ferris wheel, Dan would probably have said no, the idea of spinning and spinning while the centrifugal force pinned him to the seat far too similar to how he'd been feeling in the thick tangle of his duvet for the past week, but Phil's eyes have a little of their other colours back under the lights of the fair and Dan wants to see if they can pick up new ones in other locations.

"Yeah," Dan says. "Ok. Just let me tell my friends where I'm going."

When Dan trudges across the grass to join Nick and Ashley, Phil follows closely behind. It surprises him, for some reason.

"This is Phil," Dan says. "We're going to ride the waltzers."

"Cool," Nick offers, giving Phil a warm smile and a careful nod.

Ashley beams and takes Nick's hand in hers. "That's great. Can we come?"

Dan looks over his shoulder at Phil. His expression is now so far away from the sullen, sad guy in the photos that Dan has the fleeting impression that they could be two different people. "That alright?"

"That's great," Phil says. "The more the merrier."

Fun fairs aren't, as Phil puts it, a cure for the sads. But they're a kind of medicine maybe, if not a total cure. Phil's body pressing into his as they spin around and around on the waltzers, the dizzy high of it when they step off, feet taking them to other places but Phil staying close all the same, that's a balm too.

When he leaves, Dan still has a cloud that follows, he might always have it. But he has something else too, eleven digits written on the back of a strip of photos, the sad man within them long gone, but the promise of a new… something, held close.

The scent of sugar lingers on his jacket for days, but the memories last much longer.