Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“No,” Dan says. “No way, no, I’m totally fine, I can buy a Dictaphone.”

“Dan,” Dan’s mum says.

“It’s fine,” Dan insists, a little frantically. “I’m on Amazon right now, they’re not even expensive.”

“Don’t waste your money.”

“It’s not a waste if it means I don’t have to have some loser following me around all the time-”

“From what you’ve told me, it’s a worthwhile service. And they don’t follow you around all the time, it’s just in classes, you said so yourself.”

“Ok, sure,” Dan says, exasperatedly. “No, yeah, that’s totally fine, just sellotape me to some old crone in reading glasses, that'll make my life a million times better-“

“Dan.”

“Sorry,” Dan mutters. “I’m serious though, I’ll be ok. I can make my own notes.”

“You said yourself you were struggling,” She says.

Dan sighs and closes his eyes. Why do mums do that, he thinks. Why do they trick you into telling them things that are stressing you out, only to use them against you in the very near future? Do they learn this shit in mum school, or something?

“I’ll be ok,” Dan says, his eyes still closed. “I don’t need extra help, I don’t need someone to take notes for me, I’ll be fine.”

-

Dan’s still looking at Dictaphones on ebay when PJ trails through his open bedroom door twenty minutes later and throws himself face-down on the bed with a groan.

“Wrong room,” Dan says without looking up.

“Mmf,” PJ says into Dan’s pillow, then rolls over, bedsprings creaking. “Someone’s thrown up in the shower.”

“What?” Dan says, swivelling around in his chair. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus. Who was it? There's no way I'm cleaning that up.”

PJ shrugs, then winces, closing his eyes.

“I was gonna do so much drawing today,” He says without opening his eyes. “Like, I have this assignment for Monday and you can tell everyone in class expects me to be rubbish so I want to show up with all these drawings to prove them wrong? And then before I just sat down at my desk and…bleurgh.”

Dan smiles.

“I’m guessing it was a good party?”

“Tara was asking about you,” PJ says. He puts on a weird voice. “Where’s Dan, why didn’t you bring Dan, I was expecting Dan… She’s after you.”

Dan pulls a face.

“Glad I didn’t go, then,” He says.

PJ cracks one eye open.

“You’re gonna have to turn her down at some point.”

“Mm,” Dan says, vaguely. Instead of pursuing the subject like he usually does, PJ throws an arm over his eyes and sighs. “Hey, you can’t pass out on my bed, go in your own room.”

“Smells like sick in there,” PJ complains, turning over and burying his face in Dan’s pillow again.

“Oh my God,” Dan says. “Are you the one who threw up in the shower?”

PJ makes a noise.

“I’m very hungover and your voice is very piercing,” He says.

“PJ.”

“I might have thrown up in the shower.”

“Peej,” Dan says. “I wanted a shower later, you'd better clean it. Ugh.”

“Just give me, like, ten minutes,” PJ groans, his voice muffled. After a moment's silence, he turns his head and says, “Did you drink before uni?”

“Sometimes,” Dan says. “Why?”

“I – never did,” PJ says. He rolls over onto his back and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I thought it'd be easy, right, like getting on a horse? But it's not.”

“Getting on a horse isn't easy, Peej,” Dan says, fondly. He leans forwards and pats him on the ankle. “You don't have to get drunk at every party, y'know.”

“Felt stupid by myself,” PJ says, with his hands still over his eyes. “Drinking made me feel less stupid, I dunno.”

Dan can sympathise with that.

“So I'll come to the next one then,” He says. “And we can drink lemonade or something.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Dan says, patting PJ's ankle again. Then he curls his hand around it and yanks so that PJ yelps and flails. “Now go and clean the shower and get in your own bed.”

“I hate you,” PJ says through his fingers.

-

“It's not serious,” Dan says on Monday. He's in the academic help office with a pretty blonde woman who'd introduced herself as Louise and offered him a Loveheart sweet before he'd even sat down. “Like, my mum's just – she just worries, like, I'll probably be ok.”

“Well,” Louise says. “Judging by your assessment results, you've been entitled to a note taker since the first week of term.”

“But I don't need one,” Dan says. “It's just – my mum-”

“Dan,” Louise says. She's looking at him with big eyes, like he's suffered a bereavement. “There's no shame in getting help for stuff like this.”

“I'm not ashamed,” Dan insists, feeling his face flare with heat. “If I need help I'll accept the help, I just don't think I need it, that's all.”

“Dan,” Louise says, sighing. “Look, I can pair you up with someone really good. I mean, don't think of it as being stuck with a lecturer, think of them as...your personal academic advisor.”

Dread sinks deep into the pit of Dan's stomach at her words. He's stuck with this if he says yes. There's no backing out.

“Ok,” He says, thinking that if nothing else it'll get his mum off his back. “Fine.”

Louise beams at him.

“You're up for it?”

“I'll give it a go,” Dan says, grudgingly.

“Great,” Louise says. “Honestly, you won't regret it. None of us bite, you know.” She pauses. “Well, actually, I dunno about Chris, but...”

“Ok,” Dan says. “Ok. No, it's just.” He pauses, trying to think of how to explain it. “I – please don't take this the wrong way.”

“Ok,” Louise says, uncertainly, reaching for a sweet from the little bowl on her desk like she needs a sugar hit to get through whatever Dan's about to say.

“Is it,” Dan hesitates. “Am I gonna...like, is this gonna be noticeable? This whole thing? Like.” He pauses, and then because his social skills aren't so much skills as they are issues, he blurts out, “Am I gonna get paired with a really old person?”

Louise laughs.

“Oh, I see what you mean,” She says.

“Only – I don't – I'm not trying to be ageist, I just-”

“No, no, 'course not,” Louise says, in this wonderfully soothing sort of voice. “I get it, it's ok.”

“Right,” Dan says. His face is hot, but at least Louise isn't yelling at him and saying she's offended on behalf of her gran and banning him from her office, or anything. “It's just – it sounds stupid, I just don't want to attract any attention in classes, y'know? And I feel like if I walked in there with someone's granddad it might – I dunno, clue people in.”

“Mm,” Louise says. She's clicking about on her computer, but Dan's at the wrong angle to see what she's doing. After a moment she stops and looks at him, with this soft, kind smile on her face. “Don't worry. We had this whole thing a while ago where we did a survey and the results seemed to suggest that the best way to get students to connect with their advisors is to have them of a similar age. So most of our advisors are volunteers who're either just out of uni or doing, like, their masters or whatever. Not that older people can't do their masters, but we don't tend to get a lot of older volunteers.”

“They don't want to hang out with students all day,” Dan says, with a small smile.

“God, no,” Louise says, grinning at him. “It's ok, I've got someone in mind for you. I'm just sending him your details.”

“Ok,” Dan says. He shifts a little in his seat, already planning what he's gonna say to his mum when he rings her as soon as he leaves. “So, um.”

“Oh,” Louise says. “No, yeah, we're done, sorry! I'm not used to having an office, I keep expecting people to just walk off.”

“Right,” Dan says, getting to his feet and hitching his bag over his shoulder. “Thanks.”

-

That day in all his lectures Dan finds himself enjoying being alone.

It's not that he hasn't made friends at uni – he has. There's PJ – they've been friends since they helped each other unpack in the first week of term. Knowing PJ means he knows a few people studying Fine Art and other subjects like that – Tara and Katie, and that one guy in the art studio who always wears these weird space-age flip flops. There are a ton more people, but Dan's not all that great at putting names to faces.

The people on his own course are a different story. It's some weird competition in classes and lectures, everyone desperate to outdo everyone else, throwing out complex Latin terms and vague stuff from A Level Law while Dan struggles to write every incomprehensible thing down.

There's just this weird sense of elitism about everyone that sets Dan on edge. He knows some people by name, and there are people he chats to vaguely in seminars, but he doesn't fit, not really. He hears them discussing parties, sees the events floating around on Facebook and pretends it doesn't bother him.

It doesn't, not really. After all, he has PJ. He has his art friends. He doesn't mind sitting alone in lectures – in fact, he prefers it.

With a sigh that ruffles the papers spread out on the desk in front of him, Dan realises that this is the last day he'll have that luxury. He'll have some faceless person tagging along with him constantly, peering over his shoulder under the guise of helping him out.

At least he might get some decent notes out of it, he thinks, gloomily, casting an eye across his pages and pages of scratchy, barely decipherable handwriting.

-

The next morning, Dan can hardly believe the guy they’ve lumbered him with.

Despite Louise's reassurances, he'd been worried about getting some older guy who'd tut at him or roll his eyes at Dan's fashion choices or go on about what things were like back in the old days when mobile phones didn't exist.

The guy who he meets outside the student union is somehow not what he was expecting at all.

He's tall, but not as tall as Dan (which Dan notes smugly somewhere in the back of his head behind all the babbling and freaking out). He's also young. Dan knows Louise said that some of their volunteers are just out of uni but he wasn't banking on just out of the womb.

Alright, maybe he's exaggerating, the guy isn't that young. Even so, there's something about the guy's face, all pale skin and big eyes, that makes him look far younger than he probably is. Perhaps most importantly, he doesn't look old enough to be giving anyone academic help.

He has dark hair and one of those galaxy covered jackets Dan had seen in town back home months ago. He knows because he remembers there'd been a moment when he'd been thumbing through that particular rail just to see if they had his size out of curiosity, when he'd glanced up and caught sight of his reflection in a nearby mirror and the completely unimpressed look on his own face made him abandon the rail completely and lose himself in the comforting world of black on black at the other end of the shop.

“I'm Phil,” The guy had said. He'd wiped his palm on the leg of his dark jeans before he reached out to shake Dan’s hand and his skin had still been weird and clammy to the touch.

They’re walking to the lecture theatre and Dan’s trying to lag behind a little bit so that it doesn’t look like they’re together. Phil isn’t wearing a badge or a uniform or anything, but Dan’s never felt more self-conscious in his life. It doesn’t help that his phone keeps buzzing with texts from PJ asking what his new lackey looks like.

“I can’t believe you’re doing Law,” Phil says.

“Neither can I,” Dan says, distractedly. He knows they aren’t, but he feels like every person they pass is staring at the two of them. The last thing he wants is to draw more attention to himself than he already accidentally does.

“Are you enjoying it? Or is that the wrong question?” Phil wonders. Dan wishes he wouldn’t speak to him; it won’t be long before he notices how much Dan’s trying not to move his mouth when he replies. “Can you enjoy it? As, like, a subject?”

“Dunno.”

“I’ve seen TV shows about barristers,” Phil says. “By accident. I lost the remote and then all these people were in gowns and wigs and I ended up watching it for a bit. Is that your thing, the gowns and wigs thing?”

Dan doesn’t really want to enter into a conversation with this guy that lasts longer than five seconds, especially now they’re actually passing faces he recognises from class.

He adjusts his bag on his shoulder as they come to a halt before the lecture theatre door and he says, “Yeah.”

Maybe Phil can tell that Dan's embarrassed about this whole thing – his face is probably glowing like a distress beacon – because he stops speaking and doesn't say another word until after the lecture.

“You understood that, right?” Phil says. God, how can he be so chirpy after an hour and a half of that? Dan had spent the entire time drawing spirals on his notepad and zoning out, leaning away from Phil so nobody thinks they're actually together. “That was like...” He whistles and waves a hand over his head to indicate how little he understood, grinning.

“Right,” Dan says. “So, like, you email that to me, right? The notes? Is that how this works?”

Phil's smile fades a little.

“Right,” He says. “Yeah, I email them to you.”

“That's great. So I'll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Phil says. “I'll meet you outside the...”

But Dan doesn't stick around. He turns on his heel and escapes down the corridor, feeling like he might actually die of embarrassment.

-

When Dan arrives back at the flat, instead of going into his own room he traipses into PJ's instead. PJ's propped his bedroom door open with a pile of heavy art books, and Dan sails through the open door and sits down on PJ's bed without even saying hi.

PJ's room is weird, because it's the exact mirror of Dan's across the hall. All the rooms look the same, of course, except PJ's room is full of funny odds and ends, gauzy scarves and weird hats and cute little drawings all over the noticeboard. He's pushed his bed up against the wall so it's right under the window, and Dan settles there and watches someone walk by carrying a six pack of beer.

“Everything ok?” PJ says, without looking up from whatever he's working on at his desk.

Dan makes a noise and shuffles closer to the window so he can look outside properly.

“You've got a view,” He says. “Why don't I have a view?”

“Luck of the draw,” PJ says, swivelling around in his chair at last. “At least people can't see you if you decide to eat a sandwich in bed.”

“Which is my main concern in life,” Dan says. He sighs. “I had my first class with the note taking guy today.”

“Oh,” PJ says. “And?”

“And,” Dan says, feeling wretched. “Literally nobody spoke to me because I was with him, and, like – I dunno, he, like...ugh.” He flops backwards onto the bed.

“What's he like?”

“Young,” Dan says, automatically, staring up at the pockmarked ceiling. “Really young. Which I suppose is good, right, 'cause...he looked like a student, but like...God, I bet he thinks I'm so stupid. I couldn't even speak to him, I was freaking out so much that everyone was looking at us.”

“You know nobody pays that much attention to you, right,” PJ says, lightly. Dan lifts his head to give PJ a look. “I mean,” He explains, quickly. “I know it feels like everyone's looking at you all of the time, but they're really not. People are thinking about themselves and if everyone's looking at them.” He pauses. “You're not that pretty, Dan.”

Dan laughs and aims a kick in PJ's direction. PJ just dodges his foot, grinning.

“Thanks?” Dan says, still laughing. He falters and sighs. “You're right. How do you do that?”

PJ shrugs, watching Dan push himself up onto his elbows.

“I was rude to him,” Dan says, the realisation creeping over him, unpleasant and hot. “Oh God, poor guy, he showed up to help me, and like...oh God.”

“Don't worry,” PJ says. “You'll see him tomorrow, right? You can say sorry then.”

Dan groans and puts a hand over his face.

-

He means to be nicer to the note-taking guy. He really does. Except the next morning nothing at all goes to plan.

His alarm doesn't go off when it's meant to, so instead of having a cool three hours to get ready for class he has one.

All the plugs in the kitchen stop working for some reason, so Dan spends fifteen minutes waiting for the kettle to boil before he realises that it isn't going to because the plugs are out. Grouchy and tired, he carries the kettle out into the hallway (even though it's probably a violation of health and safety or whatever) and flicks it on there, then just because he's pissed off and tired he calls the maintenance people, who tell him that their kitchen plugs aren't a priority so long as they can still use their stove (“You know you can use pans to boil water, right?” The woman lets him know in this unnecessarily patronising sort of way).

By the time he's dressed and he's straightened his hair to a standard he's relatively ok with, he's completely forgotten about the kettle in the hall, which accounts for how he trips over the fucking thing, managing to get unpleasantly warm water all over the floor and on his jeans, and carpet burn on his hands where he'd tried to break his fall. Even though his jeans are dark there's no way he can leave the house in them without people thinking he's wet himself, so he stomps back into his room to change into this other pair that he hardly ever wears because they're a weird size and constantly fall down. It's only when he's halfway down the stairs and pulling them back up for the tenth time that he realises he should've worn a belt, by which time it's too late to even bother.

So sue him if he isn't in the mood to make nice with the starry jacket wearing note-taking guy.

The starry jacket wearing note-taking guy, who's holding a cup in one hand and nervously checking his watch with the other. He's also wearing enormous glasses that he definitely wasn't wearing yesterday, so for one terrifying moment Dan's worried he's approaching some random stranger by accident – which really would be the cherry on top of the completely shit morning he's having.

“Oh,” The guy says when Dan gets close. “Oh, hi, I was worried you were ill or something, I emailed you.”

Dan shakes his head like he's trying to shake off an irksome fly. He feels gross, all sweaty from walking up here, and hot with stupid anger at nothing, and he hasn't had anything to drink so the back of his throat's unpleasantly dry, and the last thing he wants to do in the world is sit through some dull as shit lecture on perverting the course of justice or what the fuck ever.

Maybe the note-taking guy's special power is mind-reading, because instead of trying to hurry Dan along or have a go at him for being late he says, “Is everything ok?”

“Yeah,” Dan says, automatically. Then, “It's just – ugh, do you ever just have a shit morning for no reason whatsoever? Like you woke up feeling shit and it just carried on?”

“Like you got up on the wrong side of the bed,” The note-taking guy says, but Dan's barely listening.

“I mean, my phone alarm didn't go off, which is bullshit – I'm gonna email Apple about it and fucking complain, I swear to God, and then the plugs in the kitchen didn't work and the maintenance people were so unhelpful, like, of course I know you can boil water in a pan, I'm not stupid, you know? And then,” Dan's gesturing wildly enough to attract worried glances from passers-by. “Then I put the kettle in the hall, right, because there's a plug there, but I forgot it was there and I tripped over it and fucking – carpet burned my hands.” He waves a hand in front of the guy's face. “And then there's this lecture, and I was looking at the summary online last night and it's just bullshit, seriously not worth getting up for.”

“I looked at that, too,” The guy says, when Dan's finished, breathing a little heavily. He pulls a face. Dan's not expecting it, so it shocks a laugh out of him before he can stop himself. “It seemed a bit, um. Heavy.”

“A bit,” Dan says. He pauses, suddenly feeling awkward. “Sorry I'm so late, we should get going.”

The guy looks thoughtful for a second and then hands him the takeaway cup he's holding. Dan takes it, frowning.

“I guess you didn't get to have a coffee this morning, right?” The guy says, with this understanding little smile. When Dan opens his mouth to protest, he talks over him, saying, “It's ok, it's my third, I should really cut back.”

“Oh,” Dan says.

“Don't worry about the lecture,” The guy continues, fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket. “I'll just – I can go and take notes and I'll tell them something came up for you. Is that ok? Family emergency or something?”

Dan blinks and opens his mouth, but no words come out.

“Maybe not a family emergency,” The guy says, click-clicking away on his phone. He gives Dan this considering little look, and even though yesterday Dan kind of felt like this guy was stupidly young, now he's making Dan feel stupidly young instead. Maybe it's the glasses, or the fact that he seems to know exactly what he's doing. “I don't want to curse anything, you know what I mean? I can just say you're feeling ill.”

“I,” Dan says. God, he feels like such a dick. “You don't have to do that.”

The guy smiles at him.

“It's ok,” He says, with a little shrug. “You think you'll be able to pay attention for a full hour and a half if you're thinking about, like, kettles and carpet burns?”

“But you have to go and, like...” Dan gestures in the general direction of the lecture theatre.

“I was going to anyway,” The guy says. He checks his watch. “In fact, I really should get on if I'm gonna get the notes. I'll just email them, ok?”

Dan nods, mutely.

“Thanks,” He says, but the guy's already walking away.

It's only when he's gone and Dan's left standing there, holding his coffee and feeling like the worst person in the world, that he remembers that he's called Phil.

-

Dan

just wanted to make sure you're ok and you're coming in today? It's ok if you're not, just remember to email your lecturer so they know and I'll send you the notes later on.

Thanks

Dan stares down at the email on his laptop later, sitting in bed wearing the biggest and ugliest hoodie he owns, all hunched over like he could disappear into it if he tried hard enough.

It's the email Phil must've sent when he thought Dan wasn't gonna show up for class. He has one of those pre-programmed email signatures and Dan just zones out looking at it for a while – Phil Lester, Academic Helpdesk Volunteer – like everything he emails is a magazine quote or a game review or something.

He spends so long just not paying attention, procrastinating on things like moving and getting a shower and going to speak to PJ, that when another email from Phil comes through his heart lurches horribly in his chest.

For one stupid moment he thinks maybe Phil somehow knew that he was looking at the email and this new email's telling him that he's creepy and he needs to find a new academic advisor.

Except of course, that's not what it says.

Dan

Here are the notes from today! Sorry I took so long to send them, our internet was down for a few hours at home. I guess there's something in the air today (I didn't trip over any kettles though so you still win)

I hope you're feeling better

See you tomorrow

And this time his signature says Phil Lester, Academic Helpdesk Volunteer and coffee-giving professional.

Dan hides his smile in the sleeve of his hoodie.

Chapter Text

So Phil the note-taking guy is a nice person.

Dan doesn't know why he's surprised, considering he volunteers to follow weird undergraduates to classes and take notes for them when he could be studying or sleeping or whatever. The longer Dan spends at uni the more he doesn't like other students, so he can't imagine doing what Phil does. And Phil does it with a smile, even when he gets stuck with people like Dan who panic and end up being rude without meaning to.

Like in the seminar on Wednesday. It's at 9am, which Dan thinks shouldn't be allowed – seriously, who's alert and awake enough to be dressed and mentally prepared for a long and dull class that early in the morning? Who has enough time to eat and straighten their hair and find matching socks before the class starts?

Not Dan, that's for sure. He ends up skipping breakfast entirely in favour of extra time spent despairing over his reflection in the bathroom. Only even that can't take too long, because one of his and PJ's flatmates starts knocking on the door just as Dan starts cleaning his teeth.

The flatmate in question turns out to be Ethan, this guy who Dan doesn't think he's ever said two words to. Ethan's hair always looks perfect and he's definitely the type of guy who goes to the gym - even pre-shower he doesn't look half the mess Dan does. Dan just hurries past him and tries to force down the inevitable self-image crisis in favour of putting his shoes on.

By the time he makes it to the Haywood building ten minutes later, he's feeling sweaty and gross and in no mood to socialise with anyone.

Phil's waiting outside, cool and calm, glasses steaming up a little whenever he sips at the enormous travel mug of coffee he's holding with both hands.

“Hey,” He says, expression brightening when Dan approaches him. “I thought you weren't gonna show up.”

Dan just makes a non-committal noise, shoving his headphones into his bag and pulling his phone out of his pocket. All of the corridors in this building are tiny, made up of weird partition walls, and Dan's painfully aware of the proximity of all of his sleepy-eyed classmates, who are probably wondering who Phil is and why Dan's with him.

That's his excuse for answering all of Phil's chirpy little remarks in monosyllables, head bowed and hands shoved into his pockets, slumped against the wall like if he leans hard enough it might just eat him and save him from this situation.

After a while, Phil sighs and gives up talking to him again. Guilt spikes down deep in Dan, but the judging eyes of his classmates scare him more than upsetting a nice guy, awful though that is.

Dan stares down at the table in class and kind of hates himself.

-

It goes on like that for weeks. Dan communicates with Phil as little as he possibly can, feeling guiltier and guiltier every time he sees Phil's smile fade when Dan rebuffs his attempts at conversation.

“I told you it'd be ok,” PJ says one evening, after Dan's made up some lie about how well he and his note taker are getting on.

“Yeah,” Dan says vaguely, feeling worse than ever.

-

The Christmas holidays pass painfully quickly. It barely feels like ten minutes since Dan arrived at home in early December that he's leaving again in January, bag heavier with Christmas presents and kitchen stuff his mum doesn't want anymore.

He doesn't want to leave home, but as soon as he sets foot inside the flat, smelling that weird stale potato smell that the hallway has, he's incomprehensibly glad to be back. Even gladder when he sees PJ, who wastes no time showing him the expensive markers he got for Christmas (like a puppy with a new toy, Dan thinks, fondly, as he grins).

There's a place on campus that sells milkshakes, and they end up walking down there, coat collars turned up against the January chill. It's so good to see PJ – it's weird how much Dan missed him, how much he'd got used to being able to turn and talk to him at any given moment. PJ doesn't exactly say that he feels the same, but he does let Dan lurk outside the milkshake place fake-texting instead of making him navigate the walk of shame to the counter past all of the tables, already full of students chattering and laughing, back for the new semester.

“I know you hate it in there,” PJ tells him when he comes back outside, handing Dan his drink with a smile.

Dan thinks maybe that means he missed him too.

-

Twenty minutes later, Dan thinks PJ was just trying to butter him up. It turns out he's accidentally agreed that they're gonna show up at some back to school themed party that evening.

“Peej...”

“I know,” PJ says. They're sitting on a wall in a patch of sunlight, a few accommodation blocks away from their flat. Dan thinks he'd be able to swing his legs if they weren't so stupidly long. “I know. I panicked, I'm sorry.”

“It's fine,” Dan says, because he doesn't want to be a dick – or worse, be that guy, the guy who people automatically disassociate with fun things. Dan likes parties, he's just tired from the journey back and his stuff's still unpacked and back to school, seriously? It's just gonna be a ton of girls dressed like that one Britney video, Dan'd bet money on it.

“We don't have to stay for long,” PJ says, gratefully, nudging him in the shoulder.

“Ok,” Dan agrees. Maybe it'll be fun, he thinks, grudgingly.

-

“Do I really have to wear a white shirt?” He says later, rifling through his wardrobe. PJ's spinning around in his desk chair, already dressed in his own approximation of back to school wear (a check shirt and a bow tie – he looks like a cute, nerdy professor. Dan couldn't pull that off to save his life). “I don't think I own a white shirt.”

“You could wear a black one?” PJ suggests, coming to a halt, his mouth twitching a little. “Like, goth schoolkid?”

“Ugh,” Dan says, sitting down heavily on his bed. “I need, like, a week's preparation for themed parties, I swear to God.”

“I'm sorry,” PJ says, for the millionth time.

“It's ok,” Dan insists, standing up so he can reach for the plainest black button-down he owns. Goth schoolkid it is.

He regrets it later when Katie starts talking about putting eyeliner on him.

“No,” He says, fending her off. It's a little difficult when they're all squished together in the back of a cab the way they are – she nearly stabs him in the eye. “No, Katie, oh my God-”

“It'll look good,” Katie insists. She's definitely already drunk. “It'll fit with your whole thing-”

“My whole thing is like, lowkey goth kid,” Dan says, holding her arm away from his face. “Not 2004 My Chemical Romance threw up on me.”

“Leave him alone, K,” Tara says, tugging Katie back into her seat.

That's another worry for the evening – the scary sidelong looks Tara's been giving him all evening. Dan feels guilty for the way it makes him want to run a mile in the opposite direction. It's nothing against her personally, he's just never felt at home being someone that other people want. It's just another sort of attention he'd rather do without.

When they get to the party, Dan's suspicions about everyone else's costumes pretty much manifest themselves as pure fact. The queue is full of people falling over each other, pretty much everyone wearing weird approximations of school uniform (and some creepy-looking older guys who aren't – Dan finds himself fervently wishing the bouncers won't let them in, but he knows better than to hope).

By the time they get inside, they lose Katie and Tara to the lure of the girl's bathroom, and Dan sets about yawning and not getting drunk, letting the sweaty throng of people packed into the tiny venue buffet him and Peej this way and that, the two of them gripping onto each other's hands.

Dan doesn't know why he doesn't get drunk at the party. It's not like he has lectures the next day, or anything, and it's not like he doesn't enjoy getting drunk.

Maybe he enjoys it a little too much, he thinks, darkly, catching sight of two girls clutching each other in helpless laughter, one of them spilling a drink down themselves. The last thing he wants is to start using drinking as some kind of crutch for his self-consciousness. He'd be drunk all the time if he did that.

So maybe that's why he doesn't drink all that much. He nurses a pint for a while, just about avoiding slopping it down himself in the crowd. At least him and PJ are together – PJ surveying the crush of the room interestedly over his own pint, leaning in every so often to mutter his observations into Dan's ear over the thud of the music.

For their second drink, he and PJ split up momentarily – PJ stays at the bar and Dan escapes to the toilets. Not that it's much of an escape – the toilets are just as chaotic as everywhere else, if not more so. The tiny corridor that Dan ends up queueing in is full of giggling girls and people yelling out greetings, and he keeps overhearing snatches of strange conversations. Maybe it's because he's tired and relatively sober that all of the noises make him want to flinch. He thinks almost longingly of the optics in the bar – going back and asking PJ to get him a double vodka and coke with his pint. Dan isn't exactly a heavyweight drinker, that'd probably be enough to make him feel loose and calm and less awkward.

Bad idea, he thinks, just as some guy shoves into him, cutting the queue, his friends shouting about how he's gonna throw up.

By the time he's back at the bar, PJ's deep in conversation with some guy Dan doesn't know. They're chatting animatedly, leaning in close to talk over the music. Dan's about to go and introduce himself, he really is – he can see his pint on the bar next to PJ's, untouched – but then he sees Tara just beyond them through the people clustered insistently around the bar, and he doesn't want to have to fend her off tonight.

He ends up working his way out to the double doors, slipping outside. He shudders gratefully in the cold air, goosebumps rising on his arms. It's strange outside, floodlights attached to the building casting long lengths of light and leaving weird shadows in their wake. Even so, Dan stands for a moment, appreciating the dulling of the noise when the door swings shut properly, feeling sweat cooling damply on his forehead.

“You got a lighter?” Some guy asks him almost immediately, lurching drunkenly into Dan's personal space so his face looms, moonlike in the floodlights, in Dan's field of vision.

“Sorry, no,” Dan says, and ends up hurrying away from the doors and across to where there are people sitting at tables, talking in lower voices. He takes a cold seat at an empty table and slips his phone out of his pocket, clicking through it just for something to do with his hands.

One of his friends from sixth form has tagged him in something on Facebook, and it turns out to be a hideously unflattering photo of him. It's a few years old, but the camera angle hasn't done him any favours – his face looks depressingly round, his smile stupidly manic, and his clothes are gross. He's just in the process of untagging himself with a vengeance when there's a familiar-sounding voice over by the double doors, which swing open, music blaring out momentarily before they close again.

“No, no, I don't, sorry,” The voice slurs, and it's only after a whole minute of watching whoever-it-is make their (very slow, very unsteady) way across to the tables, arms stretched out a little to avoid spilling their drink, that he realises that it's Phil.

He's wearing a white shirt and a tie, but he looks like he had to fight to get through the crowd just to get outside – his shirt collar's half up and his tie's askew.

He was probably dancing, Dan thinks, then can't even imagine Phil in any kind of dancing situation.

Except then Phil starts stumbling in Dan's direction, and Dan tears his gaze away. His stomach lurches and his heart does something stupid and he bends his head further over his phone, trying to appear as unassuming and unapproachable as possible. Not that it matters – Phil probably won't even notice him, and if he does he probably won't want to talk to Dan, of all people. Dan's nothing but rude to Phil, why on earth would he want to-

“Hey, can I...d'you mind if I sit here?”

The chair across the table from Dan's is already scraping against the ground, so he feels like he doesn't have all that much choice when he finally looks up and nods.

He guesses that being drunk has removed any vestiges of a poker face that Phil might've had. He freezes weirdly when he realises who he's about to sit with, staying unnervingly still for a moment, like a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Oh,” He says. “Oh God, of course – of course you're here.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, awkwardly, feeling suddenly warm despite the cool air outside. “Sorry.” They look at each other for a moment, Dan taking in Phil's unusually flushed face and the way his hair's sticking up at odd angles. Then he looks away, back down at his phone. “I'll – I can go, sorry, you don't have to-”

“No, it's fine,” Phil says, setting his half-empty pint down between them before sitting down heavily. “I won't – I won't talk to you, it's ok, you don't have to leave.”

“I don't mind-” If you talk to me, Dan had been about to say before the sentence died in his throat. Phil's hardly gonna believe that, after he'd spent so many weeks before Christmas actively avoiding interacting with him.

It's strangely good, seeing Phil after so long. He'd cropped up in Dan's thoughts more often than not over Christmas. Dan had just chalked it up to guilt over his own distantness towards him and the fact that they spend a lot of time together.

“I'm drunk,” Phil tells him unnecessarily, after a moment's silence. “So I shouldn't talk to you anyway. Not – not that you want me to, I'm just, I'm just saying.”

“I never said I didn't want you to talk to me,” Dan says, quietly, feeling wretched.

Phil laughs at that. Dan doesn't blame him.

“Ok,” He says, and drinks some of his pint. “Sure.”

It's an impressive amount of cutting sarcasm for someone who's so out of it they took five minutes to walk a few feet over here.

“I-”

“You know,” Phil interrupts, gesturing a little. “Dean said you're a dick. And I, like, defended you. I was like, no, no, he's actually-” He hiccups. “Actually really, like, clever, and, like, he smells kind of good, and – I defended you, ok? Just – just so you know.”

Dan blinks, surprised.

“You shouldn't have bothered,” He says, feeling his face reddening over he smells kind of good. “Dean's right, whoever he is.” Phil doesn't say anything for a moment, too busy drinking, so Dan adds, “I'm sorry I've been so shit to you.”

“You have been,” Phil says, putting his drink down so forcefully it nearly slops out of the glass. “I try and help you and you’re just so…rude.”

This is exactly the conversation Dan never wanted to have with Phil – the conversation where he gets called out on his bullshit. He half-expected it to happen at some point, but maybe when Phil was more sober and annoyed about it. Right now he's just drunk and a little sad, maybe.

“I know,” Dan says, guiltily. He doesn't know if there's any point in explaining himself in detail when Phil's this out of it, but he feels like he owes him something. “I just – I'm not good with, like, social situations, and stuff, and – and I feel like people are staring at me, like, for the vast majority of my life, and I guess I thought having you around made me more...more noticeable, that's all.” That sounds so stupid, Dan can feel himself flushing.

Phil's quiet for a moment.

“I get that,” He says, a little too loudly, reaching out to touch Dan's arm. It's strange, how loose all of his movements are, how much he's leaning across the table. “I – that's fine, everyone feels like that sometimes, like...I wish you'd just told me. I'm just…just doing my job, y'know?”

“I know,” Dan repeats, feeling even worse. “I know you are, and it's great, and I really – what?”

Phil’s laughing.

“Knew it,” He manages to say before dissolving into giggles. Dan tries to ignore the weird pull inside him at the sight of Phil’s smile. “Knew…oh my God.”

“Ok, maybe you've had enough of that,” Dan says, pulling Phil's pint away from him across the table.

“Oh my God,” Phil splutters, ignoring him. “Like, what’s the thing, the thing…”

Dan has no idea what he's talking about.

“Sorry?” He says.

Phil frowns like he’s concentrating really hard.

“Dunno,” He says, eventually. “S’gone. Can’t’ve been important.”

“No,” Dan agrees, completely befuddled. He starts glancing around, as though someone's about to burst through the double doors and take responsibility for Phil, who's still laughing a little. Of course nobody does, and Dan can't just leave him. “Hey, who did you come with?”

Phil's giggles have subsided and he's staring at Dan like he's the most interesting TV show in the world.

“Phil,” Dan says, reaching out and shaking his shoulder when his glassy-eyed stare tips the scale from intense to creepy. “Phil, did you come by yourself? Do you want me to ring you a taxi?”

“You don't have a drink,” Phil says, as self-possessed as it's possible for him to sound when he's as drunk as he is.

“I'm gonna go soon, I don't want one.”

“I could buy you one.”

“They probably won't serve you anymore,” Dan tells him. “You're too drunk. Who did you come with?”

“We're talking,” Phil says. “You never talk to me, don't you wanna...this could be, like, our...“ He waves a hand vaguely, apparently searching for the right word. “Bonding moment.”

“I think it's time for you to go home,” Dan says, gently. He slips his phone back out of his pocket, scrolling through his contacts to try and find PJ. He's about to text him when a hand touches his face, and Dan freezes like someone's hit his pause button.

“Dimple,” Phil says, simply, clumsy drunk fingertips stroking away at Dan's cheek.

Dan feels himself flushing. He gulps down a breath of air and says, “Yeah.”

“I thought, like,” Phil's staring at him with huge eyes. “I thought you had dimples but I didn't wanna...I didn't know how to ask, y'know?”

Dan doesn't even know what to say to that. He feels like a tiny creature pinned to a card with Phil looking at him like that, fingers stroking Dan's cheek.

“Sorry,” A voice says, awkwardly, and Dan rears away from Phil's hand, staring wildly at the new person standing over them. It's a guy with glasses who seems far more sober than Phil is. “Hi, er. Hey Phil, we're gonna get going now, ok? ”

Phil takes a moment to stop staring at Dan, and Dan shakes his head a little, feeling flustered as he gets to his feet.

“Hi,” The guy says to Dan.

“He's really wasted,” Dan says, abruptly. “Um – sorry, I'm just – sorry.” He trips over his feet in his haste to get back inside, find PJ and get the hell out of there.

-

The next afternoon when Dan slopes into the kitchen in the flat, PJ’s sitting at the table surrounded by sketchbooks, apparently absorbed in his work. Dan flicks the kettle on and slumps down into a seat opposite him.

“Where is everyone?” He asks in a hoarse voice.

“Out,” PJ says, without looking up from whatever he’s writing.

“They’re always out,” Dan says. “And we’re always in. Are we doing it wrong?”

“Hmm?” PJ says, finally looking at him, albeit blankly. “Sorry, I’m a bit…” He gestures at all the sketchbooks.

“An assignment?”

“Two,” PJ says, pulling a face. “Should've finished them over Christmas, it's my own fault.”

The kettle clicks off, and Dan gets up to make himself a coffee, thinking of his own list of incomplete essays with mounting dread. When he returns to the table, PJ clicks the cap back onto his pen and raises his eyebrows at Dan.

“What?”

“You, last night,” PJ says. “That guy.” Dan's about to splutter out some sort of clueless denial until PJ adds, “I saw you guys outside for, like, a second. I was gonna come out and give you your drink but I didn't want to interrupt.”

“There was nothing to interrupt,” Dan says, valiantly hoping he sounds as casual as he hopes. “That was just Phil.”

“Just Phil,” PJ repeats, narrowing his eyes, thoughtfully, like this is an interrogation. “He seemed nice.”

“He seemed drunk,” Dan says, shaking his head a little. “He’s my note taking guy.”

“What?” PJ says, eyes wide. “Seriously?”

“Yep.”

“But he…” PJ does some complicated and incomprehensible gesture with his hands. “Like, he was…I dunno, I thought you were in with a chance there.”

“No,” Dan scoffs, feeling his face prickle with embarrassment as he wonders what exactly his and Phil's brief conversation looked like from a distance. “It’s just Phil. He’s practically a lecturer.” He sighs. “Seeing him on Monday's gonna be awkward.”

“No it won’t,” PJ says, taking the lid back off his pen. Dan can sense his concentration on the conversation ebbing away as he pulls his sketchbook closer. “You didn’t get off with him, did you?”

“No,” Dan splutters, nearly spilling his coffee into his lap. “Of course I didn’t, Jesus. It’s Phil.”

PJ looks at him for a moment.

“You keep saying that like it’s a reason and I don’t think it is,” He says.

Dan doesn’t really know what to say to that.

-

On Monday, Phil’s waiting where he always waits – just past the student union, spinning his phone around in one hand.

Dan knows the exact moment that he spots him because he nearly drops it on the ground.

“Hi,” Phil says, almost warily.

“Hey,” Dan says. He’s been dreading this, but something about the way Phil’s face is all flushed with embarrassment makes him want to smile more than anything else.

“I'm really sorry,” Phil says, before Dan can awkwardly think of something to say himself. “I don't - it's all a bit hazy, but I'm definitely sorry.”

“Don't worry about it,” Dan says, warmly. “Really, you were...” The warmth of Phil's fingertips slams to the forefront of his mind suddenly and makes him falter. “You didn't do anything too bad, honestly.”

“Too bad,” Phil repeats, anxiously. “Oh God, what did I do? You can tell me. Jack said,” He pauses and flushes pinker. “He said I was, kind of, erm...”

“No, no,” Dan says, forcefully, before Phil can say anything else. “No, you were totally fine. Trust me. Just really really drunk.”

“I was so hungover the next day,” Phil says, shaking his head a little. “The whole pounding headache thing was definitely my penance.”

“I, er,” Dan had been about to say something about how he'd maybe been able to tell, just to make Phil all flustered again, but he stops himself. “So Sunday was a bed day for you, then?”

As soon as he's said it he could actually kick himself. It's not like he'd meant it in any weird subtext-y meaningful way, but something about the way it sounds makes his face feel hot.

Not that Phil seems to notice. He just laughs a little, and says, “God, yeah. I ended up sleeping forever and then my flatmates dragged me out to get coffee.”

Dan nods, then smiles because Phil's kind of smiling, the sort of inward smile where it's not exactly Dan that's making him look like that, just something he's thinking of.

“My flatmates never take me for coffee,” He says, already mentally composing a text to that effect that he can bother PJ with. “You win.”

Phil smiles a little more and says, “They are kind of awesome. Well, when they're not, like, shooting the walls with water guns or filling the bath with jelly, or...” He rolls his eyes and says, “Never mind that.”

“No, no,” Dan says, grinning without meaning to. There's something about the way Phil's eyes are sparkling that makes him want to chase this line of conversation. “You can't just say something like that and then not give details.”

So Phil tells Dan about Jack and Dean and their epic prank wars, with particular attention to the time Phil watched Dean remove everything from Jack's bedroom and reassemble it all with perfect attention to detail in the foyer of their apartment building, and the time after that when Jack spent hours filling a mop bucket with glitter from little packets just so he could balance it on the top of Dean's bedroom door.

“...and I'm pretty sure Dean still has glitter in his hair, honestly,” Phil says. “It's still in the carpet, it's one of those with little grooves in it, you know? I made Jack hoover for hours and he still couldn't get it all out.”

“That's amazing,” Dan says, and he doesn't know if he's talking about the story or Phil's smile when he told it. “I mean, I'd be on edge for, like, most of my life, if I was you.”

“Oh, no, we have rules,” Phil assures him. By this time they're slowing to a halt in the queue outside the lecture theatre, and Dan dimly remembers how much this bothers him usually, being seen with Phil. It seems stupid now. “They can't start anything without warning me first, and it can't be anything that messes up the flat permanently, you know? Because our landlord's kind of scary, and I'm the one who has to call her and stuff because they won't.” He rolls his eyes a little, and Dan's smile widens. “And I don't want to be part of the prank thing, because if they try anything with me I'll just get Louise to help me get them back.”

“Louise?” Dan says, thinking of the pretty blonde woman and her bowl of sweets. “Like, Academic...office Louise?”

Phil nods, with a smile.

“You don't mess with Louise.”

Dan's almost disappointed when they have to sit down in the lecture theatre and they can't talk anymore.

-

Dan's faceplanted on his bed that evening listening to music when the mattress dips next to him. He turns his head to look at PJ, who's sitting there cross-legged with a takeaway box of chips on his lap, grease glinting on his fingertips.

“Hey,” He says. “You want one?”

They smell amazing. It's only that that makes Dan realise he hasn't eaten anything since the instant soup he had a few hours ago when he got in. He shifts until he's sitting up and takes a chip.

They chew companionably for a moment. PJ's brought the smell of outside into Dan's room with him; he's still wearing his coat, face pink from the cold.

“You know you can just tell me to go away if you're having an important brooding moment,” He says.

“I know,” Dan says, taking another chip. He scrambles off the bed to turn his speakers down, then hops back on, pushing himself up against the headboard. He had been having an important brooding moment, but PJ doesn't need to know that. “They're really good.”

“I know right?” PJ says, biting the end off another one, happily. “It's this new place in town. Hand-cut chips, it said, and I was thinking, is there another kind of chip? Like, what else are you gonna use to cut a chip? You can't hold a knife with your foot. And then I was thinking, maybe they've got Edward Scissorhands in the back and he hand-cuts them all, like, literally hand cuts. So I ended up drawing this on the bus home.”

He sticks a hand into his coat pocket and pulls out a bundle of receipts to show Dan, who peers at the little drawing of Edward Scissorhands in an apron, peeling potatoes.

“Ha,” Dan says, grinning. “That's awesome.”

PJ does his bashful I'm-not-that-good thing that he does whenever Dan compliments him, and tells him he can keep the receipt.

“Autograph it so I can sell it on ebay when you're famous,” Dan insists, grabbing a biro from his bedside table and pushing it towards PJ, who's licking salt off his fingers like a cat.

“In a minute,” He says. “Ew, I'm all gross.”

“You're only just realising that now?” Dan says, grinning. After the brief ensuing scuffle (in which PJ triumphs only because he's wearing shoes and he uses them with vicious intent to gain the upper hand), Dan says, a little breathlessly, “Everything went ok with the note taking guy, by the way.”

“Phil?”

“Yep,” Dan says, trying to keep his voice light like he hasn't spent the last hour brooding over Phil's mere existence. “He, er. No, yeah, it went ok. He. Um.” Dan looks at his duvet cover because it's easier for a second, picking at a loose thread. “I don't think he remembers anything anyway, so.”

“Oh, that's good,” PJ says. He's quiet for a second, and Dan hardly notices because he's thinking about Phil again, until PJ adds, “Oh God, it's not good, is it?”

“What?”

When Dan looks up, Peej is giving him this serious look, like he just found out Dan's suffering from a terrible illness.

“You like the Phil guy,” He says. Dan starts to splutter out a denial, feeling his face flush hot, but PJ bounces on the bed a little and adds some dramatic finger pointing to his little revelation. “Oh my God, you like him.”

“I – shut up, I don't,” Dan says. God, what is it about denying fancying someone that makes it sound like you most definitely do fancy them no matter how you actually feel? PJ's giving him this unbearable knowing look. “I don't.”

“It's ok if you do,” PJ says, gently, like he's a counsellor helping Dan through a sexual identity crisis. “Come on, Dan, he was all over you, I really don't think it's a problem if you do fancy him. He seemed really into you.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, and covers his face with his hands for a second. With his hands muffling his voice, he continues, “He's a lecturer.”

“Not really,” PJ says. “I bet he's not that much older than us.” He pauses. “I interrupted Phil brooding time, didn't I? When I came in. You were all, like,” He flails his arms out like a starfish for a second. “Is this because he doesn't remember being all over you?”

Dan makes a mortified noise and rubs a hand over his eyes.

“I don't fancy him, and he wasn't all over me,” He says, not looking PJ in the eye when he speaks. “I just – it's awkward because, like, I remember him being drunk and, like – it's just awkward, that's all.”

“But you just said it was all ok,” PJ says. “So is it all ok or is it awkward?”

“I don't know, both,” Dan says. “Like, it's ok because – because he doesn't remember, and we're talking now, and stuff, but – oh my God, Peej, I don't fancy him,” He adds, quickly, catching the little smile PJ had been shooting in his direction.

“Ok,” PJ says.

A short silence follows, in which the two of them eat more (slightly cold) chips and Dan thinks he's managed to get away with it. Except then PJ pipes up, “I guess it's lucky you don't fancy him because then you'd never get any work done in class, would you? Like, he's there with you all the time. How distracting would that be? If you thought he was some serious eye candy you'd be in trouble.”

Dan blinks for a moment, still trying to clamber over the stumbling block of PJ saying serious eye candy without a hint of irony.

“Yeah,” He says, thinking of Phil's endearing enthusiasm and smiles during their conversation earlier. “Lucky.”

Chapter Text

It isn't until later on the next day that Dan thinks PJ's stupid eye candy comment is going to be single-handedly responsible for the inevitable downwards spiral of Dan's academic career.

Because he hadn't once thought of Phil as eye candy before Peej had said that. He hadn't even considered that Phil's presence might be a distraction in classes and lectures, except that morning in Dan's 9am seminar when he's blinking blearily at everyone from over a travel mug of coffee there's a moment when Phil – who's sitting at the desk in front of Dan's – scratches the back of his neck, and Dan just...

Dan finds himself staring at the pale skin of Phil's arms, and the back of his neck, and his ears and the way his shoulder shifts as he writes. He watches the way Phil looks at anyone who answers a question with this solemn expression on his face, like he genuinely cares about what people are saying, scribbling notes down faster than Dan can think. He's wearing his glasses today, and Dan's never really been all that bothered about glasses – he's never really had a preference, never thought about it – but Phil's glasses change the way his face looks just enough that Dan looks longer, trying to figure out just what it is about some plastic frames and two pieces of glass that make him look so different.

By the time he realises he's doing precisely what PJ had talked about, the lecturer's dismissing them all and it's only when Phil turns and smiles at him, everyone else bustling out of the room around them, that he realises the class is over and he hasn't absorbed a single word.

“Seminars this early are killer,” Phil says, cheerfully, when they're walking down the stairs that lead to the main entrance. “Seriously, I had two of those coffee shot things that come in cans when I got up this morning. And then I made Jack go via Starbucks when he was driving us in, and I still felt like – like my eyes were made of cotton wool, or something.”

Dan laughs.

“How haven't you crashed yet?” He asks. “After that much caffeine, Jesus.”

Phil shrugs.

“I'll let you know if everything starts spinning,” He says. Then, when Dan automatically turns to head down the path by the shop that eventually leads to his flat, Phil catches hold of his hoodie sleeve. “Hey.”

“Hey?” Dan repeats, stupidly.

“Come this way,” Phil says, leading him in the opposite direction.

“What?” Dan says, pulse quickening in spite of himself. “Is this all part of an elaborate plan to murder me? Because at least three people know where I am right now and who I'm with.”

Phil shrugs.

“I like a challenge,” He says. There's something about the way his eyes sparkle that makes it hard to look away. “Come on, this way, you'll like it.”

Phil's leading him in the direction of the cafeteria, which is something Dan definitely won't like.

“Are you serious?” He says when they pause outside the double doors a few moments later. “Nobody eats in there.”

Phil makes a point of looking through the glass door facetiously and saying, “I dunno, Dan, it looks pretty busy.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, laughing before he can stop himself. Phil grins at him. “Shut up, I mean – it's like Mean Girls in there, you're kidding me.”

“They do a great breakfast thing,” Phil says, fixing Dan with big, earnest eyes. “Like, where you end up eating your body weight in stuff you probably shouldn't.”

Dan's torn then, because of course he'd rushed out of the flat that morning without eating, and when he wasn't watching Phil in the seminar he was thinking about the epic sandwich he was gonna make for himself as soon as he got home.

Not to mention the fact that Phil's trying to take Dan for breakfast – a move that means they'll spend more time together, like that's something Phil wants. Not that PJ was right, but – but if Phil wants to spend more time with Dan then Dan's not gonna say no, is he?

Plus there's something about the way Phil looks when he's standing there, with the breeze ruffling his hair and his eyes big and blue behind his glasses, and Dan just knows he's gonna end up eating in the cafeteria even though he swore he never would. Because seriously, Mean Girls, he wasn't kidding.

“Ok,” Dan says. Phil beams at him. “You had me at breakfast, to be honest.”

“Great,” Phil says. Then he reaches out to take hold of Dan's sleeve again. “Come on, I won't let Regina George get you.”

-

It quickly transpires that the reason Phil has no fear of the cafeteria is because he knows everyone.

“Phil!” The woman behind the counter says, cheerfully, getting him a plate. “Everything with extra toast?”

“Maybe. Ok, yeah,” Phil says, smiling at her, and then glancing at Dan. “Don’t judge me, toast is awesome.”

“Not judging you,” Dan says with a grin, and when it’s his turn to be served he says, “Same as Phil, please.”

The woman behind the counter gives him this warm, friendly smile at that, and Dan stupidly wonders if Phil’s got some charm about him, some magic, something that puts people at ease like this, and maybe he can teach it to Dan so he can be the same.

By the time they’re safely seated and Dan’s burying his face in a cup of coffee, Phil’s already asked the cashier how her dog is (“She got a new puppy a few weeks ago,” He explains to Dan as they walk away) and been called over to another table where some guy in a stripy shirt wanted to talk about his dissertation (“I finished the first draft!” He tells Phil, after which they high five). Dan’s mentally totalling up the number of people he’s talked to at uni that he absolutely didn’t have to talk to. The number's dishearteningly low. Even PJ doesn’t count, because they live together. It’s depressing.

But not that depressing, because Phil’s there opposite him, making a satisfied little noise as he sips his coffee, his glasses steaming up. Dan can’t help but laugh when he pulls a face and has to wipe them off on his shirt cuff.

“So annoying,” Phil mutters, blinking a little oddly without his glasses. Dan finds himself reaching a hand out for them without even thinking about it.

“Come on, let’s see how blind you are,” He prompts, and Phil rolls his eyes and hands them over. Dan settles them on his nose and he feels like he’s been plunged into some distant, syrupy world. “Whoa, so blind.”

Phil laughs and says, “Yeah, exactly, give ‘em back so I can eat,” and Dan hands them over with a smile.

They eat in silence for a while, which is a minefield in itself. Dan finds himself cutting each thing into the smallest pieces he possibly can to avoid some horrifying hamster-face situation. It’s excruciating when all he really wants to do is hoover it all down in about two seconds – he’s so hungry and it smells amazing, but somehow not disgusting Phil seems more important.

“So,” Phil says, eyes bright over the rim of his cup of coffee. “It’s not that bad in here after all.”

“Hmm,” Dan says. “Maybe not.”

He’d still felt like a thousand eyes were watching him as they’d walked over to sit down – made worse by Phil apparently knowing everyone, Jesus, the last thing he needs is for any of Phil’s friends to wonder who he is and why the hell Phil’s hanging around with him of all people – but sitting here in the corner opposite Phil isn’t so bad. Phil had even let him take the seat that was up against the wall, so he doesn’t have to worry about people sitting behind him staring at him.

“And being with me,” Phil says, hesitantly. “That's – that's not so bad either?”

He keeps eye contact with Dan for a long moment, in which Dan desperately tries to chew on a mouthful of toast without looking disgusting so he can answer safely.

By the time he's done, Phil's gaze has skittered away and he's saying, “Sorry, ignore me, that was-”

“I'm sorry,” Dan says. “I mean – for being so – it was nothing personal, you know? I mean, you probably didn't know, like, I'd think it was something personal too, I just – I'm kind of really self-conscious,” It's inadequate and sounds so stupid just out there, floating between them, but he carries on anyway. “And I feel like people are staring at me for most of the time. Like, all the time, really. And I'm kind of – I feel stupid about the whole note-taker thing. And I was worried other people'd think I was stupid too. So I thought – I thought the best way to not draw attention to the fact that you were with me-”

“Was to not speak to me at all,” Phil finishes, quietly.

Dan nods.

“I'm really sorry,” He says. “Like – it's nothing personal, you're – you're –“ He falters, frustrated with himself. Phil's expression is hard to gauge. “I'm trying so hard not to do the whole it's not you it's me thing, but you know what I mean.”

Phil grins, much to Dan's relief.

“I'm just, like, shocked that you're breaking up with me already,” He says, in this mock-devastated voice. That's enough to surprise a laugh out of Dan, who splutters into his cup of coffee, much to Phil's amusement.

After Phil's handed him a napkin and Dan's pretty sure his face is so red that a lost aeroplane could use it as a landing beacon at thirty thousand feet, Phil's smile fades a little.

“I get it,” He says, gently, after a moment. It's eerily like when he was drunk, Dan thinks, except he's not leaning across the table this time, and he looks infinitely more put-together now than he did then. “But – needing a note-taker isn't something to be ashamed of. Like, I know that's easy for me to say,” He rolls his eyes at himself. “But I honestly don't think people care as much as you think they do.”

Dan smiles.

“That's what PJ said,” He says. “My flatmate, he – he said people are more focused on themselves than on other people.” He shrugs. “Which, like, I know he's right, logically, and you're right too, I just – I wish it was that easy, to, you know.” He waves a hand around near his head, not sure how to phrase it.

“Switch it all off,” Phil supplies, sympathetically.

Dan nods.

“I guess,” He says, feeling more than a little pathetic.

“If it helps,” Phil says, after a quiet moment drinking coffee. “There are, like, two other people with note takers in your classes.”

Dan stares at him.

“Really?”

Phil nods.

“See, you're so focused on if people are looking at you that you're not even bothered about other people,” He says, encouragingly.

Not true, Dan thinks. If that was true, he'd actually have absorbed something in the seminar earlier instead of just – Phil.

“I guess Peej was right after all,” He says, instead. “About – people not noticing other people.”

“Looks like he was,” Phil says, and smiles.

-

It turns out that being friends with Phil makes every day easier. Dan doesn't know why he's surprised – it makes sense. Ignoring Phil just made him feel terrible, and now that he's not...

Now that he's not, he finds himself looking forward to classes that he'd previously dreaded, just because Phil will be there. He finds himself looking forward to Phil's emails, even though they're just notes – now Phil sometimes puts smiley faces in them, stuff that makes Dan smile.

They start going for coffee a lot. And that's new, too, how Dan doesn't mind so much, going into places he'd previously given a wide berth. He queues in the campus coffee shop with Phil next to him, and the clusters of students and laughter across the room doesn't seem half as loud or important when Phil's there, trying to decide what muffin to buy and doing an impression of a caffeine-deprived zombie that involves a lot of groaning. Dan even ends up braving the milkshake place with him, much to PJ's surprise.

The more he does the more he thinks that his stupid, idle thoughts in the cafeteria that day were true – that there is some magic about Phil, some charm that spreads to envelop him when they're together, making him feel like he can conquer the everyday obstacles that normally evade him.

Part of him wants to tell PJ about his theory, because he knows exactly what PJ'd do. He'd go off on some tangent about the possibility of Phil being charmed, and then he'd draw a few dozen little sketches to that effect, after which he'd debunk the whole thing entirely and reassure Dan that his new-found confidence is his and his alone.

But Dan can't tell PJ, because these days whenever Dan mentions Phil PJ gets this weirdly smug look on his face, like he knows something Dan doesn't, and Dan could do with a little less of that in his life, if he's honest. He doesn't fancy Phil, he's just...he's just cool, and Dan really likes him. As a friend. That's it.

After all, Phil spends time with Dan because that's his job. And Dan knows that, he really does. He thinks about it a lot.

-

“I mean, I'm glad I got you,” Phil says, one morning. They're sitting on a wall outside the student union, watching the students walking by, speculating about who's hungover and trying to stifle their laughter behind their sleeves. “Like, one time I had this girl who used to try and get me to do her assignments for her.”

“What?” Dan says, smiling just because Phil is.

“Yeah,” Phil says. “And at first I thought, oh, she's just getting confused, you know, because I'm an academic helper? So you'd be forgiven for thinking that I'd, like...” He waves a hand vaguely.

“Write someone's essays for them,” Dan says.

“Yeah. Except then she'd still bug me about it even after I'd explained it to her. It was a nightmare. I'd get these, like, phone calls at past midnight, you know, asking me for help? That's why we're not supposed to give out our numbers anymore, actually. Louise had to intervene and everything.”

Phil slips his phone out of his jacket pocket to check the time, and Dan half watches him and half thinks about how he has Phil's number. Phil'd given it to him just after they'd started hanging out more often, and he hadn't mentioned anything about it not being allowed.

“Oh,” Phil says, as though he can read Dan's mind. “Oh, but you're – like, I knew you wouldn't be like her. Like – you write all your own essays, I dunno.”

“Yeah, that's why they're all so bad,” Dan says, darkly, thinking of his woefully unfinished assignments. He's taken to avoiding Facebook, because even people who aren't on his course posting about their completed essays makes him want to throw his laptop down a well.

“They're not bad,” Phil says, like he's ever read any of Dan's work. He gives Dan a concerned look over his coffee and adds, “Are you still having trouble, though? Because I can-”

“No, no, I'm fine,” Dan says, quickly, even though just mentioning his essays makes him panic and envision scenes where he gets thrown out of uni and disappoints everyone. When Phil opens his mouth to speak, Dan talks over him. “Phil, you literally just said they invented a rule where I'm not supposed to have your number in case I try and get you to do my work for me, ok, so-”

“I was gonna say,” Phil says, interrupting him. “I can talk to someone who actually can help you, if you want? Like – there are people you can talk to if work's really stressing you out, Dan.”

Dan's already shaking his head before Phil's finished speaking.

“It's ok,” He insists. The look on Phil's face is so knowing – it's not fair, Dan thinks, that a guy who can zone out in regular conversation and then tune back in with an observation about butterflies or passing dogs can suddenly look like that, like he senses Dan's bullshit completely. “I'm fine, I swear. Like – you'll be the first person to know if I start going off the rails 'cause of essays, ok?”

“Ok,” Phil says, softly. There's something shrewd about the look on his face that makes Dan feel sure this isn't the last he'll hear about this.

-

Dan likes that about Phil, he thinks, later. He's hugging his knees on a chair in the kitchen, watching PJ cook. It's one of the rare times when they've managed to be alone in the kitchen after classes – Dan remembers when he first moved in, listening like a frightened rabbit at his bedroom door, scared to come out and get food in case he bumped into a stranger who might judge his pyjamas.

Phil's much more switched on than he seems. It's fascinating. On some days Dan'd be mistaken for thinking he doesn't pay attention, but then later on he'll ask a question about something Dan had been rambling about earlier, and it turns out that he was listening and interested all along.

It's one item on a list of fascinating things about Phil that seems to get longer by the day.

-

They're having yet another coffee the following Thursday when another item for Dan's list just walks up to their table and interrupts their conversation.

“Sorry,” The guy says. Dan thinks he's seen him around before – he has the extra severe kind of undercut that Dan's always sort of wanted but is pretty sure wouldn't work on him. “Er, hey, Phil, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Ok,” Phil says, lightly, settling further into his chair. The guy doesn't say anything, but he does give Dan a massive case of the side-eye. Dan's torn between wanting to glare and disappear into his chair, so he drinks his coffee and acts like he didn't notice.

“Please,” The guy says, after an awkwardly long silence.

“Oh, you mean the over there kind of talking,” Phil says, all innocent surprise. “I won't be a sec,” He adds, to Dan, as he gets up and follows the strange undercut guy away across the coffee shop. They end up standing by the stand where all the sugar packets and straws are. Not that Dan's watching, because Phil's conversations are none of his business – especially conversations that have to take place all the way across the room where he can't hear what's being said.

The undercut guy's properly tanned, wearing a short sleeved t-shirt that shows off his arm muscles. It's cold outside, so he's probably freezing to death, but Dan thinks vaguely that if his arms looked like that he'd probably wear short sleeved shirts all the time too.

He's always admired people with nice arms, he guesses – this guy looks like he could pop Dan's head off if he put him in a headlock. The only edge Dan maybe has on him is that he's taller.

Not that he's actually gonna end up fighting some random stranger, Dan tells himself, as he watches Phil talk to the guy. Or anyone, ever. There's just something about Phil's body language the longer he's over there – the way his arms are folded, the almost curt way he seems to be talking, looking completely unlike himself somehow. Arm muscles guy is all wide-eyed, looks like maybe he's speaking in an undertone. Dan watches him edging closer to Phil and watches Phil take the tiniest step backwards, keeping space between them.

Maybe Dan will end up fighting this guy after all, he thinks, his stomach churning. He's never seen Phil look so unhappy. There's something about the two of them that makes Dan feel like he's intruding just by watching, so he looks down at the table instead, shifting sugar packets around with one of those wooden stirrer things.

It isn't long before there's the sound of a chair scraping across the floor and Phil's back, sitting down opposite Dan with a smile and reaching for the sugar like there had never been some strange, frowning interlude with a muscled guy.

“Sorry about that,” He says, pulling a face as he pops the lid off his coffee. Dan feels helplessly charmed by the way he breathes in the steam spiralling off it with a little satisfied noise before he starts dumping sugar in it.

“It's ok,” Dan says, not sure whether he should ask – whether it's even his place to ask. “I, er. I was worried I was gonna have to, like, intervene.” Phil looks up at him, half-frowning, and Dan wishes he'd just kept his mouth shut. “I mean, er. Like. Not that you'd need me to intervene, I just – in case you needed, like, backup. I dunno.”

His face is uncomfortably hot thanks to his own idiocy when he finally manages to shut up. Thankfully, Phil smiles at him.

“Backup's appreciated in all situations, don't worry,” He says, warmly. “He's just – ugh.” He sips his coffee, staring at a point somewhere past Dan, thoughtfully. “We, um. He.” He sighs. “We were together, kind of. Like, last year.”

“Oh.”

“I know,” Phil says, darkly, as though he'd gleaned a world of meaning from a solitary syllable. “I was just – he was really flattering, and, er. But a total dick, I mean, I wouldn't ever, like...” He waves a hand, vaguely. “I dunno.”

“It didn't end well, then,” Dan says.

Phil pulls a face mid-drink of coffee, shaking his head.

“Oh,” Dan says again, intelligently. When Phil gives him a look, he realises that maybe his non-responses to all of this could be misinterpreted, so he adds, “If it helps, you're like, way out of his league.”

Phil laughs.

“Right, sure,” He says, but he seems pleased. “You could tell that just by seeing him across a room, ok.”

“Well, I mean, you said he was a dick,” Dan says. “And, like – anyone who's gonna be a dick to you is totally out of your league. Like, way, way down. Super low on the, er, league table.”

Dan could kick himself for even saying anything, but Phil grins at him, and that makes it worth it.

Phil smiling makes lots of things worthwhile these days. Dan tries not to dwell on that too much.

-

“He had a boyfriend?”

“No,” Dan says.

He thought by telling PJ all about Phil's moment with his ex right before he had a shower he'd be able to escape the rigorous examination of the topic from every conceivable angle by rushing into the bathroom and locking the door behind him. He'd clearly underestimated PJ's persistence.

“You just said he did!” PJ's practically crowing in the bathroom doorway, his foot planted in such a way that's blocking Dan from shutting the door in his face. “Oh my God, Dan, that means-”

“It doesn't mean anything. Can you move?”

But he's already half laughing just from the way PJ's waggling his eyebrows, looking for all the world like a cartoon character.

“PJ-”

“I'm just saying,” PJ says. “Like – there's no misinterpretation if you did like him, you know?”

“Yeah, that'd be great,” Dan says, trying to shut the door on PJ's foot. “If I did like him. If. In some alternate universe-”

PJ scoffs. Dan tries to shut the door on his foot again.

“Ouch! Hey!”

“Stop being all like, ugh,” Dan says, imitating PJ scoffing at him. “I wish I hadn't told you now.”

“Ok, ok,” PJ says. “Fine, I'll leave you to do your stuff.”

“Good,” Dan says.

When PJ doesn't move his foot, Dan gives him a look.

“Oh,” PJ says, with mock surprise, looking from Dan to his foot and back to Dan again. The second he moves back, Dan shuts the door and locks it. “Hey, you didn't tell me if the ex guy was fit!”

“I'm not talking about this anymore,” Dan calls, lining up his shampoo and body wash on the edge of the sink.

“Because even if he was,” PJ says, voice sounding weirdly warped like he's pressing his mouth right up to the crack in the door. “You're fit too, Dan.”

“Peej, can I just have a shower?” After a moment's thought, he adds, “Thanks, though, I guess?”

There's no response, so he thinks PJ's gone, right up until he's pulling his t-shirt off and he starts talking again, making Dan jump.

“You've got, like, inner fitness too,” He says.

“I've got arrhythmia, is what I've got,” Dan grumbles, his heart pounding stupidly fast. “Jesus, PJ.”

“No, no, I'm serious,” PJ says, as earnest as someone can sound when they have their face smushed up against a door. “You're a good person, you know? And Phil said that other guy was a dick, right, and – well, you're not a dick. So you're already winning.”

“Thanks,” Dan says, sincerely. Not that he thinks PJ's right, but it's nice that someone thinks good stuff about him. Dan struggles with that himself most of the time. “But like – seriously, I'm about to actually get in the shower, so...”

“I'm going, I'm going,” PJ says. “The keyhole's all blocked up anyway, so-”

“PJ!”

There's the sound of PJ laughing and then walking away, followed by the thud of his bedroom door shutting behind him.

Once Dan's actually in the shower though, all he can think about is what PJ was saying. Not really the stuff about his inner fitness, whatever the hell that is – but more about Phil's mystery ex boyfriend, and how it's obvious that Phil's preference is for guys who are way out of Dan's league.

Not that it matters, he thinks, sighing and closing his eyes against the water. He doesn't like Phil. He's just – this whole thing is probably just a side effect of him and Phil attempting to complete three month's worth of missed friendship in a matter of weeks. Almost certainly a side effect, in fact.

Which is lucky, because judging by Phil's ex-boyfriend even if he was interested, the chances of Phil even bothering to look at him twice are minimal. Dan doesn't have arm muscles so much as he has arm noodles.

It's almost a relief, in a way. At least he doesn't ever have to worry about impressing Phil, he thinks, with a sigh, turning around so the water hits his back. You can't worry about something you'd fail at before it even started.

Chapter Text

“I saw Phil's ex boyfriend,” PJ tells Dan, throwing himself into the chair opposite his.

Dan looks up from the case study he's been trying to understand for the past fifteen minutes and blinks, like he's just woken up from a dream. He's been in the library for so long that maybe this is a dream – or some kind of sick nightmare, where the sickly off-yellow library walls surround him for the rest of his life.

PJ's pink from the cold and his coat collar is pulled up high over his mouth but Dan can tell he's smiling – just something about his eyes. Normally that'd make him feel fond, the way he usually does, but today it makes him irrationally irritated.

“You, what?” He says, trying to sound chill and calm and not like he's seconds away from snapping his laptop in half.

“I saw Phil's ex,” PJ says, digging in his coat pocket with one hand and pulling it down to uncover his mouth with the other. “In the coffee shop. I drew an artist's interpretation of him, look.” He pushes a folded piece of paper across the table at Dan, who makes a show of rolling his eyes before he slides the paper close enough to unfold.

“Oh my God,” He splutters. It's a terrifyingly detailed drawing of a dick with muscled arms. “Peej, what the fuck?”

PJ's too busy laughing to answer for a minute.

“Your face,” He says. Dan can't help but laugh at him, grabbing the picture and screwing it up just so he can throw it at PJ's head. “Oh my God – no, but really, I did actually see him, I just wanted to make you smile. I've got the evidence on my phone.” He produces his phone and clicks around for a moment before waving the screen in Dan's face. Dan gets a glimpse of a white vest and arms before PJ yanks his phone away again.

“Jesus,” He says. “Where,” He starts to say, then stops himself. “No, no, why, why are you taking secret pictures of Phil's ex? And how did you know it was him?”

“It is him, then?” PJ says, peering at the photo interestedly. “I hid my phone behind a milk jug and got him while he was in the queue. You said a guy with high cold tolerance and muscles, right?”

Dan sighs, deeply regretting saying anything at all. When PJ doesn't stop giving him this expectant look, he finally says, “Yeah, Peej, but that wasn't so you'd go and stalk the guy-”

“I wasn't stalking!” PJ says, far too indignantly for someone who has a covert photograph of a stranger on their phone. “I was observing.”

“Right, yeah,” Dan says, dryly, making a show of pulling his laptop a little closer like he's actually about to start working. “Phrase it like that to the police, that'll go down well.”

“I will,” PJ says. Dan clicks around on his laptop for a moment, opening Tumblr in another tab on autopilot. Case studies are overrated anyway, Dan doesn't really give a shit about some crime from years and years ago. Cute dog Vines are way more important. “Dan, have you thought about-”

“No,” Dan says, automatically, just in case it's about Phil.

“Dan,” PJ repeats, a little louder this time, rolling his eyes. “Have you thought about going to the academic help place about your assignments?”

Dan feels prickles of embarrassment before PJ's barely finished speaking. He stares hard at some gifset of a beautiful girl he doesn't recognise just to avoid making eye contact, like Peej's eyes are some kind of piercing beam that'll be able to see right inside Dan's head and pinpoint just how much he needs help on these stupid fucking assignments.

“Nah,” He says, as lightly as he can. “I'm fine. I'll get it done.”

“Yeah?” PJ says, worriedly. Dan envies him so much in that moment that it almost hurts – in a second he relives a thousand evenings spent sitting cross legged on PJ's bed, watching him diligently working on his sketchbook at his desk, cutting and sketching and analysing.

“Yeah,” Dan says, and manages to force himself to smile.

-

It's a lie he keeps telling, and one that he doesn't believe for a second.

He walks to class and he meets Phil and they get coffee like Dan has all the time in the world. Meanwhile the deadline creeps closer and closer, days passing like camera flashes, until their time off before the deadline begins and Dan doesn't even have lectures and seminars to procrastinate with anymore.

He spends a lot of time lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He texts Phil a little, but Phil's keen to ask about how his assignments are going and Dan doesn't have the heart to tell him.

It's not like he doesn't work. He works. It seems like he spends most of his time working, but it doesn't make any difference. He sits down at his desk or traipses to the library with PJ and he stares at his laptop screen, and then before he knows it he's opened four extra tabs and he's listening to music that's too loud and reblogging stupid shit on Tumblr.

Even on the rare occasions that he's completely focused on his studies, there's nothing more disheartening than a day spent in the library with nothing more than a hundred or so words to show for it.

“I wish I could help,” PJ says, more than once.

Whenever they work in the flat at the kitchen table together, PJ just makes him endless cups of what he calls deadline juice – a combination of hot chocolate, coffee and a shit-ton of sugar. PJ must be pretty heavy handed with the sugar because it's so sweet it makes Dan's teeth ache.

“You are helping,” Dan assures him, accepting what has to be his hundredth cup of deadline juice.

Even PJ's guilt over not being able to help makes him feel worse, not that it's PJ's fault that Dan can't do anything right. He can't even write essays without making PJ look like that, the way Dan's mum used to look when he told her about the latest taunts from the guys at high school.

As if all of his deadline worries weren't enough, he finds himself missing Phil. Phil, who's temporarily postponed their regular coffee meet-ups and milkshakes to let Dan focus, like he's mistaken Dan for a fully-functioning human being who can just do that – just sit down in an hour or two and let an essay flow out of him.

You'll be ok, his texts say. Assignments suck but ur awesome ^_^. When you're done we can drink so much coffee.

You drink enough coffee as it is, Dan replies to that last one, pressing his fingertips into his eyes when he's done like he wasn't just about to cry stupid, overtired tears before Phil texted.

-

By the time the week of his deadline rolls around, he's kind of a mess.

“Dan,” PJ says, doubtfully, watching Dan mixing vodka and coke in a mug. He'd been sitting in the kitchen when Dan had trailed in there to grab the vodka from where he'd hidden it behind the fridge, and then he'd quickly followed him back into his room like he was worried Dan might down it all in one go.

Dan might be stupid, but he's not that stupid.

“What?” He says, taking a gulp of the drink. It's so strong it makes him wince. “Ugh, ugh, that's – fuck, that's a bad idea,” And he takes another gulp, some of it dribbling unattractively down his chin.

PJ's eyes are wide and worried, biting his thumbnail as he watches Dan swearing under his breath and wiping his face on his sleeve.

“If your assignment's due, Dan-”

“The day after tomorrow,” Dan says, shaking his head vehemently and finishing the rest of the drink. He reaches for the vodka again. “Don't worry, it's fine. I just – I just want to have a laugh, you know? When's the last time we actually went on a night out?”

PJ looks uncertain.

“Ok, ok,” He says, quietly. “But – but we'll go to the library tomorrow, yeah? I'll come with you.”

Dan laughs under his breath at that, hand slipping a little adding coke to his mug. PJ finished his assignments days ago, so there's no reason for him to go to the library with Dan other than pity.

He's such a fuck-up that his friends have to supervise him, he thinks, filling another mug with vodka and coke for PJ. He's such a fuck-up he needs someone to follow him from class to class.

“There,” He says, topping up a second mug with coke. PJ picks it up and sips it, uncertainly. “Right. Now let's put some music on, it's too fucking quiet in here.”

-

Dan gets woken up the next morning by someone opening his curtains, a bright strip of sunlight falling across his face. He whimpers and pulls the duvet up over his head, ready to go straight back to sleep. He'll deal with PJ later, when he's actually alive.

“Dan.”

Dan just groans and wriggles around until his head's under his pillow.

“Dan, come on,” The voice says, and then a hand touches his shoulder over the blankets. Dan forces his eyes open, because that's not PJ's voice. His eyes feel dry and tired, and it takes him a second to throw the pillow off and turn over.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” He says, staring at Phil, who's backing away from the bed awkwardly.

Oh God, Phil can't be here right now, he can't, not in Dan's room, oh God. Dan scrambles into a sitting position and tries to flatten down his hair, all at once. Moving that quickly sends a spike of pain through his skull and he closes his eyes for a second, just breathing and trying to convince himself he's not about to throw up.

“Sorry,” Phil says. He moves back over to the bed, and sets two things down on Dan's night stand – two boxes of painkillers and a cup of coffee. “Sorry, I – I didn't want you to sleep in all day and miss your essay. Some blond guy let me in.”

Dan presses the heels of his hands into his eyes for a moment, dread and worry flooding through him. How could he have been so stupid? Why the fuck did he think it was a good idea to get drunk last night?

Well, no. He didn't think it was a good idea. He was trying to fuck up on purpose.

The self-destructive aspects of his procrastination habit are really his favourite of his personality quirks, he thinks, bitterly.

He sits in silence for a moment, trying to make connections in his head, figuring out why Phil's here and exactly when his memory dropped off last night. He has the dimmest memory of slopping vodka over the rim of his mug and PJ's worried expression, and maybe something about his phone and lying on the ground outside the flat, a blurry snapshot of a dark night's sky and the smell of cigarettes floating over from the smoking shelter.

“Fuck,” He says, hoarsely, rubbing his eyes. When he looks up, he sees little starbursts when he blinks over at Phil, who's pulling the cuffs of his hoodie down over his hands. “I – I texted you, didn't I?”

Phil doesn't say anything immediately, but the way his mouth twists awkwardly makes the answer obvious enough. Dan groans and buries his head in his hands.

“It's fine,” Phil says, in this unbearably soothing voice when Dan looks up again, long enough to grab his phone to assess the damage. “I – I called you and PJ picked up and...”

I'M uch a fuckup, the first text to Phil says. Did i tell you i miss you and everything fckinhg sucks because it fuckign sucks

Phil's still talking, something about an illuminating phone conversation he'd had with PJ. Dan's too busy hearing roaring white noise and wanting his bed to get sucked into a black hole.

“I'm ok,” He says, interrupting Phil mid-concerned sentence. He waves his hand, vaguely and staring down at his knees. “I'm – I shouldn't have even texted you, I'm sorry, everything's fine.”

He barely sounds convincing to his own ears, so he's not exactly surprised when Phil gives him this blank I'm not taking any of your shit look.

“You should drink that,” He says, firmly, nodding at the coffee. He has his arms folded and everything. “And take those. Two of each – my dad always says that's, like, the best thing.”

Dan looks at him for a second. He's wearing an overlarge hoodie, sleeves falling down over his hands. It looks soft, somehow, like if Dan coaxed him closer it'd be nice to touch. And those glasses – of course he's wearing his glasses. Dan's mouth is dry, and he coughs, awkwardly, forcing himself to look away. He only picks up the coffee to distract himself from staring at Phil, who looks a little pink in the face when Dan glances back at him over the rim of his takeaway coffee cup.

“What time is it?” He asks, after he's taken a few sips. The coffee's syrupy sweet, exactly the way Dan normally likes it, even though a stupid voice in the back of his head worries about the calories.

“Eight,” Phil says, without looking at his phone or anything. “Or, like, quarter past eight now, I guess.”

“Jesus,” Dan says, and drinks more coffee. The part of him that's irreparably stubborn (to the point of self sabotage) wants to refuse the painkillers and the coffee and demand that Phil leaves, because he's not a child who needs to be walked through every step of his life. But a greater part of him – the part that can't stop looking over at Phil, at how good he looks this morning and the fact that he's brought Dan coffee this early – that part reaches for the boxes of painkillers and knocks them into his lap.

“Two of each,” Phil repeats, like he might've forgotten.

“Isn't that, like,” Dan tries to tear the box one-handed, then gives up and sets the coffee down. “Overdosing? Like, four painkillers?”

“Nope,” Phil says. “They're two different types. Like, ibuprofen and paracetemol, I dunno how it works, but you can take them both together. My dad swears by it.” He pauses. “Promise I'm not trying to kill you.”

Dan snickers under his breath.

“I know,” He says. “Can you, like – there are some Doritos over there, can you chuck them over?”

Phil frowns a little, but passes the Doritos all the same.

“Don't judge me,” Dan says, as he takes the bag. “I like snacks.”

“Not judging you,” Phil says. “I used to keep cereal in my room when I was at uni. Actually I still keep cereal in my room, I'm not gonna – what are you doing?”

Dan laughs, looking up from where he's methodically sandwiching each pill he has to take between two Doritos, effectively getting orange dust all over his bedcovers.

“I can't take tablets by themselves,” He says, shoving one of the Dorito-sandwiches in his mouth and trying not to think about it too much. Once he's successfully swallowed it and taken another sip of coffee, he adds, “I know, like, just add it to your ever-growing list of how fucking lame I am.”

“There's no list,” Phil says, firmly.

“Right, yeah,” Dan says, once he's crunched his way through all the tablets. “I'm sure all of the people you've taken notes for needed, like, babysitting through their assignments.”

“I'm not babysitting you,” Phil says, scowling a little. “I'm just – this is nothing to do with being your note-taker, I want to help you.” He's quiet for a moment. “It's not like I've got anything better to do today.”

“Ok,” Dan says, sarcastically. “Ok, sure-”

“I don't have anything better to do,” Phil insists. “D'you want me to wait outside while you get dressed?”

“Er,” Dan says, stupidly. It's funny how Phil asks that, like if Dan said no, you can stay, he'd just stick around and watch Dan get changed. He feels himself going red, so he adds, “Yeah, sure, I won't be long,” just to get Phil out of the room before he humiliates himself even more.

“Ok,” Phil says, nodding before he traipses out of the room.

Dan sits for a moment, staring at the closed door, then slips out of bed, going over to the door.

“Hey,” He says, peering around it at Phil, who turns on his heel, surprised. “Er. Thanks for all this.”

“It's fine,” Phil says, in a voice so warm and kind that Dan thinks he could curl up in it and go back to sleep.

-

Once Dan's dressed and shoving all of his notes into his backpack, he's teetering on the brink of fully fledged panic. He feels woozy, rushing around his room, his stomach all light and strange. He ate a few Doritos while he was getting dressed but there was this moment when he opened his wardrobe where he had to lean against the wall for a second and take deep breaths until the sudden rush of nausea passed.

Now, he thinks, shoving notebooks and pens into his backpack, he has a day to finish an essay that's meant to have taken him weeks to plan and prepare and work through. And he's hungover. Not to mention the fact that the first time Phil saw the inside of his bedroom the floor was littered with dirty laundry and crusty old socks, which doesn't exactly give a lasting positive impression of being in Dan's bedroom.

Not that Dan wants Phil to have a positive impression of being in his bedroom, he thinks, catching sight of his pink-cheeked reflection in the hand mirror on his desk. He just – he wishes he could've been awake and the room could've been tidy and he could've made himself look less fucking ugly, that's all.

-

“I'm freaking out.”

“You're fine.”

“Right, yeah,” Dan says, with a mirthless laugh, speeding up a little as though getting to the library quicker's gonna make any difference at this point. “Because this is really an ideal situation to be in, it's not like I've royally fucked everything up, or anything.”

“You're fine,” Phil repeats, quickening his steps to catch Dan up and grabbing hold of his arm. Instead of stopping him walking, he just slips his arm through Dan's so they're linked. “We're gonna sort it out, don't worry.”

It's beyond pathetic how part of Dan believes him. Just because he's Phil and he always seems to know what he's doing.

They stay linked all the way to the library, until they reach the lift (“Stairs are for losers,” Dan says, just to make Phil laugh). Then they detach, awkwardly, Dan pretending to be focused on the mirrored wall of the lift rather than Phil, and how Dan's arm feels very suddenly cold without him holding onto it.

-

It's a weird day. It's a long day. Phil pulls some strings when they get into the nearly-deserted library and convinces the librarian to let them use the conference room next to the stacks, which is usually out of bounds to students.

Dan knows because of the number of times he's been trailing around the stacks in the past and he's caught glimpses of the (always empty) conference room through the windows in the locked door and he's wondered why there's an entire room that's deserted while he has to wander around waiting for someone to give up their table so he can actually work.

“So you won't have to go back through, like, the loud bits of the library,” Phil explains, once they're in there. “You can just go back out into the stacks if you need, like, journals and stuff. Or – or I can go out and get stuff for you, I-”

“No, it's fine,” Dan says, setting his laptop bag down on the table. “I can get stuff. Don't worry.” He dumps his backpack too, then hesitates, hands on the back of a chair. “What are you gonna do all day? I mean, like – this is gonna take a while, if I actually get it done at all.”

“You'll get it done,” Phil says, with the kind of conviction that implies blind faith. Dan doesn't know whether to be flattered or terrified. “And I'm gonna help you. And, like, listen to music, maybe. I won't be bored, don't worry.” He slips his own backpack off his back, sitting down in a chair near Dan's.

And that's what it's like for the rest of the day. Well – give or take the moments of blind panic, when Dan's palms sweat and his eyes blur and the words on his screen don't make any sense, nothing makes any sense – and then his head throbs just to remind him that yeah, he drank himself into oblivion last night and sent pathetic texts to the same guy who keeps fetching him coffee and promising him that they're gonna order pizza later (“Trust me, when I was at uni we used to order Domino's to the library all the time”).

“I can't believe I've done this,” Dan says, at one point, feeling like he should be wheezing or something. Maybe this is what a heart attack feels like – it's past lunchtime already and he's written precisely 500 words, which is 2500 words short of his actual word count, and he thinks he's gonna pass out. “I can't – I've literally paid to be experiencing this level of stress.”

“You've paid to get a degree,” Phil reminds him, calmly, shuffling over to move Dan's laptop away from him. “I'll read this through, you take a break.”

“But I've only written – fine,” He finishes, lamely, when Phil gives him another one of those stern looks of his. “Did anyone ever tell you you'd make a great teacher?”

Phil laughs, eyes scanning Dan's mediocre essay.

“Er, no, not really.”

“Well, you would,” Dan says, resting his chin on his hand for a second and yawning. “One of those ones who seems sweet but then gives everyone a detention for, like, the tiniest thing.”

“Sounds just like me,” Phil says, smiling at him around his laptop.

-

It's pathetic, but Dan knows for a fact he'd never have got it done without Phil. He keeps Dan awake and keeps him motivated (and caffeinated) and periodically agrees to read through what he's got, even though Dan's pretty sure his (sickeningly positive) feedback is 90% lies to make him feel better about himself.

It takes the rest of the day and most of the night for Dan to actually hit the word count and cobble together a satisfactory conclusion. He ends up finishing in those confusing winter hours where it's definitely morning but the sky hasn't quite got the memo yet.

“It's over,” Phil says, reaching out to give Dan's shoulder a celebratory shake. Dan's so tired it feels like his brain rattles around in his skull when he moves. “You did it.”

“Fuck,” Dan says. He's smiling so much his cheeks hurt, which probably looks gross to Phil, but he'll worry about that later. Or he won't, because he's done. “Oh my God, I can sleep for a week.”

“You honestly can,” Phil says, his hand still on Dan's shoulder. He's beaming so much. “I knew you could do it.”

“I mean,” Dan clicks around, scrolling through his essay without really seeing it. “It's shit. It's fucking terrible – if I get a third I'll be surprised, but it's done.” He laughs a high-pitched giddy laugh, feeling so light with relief he's surprised his feet are still touching the ground.

“It's done,” Phil repeats, and then – it's like he tugs on Dan's shoulder to shake him again, except Dan turns to look at him at the same time and they're suddenly too close together. Maybe they were too close together this entire time, shoulders touching, squashed up next to each other so Phil could read the essay too.

Dan's so exhausted that he feels like he's having some out of body experience – like when Phil blinks he should be able to hear a monumental whoosh in the air, all sounds amplified. When Phil exhales, ever so slightly, Dan can smell his coffee breath. When his own breath catches in his throat, he knows he's messed up. Coffee breath isn't good on anyone, that's just a fact – but Phil's hand is warm and heavy on his shoulder, and when his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip Dan's gaze is helplessly drawn to it, feeling suddenly feverishly warm all over.

Hey, he thinks of saying. I know I'm not exactly your type, but -

The door behind them opens with a squeak of hinges and a thud, and Dan rears backwards so suddenly he nearly knocks his laptop off the table. He clicks around on his laptop without really seeing it, automatically saving his essay for the fifth time and studiously not looking at Phil or the cleaner who's just entered the room, pulling a trolley behind him.

“Er - students aren't allowed in here,” He says, apologetically.

“I'm an academic supervisor,” Phil explains, smoothly, all business.

Dan can't look at him. He can't look at anyone right now, so he just keeps his gaze fixed firmly on his laptop and hopes against hope that he isn't too red in the face.

When he's managed to calm his hammering heart a little, he tunes back in to the cleaner and Phil talking – and the cleaner smiling. The Phil Effect, he thinks, wryly. Dan doesn't blame him at all.

“Everything alright?” Phil asks Dan a moment later. He doesn't move his chair so close this time, and Dan's stupidly relieved. He feels like his brain's full of candy floss – all of his thoughts suddenly formless and fluffy.

“Mm,” Dan says, not looking at him straight away. When he does, Phil smiles and then he shuffles in a little, nudging Dan in the arm. Dan can't help but grin and laugh. “Stop it, I-” Stop flirting while there's some guy cleaning up all of our rubbish, he doesn't say. “I'll be done in a second.”

“Ok,” Phil says, lightly.

Uploading the essay to turnitin doesn't take long – Dan ignores the similarity score, much to Phil's horror (“Unless it's, like, a hundred percent it doesn't even matter,” He insists), and neither does sending it to the nearest printer.

“I'm taking pictures of this,” Phil says, when Dan's easing the warm essay into a plastic wallet.

“Please don't,” Dan says. “My hair's disgusting, and – Phil!”

Phil just waves his phone in Dan's face and laughs at him.

“Come and get breakfast with me,” He says, when they're finally (finally!) leaving the library.

“What, after your paparazzi imitation back there?” Dan teases. “Anyway, I've got to hand this in first.”

Phil tilts his head a little, as if to say duh.

“I’m gonna walk up with you. I meant, like, after that.”

Dan doesn’t even need to think about it, not when Phil’s Phil – not when he stayed up all night to help Dan out, not when he pulled strings to get them a private place to study, not when he looks at Dan like that, the glint in his eyes making Dan’s mouth feel curiously dry.

“Sure,” He says. Phil beams at him. To cover how flustered he feels, he fake-coughs into his hand and adds, “If I pass out and, like, faceplant on the table…”

“I’ll make sure you get home,” Phil says, lightly. They share a strange look, paused at the top of the stairs that lead out of the library. Dan tears his gaze away, feeling weird, and when he glances back as they make their way down the stairs it’s to find Phil’s smiling, shoving his hands into his pockets as he walks.

The foyer of the library is completely deserted. Dan feels almost jet-lagged when they get past the first set of automatic doors, their footsteps echoing strangely in the high-ceilinged empty space, and he finally sees daylight. It's the thin, sunrise kind of daylight that Dan normally only ever sees through gaps in his curtains.

“God,” He says, as they slip out into the chilly January morning. The sky’s pink and the air smells clean and crisp somehow, and Dan’s brain hurts. “It’s so fucking weird, like – we showed up here in the morning and now it’s the morning again, like…” He trails off.

“Insane,” Phil finishes for him, helpfully, word nearly cut in half by a huge yawn. His eyes screw up and he covers his mouth, and he looks so endearing in that moment, so young and vulnerable somehow, that Dan clenches his hands into cold fists by his sides to avoid doing anything stupid like reaching out to touch him.

If they held hands, it might make Dan’s cold fingers feel warmer. Although Phil’s own hands are pale and a little pink at the tips, so he’s probably just as cold as Dan.

Like two snowmen holding hands, Dan thinks, a little hysterically, and ends up laughing to himself.

“What?” Phil says, uncertainly, already grinning even though he has no idea what Dan’s laughing about. “What?” He asks again, when Dan just laughs more.

“Hysteria,” He manages to say, breathlessly. “Setting in.”

“Better hand that in quickly then,” Phil says, and moves to link arms with him as easy as breathing. “I think my stomach’s gonna eat itself. And I need, like, twelve pints of coffee.”

-

Dan’s so tired that morning that when he’s actually slept and he looks back on it, the whole thing seems like some bizarre dream. The pinkness of the sky and the paleness of Phil’s face, so close, and the softness of Phil’s laugh in the early hours of the morning, trying to make him smile, to encourage him.

On the way to the academic submissions office, Phil actually slips a bottle of iced coffee out of his backpack and starts drinking like he hasn’t spent the entire night imbibing enough caffeine to keep an elephant awake for the next thirty years. Dan nudges into him as a joke, rolling his eyes at the bottle. There’s a second when Phil’s smile fades and he moves in close, the two of them lingering in an empty corridor, and Dan thinks it’ll finally happen, shelved tension from earlier suddenly sparking back into life and making Dan’s heart stutter and his palms sweat.

Except then Phil makes himself go cross-eyed and takes a big, slurping sip of his stupid coffee drink, and Dan ends up letting out a startled laugh and shaking his head and the moment’s gone.

They end up being the first and only customers in the otherwise empty cafeteria, Phil explaining to the women behind the counter that they’ve been up all night working (a move that gets them both an extra hash brown, much to Dan’s delight).

“The Phil Effect,” He says, when they’re sitting down. It’s one of the tables with little armchairs instead of hardbacked chairs – the tables they never actually manage to sit in when the cafeteria’s full because they’re the most popular.

“The what?” Phil says, already chewing a mouthful of toast.

“You,” Dan explains, then rolls his eyes at himself. He needs a whole day’s worth of sleep before he can actually function properly again, he’s pretty sure. “Your whole thing. People love you. You’re like, charming, or whatever.”

”Really?” Phil says, quietly, after a moment’s silence. There are crumbs at the corner of his mouth and Dan doesn’t even care.

He nods.

“D’you not notice?”

“Not regularly, no,” Phil says, cutting his egg into tiny pieces. Dan watches him and the way the light glints off his hair when he looks down at his plate. He looks up, a small smile on his face, and adds, “So you think I’m charming?”

“Shut up,” Dan says, with exaggerated exasperation. “It’s the hysteria talking.”

“Oh, definitely,” Phil agrees staunchly, nodding. “But,” Dan says, after a moment of staring down at his untouched food. “But, like, yeah. I do. Think that you’re,” He gestures with his fork. “Y’know.”

The way Phil looks down for a moment after he says that lingers in his head like a snapshot when he’s traipsing upstairs to his flat later. It’s the way he smiles, sweet and somehow conspiratorial, like he and Dan have some secret together, just between the two of them.

Maybe they do, Dan thinks, sleepily, when he’s finally falling into bed, burrowing down under the covers. Or if not, they will soon.

It’s that thought – so unbelievable and brilliant - that Dan takes with him when he finally drifts off to sleep.

-

When he finally wakes up, he’s tangled awkwardly in his bedcovers, one leg hanging over the side of the bed and drool on his pillow. He grimaces and pushes the pillow over the side of the bed, kicking his legs to get free of the covers.

He stares at the ceiling, slowly waking up, and toys with the idea that he’s been asleep for a thousand years. That’s it, he’s the modern Sleeping Beauty. If he gets up and throws his curtains open, all he’ll see is a bunch of twisting brambles pressing up against the glass.

Either that or he’s slept for ages The Walking Dead-style, and when he leaves his room he’ll find a ton of dead bodies and weird hard-to-read graffiti.

He lingers over that second idea so much that he freaks himself out, forcing himself out of bed to throw his curtains open and reassure himself about the total absence of both brambles and corpses.

It’s some indeterminate time, sky pale white and cold looking. The view’s just as dreary as usual, but Dan finds himself loving the sight of everything – the other student flats and the trees and the wheelie bins. Everything looks brilliant when you don’t have essays to write.

When he stumbles over to his bedroom door, there’s a piece of paper on the floor in front of it.

ARE YOU DEAD, YES/NO (DELETE AS APPLICABLE), the note says in PJ’s handwriting. Grinning to himself, Dan goes back to grab his phone off his bedside table before he slopes out into the corridor.

“Oh, hey!” PJ calls through his open bedroom door from where he’s spinning in his desk chair. He grabs the table to stop himself turning and gives Dan a worried little look when he walks in and sits down on the bed. “Are you…? How did the essay go?”

“Done,” Dan says, slumping his shoulders in a pantomime of relief.

PJ cheers.

“Yes!” He says, and holds his hand up for a high five. Dan high fives him and grins, glad that any bitterness he’d had over PJ’s organisational skills has completely dissipated. “We should watch movies. And eat pizza.”

“And sleep,” Dan says, flopping back onto PJ’s bed.

“You’ve been asleep,” PJ points out. “For ages. I thought you’d died or something.”

“Yeah, I saw your creepy note,” Dan says, propping himself up on his elbows. It’s weird how he hasn’t seen PJ properly since their ill-fated night out. “Hey – about the other night, you know, when I,” He waves a hand, while his brain finishes, when I got drunk and selfishly dragged you into my self destructive funtimes.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” PJ says, warmly. “It’s – it’s fine, I mean, you finished it, and everything’s great.” He pauses. “It’s great, right?”

Dan feels an unstoppable rush of fondness for Peej and his anxious little frown when he says, “Yeah, it’s great. I mean, the essay was shit, but – ouch!” PJ had actually reached out to slap his ankle, and it hurt. Dan rubs it. “Jesus, what was that for?”

“Sorry,” PJ says, sheepishly, shuffling along so he can rub Dan’s ankle too, like that’ll make it better. “Just – don’t worry about the essay. It’s done now.”

“It’s done,” Dan says, mouth twitching into a smile automatically.

“So,” PJ says. “Movies and pizza?”

Dan laughs.

“It’s, like, 11am.”

“Never too early for pizza,” PJ assures him, with a grin.

-

Dan doesn't remember falling asleep after his and PJ's movie marathon, but he wakes up lying at the wrong end of his bed, jolting awake in a mess of blankets. It takes him a second to realise why he's awake – someone's pulling his duvet off him. He pulls back, groaning.

“Fuck off,” He whines.

“I'm trying to get out,” PJ's voice says. Dan blinks his eyes open, brain working very very slowly. He stretches his leg and encounters the warmth of someone else, someone who makes a muffled noise when Dan's bare foot knocks against them. “Ugh, Dan-”

“Fuck you,” Dan says, and stops pulling the duvet, turning over so he's facing the wall and he doesn't have to put up with awake people.

“Fuck you too,” PJ says a moment later, thudding to his feet with unnecessary noise.

There's a merciful few minutes of silence when PJ leaves his room. Dan half pays attention to the noise of footsteps in the hallway and half drifts back off to sleep.

When his door creaks open again, he groans.

“You have a bed,” He reminds PJ, peering at him climbing back under the covers through mostly-closed eyes.

“Mine's cold,” PJ says, like that's an excuse, and settles down at the other end of the bed, throwing an arm over Dan's legs like they're his favourite teddy bear.

“You're the worst,” Dan tells PJ, sleepily. They have a minor tug war over who gets the most, but Dan's heart isn't really in it – he's already nodding off again.

“There's some guy in the hall,” PJ mutters. When Dan forces his eyes open and lifts his head, PJ's eyes are closed.

“Probably for Ethan,” Dan says, closing his eyes again and letting himself drift.

“Mm,” PJ agrees.

-

Dan doesn't even know what day he is when he wanders in the kitchen later. All he knows is that it's maybe the afternoon and he's hungry and probably the most well-rested person in the world.

“Your mate was here earlier,” Ethan says, just as Dan's yawning.

“Sorry? My mate?” He says, even though he's the only other one in the kitchen so there's nobody else Ethan could've been talking to.

Ethan gives him this look, hiking his holdall a little higher on his shoulder. He's wearing some kind of sports kit, his iPod strapped to his arm like he's off on a run, or something. He probably is, knowing him.

“Yeah,” He says. “Some guy with black hair. Kind of, like, emo looking. I told him which room was yours but then he left, like, five seconds later.”

“Oh,” Dan says, frowning, already digging in his pocket for his phone. Why would Phil take off so quickly? Maybe he remembered somewhere he had to be. Somewhere urgent enough that he didn't even bother to text to let Dan know he'd been 'round. “Er. Thanks for telling me,” He adds, probably too late.

Ethan shrugs.

“Thought you'd want to know,” He says, gruffly, then shoulders his bag and leaves.

Missed you earlier? he sends to Phil, before flicking the kettle on and absolutely not daydreaming about him as he waits for the water to boil, smiling down at Phil's name in his phone like it might smile back if he tries hard enough.

Chapter Text

Dan knows he'll end up regretting it, but thinking about the possibility of him and Phil warms his insides over the next week or so.

Not a concrete fact, not a confirmed thing, just the possibility – the way his eyes had flickered down to Dan's mouth and his breath in the quiet of the library conference room. The way he'd stayed up all night with him despite his insistence that helping with essays wasn't in his job description. The fact that his phone number's sitting in Dan's phone even though Dan's not meant to have it.

The way he'd slipped his arm through Dan's, linking them together as they walked, like it was all just that easy.

Is sleeping in until 2pm morally wrong or do you think i'm ok, he sends to Phil on the Tuesday after his deadline. He's barely properly awake, rubbing sleep from his eyes, hitting send before he can overthink things and just not send anything at all.

Because of course, with the possibility of him and Phil comes all of Dan's neuroses, all of his stupidity and his worry, and he hasn't so much as sent Phil a simple text in days. He hasn't seen him in days, not since the all-nighter. The last text he'd got was something about remembering he had a doctor's appointment at the last minute when he'd showed up here. Dan had replied hoping everything was ok, and that was it.

“Something happened, didn't it,” PJ had said the previous day, shooting Dan this shrewd look across the kitchen table.

“What?” Dan had said, trying to pretend he hadn't just been checking his texts for the tenth time in two minutes.

“Something happened,” PJ had repeated, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. “You know you can tell me about whatever it is.”

“I know,” Dan had said.

He does know. Sometimes when he and Peej are up past 2am playing stupid shit on PJ's Gamecube, Dan ends up telling him things he's never even dreamed of mentioning to his friends back home. There's an ease about him that Dan likes, and he always comes up with solutions to problems or worries that Dan never would've thought of in a million years. Admittedly some of his solutions aren't actually possible because they involve magic and detailed drawings on the back of old envelopes, but Dan appreciates it all the same.

Even with all that, there's a part of him that doesn't want to tell PJ about the maybe Phil thing until it's, well. Until it's actually a thing. He feels like explaining the entire situation might jinx it somehow – or worse, PJ won't see what he means, and he'll think it's all just the product of Dan's overactive imagination.

Sighing, Dan shifts in bed, turning over just as his phone buzzes with Phil's reply.

You're fine, it says. Just that.

Forcing down his disappointment, Dan slips out of bed.

-

Dan's meant to be preparing for the next semester. That involves going through a list of required reading longer than his arm and writing a reflective report about the previous semester, like the essay wasn't stressful enough.

All Dan's done all day is sit in the kitchen with PJ scrolling through Tumblr. Not that PJ's on Tumblr too – no, PJ's been sat opposite Dan since eleven in the morning with his headphones in, drawing and shading and making neat annotations with his fineliner pen. He's ahead on his sketchbook work, planning out pages and cutting individual little squares out from the pages of pictures he printed in the library.

That's the difference between them, Dan thinks. One of the many differences. PJ's getting a headstart on the next few months of work while Dan's just had the new reading list open in another tab for hours and hours.

Why do people do this why do they make you miss them when you know you shouldnt fml seriously, he writes on his blog, tagging it with delete later and dan complains once again and fuck you and your eyes.

The post gets one or two supportive likes while Dan tries his tenth valiant attempt at scrolling through the reading list like he actually cares about anything that's on it. He just keeps scrolling, the words sliding past his eyes without making even the slightest impression on him, and in the end he hops back to Tumblr just because at least he tunes in to focus on the gifs and self-righteous posts. He'd rather that than have his eyes go blurry not bothering to read Law stuff.

It's only when he gets up to make himself and PJ a drink that he realises that one of the likes is from Louise, the nice woman who runs the Academic Helpdesk.

The only reason they sort of started talking was because of the Phil Effect – Dan had gone to the office to meet him and Phil had just pulled him into a conversation with her with ease. Dan had given her his URL without even thinking about it. It was only much later that he'd frantically gone through his blog and tried to fathom what a new acquaintance might think of him judging by the bullshit he reblogs.

And now Louise has liked his awful self-pitying post. Dan feels heat creeping up his face as he clicks on her URL, scrolls down her blog a little. It's all pictures of dogs and cupcakes and the usual stuff that's only funny within the context of Tumblr, but Dan barely sees it because his brain's whirring on at a hundred miles a minute.

It's not like Dan's post was obviously about anyone, was it? It's not like he mentioned names. It's not like he even mentioned gender, it was just generic and sad and whiny, the kind of shit his handful of followers have come to expect from him some days. He just forgot Louise was one of those followers, that's all.

Not that it matters, Dan reasons. Louise is just showing her support for Dan being in a shit mood, that's all. Louise is just a nice person. It's not like she knows what the post's about.

It's not like she knows that it's been days since Dan saw Phil because of this stupid time off. It's not like she knows that even though it's not that long, the more time passes the worse his thoughts about Phil get, like an itch on skin that was already scratched raw.

It's because they've been spending a lot of time together, that's all. Dan's glad they're friends now, he really is – he's glad about everything, stupidly giddy sometimes when he thinks of Phil – but he didn't ever consider missing him.

That seems like a huge oversight now. Especially since Phil sent him that odd last text.

Is it odd? Dan slips his phone out of his pocket for the hundredth time to look at it again.

“Oh,” PJ says, just as Dan's giving the text one last despairing look before he puts his phone back in his pocket. “The gaming society has a social thing later, d'you want to come with me?”

Dan looks at PJ and doesn't say anything for a moment.

“Ok,” PJ says, putting the cap back on his pen. “Sorry, I meant, can you please come to this gaming society social with me later because if you do then I'll love you forever.”

“I thought your love was unconditional,” Dan teases, grinning. “This is a total rude awakening. You're not the guy I thought you were.”

“Please,” PJ says, sticking his bottom lip out like a kid asking for sweets.

“Fine,” Dan says, because he wouldn't ever have said no, not really. “Fine, but you owe me.”

“Deal.”

-

It's impossible, but Dan feels like part of him somehow knew Phil was going to be in the bar before he even set foot in the place.

The bar itself is lit up, so when he and Peej get past the bouncers it's the first thing Dan looks at. And Phil's just there, the blueish bar light making him glow somehow, dark hair darker in the dim light of the rest of the room. Dan feels like his gaze was drawn over there instantly, instinctively, flickering over to familiar shoulders and a side profile.

“Oh no,” He says, automatically.

“Sorry?” PJ says, loudly, not hearing him. “They're over there, come on.”

Over there, it turns out, means by the bar. It means where Phil is – Phil, who hasn't contacted him in days, and a bunch of people he's never met before in his life. That combination alone makes Dan want to turn on his heel and walk straight back out of the door.

Except he's here for PJ, so he swallows nervously, wipes his damp palms on his jeans and tries to force down all of the awkward comments he can already feel lining up in his mouth, ready to trip off his tongue as soon as someone speaks to him.

PJ introduces him to six or seven people whose names he forgets almost instantly, lost in a sea of grimace-smiles and half-waves – and then PJ's ordering them both a drink and the last person he got introduced to gestures and says, “...oh, and this is Phil.”

Phil's half smiling until he turns at the sound of his name and his eyes fall on Dan, who's seriously starting to reconsider his plan to go home as soon as possible.

“Hey,” Dan says, heart beating so fast all of a sudden it's like being kicked in the back of the throat. “I mean, I know him, I – I mean, hi.”

The person who'd introduced them is reaching over to take a shot off some guy wearing a leather jacket. Dan feels more than a little abandoned until Phil smiles at him.

“Hey,” He says, voice warm and eyes bright. Dan's heart's still kicking, but Phil's smile has softened everything, somehow. “I didn't know you were part of, like, gamer club, or whatever.”

“I didn't know you were,” Dan says, already feeling more at ease. They're friends, what was he thinking?

“I'm not,” Phil says, pulling a face. He's cupping a bottle of cider with pictures of fruit on the label close to his chest, and Dan finds it so endearing that he's drinking something sweet while everyone else down the bar is on shots and Jägerbombs. “I kind of got dragged along.”

“I know the feeling,” Dan says, sincerely. He takes a tiny step closer and adds, “I – I'm glad there's someone else here that I know, oh my God.”

“Me too,” Phil says, grinning at him.

He's about to say something else when PJ reappears at Dan's shoulder holding drinks.

“Got you a pint,” He says, handing Dan a glass.

“Thanks,” Dan says, absently. He's at that point of no return where a small part of him resents PJ for standing there because it's really cutting into his looking at Phil time. “Oh, um – Peej, this is Phil.” He gives PJ the ultimate please don't embarrass me because I know where you sleep look before he looks back at Phil, adding, “Er, and Phil, this is PJ, you know how this works, I'm sorry I'm bad at introducing people.”

He says that last part all in a rush, which is probably why Phil looks confused for a moment, frowning.

“Oh, hi, Phil,” PJ says, cheerfully.

Peej is smiling that smile – the one that made the girl manning the library desk get all flustered and knock a pot of pens over that one time. In the time it takes for him and Phil to shake hands, Dan experiences a version of the night in extreme fast forward – a version where Phil and PJ can barely take their eyes off each other and end up leaving together, and Dan gets a taxi home alone and prepares to stay in his room for the rest of his uni career.

“I've heard a lot about you,” Phil's saying. He's smiling, but for half a second Dan thinks maybe there's something a little frantic about him – his eyes, maybe – but it's probably just the weird lighting in here. “I'm just gonna – I need to – someone tried to call me, so I'm gonna-”

He just walks away mid sentence, digging his phone out of his jeans pocket. He's barely gone when PJ nudges Dan, sliding into Phil's space at the bar.

“So that's him,” He says.

“That's him,” Dan says, fighting valiantly against the urge to turn and try and figure out where Phil just disappeared off to, so he can accidentally disappear there too.

PJ raises his eyebrows, and Dan's fully prepared for the next five minutes of you like him don't you, tell me you like him when someone from the gaming society comes over and tells them they've found a table.

Which is the end of one minefield and the beginning of another, really. Dan's managed to avoid another awkward conversation about Phil, but then he's stuck sitting around a table with a group of people he doesn't know and PJ, who's chatting animatedly, making shapes in the air with his hands.

Dan just drinks, gets up for more drinks and tries not to say anything too awful when PJ brings him into the conversation. The more drinks he has the more he feels better about the situation, if he's honest. It's always been Dan's experience that alcohol never fails to numb the stares of strangers.

It also makes him less secretive about looking around the bar to see where Phil disappeared to, even though he's nowhere to be seen. Maybe he left – maybe the person who was trying to call him was having an emergency, and Phil had to rush off to help.

Disappointment sits heavy in his stomach the entire time he sits there next to PJ, letting the conversation wash over him. It doesn't seem fair, somehow, that Phil'd be here one minute and gone the next. It feels like the universe offered him the chance to hang out with Phil for the first time in days, only to snatch it away again before he'd even got used to the idea.

-

Hours later, he's drunk enough that he thinks one of the girls from the gaming society is his new best friend. She hangs off his arm and smells sweet, like lipstick, and he ends up going out into the smoking area with her. She's been going on for a long time about how she shouldn't smoke but she always does when she's drunk, so Dan thinks maybe that's why they're there, but he's not sure.

There's a frozen moment at the door when the cold air hits him in a rush, leaving him breathless for a second. He stands and looks out at the damp beer garden, all rain-washed plants and light reflected in puddles and people talking in low voices. Then his new best friend (Katherine? Kylie?) wanders off and he's left there alone, trying not to sway on the spot. The night air makes him feel far more drunk than he actually is – or maybe the stuffy air inside was forcing the drunkenness back inside him, and now he's outside he can feel it all properly. Or something. Dan has no idea.

He's just considering going back indoors to find PJ when he spots Phil.

It's such a strange moment of déjà vu that he nearly starts laughing – except he's still sober enough to acknowledge that laughing by yourself is probably not the way to look cool and normal on a night out.

Phil's sitting on one of the picnic tables they have out here, his feet on the chair part, looking down at his shoes. They've swapped places, Dan finds himself thinking, stupidly, as he starts to slowly make his way over there.

“Hi,” He says, tripping a little on the last few steps. Phil stops him from falling – or Phil touches him, Dan doesn't know which it is, maybe it's both, but he's standing there in front of Phil with his hands on his bent knees and Phil's hands on his arms, and he's confused as to how he got there.

“Oh my God,” Phil says, and starts laughing. “Oh my God, you just – you nearly broke your neck then, what the hell-”

“My shoes have, like, platforms,” Dan informs him, eloquently, still just leaning on his knees. “Like – thick soles, or something, I probably shouldn't – when did you drink so much?”

“When did you drink so much?” Phil says, and the way he laughs when he's probably wasted makes Dan's heart clench like a fist in his chest.

“Like,” Dan stops leaning on Phil's legs just so he can make a flappy gesture in the general direction of the bar. “This whole evening. I thought you'd gone home, were you just drinking out here by yourself?”

“I'm not, yeah,” Phil says, the brightness of his smile fading a little. “I just – new people, you know?”

“You should've come to get me,” Dan says, touching Phil's knee again just because it's right there in front of him. “I hate new people too, you should've...we could've been out here together.”

Phil looks at him for a moment that might last hours and might last a couple of seconds, he has no idea. Time's become this elastic, stretchy thing that doesn't make sense anymore, which probably means he shouldn't have had so many drinks.

“Nah,” Phil says, eventually, his voice soft. “Nah, I didn't – I didn't want to, like, interrupt anything, or – you know, you came with PJ, so-”

“Peej dragged me here, you mean,” Dan reminds him.

Phil isn't looking him in the eye all of a sudden. Everything's so different from a moment ago that Dan feels cold in a way that has nothing to do with being outdoors. He hops up onto the table to sit next to Phil, even though the wood's cold and damp and he'd be much warmer back inside.

They sit in silence for a while, leaning into each other a little. Dan thinks it's just him that's doing the leaning until he leans away for a moment and Phil lurches into him like he wasn't expecting Dan to move so suddenly.

“Don't laugh at me,” Phil says, even though he's laughing himself.

“I'm not, I'm not,” Dan says, grinning stupidly. “Like – lean on me all you want, we can be like – like penguins.”

“Like penguins,” Phil agrees, and bumps Dan's shoulder with his own. “Like – like friend penguins, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” Dan says, even though he has no idea what Phil's talking about. “Totally, like friend penguins, definitely.”

Except as he's speaking he reaches out to touch Phil's hand where it's resting, pale and soft looking, on his leg. He feels rather than sees Phil looking down at their hands as Dan awkwardly fits them together.

It's a great idea. It's the best idea. Him and Phil are finally holding hands and it's perfect. Dan even gets a few of those little thumb strokes in that he loves so much.

When Phil detaches their hands, it doesn't feel like too much of a separation. Not when Phil's hand finds its way onto Dan's leg, just resting there – a warm weight through his jeans.

“My ex,” Phil says, out of nowhere. He's looking off into the distance. Dan kind of hates himself for the way he's struggling to look away from how whatever he's been drinking all night has made his mouth pinker. “He cheated on me.”

“Oh,” Dan says. It's not like he doesn't understand what Phil said, but it's like it takes a second to properly permeate through the alcohol fug surrounding Dan's brain. When he gets it, he shuffles up close to Phil, pushing their shoulders closer together in what he hopes is a comforting way. “Oh. Sorry. That sucks.”

That's not what he wanted to say – he wanted to tell Phil that the guy was stupid, that anyone with half a brain would treat Phil right, the way he deserves to be treated, because he's so kind and funny and the way he smiles makes Dan's breath catch in his throat, sometimes. But his tongue feels too big in his mouth, and everything looks a little lopsided all of a sudden. It takes him a moment to realise it's because he's rolled his head onto Phil's shoulder, the smell of his aftershave tickling his nose.

It's a good place to be, he thinks, idly rubbing his cheek against the soft material of Phil's shirt. Phil's hand is kind of heavy on Dan's knee, and Dan likes that. He likes this whole thing.

Phil's still talking, and Dan falls into the cadence of his words, the sound of his voice. It's difficult to focus on what he's saying when his fingers are twitching a little on Dan's knee, rubbing back and forth. Dan never really thought about knees before, but right now it feels like the most alive part of him, lighting up just because Phil's touching him there.

“...just, you know, I know what that feels like, and – and it doesn't feel good,” Phil's saying. He moves the shoulder that Dan's leaning on, jostling him a little. “Y'know what I mean, right?”

“Right,” Dan says, even though he's got no idea what direction the conversation's gone in. Phil pulls back from him a little, leaving his knee cold, and Dan blinks at him in the yellow porch light. He thinks vaguely that they need to stop doing this – having weird conversations out of the back of places, underscored with the buzz of chatter and music from indoors. What comes out of his mouth instead, eyes lingering on Phil's face, is “Your eyes are, like. I really like them. They're great.”

He doesn't know when he starts touching Phil's cheek but he knows when Phil stops him, a gentle hand around his wrist, moving his hand away.

“Dan,” Phil says, quietly, not letting him go. Dan knows enough to acknowledge that he'd feel completely humiliated by that tiny rejection if he was more sober.

“Sorry,” Dan manages to say, trying to tug his hand free from Phil's grip. “I'm – I'm wasted, I dunno.”

“I know,” Phil says, not letting go of his wrist. “I mean, like, me too. Your eyes are like – they're amazing, and, like. I shouldn't, I shouldn't-” He touches Dan's lip for a second with his thumb and heat flashes through him for that all too brief moment. “I know what it feels like, so I can't, you know?”

Dan doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, but whatever it is seems to involve not touching Dan's mouth in any capacity, so he's pretty sure he's not happy about it. Phil's still holding onto his wrist though, his palm damp against Dan's overheated skin.

“I dunno what it feels like,” Dan tells him, thinking maybe he meant the kissing. Maybe if Dan sweet talks him that can actually happen, because it hasn't yet and the anticipatory moment's stretching on to the point of desperation the longer that nothing happens. “If you wanted to, like, show me, that's fine, because – because I dunno, and, like, I think kissing you would be pretty great.”

Phil looks so sad at that, like Dan said something terrible, and he lets go of his wrist at last.

“I can't,” He says. “I – I can't be that guy, and you can't be that guy, and – neither of us can...shit, I dunno.” He shakes his head a little, frowning, and Dan's dimly aware of the fact that this is gonna hurt like a bitch in the morning. “You should go and find PJ, I'm just gonna...I'll see you around, ok?”

-

Dan ends up finding PJ by himself. He's headed back into the bar, and one second Phil's right behind him and the next he's glancing back to make sure he's still there and he's gone, slipped off when Dan was paying more attention to putting one foot in front of the other.

He finds PJ leaning heavily on the illuminated bar, hands curled protectively around four shots in different colours.

“You're back,” He says, grinning wildly at Dan and pushing two of the shots over.

Dan decides that explaining exactly what just happened can wait until after they've drank these, at least.

-

“I love mornings,” PJ says.

Dan groans and huddles further into his hoodie.

“I'm gonna throw up,” He says, hoarsely.

“No, you're not,” PJ says, barely looking up from where he's methodically adding hash browns to two McMuffins, stupid bright overhead light bleaching everything bright white.

Or maybe that's because of the sheer volume of alcohol Dan consumed yesterday, that even simple overhead lights are making him want to pull his hood down over his eyes, like he's transformed into a mole overnight. Maybe he got bitten by a radioactive one when he was drunk and now he's Moleman. Like a really shitty Spiderman. That wouldn't surprise him at all.

There's always something so strange about being out in public with a hangover, Dan thinks. Being around laughing kids and functional human beings makes him feel weird – like everything's going in slow motion somehow. He finds himself watching stranger's mouths move like he's in a dream, feeling disconnected from it all. It doesn't help that he's feeling particularly fragile this morning – particularly noticeable, particularly ugly. He knows logically that nobody's looking twice at him – that if they are it's most likely because he has his hood up indoors, but he feels like he's drawing gazes like bugs sticking to flypaper, and it's making him wish he hadn't let Peej pull him out of bed and drag him out here before 10:30am. On a Saturday morning, Jesus Christ.

“Here,” PJ says, pushing one of the McMuffins across the table towards him.

He looks enviably put together this morning – his shirt's clean and he looks neat, somehow. More than neat - like one of those random Tumblr photos of attractive people that get so many notes. That's PJ right now.

Meanwhile Dan's sitting there in the biggest hoodie he owns with the hood pulled up as far as it'd go. He looks like a wraith, all pale skin and dark circles around his eyes.

He looks at the McMuffin for a second, the smell hitting his nose and making his stomach roll, and then he reaches for his coffee instead.

“You need to eat,” PJ tells him with his mouth full, already dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.

“I will,” Dan says, even though he isn't sure. “Fucking...those shots, why the fuck...” He doesn't know where he's going with that, so he just waves his hand, closing his eyes for a second. “Did you just put hash browns on that?”

“It's the PJ special,” PJ says, and he's grinning when Dan opens his eyes.

Dan can't help but smile back, even though his head's aching and his stomach feels weird and then there's the prickling sense of embarrassment, settling over all of his thoughts like snow.

“You can't just call it special because you put a hash brown on it, Peej.”

“Yeah, I can,” PJ says, easily. He sets it back in the box for a second, reaching for his own coffee. After he has a sip, he adds, “Ok, I'm gonna ask something and I don't want you to, like, overreact, or whatever.”

“When do I ever overreact?” Dan asks, automatically. The words are barely out of his mouth when he realises how stupid it is for him of all people to say that. “Ok, ok, fine, I won't.”

PJ gives him this searching look for a second and says, “What happened with Phil last night?”

Dan groans and buries his head in his hands.

“Just because,” PJ continues, like Dan isn't genuinely dying in the middle of McDonalds of all places. “Considering you're not into him, you know, I feel like I end up asking this a lot. Like, I'm just saying.”

Dan peels his hands away from his face to give PJ a look.

“You just used air quotes, didn't you,” He says, already knowing he's right when PJ's mouth twitches a little like he's stifling a smile. “Not into him, you...fucker, oh my God.”

But he's laughing, a little.

“I just dunno why you feel like you have to pretend you don't like him,” PJ says, his smile fading slightly. “Like – I dunno, he's just a person, you know, it's not like being into someone's illegal.”

Dan doesn't want to go into the whole thing where admitting you like someone when you're him involves basically inviting your friends to have conversations behind your back where they shake their heads and say things like isn't it sweet, it's a shame he's out of Dan's league. Dan doesn't need people to pity him for being stupid enough to like someone, he got enough of that in high school.

Not that PJ's like that, he thinks, guiltily. Of course he isn't.

“I know,” He says, with a sigh. “I just – I don't wanna talk about stuff like that, I dunno.”

“What, what happened last night or the fact that you like him?” PJ asks.

Dan narrows his eyes at him over his coffee cup, his face growing warm, and says, “The second one.”

“Ha,” PJ says, face lighting up, and Dan can feel some smug I knew it monologue in the offing.

“Shut up,” He says, feeling hot. “Last night was just – I don't even know, if I knew for sure what happened I'd probably not want to tell you but, like...” He shrugs and drinks some coffee.

He ends up explaining what he remembers, funny scraps and bits and pieces, keeping some of it to himself (the hazy memory of maybe trying to touch Phil's face, hot brush of Phil's fingers on his lip, the softness of his voice and the smell of him with Dan's cheek on his shoulder).

“...and he kept talking about how someone cheated on him once? I dunno.”

He rubs a hand across his face, feeling the rasp of stubble under his fingers. It'd take him weeks to grow even the slightest beard, he's pretty sure, but he still gets annoyingly prickly after a few days. If he was a more manly looking guy, he could probably get away with leaving it, but facial hair looks stupid on him.

If he was a more manly looking guy, maybe Phil wouldn't have pushed his hands away like that. If he looked more like Phil's ex, Phil would probably be the one sat here, puzzling through interactions with him.

Although maybe not, he thinks, gloomily. No matter how hench he was he'd still have the same personality. He'd still be Dan inside. That's probably most of the problem, not his noodle limbs.

“What does someone cheating on him have to do with you, though?” PJ wants to know.

Dan shrugs, drinking more coffee.

“I honestly don't know,” He says. “He just – maybe I'm not remembering properly, I was wasted, but – no, I'm sure he mentioned it, because I didn't know what he was on about then, either. We weren't even talking about cheating, it was so random.”

“And then he left?”

Dan nods, putting his coffee down.

PJ frowns. Dan's almost glad it's not just him.

“Have you tried texting him?”

Dan shakes his head, vehemently. His brain's playing that one moment of Phil pushing his hand away over and over and over, that one half-second of don't touch me.

“I'll – I'll see him when classes start again,” He says like he's not dreading it, picking up his McMuffin at last. “It's – he was probably just drunk, I bet he won't even remember when I see him.”

He takes a huge bite of muffin just so he doesn't have to talk about it anymore.

Chapter Text

Sunday ends up feeling like an extended hangover day.

Not that Dan feels particularly gross anymore – not physically, anyway. As soon as they'd got back from McDonald's on Saturday he'd shoved his way into the bathroom and stayed in the shower until someone knocked on the door needing the toilet (which had been long enough for his hands and feet to wrinkle like raisins). After that he'd crawled back into bed with wet hair and gone straight back to sleep, because really, what did the irrepressible hobbit gene matter after getting rejected by someone you had to see every day for the rest of your academic life?

“Wow,” PJ says, when Dan traipses into the kitchen late on Sunday morning.

Dan just makes a noise and aims for the kettle. It's hot to the touch, so he just pulls a mug down from his cupboard and starts making coffee.

“That's – I really like it. Hey, we match!” When Dan turns and gives Peej a look – Peej, who's currently gesturing at his own not-horrendous slightly curly hair with a smile. “I – I mean – we kind of match. Is matching bad today, or is that a, like, lack of caffeine face?”

Dan makes another noise and pours hot water into his mug of instant coffee.

“I'm assuming the latter,” PJ tells him, cheerfully, evidently in a good mood. When Dan carries his coffee over to the table a moment later, yawning, it's to find PJ doodling happily with Sharpies, drawing weird and wonderful creatures in his sketchbook.

“That's the funtime sketchbook,” He says, voice hoarse. He dimly remembers PJ pointing it out to him one of the first times he'd been in PJ's room (“The funtime sketchbook,” He'd said, with something akin to reverence, pointing it out on the bookshelf. “Strictly for entertainment uses only.”)

“It is!” PJ says, beaming at him. “I'm ahead on my assignments so I just thought it was time. And, like, I woke up early by accident. I think I've developed a taste for deadline juice, like, outside of deadlines? It's actually pretty good.”

“Really,” Dan says, smiling, after a sip of coffee. “And how many cups have you had so far?”

“A few,” PJ says, grinning at him again before putting the cap on his green Sharpie and reaching for a blue one.

“Hmm,” Dan says. He wakes up a little more while he's drinking his coffee and watching PJ drawing what looks like a glittering alien in a top hat.

“So,” PJ says, after a while, just as Dan's considering getting up and boiling the kettle again. “D'you want to talk about the Phil thing, or-?”

Feeling his face burn with embarrassment, Dan just about manages to say “No,” in a neutral voice.

“Oh, ok,” PJ says. It seems like he's more focused with shading the edge of the little whale he just drew swimming up the side of his page, until he pushes his empty mug across the table at Dan and flashes him a smile.

“Just regular coffee this time,” Dan grumbles, but gets up and makes them both a drink all the same. “I'm not talking you down when you're still awake at 3am and you've been hallucinating jellyfish on the ceiling.”

PJ laughs.

“Pretty sure caffeine's not a hallucinogenic.”

“Pretty sure you're an idiot,” Dan says, because the part of his brain that usually deals with stellar comebacks isn't fully awake yet.

PJ snickers anyway, and Dan finds the sound weirdly soothing along with the whisper of Sharpie against sketchbook and the hiss of the kettle. Maybe he should stop going to classes and make a bunch of ASMR videos in the kitchen. At least that way he wouldn't have to see Phil for a while.

He's carrying their coffees back to the kitchen table, about to ask PJ how lucrative he thinks ASMR videos are when PJ says, “I kind of thought we could, like, do some detective work today.”

He's tapping the end of a hot pink Sharpie against his lip, looking thoughtfully down at his sketchbook as Dan gently slides his coffee across the table at him.

“What detective work?” Dan asks, warily. “This isn't, like, stalking Phil's ex part two, is it, because I'm really not feeling it.”

“Oh,” PJ says. “I was just, like – I thought we could check out Phil's Facebook and, like, see who his potential significant other is, if he's got one.”

Dan manages to crack a smile at the air quotes PJ puts around significant other, but that's it.

“Peej,” He says, sounding pained. “We're not doing that.”

“I bought ice cream,” PJ says, like that changes everything. “When you went back to bed yesterday I went to the campus shop.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, covering his eyes for a moment. “Peej, I – no. We're not gonna...we're not gonna Facebook stalk Phil, ok, it's not happening.”

-

“I'm pretty sure this is unhealthy,” Dan says an hour later, following PJ into his room with a sigh.

“Who cares,” PJ says, nudging Dan over to his bed. Dan sits down because he can't be bothered protesting, and accepts the tub of ice cream and the spoon when PJ gives them to him. “Everyone's entitled to treats, and it tastes really good – I got cookie dough and, er-”

“I mean looking at Phil's Facebook,” Dan says. The ice cream tub's unpleasantly cold on his knee, even through his pyjamas. “You've seen too many romantic comedies, Peej. You know this stuff doesn't actually, like, mend broken hearts, right?”

“I'll take it back, then,” PJ says, half-heartedly reaching for the ice cream and grinning when Dan doesn't let him take it.

“I didn't say I didn't want it,” Dan protests, grinning too. “I just – I'm being a dick, I dunno.”

“You are,” PJ agrees, and hops on the bed next to him, crossing his legs and pulling his laptop across the bed towards them. “Now, let's do this thing.”

Dan eases the lid off the ice cream and feels weirdly embarrassed as PJ leans over to type Phil's name in the Facebook search bar. He's reached that stage now – the stage of liking someone where even seeing pictures of them makes his face prickle, like he's being watched by thousands of eyes even though it's just him and Peej and ice cream in the room.

“That's a nice picture of him,” PJ says. Dan's focused on getting the perfect first spoon of ice cream, but he knows what Phil's profile picture looks like – it's him in a suit at some event, smiling like someone made him laugh moments before the picture was taken. “I mean, that's something, right, good profile picture choices.”

“I don't think we need to add anything else to the pro list, Peej,” Dan points out, his face feeling warm when he looks back up at the laptop screen. He eats some ice cream just to distract himself from how PJ's frowning with concentration as he scrolls through Phil's profile, looking exactly the same as he does when he has his head buried in a textbook. “Mm, this is great, d'you want some?”

“Yep,” PJ says, and just opens his mouth like Dan's gonna feed him.

Dan snorts and pushes his shoulder.

“In your dreams. Let's swap,” He says, handing PJ the ice cream and taking the laptop. “All I want to show you is...” He clicks through to the About section, mouse hovering over Family and Relationships. “See, look, there's his brother, but he doesn't have a relationship status. You can choose not to show it, I did the same thing.”

“What?” PJ says, voice muffled by the spoon in his mouth. He takes it out and adds, “You can do that? I should do that.”

“Peej,” Dan says. “I'm just – that's my point, he doesn't show his, so there's no way of, like, knowing who his – who he's with.”

“Yeah, there is,” PJ says. “Go on his timeline and see who's tagged him in stuff.”

“Right, because that's foolproof,” Dan says, witheringly, plucking the spoon out of PJ's hand so he can get some more ice cream. “You tag me in stuff all the time and that doesn't mean anything.”

“I'm a great friend, is what it means,” PJ says. When Dan sighs and doesn't say anything, PJ hands him the tub of ice cream. “Here, eat more.”

“It doesn't work like that, Peej,” Dan says, weakly, but he accepts it all the same.

They sit in silence for a while, passing the spoon back and forth between them.

“He's with someone,” Dan says, eventually, because he's tired of it being the elephant in the room.

“Not necessarily,” PJ says.

“Oh, come on,” Dan says, gloomily, digging the spoon into the remaining ice cream with unnecessary force. “He was all, like, talking about how he knows how shit it feels to be cheated on. And I'm not with anyone, and he knows that because -” He flushes, faltering, thinking of how forward he'd probably been when he was drunk. “Because he knows, ok, which means he was talking about himself, which means...” Dan can't even finish the sentence. “I mean it's either that or he's, like, so not attracted to me that he's invented some imaginary guy to get rid of me.”

“That's definitely not it,” PJ says, reaching out to touch Dan's ankle. “Look – think about it this way, whoever he's with, it might not last long? And – and by the sounds of it he seems pretty interested in you, it's just the whole cheating thing that's putting him off.”

Dan shakes his head.

“I'm not gonna, like, wish unhappiness on him,” He says, feeling wretched. “I'm – I tried, and – and he's not interested – he was drunk, Peej,” He adds, when PJ seems like he's about to interrupt. “People do all kinds of weird shit when they're drunk, that's all that was. He's not interested, and he's with someone, and - and that's it.”

PJ squeezes his ankle. There's a long moment of silence, after which he says, “There's more ice cream in the freezer, if you want.”

Dan laughs without really meaning to, and when he looks up from the nearly empty tub of ice cream in his lap, PJ's smiling at him.

“Yeah, sure,” He says, rolling his eyes a little. “Get another spoon while you're in there!” He calls, as PJ leaves the room to go to the kitchen.

After PJ's gone, he can feel the smile fading off his face like it'd never been there in the first place. He flops backwards so he's actually lying on PJ's bed, just about able to see a slice of blue sky out of the window from this angle. He stares up at it and thinks about how, in amongst the murky mess of emotions he's feeling, there's more than a little relief, again. Phil wouldn't have looked twice at him anyway – Dan knew for sure that after seeing his arm muscle ex – but now he can pin a more palatable reason to his rejection than it's just because you're you or because you pull really ugly faces to try and seem funny but really it's kind of tragic.

Phil's with someone else. And that's fine. It's really, really fine.

Dan sighs, and focuses on being ready to smile when PJ gets back from the kitchen.

-

Hey do u want to go for coffee before class on monday? The text from Phil says.

Dan doesn't get it immediately. He's puttering around his room in his usual Sunday evening routine. It mostly involves half-heartedly attempting to find clean clothes to wear the next day with a calming Spotify playlist on in the background, as though gentle piano phrases can somehow eradicate how much he's dreading the return to classes.

“You wanted to do this, remember,” He mutters out loud to himself as he arranges the comforting hoodie and t-shirt combination he's chosen on a hanger. “You wanted to go to uni, this was your idea, you decided that Law was so fucking great...”

And then he stops, hanging up the clothes on his wardrobe door, because thinking about how much he dislikes Law often feels like jumping up and down on the edge of a precipice, each jump bringing him closer and closer to falling.

He only picks his phone up off his bedside table to distract himself from his impending freakout about the direction his life's going in.

Seeing the text from Phil doesn't make him feel much better – if anything, he feels worse. His mouth feels dry, and he has to wipe his clammy hands on his t-shirt before he can even think about replying.

Sounds good to me, he types, while his brain falls into a fully fledged panic about what coffee could possibly mean, whether Phil's going to want to talk to him.

He probably does. He probably wants to have some meaningful discussion about how it's inappropriate to flirt with your academic supervisor when you're both drunk on a night out. Louise might even be there – maybe Phil doesn't feel comfortable being around Dan alone anymore, and the crowded coffee shop isn't enough, he might invite her along too. Dan can see the scene in his mind, the campus coffee shop, and him sitting opposite Phil and Louise, the two of them wearing intensely disapproving expressions like it's an episode of The Apprentice and Dan's about to be so so fired.

Great, Phil texts back, when Dan feels dangerously close to hyperventilating. Then, promise I don't mean too early :) I know mondays are hell. 10 maybe?

Dan's Monday lecture starts at twelve, so the thought of meeting Phil at ten am doesn't really alleviate his serious talk worries. Two hours is a long time. Dan could throw in the towel and just quit uni in two hours.

“Shut up, shut up,” He says to himself, irritated, typing ten sounds great! If I'm late it's because I'm sleeping sorry.

Before he can get too worked up about how stupid that text sounds (an exclamation mark? Really?), he turns his phone off and shoves it under his pillow. Not that that helps, because then he stands there for a prolonged period of time, just staring at his bed without really seeing it, his brain spewing out possible scenarios for tomorrow, each more harrowing than the last.

When he finally tears himself away and throws his bedroom door open, ready to find PJ, it's to find PJ already standing there with his hand outstretched, evidently about to knock before Dan opened the door.

“You just gave me a heart attack,” PJ says, clutching his chest. “I was just gonna ask if you wanted to play something? I'm bored.”

“Please,” Dan says, gratefully, and follows PJ back into his room.

-

As soon as Dan sees Phil waiting for him on the corner the next morning, his heart feels like it just leapt into his mouth.

He toys with the idea of just turning around and walking back home, but his feet just keep him walking in Phil's direction. Phil, who isn't even looking at him. He's biting his thumbnail and looking in completely the wrong direction. Dan's heart sinks unpleasantly. This is it, then – Phil's looking out for Louise, Louise is actually gonna show up and give Dan a talk about appropriate behaviour, his worst fears are genuinely being realised--

“Oh, hey,” Phil says, finally noticing him approaching. Dan struggles for a moment to take his earphones off and disentangle them from his bag strap, feeling himself going red under Phil's gaze, fingers useless and numb and just making everything worse. “Oops, come here.”

Phil reaches out and starts disentangling the earphones himself. He's not even that close but Dan feels overwhelmed by him somehow, by the smell of aftershave and soap and washing powder, by the way his hair's shining a little in the weak sunlight, by the funny little furrow in his brow as he concentrates and the movement of his fingers.

Dan swallows and says, “That's done it, yep, thank you.” He sounds ridiculous, like he's reading a prepared statement, so he coughs, like that'll make it any better, and finally shoves the earphones deep into his coat pocket.

“There you go,” Phil says, with a smile that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Hey. Wow, it feels like it's been forever. Should we...?” He gestures down the path that leads to the coffee shop.

“Sure, yeah,” Dan says, weakly.

He feels blindsided. He'd been so sure that Phil'd want to discuss Friday night – that he'd pull a face or make some reference to it, or even apologize for being drunk, like he had last time. But he just doesn't mention it. They queue in the coffee shop and Phil makes his usual jokes about being half asleep, wanting to know if a caffeine drip would be a feasible thing to get him through the day.

It's a little unbearable, because Dan's finding it hard to remember all the important things – namely, the fact that Phil has a boyfriend and isn't interested in Dan in the slightest – when Phil's smiling at him and nudging him in the arm and making him laugh with terrible puns.

When Phil gets up to go to the bathroom, Dan quickly unlocks his phone and texts PJ.

He's not mentioning it

He taps the side of his coffee cup until PJ responds.

Maybe he doesn't remember, PJ says, but Dan isn't so sure. Phil had been sober enough to go home before doing anything regrettable, which is more than Dan can say.

It's weird how he can just be sat here, waiting for Phil to get back from the bathroom after Phil rejected him. Rejection's always been one of the things Dan's feared the most. Not even romantically – he just worries sometimes that he's too much to deal with and his friends are moments away from severing all ties with him in favour of befriending someone more reliable.

And now Phil's flat out rejected him (he can't get that moment out of his mind, the way Phil had firmly moved Dan's hand away from him) and he's – he's fine. He feels a little humiliated and a lot stupid, but he's still sitting here opposite Phil's giant cup of coffee, waiting for him to come back.

Maybe being rejected isn't so bad after all, he thinks, and then he thinks about Phil's smile and the way he makes weird little observations in a low voice that never fail to make Dan laugh out loud. Whenever that happens, he always catches Phil trying to force a smile down, the two of them sharing a look like there's some secret between them. At that point Dan usually calls Phil an idiot, but he never actually means it.

Sighing, Dan texts PJ again.

does being sad about phil being unavailable make me a fuckboy: discuss

PJ's response takes a little while – long enough that Dan watches Phil coming out of the bathroom and being waved over by a girl sitting at a corner table, poring over a notebook. Dan half watches him talk to her and half watches his phone, waiting.

In the end PJ's response is just NO and a ton of angry emojis. When Dan sends him some question marks, he elaborates.

You still appreciate him as a friend so of course you're not a fuckboy. It's not like you're only friends with him because of romantic reasons

And then, after a moment's pause, another text comes through.

That being said there are many other things that make you a fuckboy but we can discuss them later, followed by way too many crying laughing emojis.

I hate you, Dan texts back, just as Phil returns to the table.

“Sorry about that,” He says as Dan locks his phone and sets it back on the table. “That's Chloe, she's working on this presentation for class. I promised her I'd take a look at it before she has to deliver it.” And he takes a sip of coffee, Dan helplessly stuck watching him and the way his hands are curled around the coffee cup.

“Do you just know everyone?” He ends up saying, smiling a little because he can't help it.

Phil makes an mm noise, not stopping drinking, then puts the cup down.

“Not everyone,” He says.

“Lots of people,” Dan says.

“It's the academic thing,” Phil says, shaking his head a little. “I meet a lot of people like that, I dunno.”

He carries on drinking his coffee, and Dan watches him for a moment before he realises it might be a little weird and tears his gaze away, looking at the torn remnants of sugar packets on the table instead.

It's not just the academic thing, Dan knows that. There's something about Phil that just draws people to him, a bunch of helpless moths buzzing around a candle.

Don't I know it, he thinks, wryly, and focuses on drinking his coffee.

-

Predictably enough, the lecture is abysmal.

Dan wonders if anyone looks forward to this shit. He wonders if anyone looked up the lecture summary online and got excited about the topics, about the dry, clipped bulletpoints, so devoid of feeling that Dan had felt like he was reading something written by a robot.

He wonders if it's possible to enjoy Law, or if you just can't. Maybe you're meant to hate it, maybe you're meant to dread every class and drag your feet along the ground to every seminar. Maybe you're meant to watch your friend drawing in his sketchbook with this weird pull in your chest, this longing to do something like that, something you truly enjoy, something that just falls out of you and onto the page. Something that truly expresses who you are.

Maybe he's meant to be miserable on this degree, he thinks, and sighs. His lecturer's going through some slideshow that's so dull he hasn't even bothered to change the font or the background – plain black Calibri on white, burning into Dan's brain.

Dan's never been less interested in Law, and having Phil next to him just makes it worse. He's making sure to angle his legs carefully so that they're touching as little as possible. It means he's more uncomfortable than he has to be, crammed into this stupid lecture theatre seat, but he doesn't want to make Phil feel uncomfortable – or worse, for Phil to think he can't take no for an answer. Even if they haven't discussed it, Phil rejected Dan, and it's fine, and Dan wants to make sure that Phil knows that it's fine, too.

Dan draws a stick figure on his blank page and carefully adds a sad face, absent-mindedly doodling his own hair onto the figure. He's not really paying attention – he's being lulled to sleep, if anything, by the monotone drone of the lecturer. He's almost startled when Phil leans over, pulling his notebook out from under his hand and into his own lap.

Dan blinks, confused, and watches Phil scribbling on the page. He doesn't look Dan in the eye once when he hands the notebook back, and when Dan looks down at the doodle and back at Phil, it's to find Phil looking at the latest slide on the projector, looking for all the world like he's diligently making notes.

Phil's added a little stick figure of him next to the Dan stick figure. The Phil figure is smiling, and seems to be holding out a coffee, if that's what that weird scribble's meant to be. Dan breathes out the tiniest laugh and just ticks next to the drawing, grinning to himself when he hears Phil let out an exhale that means he's laughing, too.

You drink too much coffee tbh, he writes next to stick figure Phil, waiting for him to notice.

Phil just reaches over and shakily scribbles out what Dan wrote, making Dan laugh under his breath again. They make eye contact for a moment, Dan helplessly caught up in Phil's smile and the brightness of his eyes.

Dan doesn't know if it's his fault for looking too long, or if it's Phil – or if Phil's just stuck in Dan's gaze like a rabbit in headlights, he doesn't know, but one second they're looking at each other and the next Phil's ducking his head and coughing, making a meaningless scribble in the margin of his notes and looking at the projector again.

Dan feels hot and stupid, his brain buzzing like there's a black cloud of flies between his ears. He looks back at the projector too, not wanting to look at Phil for too long, at the way the brightness of the presentation casts weird shadows on his face. His leg's starting to hurt from being obstinately twisted away from Phil, and when he tries to move it as unobtrusively as possible he ends up pushing their legs together.

Phil's still looking at the presentation, and Dan just tries to stretch his leg for a minute before moving away again, but he doesn't get to – Phil pushes back, lifting his foot so it rubs against Dan's ankle in this disconcertingly slow, deliberate way.

Dan's so surprised that his pen goes skittering out of his hand and lands somewhere by his feet. Face burning, he moves the fold-down table and leans over to retrieve it, Phil's leg safely back in his own personal space and away from Dan's. Dan's leg feels cold without Phil's next to it, which is a thought he sort of hates himself for having as he straightens up, pen in hand, and pulls the little table back down.

He quickly decides to pass the whole thing off as an accident. Phil's foot was itching and he decided to itch it on Dan's calf, that's it. The idea's cemented when he looks over at Phil and he's writing again, copying down a graph from the slideshow like the lecturer's not gonna upload it onto the learning space anyway.

Except he can't just leave things – he's never been the sort of person who could just let something go. It's the one thing about him that's probably got him into the most trouble in life.

It's easy, in this weird dimly lit world of the lecture theatre, full of illuminated bored faces, to rethink the whole rejection thing. Or rather, to rethink his whole theory that the only reason Phil seemed vaguely interested in him was because he was drunk.

He seemed pretty interested in you, PJ had said. Dan could fool himself that that's true, if he tried hard enough. Maybe that's why he does it – why he nudges their knees together. His heart's thudding uncomfortably fast and he's gripping his pen so tightly in his hand he thinks he might accidentally break it if he doesn't let go.

Dan nudges their knees together, and just like that, Phil presses back, running the toe of his shoe against the side of Dan's shoe in a way that shouldn't make him shudder, not through two layers of canvas and sock, but it does.

It's such a bizarre situation to be in, Dan thinks, even while his palms are sweating so much he's in danger of dropping his pen again. He swallows hard, eyes trained on the projector while he pushes his leg further against Phil's. And Phil's definitely pushing back, and – and God, the whole entire world of human romantic encounters is so stupid, that just the pressure of their legs together, the warmth of Phil next to him (because now he's nudging their shoulders together too, what is this) is making Dan's mouth dry and his brain go haywire. He can't concentrate – the lecturer's voice, previously a drone, is just...nothing, empty – Dan watches the guy's mouth move as if in slow motion.

Dan doesn't know what to think. He doesn't know what to do. All he knows is that he's thankful for the poor lighting in this place because he's pretty sure he's gone an unattractive shade of red.

Phil's leg jerks into his, jostling him, and Dan just – he pushes back, like they're playing some kind of weird leg version of an arm wrestle. And then Phil's shoe squeaks really loudly against the floor and the two of them jerk away from each other like they've been burnt.

Nobody even notices – the lecture's so boring Dan thinks maybe they're all asleep – but when he meets Phil's eye, they end up grinning stupidly at each other, and it makes everything feel that much more real.

Smooth, Dan writes, below their doodles from earlier, angling the bottom of the page towards Phil so he can see it better.

Phil makes the breathy laugh noise again and fake-kicks Dan in the ankle, his foot barely making contact. When he looks over, he gets a half-second of Phil's smile as he looks down at his own notebook, evidently trying to concentrate.

Making notes. Like Dan does anything more with them than open the emails just to see if Phil's written something cute at the bottom, something in his signature like best at mariokart or professional sock chooser.

Dan kind of wants to reach out and cover the hand Phil's writing with with his own, let the pen fall again so he can twist their fingers together. He doesn't need the notes, he never reads them anyway.

Except they're not at the back of the lecture theatre, so all the people sitting behind them would notice if they just...started holding hands. Worse than that – that might be a step too far, breaking the weird lecture theatre spell, and Phil might just calmly shrug him off, like he had on Friday – just moving Dan's hand away like having it near him was the last thing in the world he wanted.

Long story short, there's nothing stopping Dan getting seriously rejected right in the middle of a lecture. It's not the best time to be rejected, he thinks. Running off to find a quiet corner to die in might not exactly go unnoticed.

So he keeps his hands to himself for the rest of the lecture, even though Phil presses his leg back up against Dan's soon enough, their shoulders pressing together whenever either of them moves.

-

When they finally spill out of the lecture theatre much later, Dan can't tell if it was actually warm in there or if it was just him. The cold air that hits him in the corridor is soothing on his hot face, and he ends up taking great gulps of it like he's been starved of oxygen for the past hour and a half.

He's almost definitely flushed and sweaty and ugly right now, which explains why Phil's currently avoiding looking at him, shoving his notebook into his bag with unnecessary concentration.

“I-”

“D'you want to come over?” Phil asks, all in a rush, eyes darting around like he's scared to look at Dan properly, the two of them being jostled by people leaving the lecture. “I, um.” He flushes, fiddling with his bag strap, and adds, “Um. It's just down the road. We - we could get pizza.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dan says, his stupid voice making it into a question, because – what the fuck is this day becoming, seriously, he doesn't even know.

-

They head in the direction of the bus stop, neither of them talking. It's a nice day, cold but sunny, and Dan feels his face cooling in the wintry breeze, watching the way the early afternoon sunlight falls gold between the shadows of buildings, making Phil glow when they walk in the patches of light.

Dan's insides are humming like an electrical current. He's less walking and more springing up and down on the pavement, his feet practically bouncing on the ground. He wants to text PJ, but he doesn't even know what to say. He doesn't even know what's happening.

Phil turns, pausing in a warm patch of sunlight. It seems like he's about to say something, so Dan waits, fingers drumming restlessly against his bag strap, when Phil's gaze moves to something over Dan's shoulder.

“I – never mind,” He says, suddenly flushing bright red.

Dan feels lost – even more so when he turns and sees PJ, just trailing up the path that leads to the art studio, swinging his bag like a kid who just got let out of class early.

“What?” Dan says, stupidly.

“It – it doesn't matter, I,” Phil says in a tiny voice, but whatever doesn't matter Dan doesn't get to find out, because PJ chooses that moment to amble over to them.

“Hey,” He says, with a smile. “How was class, are you dead? Hey, Phil.”

“Hi,” Phil says, smiling back even though his eyes are darting nervously all over the place. Not for the first time, Dan entertains his Phil's more likely to fancy PJ than me theory. “I, erm. I like your, er. Hoodie.”

“We're totally dead,” Dan tells PJ, looking over at him for a second. And then looking over again, because - “Oh my God, that's my hoodie, where did you even find that?”

“Oh, is it?” PJ says, peering at the cuffs like he expects to see Dan's name sewn there. “It was in my laundry basket, I dunno.”

“Didn't the fact that it's black clue you in? Oh my God.”

PJ shrugs.

“I wanted to look serious, it was that class where they all think I'm shit.” He pauses, probably because Dan's giving him some serious something is happening with me and Phil eyes. “Er, what are you guys up to, anyway?”

“Actually,” Dan starts to say, but Phil interrupts him, his phone in hand.

“I just – I just got a text, actually, I'm really – my flatmate, he – and I should go, I – we can do that thing some other time, right?” He says to Dan, meeting his eye for all of half a second before he hurries off in the direction of the bus stop.

Dan watches him go, barely believing anything that just happened.

“What – what?” PJ says, looking from Dan to Phil's retreating back, and back again. “Was it something I said?”

“No,” Dan says, aiming a kick at a nearby piece of gravel. “It was – I don't even know. I don't even know what it was.”

He sounds weak and pathetic to his own ears, and maybe that's why PJ puts an arm around his shoulders.

“Come on,” He says, leading him back in the direction of the campus shop.

“Not more ice cream, oh my God-”

“It helps,” PJ says, stubbornly. “I'm buying, come on.”

With one last look in the direction Phil just walked off in, Dan sighs, brain almost hurting with how much literally nothing makes sense, and just goes along with PJ to the shop. Ice cream can hardly make him feel worse, after all.

Chapter Text

“Everything’s fine, mum,” Dan says, for what feels like the millionth time.

“I’m not doubting that,” Dan’s mum says. He can hear her doing something else in the background – for a second he pictures their living room at home, with the squashy couches and the low coffee table and the dog lying on the rug, and feels so strangely homesick in that one second that he surprises himself. “I just worry, you know that.” She pauses. “You seem quiet.”

“I’m not – I’m not quiet,” Dan says, in this stupid loud voice, as though that’s going to fool his mum and her expertly honed mum instincts. “I’m just – classes are tiring, that’s all, and –“

And I hate it and I want to quit, because my flatmate draws amazing things and I overheard some girl in the campus shop yesterday talking about the poetry she writes in her spare time, and nothing I learn in Law is ever gonna be like that, nothing’s ever gonna feel creative, nothing’s ever gonna-

“-and that’s it, I dunno,” He finishes, lamely, face prickling. “I promise I’d tell you if there was something wrong.”

That’s without mentioning the whole thing where I really like this guy – yeah, mum, sorry about that, should’ve mentioned that before maybe – and I have no idea what he’s thinking or feeling and the weirder it gets between us the worse everything gets because I hate lectures and I hate seminars but he’s there, and if we’re not talking properly then the one bright spot I had is gone and I don’t know what to do…

He ends up breathing out a private laugh in the middle of his mum’s next sentence, just because the thought of being honest with her is so ridiculous that he can’t even contemplate it. The words are there, waiting on his tongue, and he knows he’ll never say any of them.

He doesn’t want to disappoint her, or upset her. He’s her son who studies Law at university, and she’s proud of him – she always tells him how proud she is of him.

Sometimes he wishes she wouldn’t, and then he feels awful. After all, it’s not her fault that he’s struggling so much. It’s not her fault that he recklessly chose a degree that he’s never enjoyed, not even for a second.

“Dan?”

“Oh, sorry,” Dan says, startled out of his reverie. “Um – I’m gonna have to – I was just about to head to the library, so…”

“Oh, of course,” Dan’s mum says. “Have a great day, love. Don’t work too hard!”

“I won’t,” Dan says.

After he’s hung up he ends up crawling back into bed. The one class he was meant to have today got cancelled, but he only noticed the email after he’d woken up at 7am and thrown himself into the shower, scrambling to get dressed and sort his hair out. All for nothing.

He doesn’t know when he ends up falling asleep but he wakes up when his bedroom door creaks open.

“Oh, sorry,” PJ says, in a stage whisper. “I didn’t realise you – sorry-“

“No, no, it’s fine,” Dan says, hoarsely, leaning over to flick on his bedside lamp. PJ gives him a look, crossing the room and throwing the curtains open so that yellow sunlight spills across Dan’s untidy desk in a long line. “What’s up?”

PJ shrugs and perches on the end of Dan’s bed.

“Just wondered what you were up to. Hadn’t heard from you all day.”

Dan’s very conscious of how many chins he has when he lies down, so he sits up, yawning. He’s pretty sure PJ’s not fussed about his chins but he is.

“I'm,” Dan begins, slouching against the headboard. “I'm – I dunno.”

“Ok,” PJ says, uncertainly. “Would you rather be on your own, or-?”

“No, no, it's ok,” Dan says, well aware that he sounds like nothing's ok. “I'm just tired, I dunno. And my class got cancelled so I got up early for nothing.”

“Ugh,” PJ says, sympathetically. He looks worried, frowning a little at Dan as he adds, softly, “Is that everything?”

Dan shrugs, lips pressed tightly together. He doesn't want to burden PJ with any of his stupid worries, not if he can help it.

“Why did you want to do Art?” He asks, instead, genuinely curious. “Like – why, what made you pick it?”

This time it's PJ's turn to shrug.

“Dunno,” He says. Then, after a moment's thought, he adds, “I enjoy it. And – and I'm good at it, I guess. When I'm, like, walking to places I see things and I think about how I'd draw them. Like – I think about art all the time, so – so it made sense to study it, I s'pose.”

Dan swallows, hard, and has to look away from PJ for a second.

“Why,” PJ asks, gently. “What made you want to study Law?”

Dan laughs, humourlessly.

“I honestly have no idea,” He says.

-

It turns out to be a dreary week. Dan drifts through classes, barely paying attention. He's more focused on holding stilted conversations with Phil, who just lately when he smiles or laughs at Dan seems to catch himself halfway through, like he's done something wrong, before schooling his face into a more serious expression.

It's disheartening. It makes classes even worse. Not to mention the fact that all invitations for coffee, all chats after class, all breakfasts in the cafeteria seem to have been forgotten. Dan feels like every other person Phil's ever taken notes for, and he hates it.

So when he gets a phone call off Phil on Friday afternoon, he feels like he goes through about fifteen emotions, running from elation to cold-blooded fear in the space of about half a second. His face is uncomfortably hot all of a sudden and his throat feels thick, like any words he might have to say are gonna get trapped in there on their way out. His heart’s beating really fast, like he’s about to give a presentation in front of a crowded lecture theatre.

It takes a world of courage to actually pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” A not-Phil voice says. “I, er. You’ve never met me, but I’m Phil’s flatmate.”

In the silence following that statement, Dan’s brain supplies a million reasons why Phil’s flatmate might be using his phone, including major injury and comas and oh God, what if he's dead?

“Ok,” Dan says, cautiously. “What's up? Is Phil ok?”

“What?” The voice says. “Oh – oh, yeah, he's totally fine, don't worry about that. But, er. You should come over.” Everything's muffled for a moment, and Dan thinks he hears the sound of a door closing down the other end of the line. “We're having a party tonight and you're invited.”

“I,” Dan's first instinct is to turn down the invitation – to invent prior plans, some lie about going to the library. But the thought of going to a party at Phil's flat makes him pause.

It might be good, to go and see Phil on his own home turf – Phil might be less jittery than he's been lately.

And, a little voice in the back of his head says, you might get to finally find out if he's with someone or not.

“What time should I come over?” Dan asks.

-

“Wait a minute,” PJ says, when Dan calls him. “Say that again, but slower. Phil's flatmate called you-”

“And invited me to a party at Phil's flat tonight, yeah,” Dan says, sounding more than a little frantic as he paces around his room, running his hand agitatedly through his hair. “And I said yes.”

“That's good,” PJ says, soothingly. “Hey, I'll come with you!”

“Er, no,” Dan says, turning sharply at his desk and walking back over to the wardrobe. “You can't. The guy said, something about it being a solo invitation.”

“Right,” PJ says, slowly. He pauses. “If this was a movie I'd be telling you it was a trap right about now, I'm just saying.”

“I know,” Dan says. He stops in the middle of his room, looking out of the window at the grey-white sky. “D'you think I should go?”

“I dunno,” PJ says. “I mean, Phil will be there, won't he, so-”

“If it's legit,” Dan says. “I mean, he gave me an address, but how do I know it's Phil's? And – and what do I wear? Why d'you think he said I should go on my own? What if it's a prank or something, Phil always goes on about how his flatmates are into pranks, what if-?”

"Dan," PJ says, calmly. "Breathe, ok? I'll be back at the flat in ten minutes, I just have to wash my brushes.”

-

“I mean,” PJ says, reassuringly, a little while later. They've had coffee and PJ scribbled a little pro and con list of going to the party in the back of his sketchbook, and now they're tackling the problem of what Dan should wear. “If it's a murder plot then it's the least subtle one in history, I'm just saying.”

“That's not really, like, filling me with confidence, Peej.”

“I'm serious,” PJ says, spinning back and forth in Dan's desk chair. “They've given you an address. If you don't answer my checkup texts I'll just call the police and send them there. It's not exactly Sherlock level deception, is it?”

Dan turns and looks at him.

“Ok, ok, you're not gonna be murdered,” PJ says, holding his hands up. “I'm just saying.” He gets up and walks over to where Dan's thoughtfully considering his open wardrobe. “What're you thinking?”

“Something black.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” PJ says in an undertone.

“Unless,” Dan hesitates, hand hovering uncertainly over a bright red t-shirt. “Unless that’s predictable. I don’t wanna be the guy who wears black all the time.”

“You’re not,” PJ assures him, shuffling in closer so he can flick through Dan's t-shirt collection. “Although it turns out you’re the guy who orders his t-shirts by colour.”

“It makes it easier to find things,” Dan says, defensively.

They both rifle through opposite ends of his tiny wardrobe in silence for a moment, their shoulders knocking.

“Oh my God, what the hell is this?” PJ says, pulling out a leather shirt.

“I’m not wearing that,” Dan says. “Shut up, I bought it as a joke.”

PJ’s pulling this horrified face while he touches the leather, like it’s about to come to life and start suffocating him.

“Doesn’t it, like, chafe?”

“A lot, yeah,” Dan says, absently. He’s tugging out shirts and throwing them on his bed if he likes the look of them, which means his side of the wardrobe is rapidly depleting while PJ click-clicks uncertainly through his side. “Right, that’s everything not-black that I could wear. Want to swap round?”

“I could choose your socks?” PJ suggests, uncertainly. When Dan gives him a look, he adds, “What, you’re the one who wanted outfit advice! I feel like you know exactly what you want to wear without my help.”

“I don’t know exactly,” Dan says, throwing a few black shirts onto his bed for good measure before stepping away from the wardrobe to stop himself getting carried away. “I just – it depends on what kind of night it’s gonna be.”

“It's a party,” PJ says, thoughtfully. “But it's a house party, so I'd just – wear something normal? Casual? Nothing with death spikes.”

“Point taken,” Dan says, thinking of the shoes PJ’s referring to. “Plus knowing my luck I’d scratch their sofa with them and then I’d owe them money.”

“Oh God, I didn't think of that,” PJ says. He pauses, wandering over to the window while Dan considers his clothing options. “Are you gonna shower, by the way? I can go and sit in the bathroom to make sure nobody else tries to before you go in."

“No,” Dan says, instantly. Then he hesitates. “No? Did you mention it because you think I should? Do I smell?”

PJ gives him a look, eyebrows raised.

“Of course you don't smell.”

“Good,” Dan says, although PJ’s endorsement on how he smells doesn’t stop him lifting the neck of his t-shirt and his arms and sniffing around, trying to figure out if he does actually smell.

“You don’t smell,” PJ insists, crossing the room again just to grab his arm and get him to stop. “Come on, decide what black shirt you’re gonna wear.”

“I might not even go with black,” Dan protests, surveying the array of colours on the bed. “I could, like…” He reaches out, shuffling his clothes around. “What about a white t-shirt? That's – I mean, it's kind of like black. And I get to stay true to my, like, monochrome self, but without being the guy who always wears black.”

“Sounds good to me,” PJ says, shrugging. “Oh, but what if you spill a drink on yourself?”

Dan hesitates, then shrugs himself.

“I'll just be extra careful,” He says. “I'm not planning on being too drunk, anyway.”

“Good idea,” PJ says. He watches Dan hanging the white shirt on one hanger, then crossing the room to hang it on his curtain rail. “Right, so. I have no idea how your wardrobe goes, so d’you want me to make a drink while you put everything back?”

He hurries off before Dan can even say yes.

-

“I feel like I'm in the beginning of an episode of Casualty or something,” PJ says when he's driving Dan to Phil's flat.

It's the first time they've driven anywhere that wasn't Tesco or Domino's, and it's a mark of PJ's concern about the evening that they avoided their usual fight over the aux cord – PJ had surrendered immediately and let Dan listen to Radiohead quietly during the whole journey.

“I'm gonna be fine,” Dan says, even though he's been getting flutterings of nerves deep in his stomach for the past hour.

PJ shoots him this worried look as he indicates to turn.

“Just call me if it turns out to be weird, ok?” He says. “I'll wait outside til you text, so if it's not Phil's flat just leave straight away and I'll be right outside.”

“I'll call you,” Dan says. He has a bottle of Smirnoff in his lap, and for the fifth time in the past ten minutes he fumbles to unscrew the top and take a sip. Dutch courage. “But I'll be fine.”

“You'll be fine,” PJ says, still sounding concerned. He's quiet for a moment, the two of them driving in the greyness of another winter evening, and then he adds, “I mean, it's just gonna be a party. I'm just kinda weirded out because it was Phil's flatmate who called you and not actually him.”

“I know,” Dan says. He feels exactly the same. He'd texted Phil a few times while he'd been getting ready, but there'd been no response. Phil hasn't even read the texts, which is worrying, to say the least. “But like, I'll go in, and – and if it's weird, I'll leave straight away. It'll be fine.” And he takes another swig of Smirnoff.

-

Phil's apartment building is way fancier than Dan's, not that that's too much of a surprise. Dan's living in awful campus accommodation and it turns out that Phil's living in some fancy complex where all the windows have boxes brimful of bright flowers, each pathway lined with neatly trimmed hedges and funny curved silver benches. Something about it reminds Dan of expensive Sims houses.

It doesn't exactly put him at ease, walking down the path to the main entrance, cringing against the mistlike rain that's just started to fall. It'd be great if his hair got messed up this quickly, before he's even set foot indoors. That'd be typical of his entire life, really.

He nervously slips into the foyer of the building and goes over to the lifts. The fourth floor, that's what the mysterious voice on the phone had said. Flat seven, fourth floor.

The lift has a mirror on the back wall. Dan makes an unhappy noise when he catches sight of himself, surreptitiously trying to flatten his fringe down so he doesn't look so stupid. It doesn't look too damp, so he thinks he might have successfully avoided hobbit hair – at least for now. He doesn't hold out much hope for if it's a crowded party and the air gets hot in the flat, because then he'll be done for.

He takes a few more fortifying glugs of Smirnoff before he gets out of the lift, fumbling to screw the cap back onto the bottle as he walks around the landing, heart hammering in his chest.

Flat 7 looks exactly the same as all the other doors – uniform light brown wood with a peephole and a little gold number 7.

Dan stands for a while, panicking and worrying and seriously considering just running, back over to the lift, slamming the ground floor button until he gets back to the safety of PJ's car. They could go and get pizza, even though he really shouldn't considering all the consolatory ice cream he's eaten lately. They could have a quiet, comforting evening in, the same as a thousand other evenings when the two of them have just sat together in their pyjamas, warm and happy and not potentially making enormous mistakes.

When he reaches out to knock on the door, he's surprised that his hand seems steady in the air. He feels unsteady himself, like he's moments away from throwing up in a way that has nothing to do with the bottle in his hand.

Against all odds, he knocks. He's sweating, and he's getting this uncomfortable prickling sensation all down his spine that he remembers well from a thousand humiliating high school moments. Logically he knows all he's doing is knocking on a door, but he could be Jack, knocking on the door of the giant's castle, for how tiny and afraid he feels.

When Phil finally answers the door, Dan feels like he could faint with relief.

“Oh,” Phil says. It’s a kind of a I didn’t expect you to be here and now this is awkward oh, and Dan's brief feelings of ease sputter and die almost instantly. “Oh, Dan, hi.”

“Hi,” Dan says, feeling himself going bright red. Phil's wearing a dark button-down shirt with brightly coloured pyjama bottoms, and there's a moment when he thinks Phil maybe realises what he's wearing because he laughs and goes pink.

“Um,” He says. “I wasn't – wasn't expecting -”

“Phil,” A voice calls from inside the flat. A guy in glasses who seems vaguely familiar wanders out into the hallway. “Where's the – oh, Dan's here!”

“I'm here,” Dan says, weakly, when the guy comes over to stand next to Phil, reaching out to shake Dan's hand enthusiastically.

“I called you, hello,” The guy says. “I called him,” He adds, to Phil.

“You called him,” Phil repeats, faintly.

“To invite him to the party,” The guy says, like it's obvious. “Come on, Dan, d'you want a drink?”

“I, um?” Dan says. The guy's already walking away back down the hall, leaving Dan and Phil lingering awkwardly on different sides of the front door. “I'm really sorry.”

“Don't be,” Phil reassures him. “I – I – I'm glad you're here, you look -” He stops, eyes flicking up and down Dan's outfit in a way that makes Dan want to fold his arms and cover himself somehow, even though he's wearing a perfectly respectable t-shirt and jeans. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Thanks,” Dan says, awkwardly.

“Phil, will you just let the poor guy in?” Phil's flatmate's voice floats down the hall from another room. “You're making us look like bad hosts.”

“Right,” Phil says, clearly flustered, stepping back to let Dan get past. “Um. I'm sorry about – I'm just gonna go and get ready, do you wanna-?”

“I'll keep him company, don't worry,” Phil's flatmate says, reappearing in a doorway while Phil shuts the front door behind them.

“That's what I'm worried about,” Phil says in an undertone, and gives the guy a long look before he hurries off down the hallway.

“Come on,” The guy says. “Kitchen's this way.”

Dan awkwardly follows, lingering in the doorway and feeling like he's intruding. It's some combined kitchen-living room thing, and there's some guy sprawled out on the sofa, humming under his breath a little. Dan remembers all of Phil's stories about the prank wars between his flatmates, and wonders if this is part of it – if he's part of some massive joke.

The only thing familiar – and weirdly comforting – about the whole situation is the fact that the Mariokart 8 menu screen is playing to itself on the TV. Dan uses the pause to fire off a quick text to PJ, letting him know that the invitation was legit and so far no murderers have emerged from shadowy corners with huge knives.

“I'm Jack,” The guy who led him in here tells him, helpfully, wandering into the kitchen area. “That idiot on the sofa's Dean, don't mind him, he's a lightweight who can't play Mariokart for shit.”

“I am not shit,” Dean insists, without moving from his prone position on the sofa. He holds his hands up so Dan can see them, popping up over the back of the couch. “It's just – my thumbs, they weren't fast.”

“We're starting early,” Jack tells Dan, waving him over to the kitchen. Dan awkwardly approaches, standing on the other side of the little countertop island and watching Jack dig a bottle of vodka out of the freezer. “The rule is, if you lose the race you have to down your drink.”

“He's a cheat,” Dean calls, an accusatory finger appearing over the back of the sofa. “My drinks are way less – way – not as strong as his!”

“Sore loser,” Jack calls back, pulling a stack of plastic pint glasses out of a cupboard and setting them down next to the vodka. “What're you drinking, Dan?”

“Um,” Dan says, lifting the bottle of Smirnoff and giving it an awkward little wave.

“Nice,” Jack says. There's a bottle of rum on the counter alongside the vodka, and a few untouched bottles of coke just lined up, which Dan's quietly glad about because he didn't think to bring any mixer. Except then Jack pours some rum into one of the pint glasses and pushes it across the table towards Dan. “Put your vodka in that.”

Dan laughs, uncertainly.

“I wasn't gonna get that drunk,” He says, weakly.

“You don't have to,” Jack says, reassuringly. “But you have to have a drink to play Mariokart, them's the rules.”

“I told you,” Dean says, and then actually sits up, hair sticking up all over the place. “I'm so sorry, Dan, he's a – a s-sabotager of livers, is what he is.”

Dan looks down at the generous measure of rum in the pint glass, then at Jack, who's grinning a little. Alcohol will make him feel less out of place in this situation, he knows, but he doesn't want to end up out of it so early on. Not that he's planning on losing at Mariokart, but even so.

“Ok, fine,” He says, unscrewing the Smirnoff and adding some to the rum. “But only if you have both in your drink, too.”

“Ha,” Jack says, grinning, and Dan feels triumphant, because that was clearly the right thing to say. “You’re on.”

-

“Fuck,” Jack says, ten minutes later. Dan’s totally smiling his smuggest smile and he doesn’t even care, he just wrecked Jack on Yoshi Circuit. “You cheated.”

“Nope,” Dan says, taking a little sip of his drink. Once he'd diluted it with Diet Coke it wasn't as bad as he'd expected it to be. “Come on, you came off on, like, the first corner-“

“Because you surprised me! And that water bit always gets me, I didn’t expect-“

“You didn’t expect me to be a pro, but I am,” Dan says, the first buzz of alcohol making him feel confident. “Drink up.”

“Yoshi Circuit’s such bullshit anyway,” Jack says, after a huge gulp of his drink. “Who has a circuit shaped like them? Fuck Yoshi.”

“Fuck you,” Dean chips in. “You’re supposed to down the drink, not sip it, what’re you doing?”

“Whose side are you on?” Jack demands, aiming a weak slap at Dean's head and missing. “I’m on the side that didn’t make me down four drinks in an hour,” Dean says. He’s sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, and he leans back, resting his head against the sofa and swivelling it around to look up at Dan. “So that’s you.”

“That’s me,” Dan agrees.

Jack scowls, but he drinks the rest of his cup in one.

They’re halfway through their rematch when Phil walks in.

“Sorry,” He’s saying, distractedly. “I was about to come in and then my mum rang, and she was asking what I want for my birthday, and I hate that conversation, because it’s like, don’t make me choose-“

“Ha!” Jack says, when Dan turns to look at Phil, the contest forgotten. “Ha! Talk about coming off at corners, the student has become the master!“

“Oh,” Dan says, feeling flustered suddenly now that Phil's in the room, the controller feeling big and unwieldy in his hands. “That – that doesn't count, I was distracted!”

He focuses on clawing back his lead, but he's already distracted by the noises of Phil walking around, opening the fridge and cupboards, and the whoosh of a tap.

“Anyone want coffee?”

Jack snorts.

“Maybe, like, tomorrow morning – yes!” He drops the controller and throws his arms in the air. Putting on an American announcer's voice, he adds, “Wrecked, destroyed, pulverised, that was an amazing performance there from rookie racer Howard-”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, his competitiveness winning out over his awkwardness. “I swear that doesn't count, I got distracted-”

“You snooze, you lose,” Jack says, which doesn't make any sense. “Down your drink, loser.”

“Jack,” Phil says, reproachfully, over the tinkling noise of him stirring his coffee.

“Down your drink, please,” Jack says, flashing Phil a grin when he rolls his eyes. “Loser.”

“Hey!” Dan and Phil say simultaneously.

Dan feels himself flush for no apparent reason – maybe because Phil's walking over to sit in the empty armchair, fully dressed this time in the same button-down shirt with dark jeans, and bringing a smell of sweet aftershave along in his wake.

“It's fine, I'll down it,” Dan says. “But this is the first and last time.”

He swallows the pint in about four gulps, careful not to look at Phil after he's done for fear of seeing disgust on his face.

There isn't really an attractive way to down a drink, he thinks, regretfully.

“After you've had that, it's you versus Dean,” Jack's saying to Phil, who's shaking his head.

“No way,” He says, half-laughing. “People aren't showing up for two hours, Jack, I'm not gonna get wasted before anyone even arrives.”

“People might not arrive, remember,” Dean points out. “And then, like, you're cushioned against...against...”

“The disappointment,” Jack agrees, tapping Dean supportively on the shoulder. “Exactly. God knows we need it in this place.”

They all laugh, and Dan feels a little like he's missing something until Phil explains.

“We have a bad history of parties in this place,” He says. “People just haven't shown up the last couple of times.”

“Which usually leaves us sitting here at eleven surrounded by Pringles," Jack says.

"And sadness," Dean adds.

"And sadness," Jack agrees. “Which is why me and Dean had the great idea to get drunk so early.”

“It's a great idea til one of you throws up on something,” Phil says, darkly. “I want our deposit back.”

“The toilet is the only throwing up place,” Dean says, knowledgeably, sliding sideways a little. Jack has to move and help him sit up straight again, during which time Dan makes eye contact with Phil and the pair of them end up bursting out laughing.

“Oh God, fine, fine,” Phil says, still grinning in a way that makes Dan's stomach feel strange. “As soon as this is done I'll join you guys.”

This announcement is met with cheers from Jack, and half-hearted cheers from Dean, who's sliding sideways again. Dan's gaze flickers over to Phil and how bright his eyes are over the rim of his coffee cup, and he finds himself feeling fervently glad that he decided to show up.

-

update pls, PJ texts a few hours later.

Dan's feeling pleasantly buzzed, cradling his bottle of Smirnoff on his lap. Phil's holding the Diet Coke – the two of them had decided to share – and they've commandeered the sofa, sitting at opposite ends as people actually start to arrive.

“No texting during the party,” Phil says, deadpan, prodding Dan on the leg. They're facing each other on the couch, but by virtue of the length of the sofa and their legs combined, there's a lot of awkward knee and leg touching going on. Dan is irresistibly reminded of that weird day in the lecture theatre, which is enough to make him worry he's about to drop his phone into the drink of vodka and coke that's also resting carefully on his lap.

“I'm not texting,” Dan reassures him, sending back a quick everythings fine before struggling to shove his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. It's a move that involves quite a lot of wriggling, so much so that Phil leans over and rescues his drink before it spills. “Thanks.”

Phil just grins at him, leaning his head against the back of the sofa, his eyes gentle, somehow. Even though there's music blaring out from the speaker system (Mr Brightside – Dan privately thinks it's way too early in the night for that song, but it's not his party), it feels like a quiet moment between them. Like being close to Phil somehow means all the dials for the rest of the world have been turned all the way down, fading into unimportance.

“I'm glad you came,” Phil says, handing him his drink back.

“I wasn't gonna,” Dan admits, alcohol loosening his tongue. “I, like – I got this weird, weird phone call, and – and I thought I was being invited to some, like, murder party, and then you weren't replying to your texts...”

“I don't know where my phone is,” Phil says, touching Dan's leg unnecessarily for emphasis. “I was looking for it earlier – do you know where my phone is?” He asks, catching hold of Jack's arm as he wanders past with one of the new arrivals.

“Cutlery drawer,” Jack says, and keeps walking, over to the little cluster of people in bean bags on the other side of the room.

“Cutlery – what?” Phil says, and Dan laughs at him.

“Lame, oh my God,” He says, reaching out to do some unnecessary leg touching of his own. “How do you lose your phone in the cutlery drawer?”

“I don't even know,” Phil says, grinning, and then rests his head back against the side of the sofa, looking at Dan. Dan rests his head there too, just because being looked at by Phil makes him feel a strange, and the coolness of leather against his cheek makes everything feel a little more real. “No, I'm really glad you came. I'm – I'm glad.”

“Me too,” Dan says. He watches Phil finishing the last of his drink, and then holds his hand out for the cup. “You want another?”

“I wasn't gonna get drunk,” Phil says, but he's already handing over the cup, the two of them swapping drinks because Dan can't hold his and Phil's at the same time.

This whole thing would be much easier if they thought to do it in the kitchen, but Dan can't bring himself to suggest it – he likes sitting here with Phil, the sofa their little island in amongst the few people milling around that Dan doesn't know.

“Me neither,” Dan says, shakily pouring Smirnoff into Phil's cup and handing it back to him so he can add coke, the two of them trading cups back and forth with smiles.

-

“So,” Dan says, a little while later.

He's just been to the bathroom. He'll never understand why experiencing the sudden stillness and quiet and the buzz of music through the walls always makes him feel drunker than shots ever did, but he ended up listing sideways as he got to his feet, practically stumbling over to the sink to wash his hands.

When he'd unlocked the door, it was to find Jack waiting, leaning against the opposite wall with a bottle of beer in his hand.

“Phil didn't know I was gonna be here.”

Jack doesn't even look bothered – maybe the two of them are too drunk to be bothered anymore.

“Not exactly,” He says. “I – I might've borrowed his phone to call you. But – I knew he wanted to see you, he was just too – too scared to invite you himself. I was doing him a favour.”

“He – what?” Dan asks, leaning heavily against the bathroom doorway.

“He wanted to see you,” Jack says. Then he gives Dan this very specific sort of look that he doesn't get straightaway, kind of scrutinising, eyes narrowed. “You've – look, sorry, I just. I got the feeling that both of you, like. You're on the same page. You know?”

“I,” Dan says. “What?”

Jack's still giving him that look.

“You know what I mean,” He says, and then waggles his eyebrows in this seriously worrying way. “But you're gonna have to let me use the bathroom or we're gonna end up with a situation.”

Dan hurries out of the bathroom, and Jack gives him one last pointed look before he shuts the door behind him.

-

Despite Jack's concerns earlier in the evening about their previously unsuccessful attempts to hold parties, by ten the living room of the flat is full, twenty or so people having shown up in the end. It seems like much more than that, watching them all milling around, some people dancing by the large windows.

Dan and Phil have found another safe space by perching on the kitchen island. It means they're close to the fridge, and people keep coming over to get drinks and stopping to chat.

Phil's presence cushions Dan against his fear of strangers. His leg is warm against Dan's and whenever he gestures wildly when telling a story his arm kind of flails into Dan's shoulder.

It's the best place to be, he thinks. Although part of him – probably the most sober part – dimly thinks that maybe he shouldn't be drunk and leaning on Phil so often.

“You should stay over,” Phil says, suddenly, and Dan instantly changes his mind. Being drunk together is the best idea.

“No, no, it's ok,” Dan says, but Phil talks over him.

“You should stay,” He insists, warm hand falling onto Dan's knee and squeezing. “We have, like, a ton of room, and I want you to stay, I want you to.”

His face is quite suddenly so close, his breath warm, that Dan freezes in place and accidentally lets his drink slip out of his hand so it splashes all over his t-shirt and drips down onto his jeans.

“Oh my God,” He says, hopping gracelessly to his feet, closely followed by Phil, who's ineffectually patting the huge coke stain on Dan's white shirt like that'll make it disappear somehow. “Oh my God-”

“It's ok,” Dan thinks Phil says, but he loses grasp on regular conversation because a moment later Phil's holding his hand and tugging him out of the room.

Dan doesn't realise how hot it is in the living room until they stagger out into the hallway, which is cool by comparison.

Phil’s bedroom’s even cooler. He has his bedroom window open, and Dan goes straight over to it to lean on the windowsill, enjoying the evening air. Phil joins him after a second, leaning right up next to him, the two of them turning their faces into the breeze like plants turning towards the sun.

“I can’t believe I spilt a drink on myself,” Dan tells Phil. “Peej told me I would, but, like, I wanted to wear white because I didn’t want you to think I just own black things.”

“I don’t think that,” Phil says, softly, and when Dan looks at him he finds Phil looking right back, eyes soft and dark in the dim light. “Well,” He amends, with a funny little smile that makes Dan laugh. “Maybe a little bit. But that’s fine.” He pauses, swallows. “You look good no matter what, Dan.”

Dan’s stomach feels like it’s doing loop-the-loops inside him.

“Even covered in coke?”

“Even then,” Phil assures him. He seems to hesitate for a second, gaze skittering away from Dan and out of the window. When he looks back there’s something about his expression that makes any stupid comment Dan was about to make die in his throat.

It’s an endless moment, the moment of waiting for something to happen, broken only when Phil reaches out to touch Dan’s face.

Dan’s thought so much about the last time this happened that he worries for a second he’s just having a stupid vivid fever dream, but the first time was nothing like this. Phil’s stroking his fingers up and down, thumb touching Dan’s lips very very softly. It’s this maddening, barely-there touch – the breeze ruffling their hair is more substantial than the way Phil’s touching him.

Dan can hear Phil breathing. His eyes are so dark and his eyelashes so long that Dan feels like he could fall into the look Phil’s giving him and happily drown.

“I’ll find you a t-shirt,” Phil says, thumb still stroking, so Dan isn’t sure about answering for a moment.

Then the touch is gone, leaving Dan's lip feeling cold. He breathes in a little gasp of air and manages to say, “Ok.”

“You should take off that one,” Phil says. “So you can swap. If you want.”

“I, um,” Dan’s mouth is so dry, he wishes he’d brought another drink in here with him.

“I mean,” He’s not entirely sure, but he thinks if the light in here was better he’d see that Phil’s gone red. There’s something about the way that he ducks his head for a second that gives him away. “I’ll – I’ll look away, you don’t have to worry, I’m not – I’m not gonna-“

“It’s ok,” Dan says. “I wasn’t worried about that, it’s ok.”

“Ok,” Phil says. The word’s barely a breath, barely a noise, Dan just watches his lips move and doesn’t hear anything. “Ok, I’ll get you something.”

Dan ends up leaning against the wall, watching Phil rifling through his wardrobe. It's like some weird throwback to him and PJ doing the exact same thing earlier, only this time the room's bathed in shadows, the distant yellow of streetlight bathing the room in an odd glow.

Dan doesn't know why neither of them have turned any lights on. He doesn't know how Phil's meant to choose him a shirt in the dark, but he's still looking all the same, hangers clicking.

“Here,” Phil says, bringing what seems like a plain black t-shirt over to Dan with a small smile. “I normally wear it to bed, but, um, it's clean.”

“Thanks,” Dan says, quietly, still feeling dazed and a little slow, made worse when their fingers awkwardly fumble over each other's when Dan reaches out to take the shirt.

“I'll just, um,” Phil looks at him for a moment. The streetlight doesn't reach so well over here – it's more shadowy, making Phil look like a black and white photograph. “I'll turn around, ok, and then you'll-”

“Yeah,” Dan says, quietly. They look at each other for what feels like an endless moment, and then Phil turns away retreating back to the wardrobe and facing the wall.

It's the quickest t-shirt change of Dan's entire life. Part of him's worried about messing up his hair, but more of him is worried about the fact that Phil's standing right there, and anyone could walk in and catch him changing. It's not exactly a flattering act to be caught in, shucking off a damp t-shirt in favour of a dry one.

When he's done he stops to laugh at himself a little, flattening down his hair.

Phil laughs, too.

“You don't even know what I'm laughing at,” Dan says, grinning as he turns to face him, still facing the wall.

Phil just carries on laughing. It's a soft noise that makes Dan smile, going over to where Phil's standing. When he gets closer he sees that Phil's hands are clapped over his eyes, like a little kid worried about seeing something scary.

“Hey,” He says, softly, reaching out to touch Phil's wrist, tugging his hands away from his eyes. “Hey, it's safe to look now.”

Phil turns and smiles at him.

“I didn't look,” He says.

“I know,” Dan says, softly. He's still holding onto Phil's warm wrist, not entirely willing to let go just yet. He swallows. “If you – like, if you had looked, I wouldn't have minded.”

Phil gulps down a little breath of air, and Dan watches his adam's apple bob as he says, “Really?”

Dan nods. It turns out it's difficult to keep a conversation going when he's so close to Phil like this. Dan's in this prickly state of awareness of every inch of Phil – his arms and his legs and the softness of his hair and the length of his eyelashes. It feels like it should be an oppressive feeling but it's not – it makes him want to explore with his hands, mapping out Phil's existence with his fingertips. Maybe Phil wouldn't mind if he did.

As if he's read Dan's mind, Phil reaches out and touches Dan's shoulder.

“I know I said,” He begins, and Dan waits for it – the explanation, the missing boyfriend, the inevitable rejection, something. “I know I-”

“Phil, Phil,” Someone calls, the bedroom door bursting open. A girl stumbles in, giggling, a dangerously tilting cup in one hand and a phone in the other. “I found your phone in the cutlery drawer, what the fuck?”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Phil says, quietly, to Dan. Dan has no idea what he's apologizing for but he nods, watching as if in a dream as Phil leads the girl to his desk chair so she's sitting down.

“I'm just gonna,” He gestures back at the bedroom door. “I should go and text Peej so he doesn't think I'm dead, I'll be right back, ok?”

Phil's face seems to fall at that, but Dan chalks it up to the unwanted interruption of the random blonde girl, who's laughing and leaning heavily against Phil's desk.

When he fetches his phone from his jacket pocket and steals back out into the relative quiet of the hallway, he finds several unread texts from PJ.

Still alive?

Ethan has his rugby friends over for a party in the kitchen send HELP

I can't get a cup of tea Dan I'm an unfit noodle

I hope you're ok

Pls reply??

Laughing, Dan sends, get tea ur not n ndit noodle. And then when he realises he's messed up, he sends, IGNORE TYPOS.

He locks his phone, slipping it into his jeans pocket and stands for a moment, trying to slow his uncomfortably fast pulse. His face is warm under his own fingers, and he breathes in and out for a second, then laughs at himself and heads back down the hall to Phil's room.

Later on, Dan replays the moment in his head over and over again. He steps into the room, already half-smiling at the prospect of just...being alone with Phil again – maybe Phil's already convinced the phone girl to leave -

Except when he steps in the room, eyes taking too long to reacclimatize to the dim light, it's to find Phil and the unknown girl sitting way too close, and the girl's hand touching Phil's neck, pulling him in closer, and -

And white noise floods into Dan's ears, and blood rushes to his face. He walks straight back out again, shutting the door behind him with a snap.

The party music's a blur and the chatter's meaningless and he bashes his way into the kitchen to find his jacket. He feels like he's moving in slow motion while everyone around him's moving really fast, and he's vaguely aware of someone saying his name but all he can think of doing is getting the hell out of there.

He grabs his jacket and then just walks out. Down the hall, he stabs at the lift button with the usual logic that if he presses a million times it might arrive quicker.

“Dan,” Phil says. He's breathless, hair sticking up in odd directions, and Dan can't even look him in the eye because he feels so fucking stupid. “Dan, wait.”

“I just,” Dan says, pressing the lift button a few million more times for good measure. “Got a phone call. It sounded important. So, um. I'm going.”

Or he would be going, if the lift would show up.

“Dan."

Dan can't look at him. It's like his face is the fucking sun or something, Dan just can't bring himself to look. Which is hilarious considering how much he was looking only a few minutes ago – and fuck, that doesn't make him feel any better. He stares at the stupid unresponsive lift button when he says, “PJ rang.” Then he tears his eyes away and manages to look Phil in the eye. His stupid blue eyes. Fuck him. “It's ok, you should get back in there. I, uh. I could see you were busy.”

“No, wait,” Phil says, and actually grabs his arm. “You don't get to do this, you – I took you for a lot of things but – but not a hypocrite, Dan, I never thought you were that.”

“What?” Dan says, barely able to believe what he's hearing, shrugging Phil's hand off him. “Are you kidding me? You – you spent the entire evening making me feel like – feel like -” He can't even bring himself to say it. “And then I leave for, what, half a second, and it turns out none of it even meant anything, well, that's fine-”

“Oh my God,” Phil says. His face is blotchy with colour and when he reaches up to touch his mouth his fingers look bizarrely pale against his flushed face. “You're – you're really doing this, I can't...” He stops, shaking his head, and Dan doesn't know what the look on his face means but he knows he wants the floor to swallow him whole. “I mean, it really sucks, doesn't it, when you really like someone and they're with someone else. Like, doesn't it just really hurt when they keep giving you these signals and making it seem like they like you too and then – and then there are these constant little reminders that – that it's all just too good to be true?”

Phil's voice, strong with sarcasm when he'd started speaking, wavers to an unsteady murmur by the time he's finished.

Dan swallows. He doesn't think he's ever felt as bad as this in his entire life.

“Yeah,” He says, voice sounding ugly and small. “Yeah, it really does fucking hurt, thanks.”

Then, because something has to go right in his life just once, the lift arrives with a helpful little ping, and Dan practically throws himself into it, stabbing the ground floor button like his life depends on it. He stares down at his phone screen until the doors slide closed, and it's only then that he squeezes his eyes shut tight and presses a hand over his face, like he can force his humiliation and hurt back in, somehow.

He still has one hand over his face when he blindly rings PJ.

“Hey,” PJ says, cheerfully, when he picks up. “I can tell you're having a good time just from the typos." When Dan doesn't say anything, he hears a sharp intake of breath down the phone line. "Dan, is everything ok?"

“Can you come and get me?” Dan asks. “Sorry, I know it's late.”

“No, no, 'course,” PJ says, straight away. “I'll set off right now. Are you ok?”

Dan doesn't know what to say. He hasn't ruled out the possibility of drunk crying yet.

“I'll, um. Tell you in a minute?”

The only thing that makes the whole ordeal worse is catching sight of his reflection in the stupid back wall of the lift a second later, and seeing how red and ugly and shiny-faced he is. Which, really, explains the entire thing. How can he expect Phil to look twice at someone who frequently resembles a tomato depending on the awkwardness of any given situation? How can he expect Phil to look twice at him, full stop?

He can't. That's just it. He was stupid for ever thinking that he could.

-

When PJ's car pulls up down the road from Phil’s apartment building, it quickly becomes clear that he'd rushed out of the flat.

“Are you wearing your fox onesie?” Dan asks as he gets into the car.

“Yeah,” PJ says. “I was in a hurry. And it's cold.” He pauses. “What's wrong?”

Dan feels way too drunk to even say anything, so he just shakes his head.

“Shit,” PJ says, and reaches out to squeeze Dan's cold fingers for a moment.

-

They end up going through the McDonald's drive thru because it's the only place PJ thinks they can buy coffee at this time of night.

"There are half a dozen huge rugby players in the kitchen, so it's not like we can go in there," PJ says, evidently trying to coax a smile from Dan.

Dan doesn't want coffee – he wants to sleep for a week, go into hibernation and preferably never see anyone again – but PJ refuses to see the pros of this brilliant plan, so coffee it is.

“D'you want to talk about it?” He asks, when they're sitting parked under a streetlight.

Everything in the car's bathed in orange and confusing shadows, and whenever Dan happens to look over at PJ his eyes catch on the furry ears of his onesie. Dan doesn't think he's ever had a more surreal evening in his life.

“Phil was kissing some girl,” He says, quickly, taking a sip of his coffee like, whatever. It tastes disgusting and scorches his oesophagus, he's pretty sure, so when he speaks again he sounds a little strangled. “That's it.”

“Oh,” PJ says.

Dan feels the overwhelming sense of his own stupidity rising again, so rather than letting PJ see that in his face he stares out of the window, blinking hard.

“It's not even. Like.” He stares at the way the streetlight through the smudges on the window creates funny little yellow clouds of light on the glass. “He was, like.” He wants to explain what had happened in Phil's bedroom, somehow. He wants to explain the way Phil had looked, the way he'd touched Dan's mouth. Who the fuck touches someone's mouth and looks at them like that and then kisses someone else five minutes later? Who the fuck does that? “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” PJ says, after a moment.

Dan shrugs.

“It’s ok.”

“D’you want to eat gross stuff and watch shit movies in my room?” PJ says.

“Oh, Peej,” Dan says, groaning. “I'm, like – I'm wasted, I can't appreciate movies right now.”

“That's why I said shit movies,” PJ says, encouragingly. “It's not like you're gonna get any sleep anyway, not with Ethan and his mates in the kitchen." When Dan doesn’t answer straight away, he adds, “I can set up the projector? We can have, like, super widescreen if I take my posters down.”

Dan can’t help but smile at that. It feels weird on his face – it's too soon after that look on Phil's face, the sharp sarcasm in his voice. Just thinking about it makes Dan flinch.

“Sure,” He says, just to distract himself from his awful thoughts.

Chapter Text

Dan pretends he's sick on Monday.

He figures flu is a good enough excuse to have a few days off without suffering any awkward questions, so he messages his tutors some lie about having been to the doctor's and then crawls back under his bedcovers.

He spends the days off avoiding social media and wearing his ugliest clothes around the flat, occasionally taking walks to the campus shop with his hood up. Part of it's to combat the chill but a lot of it is in case Phil's around somewhere.

Dan knows that a hood isn't exactly the best disguise, but it's the only one he's got.

“What if they find out you're not sick,” PJ says, tentatively, on Wednesday afternoon.

They've been playing Mario Party 7 for so long that Dan thinks he'll dream in the background music for weeks, sitting hunched over in PJ's room with the curtains partly drawn. There's a gold band of sunset falling into the room, casting bright light on all of PJ's art books and the trinkets on his bookshelf.

Dan doesn't care if they find out he's not really ill. He doesn't care if he misses a ton of assignments. If they try and call him in for a meeting about his productivity he's already decided that he just won't go.

If there's one thing that Dan's skilled at in life, it's burying his head in the sand.

“They won't find out,” He says, with a confidence he doesn't feel, the pair of them watching Wario take his turn.

“Ok,” PJ says, quietly, and doesn't press the subject. A few moments later they're laughing over a particularly frustrating minigame like nothing happened.

Dan just pushes it to the back of his mind, along with all of his other worries, grouped together back there and clamouring for attention. During the day he can keep himself busy – he can go cross-eyed browsing Reddit for hours on end, getting into arguments about Guild Wars on obscure boards. He can avoid Facebook and sit on the countertop in the kitchen with PJ, the two of them drinking coffee and making each other laugh.

It's only at night, when he's finally turned his laptop off and turned his phone over on his bedside table, surrendering himself to the dark and the warmth of his bed, that things get bad. That's when Phil's face seems to swim behind his closed eyes, with the same look on his face he'd had in the hall outside his flat, all flushed face and sad eyes, like it was Dan who'd just kissed someone else.

None of it makes sense, no matter how hard he tries to force it to. It doesn't fit, the way Phil seemed so hurt about his ex cheating on him, projecting that onto Dan somehow. Had he ever had a boyfriend? Or was all of that just a mind game? And why had he spent so much time with Dan at the party?

The party's what he dwells on the most. Specifically the fact that Phil didn't invite him. If he'd wanted Dan there, he would've asked him – but he didn't, Jack did. He thinks of the look of surprise on Phil's face when he'd answered the door, and relives the evening in painful, minute detail. He relives the evening from Phil's point of view, imagining him dying of boredom, feeling obligated to babysit Dan all night and hating every second.

That's how Dan spends the nights when he can't distract himself. He goes over and over every smile and conversation and casual touch until they morph into something monstrous, the way darkness in familiar rooms turns everyday objects into strange, unknown creatures. When he manages to distract himself from that, he gets swept up again by Law, now with the added worry about the classes he's missing and the work he's ignoring, unread emails piling up in his uni inbox.

-

By Thursday, he has three missed calls from Phil.

He's been leaving his phone on silent, worried about finally getting called out by the attendance office or something. He justifies it in his head by thinking that if his phone's on silent and he misses the call, then it's not really his fault – ignoring the fact that he has his phone on silent just so he can ignore calls, and any missed ones are his own fault entirely.

It's that kind of selective thinking that stops him from going mad with worry.

“Phil's calling you,” PJ tells him, on Wednesday afternoon.

“Mm,” Dan says. He's lying across four chairs in the kitchen, his phone abandoned on the kitchen table above him.

PJ shifts in his seat on the other side of the table – Dan watches his knees moving, jiggling a little with unspent energy. They've been sat here drinking coffee all day, and Dan knows that PJ's an active sort of guy. Not even necessarily in an exercising kind of way, but he knows that PJ prefers to always have something to do.

Dan's new sedentary life of the past few days involves moving between his bed and the kitchen, and that's pretty much it. He's been alone the past two days until PJ gets back from class. Today, PJ had an early seminar, and he's already getting antsy.

Just another thing to worry about, Dan thinks.

“Are you not gonna pick up?”

“Nope,” Dan says, still watching PJ's knees. He forces himself to sit up, dragging three of the four chairs with his legs and nearly ending up rolling onto the floor. The side of his face is hot from being pressed against the cheap plastic of the chair and his head throbs a little, lack of sleep and water giving him the mother of all headaches. “He just wants to know why I'm not in class. Uni probably make him call. Whatever.” He shifts his phone over to himself and looks at Phil's name on the screen, at the stupid blurry snapshot of his hand that Dan has set as his picture.

They'd been drinking milkshakes up by the library one time, and Dan had insisted on taking a photo of Phil. Phil'd started complaining about his hair looking bad and he'd moved so fast he was basically a blur, and that was all Dan had got as a picture.

Dan reaches out and cancels the call with one tap, then turns his phone over so he can't see the screen anymore.

PJ doesn't say anything, but his silence sort of speaks for itself. As the week wears on, PJ says less and less, and Dan toys with the idea that he hates him, that he's slowly wishing he'd never made friends with Dan in the first place.

It's the worst form of torture, thinking that way, but he can't seem to stop himself.

-

“Hi. It's Phil.” A long breath. “So, er. I think I saw you yesterday? I, er. You were up by the shop, I think, erm. Anyway, I guess you're still feeling ill. I'm still sending the notes. I.” A long pause. “I feel like maybe we made a mistake, um. I definitely did, I. I shouldn't have...” A quick exhale, followed by another pause. “Just. Let me know when you're feeling better, alright?”

-

“Dan, hi. It's Phil, um. Listen, I'll just email you the notes, ok? I hope you feel better soon. Ok. Um. Bye.”

-

“I know you don't want to talk to me.” Silence. “Dean says I should stop calling, I dunno. I'm not – I'm not doing this because – I just want to make sure you're ok, alright? So – let me know, if you want to. Please.”

-

“I'm gonna quit,” Dan says, on Friday. It's the first time he's said it aloud – the first time he's admitted it to anyone other than himself. “Drop out, whatever. I don't wanna do this anymore so I'm just...not going to.”

PJ's quiet for a long moment afterwards. They're watching Legally Blonde in Dan's room, PJ valiantly braving his mountain of unwashed clothes and his rumpled bedsheets that he spilt coffee on two days ago and still hasn't changed.

Watching the film that he'd always joked inspired him to take Law in the first place just makes him feel overwhelmingly sad. He feels sad for the dumb kid in sixth form who got a few good grades in Law and mistook that for ambition and skill. It's enough to make him voice what he's been thinking of in the back of his mind for weeks.

Once the words are out, part of him wishes he could take them back, for fear of PJ's reaction. If PJ's disappointed, it'll be like a primer for the disappointment of everyone else. His lecturers, his mum, his dad, his grandparents. He won't be his mum's son who's studying Law at uni anymore, he'll just be Dan. Regular disappointing Dan, who had to move back into his childhood bedroom barely six months after starting his degree because he just couldn't hack it.

“It's not because of Phil, is it?” PJ asks, hesitantly.

“No,” Dan says, firmly, because that's one thing he knows for sure. “God, no. It's – I hate it, Peej. I – I put up with it for ages, maybe – maybe a little longer than I would've done, because – because...” He shrugs, swallowing hard, thinking about Phil. “Anyway, that's all different now, so.”

PJ breathes out through his nose. When Dan looks at him, he's biting the dry skin off his lip. He doesn't seem disappointed. If anything, he seems concerned.

“What're you gonna do?”

He asks it so quietly that Dan could easily pretend he hadn't heard. He could ask PJ if he wants a coffee and then go and put the kettle on, or change the subject entirely.

Except he's tired of running from everything in his life that makes him feel uncomfortable and scared, so he shrugs.

“I don't really know,” He says, trying to smile as he says it, like being cast out into the world with no university qualifications and no ideas for the future is his idea of a joke.

PJ's quiet again for a second. Then he smiles.

“Tell you what you won't be doing,” He says. “You won't be staying up til 3am to read about old cases.”

Dan laughs, surprised.

“Guess I won't,” He says. “Or – or staying in the library all night.”

Like he had with Phil. Phil and his endless cups of coffee and the way he'd linked their arms together and his smile-

“Or sitting through lectures,” PJ says, evidently encouraged by the fact that Dan's smiling. “Or any of it.”

“Any of it,” Dan repeats, wonderingly.

It's weird – somehow, in the face of the impending avalanche of disappointment and bewilderment that's set to crush him when he tells his family what his plan is, it hadn't occurred to him to feel relieved. It hadn't occurred to him to think of all the reading he could do for fun, all the early morning classes and lectures that he just wouldn't have to go to anymore. All of the things he'd hated, the things that've plagued him since halfway through September, they're all gonna be gone.

The feeling of lightness, of freedom that sweeps over him at that thought is enough to make him flash PJ a Cheshire cat grin, then laugh at himself.

“What?” PJ says, laughing just because Dan is. “What is it?”

“Nothing, I just,” He sighs, still smiling a little. “I didn't think of it like that. I've been thinking so much of all the stuff I'm gonna have to do when I quit that I forgot – I forgot all the stuff I wouldn't have to do, you know?” He pauses. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“That's ok,” PJ says.

They sit in companionable silence for a while, the DVD playing to itself in the background. PJ seems like he's watching it, so Dan starts paying attention again, too.

“Are you gonna tell Phil?”

Dan blinks, staring hard at the laptop screen. He shakes his head.

“He doesn't want to know,” He says, as neutrally as possible. He can feel PJ looking at him, but he just carries on looking at the laptop until PJ looks away.

-

It's almost a relief when Saturday dawns, cold and wet, and Dan doesn't have to spend the entire day thinking about what classes he's missing. PJ talks him into leaving the flat – into leaving campus entirely, and as reluctant as he is to go out he runs out of excuses fairly quickly in the face of PJ's enthusiasm.

“We're going on an adventure,” He says as they walk up to the car park, one hand holding tight to Dan's jacket sleeve like he's worried he might turn and run at any moment.

“You promised me calm,” Dan says. “You said we were gonna have a stress free day.”

“Yeah,” PJ says, flashing a smile that Dan can't help but return. “Didn't say it wouldn't be an adventure though.”

Dan makes a show of rolling his eyes, but he can't deny there's something enjoyable in being outside after so many days spent mostly indoors. The air smells the way it does after rain, like grass and plants, somehow, their creeping leaves and branches reaching out over the side of the fence that separates the campus from the surrounding woodland. Dan lets his hand run across the wet fronds, moisture dripping down his hand and soaking into his shirt cuff under his jacket. He can hear birds chirping somewhere in the trees.

He finds himself breathing deeply as they walk, each deep inhale a little flash of cold at the back of his throat.

“I know, right,” PJ says, finally letting go of his sleeve as they reach the outskirts of the car park. “Everything smells great after rain. It's the plants, or something. I'm sure I read that somewhere. They're, like, celebrating.”

Dan laughs.

“You read that somewhere?” He says. “Where exactly did you read that the smell after rain is plants celebrating?”

“Ok, fine, I didn't read it anywhere,” PJ admits. “Made you laugh though.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, as PJ unlocks his car and the two of them get in, Dan quickly shutting the door. “Shut up.”

“No,” PJ says, slamming the door shut behind him and pulling his seatbelt on. “I'm a great friend. Look, I'm even letting you have total control of the music.”

He's holding out the aux cord, earnest expression on his face.

“Peej...”

“Just take it before I change my mind.”

“I,” Dan feels guilty, all of a sudden. He's been behaving like a zombie all week, no wonder PJ's being especially kind to him. “Fine.”

He ends up playing All Star just to make PJ laugh, the two of them singing along like idiots with the windows rolled down.

“And that's why nobody wants to go out with me,” Dan says, when the song's over.

“Dan.”

“I'm kidding, I'm kidding,” Dan says, holding his hands up. “I mean it's true but I'm totally kidding.”

He's just about to play Rick Astley to carry on the meme theme of the journey when his phone rings in his hand.

His stomach lurches unpleasantly before he registers that it's an unknown mobile number, and not Phil calling him at the behest of the uni again.

“Who is it?” PJ wants to know.

Dan shrugs, staring down at his phone like it's about to set on fire. There's nothing at all stopping him from just cancelling the call, but instead he disconnects the aux cord and answers it.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” A vaguely familiar voice says. “Hi, er. Sorry, this is – this is – hey!”

There's the sound of a scuffle, and then another voice says, “Hi, Dan.”

“Jack,” Dan says, meeting PJ's eye when he stops at some traffic lights and looks over. “And – and Dean?”

“Yeah, he was being too slow,” Jack says.

“It was my idea to call,” Dean says, in the background.

“It was technically his idea, yeah,” Jack agrees.

“That's great,” Dan says, tonelessly, any potentially good feelings he'd been experiencing leaching out of him as quickly as they'd arrived. “Well, if that's everything-”

“No, no,” Dean says. There are some muffled noises, and then he's lowering his voice to add, “Phil won't come out of his room. I mean, he's been, like, eating and showering and stuff, but other than that...”

Dan swallows hard, looking out of the passenger side window so that PJ can't see his face.

“Oh,” He says, in a horribly distant sounding voice. “Ok. Well, I don’t really see what any of that has to do with me.”

“Right,” Dean says. Dan hears Jack scoff in the background. The two of them sound mean, which doesn't suit them at all. It makes Dan feel like there’s something cold and heavy sitting in the pit of his stomach. “Look, it’s really none of my business, I just – I think it’s absolutely fucking shit that you’d make eyes at him one second and then run off to your boyfriend the next-“

“I – what?”

“But he really likes you, for whatever reason,” Dean continues, cutting across him. “And we kind of thought you really liked him too, so you need to just sort your shit out, ok?”

“Wait,” Dan says, feeling like his ears are ringing. “What d'you mean, my boyfriend?”

“What?” PJ says.

“Your boyfriend,” Dean repeats, like Dan's the one being stupid right now.

“Is he being serious?” Jack says, evidently taking back the phone because the next second he's saying, “Tallish guy, looks like a painting. Has a last name I dunno how to pronounce.”

“Oh my fucking God,” Dan says, realisation crashing down upon him like a dead weight. “You think – you think PJ's my boyfriend?”

“Shut the fuck up,” PJ says loudly, gaping at him. Dan flaps his hand at him because Jack's still talking.

“Wait wait, so he’s not your boyfriend?”

“Of course he's not, oh my God,” Dan says, not quite believing that he's having this conversation.

“Put it on speaker,” PJ says.

“He's here right now, gimme – one second-”

“...don't understand,” Jack's saying, his voice buzzing out of Dan's phone speakers. “You live together, don't you?”

“Well, yeah,” Dan says, incredulous.

“It's student accommodation,” PJ adds. “He lives with like five other people, do you guys think he's dating them too?"

"That's PJ," Dan explains, quickly.

“But,” Jack says, after a moment. “Hang on, this still doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, a little sourly. “A lot of things don't make sense. Like why Phil'd string me along for so long and then kiss someone else while I was right there-”

“Oh my God,” Jack says. “That was Lisa. If you knew her you’d understand, whenever she’s having a bad day she attaches herself to the nearest person by the mouth. Five minutes before she got Phil she was trying to back Dean into a corner, that's just what she does.”

“She did,” Dean calls in the background.

“Yeah, well,” Dan splutters, his anger quickly losing steam. “He – he.” He stops, swallowing. “Does he really think me and Peej are a thing?”

His voice sounds small, afraid somehow. He cringes at himself, hating sounding so weak in front of PJ, never mind to someone he barely knows.

“We all thought you were,” Jack says, sounding considerably kinder. When Dan doesn't say anything, he adds, “Look, Phil came home one day going on about you, ok, and how great you were. It was like that for a while, and me and Dean kept bugging him to do something about it, you know, but he wouldn't, and then – then he came back one day really, like, upset, and it turned out he found out you had a boyfriend.”

“But,” Dan says, his mouth dry, voice weirdly raspy all of a sudden like the inside of his mouth's been sandpapered. “But I'm not, I'm – we're not, I don't get it.”

There's silence down the phone line for what feels like a long time. Dan takes the opportunity to turn speakerphone off and put the phone back to his ear.

“You're gonna have to tell him,” Jack says. “That's – he has no idea.”

Dan doesn't know what to say. He'd resigned himself to the fact that Phil wasn't interested in him – that Phil had played him, humiliated him, that Phil wasn't anywhere near the person Dan had thought. Now, though, thinking about everything through this new perspective – the messed up, Dan has a boyfriend perspective – everything makes a lot more sense.

“I'm just – I'm busy, so I have to go,” He says, absently, and hangs up.

There's silence in the car for a moment.

“What was that about?” PJ asks.

“That was – Christ, that was Phil's flatmates,” Dan says, leaning his head back against the headrest and blowing his fringe out of his eyes. He explains who Jack and Dean are, and what they'd said that he hadn't heard.

PJ whistles.

“Wow,” He says. “So – they really thought-?” He points between the two of them with his free hand.

Dan nods.

“And Phil, he-? He thinks that too?”

“Sounds like it,” Dan says, with a flippancy he doesn't feel. He stares out of the window at the passing buildings – it looks like they're driving up to the woods. Dan doesn't know why he's surprised when it's one of PJ's favourite places to go and draw. “Even if he thought that, he still – he still kissed someone else, so.”

His voice sounds weak to his own ears, but if PJ notices he doesn't say anything.

“I mean,” He says, as they're pulling into the side road that leads to the woods. “Technically, he...he thought you were with me, so...”

Dan just shakes his head, lips pressed together tightly. He thinks it'll take more than second hand words from Jack and Dean for him to stop torturing himself by replaying the memory of Phil and that unknown girl.

“Come on,” PJ says, gently, a few moments later. He cuts the engine, and the two of them stare out of the windows at the trees all around them. “Ready to go monster hunting?”

"Always," Dan says, and manages a small smile.

-

Phil calls him again on Monday morning.

Dan had decided - the same way he always ended up deciding on long Sunday evenings – that Monday would be the start of something new. Monday would be better. He wasn't going to mope around the flat anymore, or make PJ worry. He wasn't gonna carry on burying his head in the sand.

He makes himself a to-do list and tapes it to his bedroom window so that it's the first thing he sees when he forces himself out of bed at seven am and throws his curtains open on a dull, wintry morning.

Call mum

laundry

drop out

talk to phil

When Phil calls him just as he's straightening his hair, he nearly ignores it. But this is one of his to-do list items, he thinks, looking at the unsatisfactory sliver of his own reflection he gets in his crappy hand mirror. Monday has to be better.

He sets down his straighteners and answers the phone.

“Hi,” Phil says. “I. Hey.”

“Hi,” Dan says, his voice hoarse. His palms are damp, and he wipes his free hand on his jeans. He'd planned so many things to say to Phil, but it feels like they all fluttered out of his head as soon as he answered the phone. “I'm not coming to class today.”

“Right,” Phil says, in this weird matter-of-fact voice.

“But I think we should talk,” Dan says, his own voice sounding just as calm and characterless as Phil's. “So, um. Can we? Talk, I mean?”

“Of course,” Phil says. “Um. Meet you outside the student union in an hour?”

“Sure,” Dan says. “Bye.”

He hangs up.

Just like a conversation between strangers, he thinks, blinking hard. Steeling himself, he puts his phone back down and picks up the straighteners again.

“Today has to be better,” He says to himself.

At least PJ's not around to hear how unsteady his voice is.

-

It's surreal, walking up to the student union to meet Phil as though it's a normal day. Dan gets caught up in the rush of students making their way to their morning classes, faces hidden behind cups of coffee. He pulls his hood up against the wind and shoves his hands deep into his pockets, trying to school his expression into one of complete indifference.

He doesn't know what to think. The events of the past few days flutter and flap between his ears like so many noisy black crows, making it hard to pin down singular thoughts and identify them. Phil likes him, Phil hates him, Phil touched his mouth in a darkened room, Phil kissed someone else, Phil set out to humiliate him, Phil thought he was with PJ and the whole thing was a mistake...

Dan doesn't know anymore.

Scared, he types in a text to PJ, then deletes it and changes it to shitting myself.

All you have to do is explain everything and listen to his side, PJ replies almost immediately, like he was waiting by his phone or something. You're gonna be ok

Dan swallows hard, staring down at the text for a long moment before locking his phone and slipping it back into his pocket.

Phil's there by the student union, spinning his phone in his hand agitatedly. Dan feels the heat rising in his face at the sight of him. He wants nothing more than to turn and walk away before he gets spotted.

Except nothing ever got resolved by running away, so Dan just keeps walking until he reaches him.

“Oh,” Phil says, nearly dropping his phone when he spots Dan. “Oh, hi. I wasn't sure if you were gonna show up.”

Dan doesn't know what to say to that. Part of him wants to make some quip about how at least he didn't trip over any kettles this time, but thinking about those early days of their friendship makes him feel like he's about to freefall into total panic, so he keeps it to himself.

“I just, um. We need to talk.” When Phil doesn't say anything, just watches him warily (his hair looks great, blowing about a little in the wind like this is a music video, and his bottom lip's red like he's been biting it, and he looks so worried and so sad and so good). “Like, um.” He shrugs. “I'm. It's totally up to you if you want to kiss random girls at parties, I guess.”

That's not what he'd meant to say at all.

“She wasn't a random girl,” Phil says, and Dan's heart sinks in spite of himself. Of course he'd got his hopes up, of course he'd let himself think that maybe this could all be easily resolved. In the brief moment before Phil carries on speaking Dan envisages a whole conversation where Phil explains all about his undying love for the girl he'd kissed, complete with an invitation to their upcoming wedding in the south of France. “She – she's just a friend, a – a really drunk friend.”

“Right,” Dan says. He feels like he's been thrust into a spotlight and had his preprepared speech snatched away from him, leaving him floundering and terrified. His mouth is dry. “Well, um. Ok. So's PJ. I mean, not drunk, but – but a friend. Just a friend.”

Phil takes an age to look him in the eye.

“Really?” He says. Dan doesn't hear him speak, but he sees his lips form the word.

He nods. A passing group of girls laugh amongst themselves, and Dan flinches – why does other people's laughter always sound so menacing?

“I know somewhere we can go,” Phil says, like he'd read Dan's mind. “Come on.”

Somewhere turns out to be the academic help office where Dan had got into this mess in the first place – where Louise had offered him sweets and told him she knew just the person to pair him up with as his academic advisor.

Phil doesn't look at him as he lets them in, leaving Dan stranded in the doorway, breathing in the smell of printer paper and the faint vanilla scent of the reed diffusers Louise has on her desk. He shuts the door behind them, and suddenly the small room seems so much smaller and very very quiet.

“Jack told me,” Phil says, what feels like an age later. “He, um. About you and PJ.”

“Right,” Dan says. “So – so, what-?”

“I wanted to hear it from you,” Phil says, sounding like the words cost him a great effort.

“Right,” Dan repeats, sounding more impatient than he'd meant to. “So now you've heard it from me. Me and Peej were never together.” When Phil doesn't say anything, pink cheeked and staring at the carpet, Dan lets out an involuntary noise of irritation and adds, “Was that-? Was that everything?”

“No,” Phil says, just as Dan's considering giving up and leaving the room. “I – I thought you were with PJ. This entire time, so – so that's why I've been.” He swallows. “I really. I always.” He makes a tiny frustrated noise, frowning. “I dunno how to say it.”

“Don't know how to say what?” Dan asks quietly, his heart beating so fast he almost feels sick.

Phil squeezes his eyes shut for what feels like the longest moment, pinching the bridge of his nose like he has a headache.

“I like you,” He says, in a small voice. The words are barely out of his mouth when he's pulling a face. “It sounds so stupid, I'm – I'm like a fourteen year old or something, Jesus, I just – I really. I mean, at first when you didn't want to talk to me, I was, like,” He waves his hand, vaguely, in some nervous gesture that doesn't make any sense to Dan, who can hear the whoosh of his pulse in his ears. “But I – I mean, you know, you're – you're you, and I. I dunno. But I thought you were with PJ, so – so I didn't do anything about it.”

Dan swallows. Phil's just looking at him, expression honest and open and more than a little afraid, and Dan can't handle that or the way his face is blotchy with colour. He probably doesn't look much better.

For once in his life, he might actually be speechless.

“That was why you kept, like...I mean, the whole...acting weird, and, um.” His face flares with warmth at the thought of Phil shrugging his hands off, Phil talking about cheating and stopping Dan from touching him. “Rejecting me. That was why?”

Phil nods.

“I understand if you,” He gestures at Dan, wordlessly. “I get it, if you, uh. If it's not...If it was just a drunk thing, or whatever.” He shakes his head. “It doesn't matter.”

He looks lost somehow, embarrassed and small, like he wants the floor to swallow him whole. For the first time, Dan thinks that maybe it's not just him with a stupid overly loud internal monologue. Maybe it's not just him who overanalyses and worries and gives himself headaches thinking everything over again and again.

“I'm gonna quit,” He says, quietly. Phil meets his eye at that, surprised, so Dan carries on before he can say anything. “I mean, uni, I'm dropping out.”

“What?” Phil says, staring at him. “But – what about -” He blanches. “Not because of me?”

“No,” Dan says, calmly, taking one step closer to where Phil's standing by Louise's desk. “No. I stayed way longer than I would've because of you.” He stops, thinking about how that sounded, and shakes his head. “I don't mean that in a bad way, I just...The course is shit, you know? I hate it, it's – it's soulless and boring and – and for a while I thought maybe I'm meant to hate it, you know, maybe I'm – maybe that's it, for the rest of my life.” He shakes his head, distracted. “But that's not the point, the point is that having you there in lectures, that was, like, something to look forward to, you know? Being able to spend time with you, that was...that's the only reason I'm still here.”

He takes another couple of steps forwards, and Phil shuffles back a little, bumping into Louise's desk and making her little bowl of Loveheart sweets rattle.

“So you're leaving,” He says.

Dan nods. He's close enough to Phil now that he can smell his aftershave. He's breathing quickly, nervous little breaths that sound loud this close.

“I'll miss you,” Phil says.

Dan looks at him for a moment – at the way little strands of his hair are sticking up, fingers twitching restlessly. He has a strange moment of remembering that first day they'd met – his surprise at meeting the surprisingly youthful looking guy up by the student union, bright eyed in his galaxy jacket, happily trying to make conversation.

It's like thinking about a different person. A different person who didn't stay up all night with Dan to make sure he got his essays done, a different person who didn't encourage Dan to brave the campus coffee shop and the cafeteria, a different person who didn't make Dan smile every day, who didn't brighten even the most exhausting days.

“I feel like you're missing the point,” He says, softly. Phil's adam's apple bobs when he gulps, nervously, and Dan feels so fond of him in that second that it's almost painful. “I'm – I'm trying to say I like you too, you nerd.”

He hates himself a little as soon as he's said it, but it eases the tension and makes Phil laugh, snorting a little and covering his mouth with his hand. That makes it somehow easy to reach out and touch him, squeezing his hand tightly.

“Oh my God,” Phil's saying, shaking his head a little.

“What?” Dan says, grinning despite himself. It feels good to smile – the weight of worrying about Phil gone, as though it was never there at all. “Was that, like, not the declaration you were expecting?”

“I,” Phil lets out a breath through his nose, smiling and looking so relieved that Dan just wants to hug him. He feels like holding on to Phil's hand is the only thing stopping him from just floating away. “I wasn't expecting anything.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, and moves closer to him, their knees knocking together a little. “Just, like, a life hack for you, if a guy keeps flirting with you all the time, he probably likes you, ok?”

“You were drunk.”

“Yeah, in that lecture I was so drunk,” Dan says, voice coming out quieter than he'd intended now that he's so close. They look at each other for a moment, and Dan's dimly aware of how weird this would look if someone walked in – the two of them stood so close, holding hands and breathing at each other. “Phil-”

“I'm sorry I upset you at the party,” Phil blurts out, like it's something he's been holding in for a while. “I – Lisa kissed me out of nowhere, and I – I thought-”

“It's ok,” Dan says.

“No,” Phil says, looking pained. Dan's finding it hard to concentrate when Phil's simultaneously rubbing his thumb against the side of his hand. “I – I was a dick, and – and -” His eyes flicker from Dan's mouth to his eyes and back again, and Dan's breath catches in his throat.

“Oh God, never mind,” Phil says, hoarsely, and finally kisses him.

It feels like the rest of the world pales into insignificance in that moment – the longest moment, the moment when Dan realises that Phil's lips are as soft as he always privately thought they might be.

Another unsurprising revelation is how gentle Phil is. He eases his hand free of Dan's grip so he can touch his face, stroking a little. It's the sort of gentle that makes Dan want to push back – so he does, simultaneously touching Phil's hip to bring him closer and moving forwards, pushing until the two of them thump against Louise's desk. There's the thud of something falling over, but Dan doesn't care.

Phil makes a surprised noise against Dan's mouth, breaking off to breathe out a laugh at him.

“We shouldn't,” He says, unevenly, but he ends up kissing Dan again before his sentence even makes sense, a move which Dan's completely fine with until he pulls away again. “Louise's desk, we shouldn't-”

“Mmf,” Dan ends up saying, because Phil kisses him again before he can reply. The two of them break off again to laugh, resting their foreheads together. Dan hasn't felt this happy in months. “Ok, ok, my flat – that's, like, a place, you know, where we can,” He blinks rapidly, trying to find the right words when his brain feels like melted marshmallow.

Phil laughs at him.

“Shut up,” Dan says, laughing too, and kisses him just because he can, feeling giddy and stupid.

The office door opens.

“Oh,” Louise's voice says, and Phil takes a second to let him go, it all happens so quickly. “Oh, I'm sorry, I'll just -” Dan turns in time to see her hurrying back out, quickly shutting the door behind her.

“Oh my God,” Dan says, his face burning. When he turns back to Phil, he's laughing, his face hidden behind his hands. “Oh my God.”

“I told you,” Phil says. “I said it was a bad – wait, what the-?” He moves, feeling behind his back. “What the hell, did something spill on me?”

It quickly emerges that the two of them have managed to knock over one of the reed diffusers on Louise's desk, and the back of Phil's jeans are soaked in vanilla-scented oil.

“I mean, like, of course,” Dan says, as the pair of them quickly try and mop up the mess with the box of tissues Louise keeps on top of her filing cabinet. “Of course you manage to get vanilla stuff everywhere, like, why am I not surprised?”

“You pushed me,” Phil protests, holding a file aloft with one hand.

“Yeah, well,” Dan says. “You didn't exactly complain, so...”

He mostly means it as a joke, but when he looks at Phil he isn't laughing.

“Good point,” He says, with a small smile.

That might be around the time Dan decides he's so over offices – or any places in general that don't have lockable doors.

“We should-”

“My flat's-”

They both end up speaking at the same time, then laughing at each other.

“Whatever, whatever,” Dan says, in a would-be nonchalant voice, throwing the vanilla-sodden tissue into the bin and grabbing hold of Phil's hand. “Let's go.”

Phil just grins and lets himself be pulled out of the door.

-

“You have lots of freckles,” Dan tells Phil, the next morning.

Phil's facing away from him, faceplanted into his pillow. Dan's been awake for a while, alternating between scrolling through Instagram on his phone and watching the way the sliver of sunlight creeping between the gap in the curtains falls on the pale skin of Phil's back. It gives him a bright white line of illuminated skin right across his spine.

When Dan had first looked over, he'd felt creepy about looking at Phil when he was asleep. Then he'd considered everything that had happened yesterday – all the brilliant, stupid, unbelievable things – and he'd reasoned that maybe he was allowed to look at Phil now. Just for a little while.

He doesn't quite graduate to touching, though. Connecting the dots between Phil's freckles just by looking probably isn't so weird, as long as he's quiet about it.

Of course, Dan being Dan, he couldn't stay quiet for long.

“Mmf,” Phil says, and turns his head until he's facing Dan. He's bleary eyed without glasses or contacts, and his hair's sticking up all over the place. He might be the best thing Dan's ever seen. “Freckles?”

“You've got a ton of them,” Dan says.

Phil yawns, curling up on his side and rubbing his eyes. He blinks them open, slowly, and reaches out to pull Dan closer.

“You put a shirt on,” Phil says, in a tone of voice that's both sleepy and accusatory.

“It's winter,” Dan reminds him, shuddering involuntarily when Phil touches the side of his face. “And your flat's cold.”

“Cheater,” Phil says. Dan can see the exact moment when he realises that he isn't making any sense, because he laughs and turns his face back into the pillows. “Ugh. I need coffee.”

“Loser,” Dan says, grinning, and leans in to kiss his ear. Phil turns his head again, kissing Dan with his eyes closed. He misses Dan's mouth completely at first, and Dan snorts at him, but the second attempt's more successful, and Dan finally feels like he can reach out and touch Phil's shoulder, his bare skin warm and soft.

“You cleaned your teeth,” Phil says, sleepily, eyes already half closed, as though kissing Dan once was enough activity for one morning.

“And you didn't clean yours,” Dan says, laughing at him. “Gross.” And he kisses him again.

After his second cup of coffee, Phil's conversational skills seem to wake up along with the rest of him.

Dan feels like the opposite. The more he wakes up the more distracted he is by Phil. He can barely take his eyes off him and the way he's leaning up against the headboard, fingers folded around a coffee cup and his glasses steaming up with each sip.

“I could get a complex,” Phil says. “If you keep, like, looking at me. I feel like I've got something on my face.”

Dan feels himself flush, but doesn't look away.

“You,” He begins, and then laughs. Phil starts rubbing his cheek, like he's worried he actually does have something on his face after all, so Dan reaches out to grab his hand. “No, no, it's just – I was gonna be like, you have pretty on your face, but like-”

“Oh my God-”

“Gross, I know,” Dan says. Phil's smile feels like a triumph – especially when he squeezes Dan's hand, bringing it up to his mouth so he can kiss Dan's fingers with coffee-warm lips. Dan swallows, suddenly feeling like there's not enough air in the room. “I mean, true, but gross.”

“Mm,” Phil says, and leans over to set his coffee down on the bedside table, managing to spill some on his duvet on the way. If he notices he doesn't react – just shuffles closer to Dan, encouraging him to lie down. “You're the one with pretty on your face, let's be real.”

It's such a daft thing to say, and ordinarily Dan would have a thousand witty comebacks at the ready. It's hard to be cutting and sarcastic when Phil's eyes are so intense behind his glasses. There's something reverent about the brush of Phil's fingertips that leaves Dan feeling breathless.

They're kissing, soft and slow, when Phil's phone pings.

“Ugh.”

“Do you have classes today?”

Phil shakes his head.

“Didn't you hear?” He says, and his voice trembles a little the way it always does when he's struggling not to laugh. “I'm sick. I'm lo-”

Dan claps a hand over his mouth.

“If you were about to say lovesick,” He says, half-laughing. Phil just licks his palm, eyes sparkling. “Fuck off, oh my God. I'm going home.”

“Hey, no, we should instigate a three strike system for bad pickup lines,” Phil says, catching hold of his wrist and tugging him back again. Dan's helpless to do anything other than kiss him.

“Strike one,” He says, darkly, when he pulls back.

“Fine,” Phil says, eyes bright. He looks doubtful for a second, and adds, “You can totally leave if you want to. You know that, right? I didn't mean to, like, be all grabby, or whatever.”

“Oh my God,” Dan says, kissing him. “Strike two for being an idiot.”

“No fair, this is a pickup line strike system,” Phil says, and Dan rests his face against the side of Phil's neck, laughing. “You can't just make it about me being an idiot too, that's a completely separate thing.” He pauses. “So you don't want to leave? It's ok if you do.”

Dan pulls back and looks at him.

“I don't want to leave,” He says, firmly. “You're not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Sounds good to me,” Phil says, and hugs him close.

-

It turns out that dropping out of uni is as simple as having a meeting with his tutor.

Well, it's not quite as simple as all that. At first she'd tried to talk Dan out of it, tried to think of solutions to all of his issues, tried to encourage him, but he'd stuck to his guns, patiently repeating the fact that he didn't want to study Law anymore. He'd spouted some nonsense about taking a gap year to consider things, and she'd made sympathetic noises about his academic struggles. He'd made sure to waxed lyrical about the academic support team (flushing stupidly as he'd said it, thinking of Phil and Louise and Louise's office). The last thing he wanted was him dropping out reflecting badly on Phil.

“It's just Law,” He'd explained, repeatedly. “I think I made a mistake choosing it, that's all.”

He leaves the building twenty minutes later, feeling so much lighter than when he'd walked in. The sun's shining, and he squints in the bright light as he walks down the stairs, heading back to his flat.

It feels like everything looks more beautiful, somehow, now that he doesn't have anything to worry about. The only blot on the horizon is the thought of calling his parents to tell them that he's officially a college dropout, but even the thought of that looming over him isn't enough to dampen his mood as he walks home.

Maybe tonight they'll eat pizza. Or maybe Phil will want to do something – maybe he'll stay over at Phil's again, or maybe Phil will stay over at his.

He thinks about all the days he has stretching out in front of him, days where he can catch up on his sleep, and ignore all of his Law textbooks. Days where he can spend as much time with Phil as possible.

Of course, part of him's terrified. He knows deep down that he's scared shitless, and i'll be that part of him that emerges as soon as he prepares to go to sleep. He'll worry then, about being a failure and letting people down and having no direction in life.

But, he reasons, he'll probably end up worrying about it with Phil by his side.

Maybe, he thinks, looking up at the bright blue sky, that'll be enough to soften any crisis that comes his way.

-

“Oh my God-”

“No, no, look, see-”

“Yeah, but then he'll just win every time,” PJ's voice floats down the corridor when Dan pushes the kitchen door open. The lights automatically flicker on, and he stands there for a moment, just listening.

“It's funny, trust me,” Phil's voice says.

“It's funny when Luigi wins every time?”

“It's a meme.”

“I know it's a meme!”

“It's classic-”

“I'm just saying, it seems a bit – I dunno-” Dan appears in the open doorway of PJ's room to find Phil and PJ sitting cross legged on PJ's bed, the pair of them in their unmatching socked feet, playing Mario Party on the Gamecube. “Dan, tell your boyfriend we're not setting Luigi's difficulty to hard because it's no fun if he wins every time.”

“But it's classic,” Dan says, apologetically, hopping onto the bed behind them and absently touching his fingers to the back of Phil's neck. Phil turns and flashes him a bright smile.

“Oh, I see how it is,” PJ says, giving Dan a look. “You're just gonna side with him every time now.”

“Not every time,” Dan protests. “I mean, it is kind of an old meme-”

“Ha!” PJ says, pointing at Phil, who rolls his eyes. His triumphant grin fades a little after a second, and he asks, “How did it go?”

“Alright,” Dan says, flopping backwards until he's staring at the ceiling. “I mean, I'm out. It's done.”

“Dobby is free,” Phil and PJ say simultaneously, then crack up and start laughing.

Dan can't help but laugh too, shaking his head at the pair of them.

“Is this how it's gonna be now,” He says. “You guys are gonna be, like, BFFs, or whatever.”

Phil and PJ look at each other for a moment.

“Pretty much,” Phil says, grinning.

“He likes Zelda, so...” PJ says, and shrugs.

Dan laughs, chin resting against the bed.

“I should call my mum,” He says, a moment later, when nobody says anything. “Shouldn't I?” He adds, a little helplessly, looking from Phil to PJ and back again.

Phil nods, reaching out to touch his ankle.

“Sooner rather than later,” PJ says, wisely. “But hey – I have ice cream!”

“Oh God,” Dan says, and laughs, face pressed into the bed. “Peej, no, none of my clothes are gonna fit.” He catches Phil's eye and explains, “PJ thinks ice cream is good for, like, bad days. And good days. And days ending in 'y'.”

“It works every time,” PJ says, stubbornly. “I'll go and get it. D'you want some, Phil? It's cookie dough.”

“Er, yeah, thanks,” Phil says. The two of them watch PJ leave the room and listen to him walking off down the corridor, the kitchen door swinging open with a creak. “Do you want me to go while you call? I can help PJ with the ice cream. Or, like...call for pizza.”

“Oh, so you're trying to kill me too,” Dan says, wriggling into a sitting position so he can ease his phone out of his pocket. Once he's there, it seems like a shame not to kiss Phil. Phil, with his freckles and his smile and the fact that him and PJ get on, of course they do. “Nah, it's ok, you can stay. I might start freaking out and need the support, who knows.”

He unlocks his phone with a sigh.

“Ready to become a disappointment,” He jokes, trying to force out a smile.

“You've done what you had to do because you were really unhappy,” Phil says, gently, reaching out to hold Dan's hand. “That's doesn't make you a disappointment, that makes you a regular person. And – and your parents love you, and they want you to be happy, not miserable. Right?”

“Right,” Dan agrees, softly, even though he's not sure at all.

“You'll be fine,” Phil says with conviction, leaning forwards. Dan closes his eyes, but all Phil does is kiss him on the forehead.

“Promise?” Dan says, quietly, even though he knows that's not it works.

“Promise,” Phil says anyway, and kisses him.

Dan takes a deep breath, squeezes Phil's hand, and dials.

It rings for what feels like the longest time.

Outside PJ's bedroom window the midday sun is shining golden through spidery tree branches, bright white clouds scudding along the blue sky. Dan closes his eyes for a second, feeling jittery with nerves. Without saying a word, Phil shuffles up close to him, resting his head on Dan's shoulder and linking their arms.

PJ'll be back in a minute with ice cream, and they'll play stupid old games until it goes dark outside, and everything's going to be fine.

“Hey, mum?” Dan says, the moment she picks up. “I've got something to tell you.”