Chapter Text
Daniel Howell had never seen the point of attending big family events for relatives he barely knew.
There were usually two options: either you make a massive effort and wind up looking like a dick, or you make no effort and wind up looking like a dick.
And his problem, as always, was not knowing what kind of dick he wanted to be.
A distant aunt of his was getting married and the whole family had been invited to stay in some posh seaside town in the south for two weeks. A lovely get away for most of the family.
For Dan, they might as well have invited him to spend a week defusing a bomb with a butter knife.
Now, it wasn't as if Dan disliked his family. Well, not really. It was just that every time he was around them, guilt consumed him until he felt physically ill. Every interaction, every half-hug, every harmless conversation felt like another lie he was forcing through his teeth. He was nearly thirty, and none of his family really knew who he was.
Not really.
There was a ghost of himself that shadowed his family. It laughed at his uncle’s jokes about all the women whose hearts he must have broken with his bachelor status. It talked football with his cousins, and drank Stella with his Dad. The ghost performed heterosexuality—performed masculinity well—and it burnt a piece of his soul each time it did.
And every time he returned home and fell back into Phil's arms, the ghost would leave.
It was 5am when he woke up, feeling nauseous. Anxiety begun to crawl through his skin, as he lay in his hotel bed that morning. His arms were already wrapped around Phil's sleeping body, his left arm around his shoulder and his other arm clutching Phil's midriff. Both of his legs had tangled themselves in between Phil's and Dan clutched him closer, knowing that the warmth of his boyfriend's skin would dull the ache, even just a little.
He watched Phil sleep. Watched the way his dark hair, darker than even the night sky, had fallen across his closed eyes. Instinctively, Dan brushed one of the longer strands from his face, gently enough not to wake him. Dan considered turning off Phil's alarm on his phone before it set off, so Phil would sleep in and then they'd have a perfect excuse not to go. Then Dan could spend the rest of the day with Phil, and Phil only.
But he didn't. Instead as soon as the morning light began to slip through the hotel curtains, Phil began to stir slowly. Dan quickly closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep as he felt Phil stretch and wiggle beside him. He heard Phil laugh quietly, presumably realising that Dan had latched on to him like a particularly resilient weed in the middle of the night. A warmth spread inside Dan as he felt Phil's fingers thread through his hair.
"Dan," Phil mumbled. "I know you're awake."
Dan ignored his boyfriend, and squeezed his eyes closed tighter. He heard Phil giggle and shake him a little.
"Dan!" Phil tried again. Burring his face deeper into the nook of Phil's collarbone, Dan pretended to snore, loudly. Phil only giggled more. "Dan...come on, we'll be late."
Dan whined, burying his face deeper into Phil's collarbone. Failing to fool his boyfriend, Dan decided to try a different tactic.
Gently, he began to feather soft kisses into Phil's exposed skin. His lips drifted from his collarbone and lightly brushing against Phil's pale chest. And as he shifted his attention onto Phil's neck he could feel soft giggles vibrate from Phil's body onto his own. Phil only laughed more as Dan placed hundreds of small kisses trailing from his neck up to his ear.
Breathing in his skin, Dan was reminded of the moments, many years ago, he used to be able to sink his teeth into Phil's skin in places that weren't hidden. Before, he used to be able to dust purple and red bruises amongst the freckles on his boyfriend's neck and shoulders. Before, he could mark Phil as his. Now, he could only hide his desire for him in bites left on places no one else would see; the curve of his chest, the skin of his thigh.
There had been something intoxicating about being able to mark Phil as his, however fleetingly. Now, that possessiveness had to remain hidden, confined to private moments and places no one else would see. Dan could no longer leave evidence on the visible parts of Phil; all he could do was carry the ache of wanting him quietly, beneath the surface.
His teeth bit into the top of Phil's ear and he could feel Phil's left arm wrap around the small of his back and his other thread through his hair. Dan was pulled away from his fixation on Phil's ear by a firm tug of his hair. Phil cupped Dan's chin firmly, Phil's hair was a mess and his eyes were clearly struggling to focus without his glasses. Despite this, he was still grinning at Dan, and Dan was completely, as usual, transfixed. "Well good morning to you too. But we still need to get up, or we'll be late, rat."
Right, so that hadn't worked. Dan rolled his body on top of Phil's, and kissed him deeply. Phil gripped onto his waist, the pressure dripping pools of electricity beneath his skin. Dan cupped his boyfriend's jaw, kissing him with a infatuating desperation that bled from his heart into his lips.
"Mmmph..." Phil mumbled, his grip on Dan loosening. "Dan...I....mmphh...know what...hmmm...you're trying...to do."
Dan ignored him and rolled his hips onto Phil's, smiling into the kiss as Phil moaned quietly. Phil gripped onto Dan's waist with one hand, and captured his face with the other, before pushing Dan off him. Despite looking dazed, Phil was smiling at Dan with utter amusement. "Nice try rat, we're still going to your aunt's wedding. You may be pretty but we drove five hours to be here."
Dan groaned before falling back onto Phil's chest, Phil only laughed more as Dan looked up at him and pouted. "I don't want to go."
"You did yesterday, you promised your mum. And we have to leave the house at least once a year. Sometimes it's good to talk to other people."
"Ughhhh, I hate other people."
"Come on we need to get up and get changed, unless you want to go in your boxers. I bet your mum's book club friends would love that."
"Oh fuck off."
⚞•⚟
Despite what some of his cousins and various tabloids have suggested, Dan wasn't a dickhead. He was just intensely introverted.
His family had decided to all meet up a few days before the wedding, a decision that Dan regarded with the quiet dread of a man being marched towards an execution. He hovered at the edges of conversations, nursing the same drink for so long it had become warm, smiling a fraction too late at anecdotes he didn't realise were supposed to be jokes.
After Phil had disappeared off to God knows where, Dan loitered around the room, his mind in turmoil—logic and anxiety locked in constant battle. His anxiety conjured images of his family’s inevitable questions about his dating life, while the more rational part of his brain reminded him that he had survived these gatherings practically every year.
Well survived was putting it lightly. He hardly ever escaped without receiving unsolicited financial advice, someone attempting to set him up with a lovely lady from their workplace, or some form of intervention cooked up by his retired relatives, who were convinced they knew what was best for him.
And tragically for Dan, this time, it had been a combination of all three.
His mother had cornered him in the kitchen with such a strangely subtle suggestion that Dan hadn’t even realised what she was implying at first. Between trying to secure another slice of birthday cake and narrowly avoiding knocking over a wine glass, he was only half listening to what she was saying.
"...and Linda's youngest has just been approved for a mortgage and she's absolutely delighted. How lovely must that be Daniel? To not have the stress of renting...." She rambled on.
It was at this point that Dan had finally managed to pick up another slice of cake and put it on his plate. He decided to get a bigger one, so he could share it with Phil.
Speaking of Phil, Dan hadn't seen that rat in a while, and he was beginning to get concerned over which of his aunts had wrangled him into a conversation. Knowing Phil, he'd be far too much of a sweetheart to escape, no matter how desperately he wanted to.
"...and even your brother has been with his girlfriend for nearly five years, and he seems so happy, I just can't help but wish to see you..."
Dan tried to glimpse outside the kitchen window, maybe Phil had gotten trapped in a conversation with Mary from next door who was apparently a psychic medium. Although, Phil would probably be completely endeared by her company as he was convinced he had inherited some of that shit from his Grandma.
"...Dan you'll be thirty in a few years. And we love Phil, you know we do..."
"What?" He asked, with a mouthful of cake.
If his mother noticed that it was only the mention of Phil's name that had captured her son's attention, she didn't comment on it. His mother sighed, "What I'm trying to say Daniel, is that we've been talking about it, and we're all a little bit worried."
It was in that moment that Dan noticed that his brother and a few of his aunts were also standing beside his mother.
He stopped chewing, slowly. Great, another intervention.
"Worried about what? I'm fine," Dan mumbled. It wasn't as though he was a proud liar, but there was no way he wanted to unpack his mess to his mother, let alone with her book group and his extended family present.
Dan's mother sighed, and looked towards one of her friends. "Where's Phil, sweetheart?"
"I don't know, last I saw he was talking to Eileen's nephew," Dan mumbled around a mouthful of cake. He tried to sound nonchalant, but in reality, he hoped they hadn't been talking for too long. Eileen's nephew, Michael, was painfully lean and sported a glorious ginger mullet that Phil said was “super cool.”
Dan thought the bloke looked like a twat and hoped he wasn't going to the wedding.
Dan subtly glanced towards the window, trying to see if he could spot him, but his mum cleared her throat. "I mean, how should I know? Phil's is his own person, it's not like I'm like monitoring him and know what he's up to all the time."
Dan was lying, of course, but he probably shouldn't mention to his mum and her reading group that he spent practically every day with Phil, or that he spent more time than he'd ever willingly admit simply watching him.
There was a strange comfort in it, in knowing where Phil was and what he was doing. Dan could sit beside him on the sofa for hours, saying almost nothing, while Phil played his Nintendo Switch. Dan would watch the movement of his thumbs, the tiny furrow that appeared between his eyebrows when he was concentrating, the occasional twitch of his mouth when something went wrong.
But there was something possessive in the way Dan kept track of him. It was gravitational. Phil was a fixed point in the otherwise shifting landscape of Dan's life; when everything else felt uncertain, Dan needed to know that Phil was there. He needed to know where he was going, who he was talking to, when he'd be home.
He had built his days around Phil so gradually that he hadn't noticed the architecture of it until there was a possibility of someone else stepping inside. Phil had a constant presence against which he measured the rest of the world. His second heartbeat.
It wasn't as if they were that toxically co dependent, not really. It was merely that he had grown accustomed to having Phil all to himself, and the prospect of somebody else discovering how lovely it was to sit beside him felt a lot like theft.
"Of course, dear," his mum said and she gave him a small smile. She looked as though she was weighing her words. "Dan, when I said you could bring a plus one to the party, it was a sort of open invitation to...well..." his mum cleared his throat awkwardly. "I like Phil, we all do, but I was hoping...you'd bring someone you may be seeing like...romantically."
Dan choked on the cake.
"Huh?"
"Dan, when was the last time that you and Phil went anywhere without one another." His mum swallowed, "when was the last time you really spent time apart?"
Dan immediately felt defensive. Last time was literally this morning, Phil had gone over to grab coffee for the both of them as an excuse to eavesdrop on the latest update to Costa coffee co worker drama. Phil was convinced one of them had been on Big Brother a few years back. He opened his mouth to tell his mum that but the words died in his throat.
But that had only been for about an hour. Dan began to rack his brain and the longest time that he and Phil had been apart this past year was only a few hours at a time. And during those hours, they two would often be texting one another.
Oh fuck, he didn't like where this was going.
Days in which Phil had not been there at the edge of his vision, a name lighting up his phone, a voice from the next room. He searched backwards through the years, rummaging through old memories like a winding labyrinth, following one corridor after another, only to find that every path, eventually, led back to Phil. Like the moon circling the earth, like a tide pulled helplessly towards the shore, his thoughts seemed to bend themselves around him.
Phil had become so deeply threaded through Dan's thoughts that distance seemed almost irrelevant. He could leave the room and still carry him with him. He could spend an afternoon alone and find himself wondering what Phil would say about it. If Phil had been snoring and Dan had to sleep in the spare room, somehow Phil would be still be there in his head.
Even if the two of them were actually apart, Phil was the direction Dan's thoughts naturally travelled in. In the small pauses between thoughts and in the instinctive urge to turn and tell someone something funny. Every space in Dan's mind had quietly learned to fill with him.
In his dreams, Phil appeared there too, wandering through whatever strange nonsense Dan's sleeping brain had invented, usually doing something completely stupid. Once, inexplicably, he had been a talking fish. Dan couldn't remember the details when he woke, only the peculiar certainty that Phil had been there.
For the sake of his mum's sanity, Dan again, found himself lying to her.
He laughed awkwardly, "time apart? What do you mean? We're almost never together, it's just that...we live together and...work together...so its just easier to leave the house at the same time."
It was one of his mum's friends, who spoke up next. "I've never seen you two away from each other. It took me a little while learn each of your names properly. I still can't see the point in it."
Dan scowled as he watched his mum push her friend away, she looked a little embarrassed. It was clear, that this was a topic his mum had been talking to her friends about frequently. His mum could gossip all she liked with her book club over Dan's career choices, how different he was from his brother, he didn't really care.
But the one thing Dan was certain of—the one thing in his life that kept him going as surely as air itself—was Phil. He was as certain of his love for Phil as he was that the sun would rise each morning. His mum didn't know the depth of his infatuation, of course, but hearing her question and scrutinise whether Phil was really a good part of his life made Dan feel nauseous. The very suggestion that Phil might be something other than the best thing that had ever happened to him felt almost unbearable.
"I have no idea what you're all on about. We're not even in the same room, right now." Dan protested.
His mother appeared disappointed but not at all defeated, which was unfortunately a sight Dan was beginning to grow used to. "You know Daniel, weddings are a great place to meet new people and I think there are plenty of women who have been interested in you but get the wrong idea. If you never leave the house, or even entertain talking to people other than Phil, how on earth are you supposed to get married?"
Dan didn't want to talk to people other than Phil, he didn't need anyone else. Other people were just inconvenient, he had everything he could possibly want with him, all day, every day. For God's sake he had fought very hard for it, he had spent hours upon hours watching every video Phil had ever and when he was a teenager. He had learnt everything about him, he done everything you could possibly think of to bait Phil into even talking to him in the first place. Why would he ever want to let that go?
His mum, however, could never know that. She would think Dan was insane. He wasn't, he was just in love.
Dan picked his words carefully, "you can't uninvite Phil from the wedding, it was a five hour trip here."
He wasn't sure what exactly him mum wanted him to do about this 'problem' she had invented but Dan sure as hell wouldn't be staying here for two weeks without Phil. Not if she was planning on scrutinising every part of his life.
"Don't be silly duck," His mum laughed a little. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just saying at some point, it might be a good idea to have some time apart from Phil. To have some independence...a little break we'll say..."
"A break?" Dan asked.
She said it as if Phil was something holding Dan back. As if their lives were some unhealthy knot that needed loosening. As if Phil wasn't the only person that Dan was his true authentic self around.
Usually Dan would just agree and pretend to go along with whatever scheme his mum was crafting, but this seemed something even he could never predict.
"Don't look at me like that Daniel, I'm not trying to be rude," She asserted. "It's just a suggestion."
"You've got it all wrong Mum, it's not like Phil and I are attached to the hip..." Dan muttered but he didn't sound convincing, not even to himself. "We can very easily spend time apart. We do it all the time."
Dan wasn't even sure what he was saying at this point, just rambling on about anything just to get his mum to drop this topic.
His mum smiled softly, "well then it's settled, use this week to spend some time apart and try and meet other people. Maybe it'll be good for Phil as well, maybe he'll even meet someone to take home to his family."
Dan tried his best not to scowl. Not if he had anything to do with it. There were already enough people in the world trying to take pieces of Phil's attention; Dan didn't see why he needed to encourage them.
It wasn't as if the two were that co-dependent, not really. Dan just really enjoyed being with Phil and why should he have to give that up? He liked knowing where he was, what he was doing, who he was with. He liked being the person Phil came back to. There was nothing strange about that.
He forced a smile past his lips, "we can be away from each other for a week easily. We do it all the time."
"Fifty quid that you wouldn't even last a day," His brother chimed in, appearing out of no where.
"Ha, ha," Dan muttered but his heart wasn't it. The laughter died somewhere between his mouth and his stomach, where the anxiety had already begun to gather. Slowly, horribly, he realised what exactly he'd agreed to. His brother was probably right. But he had to, he had to prove to his family that he wasn't obsessive and completely co-dependent with his secret boyfriend.
Because if his family ever found out the truth; if they knew how completely Dan had had worked himself into the fabric of Phil's life, how there was hardly a thought that didn't brush against him somewhere, then they would interfere.
And well, Dan couldn't have that. He didn't want anyone saving him from Phil. He didn't want anything to change.
No. It was fine. This was fine. He could do a week. A week wasn't long. People spent weeks apart all the time. Entire years, probably. Some people even went on holiday without their partners and came back perfectly normal.
Hell, they two of them had done that before. Back in 2010, Phil had gone away with his family to Florida for two and a half weeks and Dan had...spiralled just a little.
He could this, he had to do this, for Phil.
He just wasn't sure how he was going to tell him what exactly he'd signed the two up for...