Work Text:
The next day was to be Phil's funeral. Dan had no interest in going. His friendship with Phil was personal to him and not something he wanted to share with family and friends who would mean well but insult with every word of comfort. He decided that even if he had to attend physically, he would be somewhere else in his mind. He had to.
Dan remained silent and stoic through the service. People left to return to their lives, the relatives trading condolences, leaving Dan alone in the room with the coffin.
He didn’t want to look. If he looked, it’d be real. He would rather have ran far, far away from the nightmare he was trapped in, but maybe that was exactly why he had to see. His desperate mind would do anything to pretend none of it was real, would do anything to fill the pain of the real world with some pleasant fantasy, and he had to stick to reality.
He strode over and gazed into the box. Lifeless. It was as if it was nothing but an object lying there. Even with Phil’s typically pale skin you used to see the warm glow of life from within him. Now all that could be seen there was the sickly pale-green colour of death.
Dan turned abruptly and strode away, before a voice stopped him mid-step.
“Don’t go.”
He froze completely. A part of him was screaming at him to run, to run as far as he could in as little time as possibly, and to start now.
Now.
The other part of him was inexplicitly filled with something that could only be described as anger, and that might be what kept him standing exactly where he was.
“It’s okay,” Phil’s voice came from behind him.
“Who are you?” Dan asked slowly.
Laughter. It didn’t sound right to Dan. “You know who I am. Looking away from the obvious part where there is no one else here, even though it’s a really weird situation – I mean, you can hear it’s me, right?”
“Hear it’s who?” Dan said, no emotion in his voice.
“Just turn around and look at me, then-“
“Hear. It’s. Who?” Dan repeated carefully, biting every word.
A sigh. “Phil.”
“That’s impossible. Phil’s dead.” The words hurt something deep within him, but he couldn’t run away from them. It was the truth.
“Look, I know it’s really, really weird, but I swear, it’s me!”
“No.”
“But Dan-“
“SHUSH!” Dan whipped around with a ferocious look in his eye, finger pointing directly at something that really, painfully looked exactly like the body he had looked at just seconds before, but that should not be standing in front of him.
“I’m-”
“You’re NOT Phil!” Dan spat out, taking a step closer to the figure in front of him, his tone inviting no challenges. “YOU’RE NOT EVEN REAL!”
Phil looked at him, confused. “I’m standing right here, Dan, I’m right in front of you!”
“No you’re not.” Dan’s hands fell to his sides, and the stoic look returned to his face.
“Dan, I promise you, I’m real! I can’t explain it, I don’t know what happened, it was all really confusing, I can’t even figure out my own head right now much less how I got here or how I should explain it-“
“Oh, really? How convenient.”
Phil was looking thoroughly perplexed now. “What makes you so suspicious about me even being here? I get that I can’t explain it and it’s all really bizarre, but if you can’t even believe this-“
“You’re not real.”
“Why do you keep saying that? I’m right here!”
The huff of laughter that came from Dan’s mouth would have sounded to no one like an expression of amusement, just like the smile on his face would have looked to no one like an expression of joy. The tears pressing on his eyes were clear as day to anyone looking. “Because I’ve already written this story.”
Phil frowned. “What?”
“I’ve already written this story. For TABINOF – the phanfiction, remember?”
“What? That’s not true, it’s not the same-“
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, when you never even let me finish a sentence, that doesn’t give me much room to explain anything, does it?”
“Well, I’m just interrupting myself, aren’t I?” Dan countered, the mockery of a smile not reaching his eyes.
Phil threw his hands up in exasperated defeat. “What are you on about?”
The question echoed in the room unanswered. Sad brown eyes studied the motionless figure by the coffin – the suit that was too smooth and unwrinkled, the skin that was too pale, the eyes that just weren’t right somehow. He turned away again, the sight making his stomach turn, but even with his back to the impossible creature he could not ignore the silence in the room, empty except for his own breathing that lacked the echo that should have come from behind him.
“You know,” he began, telling himself he was only filling the silence, a part of him wondering why he didn’t just walk out the door instead. “When I first showed that story to Phil, he thought it was a horror story.”
His eyes flitted around the room, like there was a chance he’d find some comfort if he looked long enough.
“He thought it had a bad ending, like it was a bad turn of events, because of how much I resisted in it, because the demon possessing his body had won. Since I’d resisted his advances at every turn until the very end, and just generally…. showed how much I didn’t want it, how I didn’t for a second think it was him. And yet I was still turned, and I had eternity as a vampire ahead of me, with the deceptive monster that turned me.”
The warmth behind his eyes had spilled over. He knew he was crying now.
“But that was never a horror story. Far from it.” Every word seemed to get stuck in his throat but he worked them out of it. He tasted warm, salty tears. “All the horror of it was in the first few paragraphs.” He swallowed. “The horror was him being dead in the first place.” The words were still hurting like hell, but he couldn’t ignore them, he couldn’t. He couldn’t run from it. He couldn’t let himself.
“Now, this?” he said, turning back around and gesturing at the deceptive figure who’d apparently walked a few steps closer while he’d talked. “This right here,” he whispered, choking back a sob, “This is my fucking dream scenario.”
The look of confusion in the thing’s eyes softened.
“This isn’t the problem. This,” he said, stepping forward and pointing to the point right between the light blue eyes. “is the fucking solution to my ultimate nightmare.”
The figure looked taken aback by this. “So … why did you resist it? In the story, I mean,” he asked quietly. “You wrote it, after all, and you didn’t seem very happy in it.”
“Because of countless reasons!” Dan threw his hands up in aggravation. “How the hell would I know it was actually you, not just some demon imitating you? You’ve watched Buffy more than I have, you know that’s totally possible! We know fuck-all about vampires in real life, because as far as we know, they don’t bloody exist! And why the fuck would I want eternal life – much less eternal life where I didn’t even know if I was myself or if you were yourself? I knew nothing about what was going on or what was happening, only that you were dead and I wasn’t and something that looked an awful lot like you apparently wanted to change this and gave me no choice in the matter and it was kind of a really fucking scary situation!”
There was a pause as the last remains of Dan’s shouts echoed in the room. The figure of Phil only looked more confused.
“So, then…” it asked as quietly as before. “How is that – this – your… dream scenario?”
Dan just looked at it – him, it, whatever. With tears still trickling down his face, he just looked at the figure standing between him and the coffin that to him was like the elephant in the room. He looked at the blue eyes, dark blue in the soft light, that looked so much like the eyes he so dearly wanted to look into. He looked at the jet-black hair, at a fringe gap he wanted to reach out and fix, at the pale skin that was just barely on the wrong side of yellow, at the lips that should always be smiling but instead were tinged purple. He looked at the suit he’d seen in Phil’s closet more times than he’d seen him actually wear it. He looked back into blue eyes that still looked back at him in confusion.
“Because this,” he whispered, gesturing at the whole figure he’d just so closely examined. “despite all it’s flaws, despite everything horrifying and scary and unknown about it…. It would’ve been a chance, and that… This is so… this is such an infinitely more tempting option than…” He waved his arm in the general direction of the coffin he struggled to look directly at anymore, despite it being placed too high up for him to see anything but the side of a box of painted wood. “That.”
The Phil figure followed Dan’s gesturing to look at the coffin behind him, like he’d forgotten it was there. “That?”
“That,” Dan repeated.
“What do you mean?” He turned back to look confused at Dan again.
Dan looked at him incredulously. “You’re kidding?”
The look didn’t change.
“There’s another… Phil’s in there. A Phil I didn’t make up in my head. The real Phil. The….” He swallowed, the damn words once again hurting every part of him on the way out of his throat. “The dead Phil.”
The figure raised its eyebrows. “Is he now?”
Dan frowned. “Yes, he is.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just saw him in it a few minutes ago, and he was, y’know…” He huffed in annoyance, giving up on trying to bring those words out again. “He wasn’t exactly in a state to move.”
“But you don’t know he’s still in there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. You said he ‘wasn’t’ – you’re not even sure yourself, are you?”
“Shut up.”
“Okay,” Dan wasn’t sure what he expected, but somehow it wasn’t that the figure would listen. The was a minute of eye contact before it spoke up again. “Why do you keep insisting I’m dead if you don’t even want me to be? If you’d rather have me here,” It tilted its head and stepped closer to Dan. “Why won’t you accept that I am?”
“You’re. Not. Real.” Dan squeezed his eyes shut. This whole debacle was pulling at too many painful strings.
“And this dead Phil is?”
The word wouldn’t stop hurting. They made him want to start screaming and never stop until they stopped existing. “Yes,” he whispered.
He heard no response for too long, and opened his eyes to a doubtful look from the other man.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, he’s right there!” He gave in and in a couple of long steps was once again by the coffin’s side, a long arm gesturing at its contents.
It came as a surprise to him how surprised he was to see the body in the coffin. It hit him like a punch in the gut, even though it had no reason to, and he looked away and closed his eyes immediately for fear of either throwing up or just breaking down crying if he spent too long staring at what looked like a morbid wax-replica of his best friend. He already knew it was there. He didn’t understand why it shocked him so much.
“He’s right…” he choked out, now less frustrated and more simply suffering. He couldn’t finish the sentence. Gritting his teeth together, he looked back at where Phil’s living figure had been standing, but was faced with nothing but an empty room. Again he was surprised at his own surprise, and his crushing disappointment. No, this was good. He was back in reality, where he needed to be.
Reality is good. Phil was dead.
The words didn’t seem right. The more he tried to repeat it to himself, the more it hurt. His breathing was slowly becoming more and more rapid as the words fluttered past his lips in constant repetition and the world closed in on him and his legs couldn’t support him anymore and the words, the words, the damn words weren’t right, they weren’t right-
“Is he?”
Dan’s eyes flew open again. He’d somehow ended up on his knees and his arms were hugging his waist but more importantly there was a pair of fancily clad legs in front of him.
“Am I actually?”
Dan looked up into Phil’s eyes. Before even granting him an expression, Dan got up and turned to look in the coffin again. It was empty. He slowly turned back to Phil. “You’re not real,” he said slowly.
“Aren’t I? I feel quite real to me.” And the rosy pink smile, and the joking glint in his bright blue eyes and the crinkles around them… it was so, so painfully familiar.
He looked back at the coffin, and was startled to see something, something was there, but then it wasn’t. He continued to stare at it for a while, wide-eyed. Nothing appeared. Footsteps approached him from behind, but his eyes remained glued to the empty coffin, expecting something to show up in it. It really was a much more pleasant sight without something in it. However, it was still unnerving him, and something in him suffered at the sight.
He drew a sharp breath as he felt a hand lay comfortingly on his shoulder. His eyes finally shifted away from the coffin and to Phil on his side. “You’re … not real,” he whispered, frowning, with less conviction than before.
Phil hummed. “That’s actually entirely possible,” he agreed. “But you can’t tell the difference, can you?”
Dan didn’t reply. He just looked. There wasn’t any good answer he could give.
“So does it really matter?”
Dan still said nothing, and instead looked back at the coffin. Slowly, he lifted his arm so his hand hovered over where Phil’s chest would have been if he lay there. Assuming he wasn’t completely out of it, his mind couldn’t empty the space completely, could it? He’d feel something there, or there’d at least be some kind of disturbance as his mind tried to work around his hand landing on something, on, on…
His fingers curled in distaste at the very thought.
All he had to do was lower his hand, and he’d know. He’d see something. He’d feel something. If… there was something there. If Phil actually, truly, in reality was…
He pulled his hand back. He hardly noticed he did, but before he knew it, it was back at his side. His face remained expressionless as he simply took a moment to breathe. His eyes didn’t leave the empty coffin.
Then, before Phil could ask what he was doing, he turned and walked towards the exit. Before he’d reached the door, he stopped. He turned back to look at Phil, still standing by the coffin, looking at Dan questioningly.
“Well?” Dan asked.
Phil raised his eyebrows, and then cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well what?”
“You coming or what, slowpoke? I haven’t got all day.” It was a lie. He did have all day. He had all week. He had all month. He would have waited all that time if he needed to. He had nothing more important waiting.
Phil’s questioning look was replaced with a smile so bright one could with a single look understand why some called him the very essence of sunshine, and he ran with light steps over to Dan's side.
The sight flooded Dan’s cold, empty chest with a wave of warmth, and finally, he felt like he could breathe again.