#ficsterfics

The landlord had changed the terms of their lease after hearing that they were sticking around for at least another year, and likely much longer than that. Their insurance now covered up to four permanent residents if they should need it, and they were now allowed to keep pets, so the temptation had existed since that particular phone conversation. They each took it in turns to take up the mantles of temptation and reluctance, not a push-pull but a pull-pull because really, it was the same emotion put in a different direction.

“So… we could technically get a dog now,” Phil said one day, leaning against the fridge, watching Dan cook. “Or a cat, or a hamster or something.”

“I am not getting another hamster,” Dan said, brandishing a wooden spoon for emphasis. “Never again in a million years.”

“Well, a cat then.”

“Aren’t you allergic?”

And then a few days later, apropos of nothing, Phil sat down next to Dan on his bed and mused, “It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to get a cat anyway. We go off abroad all the time.”

Dan sniffed, not looking up from his laptop. “Yeah, but we could get people to come in. Could take it up to Louise, even. She’d be over the moon.”

“I suppose…” Phil let himself fall back onto the bed and watched the cracks in the ceiling.

A few minutes passed in silence, and then Dan cleared his throat. “But then again, cats are supposed to have outdoor spaces, aren’t they? We don’t even have a balcony.”

“You can get indoor cats,” Phil offered.

“Still feels cruel. It would be Suki the hamster all over again.”

And so on and so forth. So perhaps they didn’t talk each other into getting a cat at all. Perhaps it was all Laura’s fault.

Laura was the Battersea employee who was tasked with showing them round the facility the day they visited to film for the happiness documentary. She chatted happily about the various cats they filmed with and some of those they didn’t, and after observing him for a while flat-out demanded why Phil didn’t have a cat of his own.

“We go off on business trips a lot,” he explained.

“Catteries.”

“I’m allergic to long-haired cats.”

“Short-haired cat.”

“We live in a second floor apartment with absolutely no outdoor space.”

That stumped her for a second, and then her expression cleared. “TK,” she said decisively.

“TK?” Phil asked.

“Short for Tiny Kitten. Come and meet her.”

The cat presented to them was neither tiny, nor a kitten. TK was a black and white lump of a thing, perhaps a little small as cats go, but only barely. She looked stocky more than anything, despite the short fur. Her tail flicked twice when she saw her visitors, great golden eyes focused sharply through the glass door.

“Normally when we’re looking to rehome cats who can’t go wandering round outside, like cats with FIV or something, we do try to find homes with roof terraces or at least balconies, but the thing with TK isn’t that she’s contagious to other cats; she’s just a bit vulnerable because of her lack of hearing,” Laura explained. “Her vision is A+, and she picks up vibrations and stuff, but we still wouldn’t want her exposed to other predators - foxes for one thing, but birds of prey for another. Owls and the like.”

“Hence why balconies would be out,” said Dan.

“Exactly. I mean, it would take a pretty big owl to actually carry her off, but if she suffered any damage at all to her eyes, or her ears, whiskers, tail - she'd be put at much more of a disadvantage. So... thoughts?"

They exchanged glances. "Can we go in and meet her?" Phil asked.

"Sure! Here, I'll let you in and leave you to chat for a bit."

The cat backed away as the door opened, and her tail lifted straight up into the air. Her ears twitched - picking up vibrations? Or did she do that through her whiskers, the pads on the bottom of her paws? Still, she did consent to let Phil stroke her back when he sat down, and after a little while even started twining herself sinuously round Dan's legs. Dan crouched down to get acquainted, using Phil’s shoulder to balance himself.

"Any sniffles?" he asked Phil, shifting to sit next to him.

Phil gave an experimental sniff. "No, I think I'm okay. But then I did take a massive dose of Piriton this morning."

Dan nodded. "Are we seriously thinking about doing this then?"

"I guess so. Although maybe we should go for a sort of probation period, just in case?"

"Makes sense."

TK bumped her head against Phil’s leg, as if in approval of this plan, and Dan laid his head against his shoulder, smiling at the cuteness of the two of them.

Laura cleared her throat from the door. “So, yay or nay?”

Within a week, the formalities of a conditional adoption were sorted out, a cat bed, scratching post, bowls and food were acquired, and somehow, without ever quite intending to acquire one, Dan and Phil found themselves the owners of a cat.

***

Louise, predictably, was overjoyed.

"She's such a little darling!" she cooed, kneeling on the floor to greet the cat. "Oh, me and Matt have been planning to get kittens for months now and you've beaten us to it! What's her name?"

"TK, short for Tiny Kitten," said Phil. He perched on the arm of the sofa, watching TK consider whether or not to let Louise pet her. "We think she might actually have been a tiny kitten when the Battersea people got her."

"It's not the best-thought-through name," Dan chimed in as TK finally acquiesced to the attention, butting Louise's hand in a clear invitation.

TK had adjusted fairly well to the move, despite having been in Battersea for a fair amount of time. She already had her favourite spots in the flat, including a patch of carpet behind Dan's bedroom door which was a mystery until they worked out that a hot water pipe ran directly underneath. She also seemed fairly placid, stubborn almost, although she got very disconcerted by laser pens being shone at the walls. Phil thought it was funny. Dan thought it a little bit cruel.

At the moment, she was submitting fairly peacefully to Louise invading her personal space on the rug, purring low in her throat as her fur was rucked up and smoothed back down again.

“You have to let me bring Darcy round so she can play with her,” she said. “You have no choice.”

“Noted,” said Dan. “Just give us enough warning to tidy up the various child hazards in our home.”

“Need to hide your porn stash, Daniel?” she teased.

He made a show of considering, stretching out and nearly knocking Phil off the arm of the sofa. "It's mainly the dildos to be honest."

Phil spluttered slightly, which set Dan and Louise to giggling. He shook his head at them.

"Oh, stop with the prudishness, it doesn't suit you," said Dan. He gave Phil's arm a tug, and Phil dutifully slid down from the arm of the sofa to slump next to Dan, almost in his lap. Louise watched them with a fond smile until TK got jealous and batted her hand.

"So who gets to keep this needy little beastie when you eventually move out then?" she asked.

***

Living with a cat wasn't all that different to living without one, it turned out. Phil was quite reassured by the lack of responsibility involved, once he realised that TK was quite capable of taking care of herself. For example, she had a very firm idea of when she liked to be fed and would come and find one of them in order to ensure that this schedule was maintained. If she wanted attention, she would jump on someone's lap and dig her claws in until she was sufficiently petted. She co-opted any stray pieces of paper as a bed, for reasons entirely unknown to the human occupants of the flat, left black cat hairs on anything light and white hairs on the entirety of Dan's wardrobe, but never really made a nuisance of herself otherwise.

Until the mice returned.

Quite why they returned after the cat's arrival, it was impossible to know, but the fact of the matter was that one afternoon, TK trotted into the lounge with a mouse held squarely in her jaws.

Dan, in browsing position, looked up first. "Eugh," he said. "I thought the mice had gone."

Phil banged a full stop into the email he was composing. "Hm?"

"Look at the cat."

Phil closed his laptop, looked down, and made a face. "Well, at least we know she'll actually catch them?" He got up from the table to crouch in front of TK. "Can you put the disease-ridden rodent down please?"

"You do know the cat cannot a) hear you or b) understand you," Dan muttered.

Phil ignored him. "Come on TK, put the mouse down, there's a good girl."

TK did.

And the mouse scarpered, clear under the sofa where Dan was sitting.

Phil swore loudly. "I thought it was dead!"

"You are fucking kidding me," said Dan. He lifted his feet from the floor and peered over the edge of the sofa. "Can you see it?"

Phil nearly overbalanced trying to look. "Yeah, it's in the corner, by the leg. Why didn't she just kill it?"

"Are you advocating the death of an innocent creature?"

"This one, maybe." Phil knelt down so he could better stare at the mouse. The mouse stared back. Phil rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Can you go and get something to catch it?"

"Like what for Christ's sake? We threw out the traps."

"Like a box or, I don't know, something we can put down on top of it to stop it escaping."

Dan stepped gingerly off the sofa. "Okay, be right back."

"Brrrb," Phil trilled back automatically.

"Shut up," Dan called.

The mouse quivered. Phil tried not to blink, until it occurred to him that TK was still in the vicinity and liable to cause havoc if she decided to go for the mouse again.

"Dan?"

"What?"

"Can you get TK out?"

He heard Dan come back into the room. "Why? She might catch it again."

"And let it out somewhere else. Like your bedroom, for example."

"Point taken. Here's the colander."

He dumped it on top of Phil's head, so he found himself suddenly seeing the world through cloudy translucent plastic. "The colander?!"

"It has airholes! Come here, cat."

"Okay, fair point, but I can't fit it under the sofa!"

He looked up at Dan, who was trying to pick TK up, and the movement dislodged the colander from his head. It clattered to the floor, and out of the corner of his eye, Phil saw a flash of brown - the mouse had made a dash across the room to hide under the TV unit.

TK yowled - the loudest sound they had so far heard her make - and twisted out of Dan's arms in a marvellous feat of acrobatics, landing squarely on her feet before scrabbling wildly to make chase.

"Oh, shit," said Dan.

Phil hit himself in the head with the colander. It didn't help.

Twenty minutes later, the cat was shut in the office, everything in the lounge was unplugged for fear the mouse would eat through a wire and cause some sort of electrical fire - or worse, render the internet router inoperable - and everything which didn't have to be on the floor was piled onto the table. Phil stood in the middle of the room, wielding the colander like a war hammer, whilst Dan stood on guard by the sofa, which they hoped was the mouse's current hiding place.

"Are you sure it came out from behind the TV?" Dan asked.

"Yes?"

"And say that once more with feeling?"

"Shut up."

They waited in silence for a minute.

"Are you sure we shouldn't just try and poke it out with a stick or something?" asked Dan. "Or I saw this lifehack on tumblr for finding earrings on the floor - you stick a thin piece of material over the the nozzle of the hoover-"

"I thought you were the one against the killing of the mouse."

"It wouldn't kill-"

A sudden movement, and Phil struck.

He leapt across towards the armchair (okay, so not the sofa then) and dived with little to no grace, plonking the colander down atop the mouse with an almighty bang.

"Got it!" he crowed.

"Are you sure?" Dan crouched down to peer through the plastic. "You didn't kill it, did you?"

"If I did, we're pretending TK did it."

The mouse scrabbled against the floor, proving its continuing existence, and Dan sighed in relief.

"Thank fuck," he said. "Right, I'm going to get a calendar or something so we can slide it underneath and carry it outside. Do not let it escape."

"There's a calendar in the office," said Phil.

He sat back on his heels, leaving one hand on top of the colander in case the mouse should prove strong enough to move it and escape, and rolled his shoulders. His spine cracked in a satisfying yet entirely gross fashion, and he tried to squash the little voice which whispered that he wasn't getting any younger.

Dan came back into the room, leafing through their Project for Awesome calendar. "Which YouTuber do we want to get mouse poo on their face?" he mused.

"Don't be mean," Phil said. "Unless the Janoskians are in there. Are the Janoskians in there?"

He leant back to take the calendar from Dan, and then overbalanced when a flash of black and white streaked past him. He waved his arms wildly, trying to stay upright, as Dan shouted, "no, TK, don't!"

But it was too late. The colander went flying, Phil landed heavily on his coccyx, and the mouse went haring off once again.

"Fuck," said Phil. "Ow, ouch."

Dan crouched by him. "Are you alright?"

"Nope. Yes. Give me a minute. Ow, ow, that hurts."

"Here."

He grasped Phil's upper arms and helped lift him up to the sofa. Phil wrapped his fingers round Dan's forearms, probably digging in his nails a bit. For such a short fall, his back hurt a surprising amount.

"Thanks," he said. "I'll be alright in a sec. Ow. Where'd the mouse go?"

But before Dan could answer, TK leapt lightly onto the sofa and gently deposited a - now clearly dead - mouse upon Phil's lap.

All three of them stared at the little brown body for a moment, and then Phil sighed. "So, who gets to make the video about this?"

(Dan ended up fending off a fair few angry comments from animal rights activists.)

***

VidCon presented a slight challenge, because it meant that they couldn't leave TK with Louise or pretty much any of their friends for that matter, because none of them were going to be in the country. They considered carting the cat off to Dan's parents, but Wokingham was still a fair way to travel, even if it wasn't as far away as Phil's family home, so in the end Phil phoned up Battersea and got a recommendation for a cattery. It had a very self-assured tagline (''possibly the finest cattery in the world") but that didn't stop Dan worrying for the entire journey home after leaving TK behind in her little enclosure.

And to be fair, it was kind of weird when they got back to the flat and weren't greeted by her at the top of the stairs. Phil naturally looked down to check he wasn't going to trip over her (it had only happened twice, no matter what Dan claimed), and when he went into the lounge, it was to find Dan staring at the dent in the sofa where she'd been curled up that morning.

"D'you really think she'll be alright?" he fretted.

"She'll be fine," Phil said. "They know what they're doing. We gave them a feeding schedule, they said they'd make sure someone spent a bit of time with her every day, and it's only five days anyway."

Dan scowled. "Shut up with your logic and let me be irrational about the cat."

Phil laughed at him and pulled him in for a quick, one-armed hug. "Fine. New question: are we really bringing the Wii?"

Dan stepped back, faux-horror on his face. "You're already depriving me of our cat for a week, you're not depriving me of Mario Kart as well."

"You could just put it in your suitcase," Phil pointed out.

"Yes, well, you always pack less shoes than me. Do you really want to do the bit where we're forced to transfer underwear between suitcases because mine's overweight? And then we never work out whose is whose again?"

Phil was still unconvinced. "That's basically what happens every time we do the laundry."

"Doing the laundry doesn't involve showing airport staff our pants. The Wii goes in your suitcase."

The Wii went in Phil’s suitcase, and off they went to VidCon. It was always a surreal time, the time when Phil felt he could most identify with what it must be like to be Harry Styles, unable to set foot outside his hotel room without being captured on dozens of cameras. Even inside their suite there were people with cameras, vlogging, though at least they could ask those people to turn the cameras off and expect that it would actually happen. Particularly if they were willing to be distracted by Mario Kart. Even Cat, daily vlogger extraordinaire, was willing to put the camera down in order to soundly beat Phil three times in a row whilst Dan spent forever getting ready to go out one evening.

“I hate you so much!” Phil yelped as a well-placed banana skin took him out and sent him spinning off the course.

“Seriously, I got you with a banana skin? That’s just embarrassing,” Cat said. “It’s not even a fake box, it’s literally the easiest thing to not get killed by.”

She crossed the finish line with flair, leaving Phil to drag himself into a pretty terrible seventh place. He hit his head on the controller dramatically.

“Ow, don’t do that to your poor remote!” Cat joked. ‘Or Dan’s remote. That would be worse.”

“It belongs to both of us so I’m technically allowed to destroy it halfway,” Phil pointed out. He chucked it onto the sofa to make his point.

Cat set her controller down on the table. “What, you each bought half a Nintendo Wii?”

“Well, we have a joint bank account, so it was more like we both bought one Nintendo Wii,” Phil shrugged.

Cat laughed. “Every time I think you couldn’t get more married, you say something like that and I’m back to square one. You have a joint freaking bank account?”

"It started out just for the rent," Phil explained. "But then we moved to London, and since the flat was unfurnished we had to buy basically the whole of IKEA, and we just each put a bit more in for those couple of months, and then it just seemed more sensible to have a joint account for stuff like - the weekly food shop, camera equipment, plane tickets, or booking the cattery is the new one, since it would be kind of unfair if just one of us paid for the cat-"

Cat's eyebrows twitched together. "Wait, rewind a sec - you buy cameras together?"

"Yeah," said Phil. "We do actually have two DSLRs, and a couple of little vlogging ones, but the lenses and stuff, and the soft boxes, tripods, that sort of thing - that belongs to both of us."

She shifted to sit cross-legged. "Like, I get furniture, because you really can't just buy two sofas, right? The Wii - well, I guess it’s the same principle. But I don't know, I can't imagine sharing a thousand dollar camera with my flatmates. That shit is mine."

"Yeah, but it's Dan," said Phil, and only when he finished speaking did he realise precisely how silly that sounded. He looked down.

Cat laid a hand on his knee. “Hey, don’t look like that. You’re awesome. If it works for you, it works for you, you know? You two do your own thing, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you how completely weird it is. You two are awesome and anyone who tells you different isn’t worth listening to.”

Some people just had a gift for saying seriously cheesy things and sounding entirely sincere. The American accent helped, as far as Phil could tell. Good lighting and ukulele backing music, too. But that sort of genuine sincerity always raised his hackles a little bit, sparked a voice in the back of his head which sounded just a little bit like Dan at his most sarcastic; it made him automatically disbelieve whatever was being said.

Dan broke the moment by opening his door and coming out to do a little twirl. “Honey, does my bum look big in this?” he asked.

“You don’t have a butt,” Cat pointed out.

“Spoilsport,” Dan grumbled. “Seriously though, am I good to go?”

“You’re gorgeous,” Cat assured him. “Now come on, me and Phil have been ready since forever and we’re all on mainstage tomorrow. Sleep has to happen at some point.”

Regardless of how much sleep actually happened, the mainstage ‘who’s more likely to’ show went pretty well. It was kind of amazing how much easier these things were when they just embraced the double act thing. It was practiced carelessness, though; it would take a while to truly stop worrying about where exactly to draw the line. In a way, it was easier in 2012 when they were being so strict about the whole shebang. These were uncharted waters, and when they went for the hug, it was with Phil watching Dan’s facial expression and body language carefully, always checking boundaries, pulling away too soon. Once offstage, he pulled him into a proper hug, wrapping his arms around Dan’s waist.

“We did it,” he said.

“For another year,” Dan replied. He pressed his face against Phil’s hair for a second, exhaling softly, before standing up straight. “One day I’ll get used to the adrenaline.”

“I won’t,” said Phil with certainty.

“No way,” said Cat.

Dan laughed, shaking off the energy. “Okay, fair point. Me neither.”

***

The summer wore on as summers always do, a mixture of laziness and mayhem, never quite finding the balance between the two. They fought balancing their own Sunday radio show with preparing for the transition into the Monday guest shows, did the newlywed tag live on stage at Summer in the City, started a joint gaming channel which took up a surprising amount of time. Editing those was fun though - they traded off on who did the rough cut and who tidied it up, and Phil was very proud of the finished product. The new and improved Dan and Phil Shop soared in its opening weeks, bringing in a much higher income than either of them were used to. In short, everything was going unprecedentedly well.

And then the cat escaped.

Really, it was a miracle that she hadn’t tried this particular trick before, Phil thought. Simply wait by the front door for them to come home, and as soon as it opens…

A black and white fluffball streaked past them into the street.

“Shit!” said Dan. “Was that-”

Phil was already running after her. This was London, this was a busy London street, she wouldn’t be able to hear the cars even if she could see them, she’d never really seen cars before-

“STOP THAT CAT!” he shouted.

(Faintly, he heard Dan mutter “seriously?” from somewhere behind him.)

Unfortunately, the natural reaction to two men running full-pelt down the pavement was to dive out of the way, so none of the passersby seemed particularly inclined to make chase after TK.

She dived down an alleyway; Phil nearly overbalanced as he wheeled round to follow.

“Oh, thank god,” he gasped. TK, despite her lead, had managed to find herself a dead end, with a high stone wall to scrabble up. That said, she was already at chest height - he darted out and grabbed her before she could get any higher.

Dan’s presence was announced by a clatter of heavy footsteps behind him; when Phil turned, it was to see him leaning against the wall, panting. “Thank fuck, you got her,” he wheezed.

“Yes, and now she’s shredding my skin,” Phil replied, because TK had not taken well to her sudden capture. “Also my shirt - ow, TK!”

“That’s the difference between you and me - I would have worried about the shirt first,” Dan said. “Okay, I’ve got my breath back, give her here.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m wearing a leather jacket, it’s fine. Give me the rabid cat.”

TK did her best to effect escape number two in the transfer process, but ultimately - thankfully - failed. Dan held her firmly against his chest, one arm around her belly and one underneath her hind legs so she could retain some sort of balance. He managed to keep hold of her for just as long as it took them to get home and close the door firmly closed behind them, and then she was springing out of his arms and bolting up the stairs.

“Yeah, go to your room!” Phil shouted.

Dan raised his eyebrows. “Do we need to go over how you are not Dr Doolittle again?”

Phil shrugged. “I talk to my Sims too. Hey, we should do Sims 4 for the gaming channel.”

“I’ve never actually played the Sims properly before,” said Dan. “But yeah, sure. Could be fun.”

***

The early autumn brought with it Phil’s grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, and the return of the entire family to the Isle of Mann for a weekend. It was supposed to be a garden party until it started raining cats and dogs, at which point it became a huddling-under-gazebos party, simply because there wasn’t enough space in the house for everyone. Still, there was a literal tonne of party food, including a three-tiered cake which was probably meant to look like his grandparents’ original wedding cake, except for how theirs didn’t have any tiers. It was a good effort, though.

“You’ve not brought your young man along,” his grandmother observed at one point.

Phil sighed at the deliberate error. “I keep telling you, Gran, he’s not my young man. And no, he’s looking after the cat.”

Apparently this was hilarious, because she cackled heartily for a moment. “You’re twenty seven now, aren’t you? I had a cat when I was twenty seven. I also had two children and your grandad over there. I think I’m winning.”

She nudged him, a wicked gleam in her eye, and Phil laughed. “Yeah, but I’ve got more subscribers on YouTube.”

“Ooh, you and your internet. You know your cousin Thomas found his girlfriend on the internet? One of these dating things.”

He hadn’t actually seen his cousin Thomas for going on ten years - he doubted they were even Facebook friends - but he did his best to look interested. “Oh, really? How long have they been together?”

“Twenty three months today,” she answered promptly, making him wonder how it was that grandmothers remembered such details about every single descendent they might have. She tugged at his elbow, making him lean down so she could whisper in his ear. “He’s going to propose after the speeches. Asked permission to crash the party and everything. I gave him my old mother’s ring to use. First grandchild to pop the question. When’s your Martin going to get on with that?”

“I don’t know,” Phil whispered back. “Maybe you should tell him to get a move on.” Martin would rag on him for that one, but it would be worth it for the look on his face.

His gran chuckled, releasing his arm. “You’re not getting away that easily, young’un,” she said. “Next time you come out to the Isle, I expect you to have a nice young lady on your arm. Or a young man. Or you can be on a young man’s arm.”

“Suddenly I feel too young for this conversation,” Phil muttered.

Thomas did indeed propose after the speeches, getting down on one very muddy knee. His girlfriend, whose name Phil still didn’t know, gasped prettily, and then burst out laughing at the sight of the soggy man she was to marry.

“Get up, you silly sausage,” she grinned. “I’ll marry you as soon as you’ve learned not to ruin perfectly good jeans asking a stupidly obvious question.”

Everybody cheered, and a buzz of excitement persisted for the rest of the party. Phil learnt that the brand new fiancée’s name was Isobel, and that she was an air hostess on long haul flights, aged twenty three to Thomas’s twenty five.

Phil hoped he was imagining the pointed looks that his aunts kept giving him from the corner of the gazebo.

***

They started filming the Sims videos in late September, but the series was still happily spinning out by the beginning of November. It shouldn’t be so interesting, given the repetitiveness of Dil’s life (or Dildo, as Dan kept calling him off-camera), but then Coronation Street shouldn’t have been able to last half a century by that logic. They kept adding ridiculous extensions onto the house (which would never have received planning permission in the first place), running out of Simoleons on a worryingly regular basis…

“How are we this bad at taking care of pixels on a screen?” Phil asked as Dil bewailed his lack of food. “We’ve managed to keep TK alive this long.”

“We would probably be better at keeping an actual child alive than we would Dil Howlter,” Dan said.

Phil shook his head, dropping his game face. “Too far. Take it back?”

Dan frowned at him. “That was fine. No sexual innuendo, no nothing. What was wrong with that?”

“Too much married-couple-ness,” Phil shrugged. “Next they’ll believe we’re actually planning to adopt a child.”

“So?”

That brought Phil up short for a second. “Talk about it later. Keep that in if you like.”

Dan did the rough cut of that episode, and when Phil watched it back before starting in on the effects and precision editing, that quick exchange was indeed left in. “We would probably be better at keeping an actual child alive than we would Dil Howlter” - and then a quick cut to the gameplay footage, hiding Phil’s reaction.

“So talk.”

Phil span around on the chair to see Dan leaning against the doorframe, carefully casual, deliberately distant.

“Something’s wrong,” Dan pressed. “That was a completely hypothetical statement, it shouldn’t bother you. Three years ago, yeah, but now, it really shouldn’t. So why did it?”

“I just - oh, it’s the same as always, just not giving people the wrong idea. I know,” he said, forestalling Dan’s interruption, “I know we said we’d stop pretending, stop acting like we didn’t even like each other, but there’s being honest and then there’s taunting them with stuff which is never gonna happen.”

Dan rolled his eyes. “We’ve been through this. You’ve been through this with me, for Christ’s sake - it doesn’t actually matter what they think, because we know what we are-”

“Do we? What are we then?”

A plaintive miaow sounded from around Dan’s ankles. TK didn’t often make oral noises, but apparently the instinct for communication was so strongly inbuilt that even her deafness didn’t stop her calling out for their attention from time to time. Dan scooped her up, provoking some scrabbling for balance, and then sat down on the office sofa, setting the cat on his lap. TK let out a little chirrup and then began kneading at his jeans, settling down.

“We’re us,” he said.

“Tautology,” Phil retorts.

“What, you need a dictionary definition?”

“I don’t know, maybe I do. I need a best before date, anyway.”

Dan frowned. “What d’you mean?”

Phil shrugged. “Well, this is going to end at some point. We’ll move out, move on - meet people.”

“Have you met someone?” Dan asked immediately. “Is this you telling me you’ve got a new-”

“No, of course not, I would’ve told you. It’s just - hypothetical.”

Dan still looked a little suspicious, but he settled back into the sofa, running his fingers through TK’s fur in long, luxurious strokes. “Okay. So. Why are you talking about moving on?”

“Because it’s going to happen, at some point. That’s just how life goes - you spend your twenties in the city with your friends, and then by your mid thirties you’re married and considering moving out to the country, looking at catchment areas for local schools - it’s just what happens.”

“So… basically, I should stop making jokes about your age.”

Phil had to laugh. “Yeah, maybe.”

Dan rolled his shoulders. “Okay, I do see what you mean. I just think it’s a bit… narrow-minded. Which, maybe it is just cos I’m a bit younger, but I don’t see that as being absolutely inevitable? And like you said, it’s all hypothetical at the moment, right, so why worry now?”

“But you agree with me that it’s really really likely. At some point we’re going to move out and get married to other people, and we’re making that more and more difficult the longer we live together.”

Dan frowned, confused, but Phil pushed on. “We have a joint bank account, we jointly own games consoles, furniture, cameras - who gets the mac when we move out? The sofa? The softboxes?”

“The cat,” Dan finished.

“Exactly.” Phil shrugged.

“But - okay, this is radical, but I have a solution to all of this. Just don’t move out. Just… stay together.”

Phil actually laughed at that, until he realised Dan wasn’t joking. “Seriously?”

“Well, why not? It’s not actually a rule that we have to move on. And I don’t know about you, but I’m happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, happier than I can imagine being with someone else - fuck, this is cheesy, but you get what I mean. Why can’t we just - stay?”

And if he had to be honest, Phil was too. But all the same...

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Right,” Dan said quietly. “So you think we should move out.”

The statement sank through the silence that followed.

"Yeah," said Phil, eventually. “Don’t you?”

Dan looked down. “I think I disagree with the concept of ‘should’.”

Phil nodded, his head jerking like it belonged to a badly controlled marionette.

"Lease isn't up for another nine months," said Dan. He wasn’t looking at Phil but at TK, at the movement of his fingers over her head. "We'd need to start looking for a new - well, for new places, though."

"See, that's just it!" Phil said. "Even when we're talking about moving out, you automatically say we'd need a new place, singular. That's not-"

"Don't say 'normal'," Dan interrupted. "Oh my god, you can't say 'normal' like it means 'right'."

No, he couldn't. But what were the alternatives?

"But you get that we should-"

"No, just stop with the shoulds. I should have stayed in uni, you should have got a proper job - we both should have done that-"

"I do want a family though," Phil interrupted. "I never wanted a proper job, you never wanted to stay in uni when there was a viable alternative, but I do - I want to bring up kids someday. I want a stable home. I want-"

"A white picket fence, two point four kids and a dog?" Dan said scathingly.

"Don't say that like it's a bad thing."

"Well don't you say it like it's the only thing." He gently pushed TK off his lap, disengaging her claws from his jeans. Her eyes widened and her ears pricked up in protest, but Dan stood up anyway. “I don’t know about you, but this is my home. This flat, you, TK. This is where I want to be.”

Phil shook his head, trying to clear it. “Me too, but-”

“No.” Dan suddenly looked so tired. “Make up your mind. Either you want this, or you don’t.”

“But what is this?”

Dan laughed, the sound acrid. “Me, and you, in our flat, in our home. YouTube, and Radio One, and whatever else we can swing. TK. Maybe we’d move to a bigger place in the future, if we needed it. Maybe we would decide to adopt a kid, I don’t know, I’m not up for discussing that one for a few years yet. Maybe we’d-”

“You’re not my husband, Dan,” Phil interrupted. “You’re not even my boyfriend. We tried that, it wasn’t what we wanted. We’re just-”

“We’re not just anything.”

“Yes, we are.”

Dan opened his mouth to respond, but then his eyes closed and his face crumpled into a hideous, cynical smile. “You absolute fucking hypocrite,” he said calmly.

And then he turned and walked away, TK trotting happily along behind him, leaving Phil sitting alone with the echoes of their argument.

***

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

The poem rang in Phil's head all day, but it wasn't until he caught someone's tweet about keeping pets indoors that he remembered that Bonfire Night involved fireworks.

He glanced out the office window into the greyness of the London evening, never quite as dark as those of his childhood, and flinched at the explosion of - something. He used to know the names of all these fireworks, didn't he? When did they become something to worry about rather than something fun and exciting and interesting?

He scrunched up his eyes, clearing the fuzziness of prolonged computer work, and pushed away from the desk, suddenly aware that he should probably check where the cat had gotten to. If she'd managed to escape again, and on Bonfire Night -

But the cat was easily found.

She was a silhouette, framed against a flash of light that briefly suffused Dan's bedroom, leeching the contrast from the black and white of her fur and leaving spots in Phil's vision. He had to blink twice before he could clearly see TK perched on the windowsill, tail hanging down and swinging gently from side to side.

"She doesn't seem to mind the fireworks."

Only then did Phil see Dan cross-legged on the floor, looking up at the window, or perhaps just at the cat.

"Oh," Phil replied, a second too late.

Dan didn't turn round. "I sort of forgot she wouldn't be bothered by the noise. Found her here."

"I thought maybe the lights..."

A shower of sparks burst into existence and fluttered downwards with a loud crackle. TK's ears twitched, and her head lifted towards the light.

"Guess you were wrong," Dan said quietly.

Phil bit his lip and didn't answer.

Dan exhaled, a long, slow sound, and got tiredly to his feet, facing Phil, barely lit. "You're wrong," he repeated. "And in all honesty, I would have expected us to be on the opposite sides of this argument."

"You're disappointed in me."

It wasn't a question, but Dan answered anyway. "Yes."

Phil nodded. “Right. Well. I think, I think I’m going to go out for a bit. Might go and stay with Mum and Dad for a few days, or something. You’ll be alright with the cat?”

“She’s mine too, Phil. She’s ours.”

And so she had been, for months now. But still Phil could hear Louise’s voice in the back of his head, something he’d thought he’d forgotten.

"So who gets to keep this needy little beastie when you eventually move out then?" she asked.

When you move out. When. Because Louise had done life right, with her husband and child - she and Matt had both been through university and come out the other side with degrees, and they both had jobs, combining them perfectly with being Darcy’s primary caregivers, and that was how life was supposed to happen. Louise’s life partner was also her romantic partner. That was how it worked.

Dan had laughed. “Oi!” he’d said. “What are you, an anti-phan shipper?”

It had been funny. Phil had pressed a kiss to Dan’s cheek, continuing the joke but comfortable in doing so, and Louise had pretended to fan herself, bemoaning the lack of photographic evidence of the moment. And then Dan had asked her how Zoe’s beauty range was coming along, and the conversation moved on.

Now, Dan turned away from Phil, unimpressed by his lack of response, just as a rocket lit up the sky outside the window, its screech exploding into fierce crackles. TK raised herself up on her hind legs, placing her front paws against the glass.

Phil left the room.

***

He didn’t go out in the end, because it was eight o’clock on a London November evening, but instead retreated to his room to do nothing in particular on the internet. He considered resurrecting his Neopets account just for something mindless to do, but couldn’t for the life of him remember what his password was. Outside, the fireworks continued on into the night, until he started to wonder if people arranged with their neighbours not to have their fireworks at the same time. He imagined London erupting in the shape of a many-stranded spiral, perfectly planned and executed, and then wondered if that was necessarily better than the chaotic, patchwork lightshow that was probably happening.

“Budge over.”

Phil automatically did as requested, and then blinked as Dan plonked the cat onto the bed and sat down at its foot, opposite and across from Phil. TK decided she was against this turn of events and hopped straight back off again; Dan shrugged as she went.

“What’s that saying about herding cats?”

“What you doing here?” Phil asked. The laptop screen had gone black, he noticed. “I thought we were fighting?”

Dan sniffed. “I decided that a) I hadn’t had a hug in like twelve hours and cats scratching your knees does not count, and b) dramatic silences and people walking out never works, so we’re going to do the sensible thing and actually talk about this. I even came up with a compromise, are you impressed?”

“Um… I guess it would depend on the compromise?”

“Fair point.” He shifted Phil’s laptop onto the floor. “Right, so, compromise: I won’t try to convince you that society’s parochial view of life is stupidly narrow and inaccurate, and I’ll stop with big scary talk about the future, and you won’t try to leave me until you actually want to leave me, and you’ll also stop with big scary talk about the future.”

Phil was all ready to shake on it and move on until he thought it through again. “Hang on, your compromise involves less communication? That… doesn’t seem smart.”

Dan’s nose wrinkled. “Yeah, but we’re just going to keep disagreeing. You see the future going one way, I see it going another. If we talk about it, we’re just going to scare each other and argue. So, agree to disagree and move on.”

“Okay.” Phil slumped back against the headboard. “That makes sense on its own. But it doesn’t actually solve the problem of we want to do different things.”

“Yeah, but we don’t,” Dan pointed out. “I want to keep living in this flat. So do you. You just think you shouldn’t want that. Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re… not wrong. I mean, I also think I shouldn’t keep living here.”

Dan nudged Phil’s knee with his foot. “That’s where your bit of the compromise comes in. You ignore the ‘shoulds’ until they match up with what you actually want to do. Like, obviously I’m not going to force you to live with me if you’re actually unhappy, and maybe you will find someone you want to do the two point four kids and a white picket fence thing with, but until then, I want you to be happy. With me. Okay?”

Phil didn’t respond straight away.

“I just want you to do what makes you happy,” Dan repeated. “Like. Surely that’s not difficult to agree to.”

“Okay.” Phil sighed. “Fine, I’ll agree to your compromise. I’m still going to be worrying about it, though.”

“You’re allowed a mid-life crisis or two,” Dan said graciously. “No, wait. I was supposed to stop with the age comments, wasn’t I?”

Phil laughed. “I wouldn’t want to take away your only source of humour.”

“Ooh, burn.” Dan scooted round to sit next to Phil, leaning against him. “Are we okay?”

“Yeah.” On an impulse, Phil pressed a kiss to Dan’s cheek. “We’re good.”

“Good.”

The door creaked slightly, and they both looked over to see TK’s tail poking up as she made her way towards the bed. “You gonna be sociable again?” Phil asked.

Dan looked at him fondly. “You’re never going to stop talking to our deaf, non-English-speaking cat like you expect her to respond, are you?”

Phil grinned as TK hopped up onto the bed, right up until he saw the mouse clamped between her jaws.

“Oh, shit.”

TK purred - with a mouse in her mouth, how was that possible - and dropped the offering onto Phil’s lap.

Well, it kept Phil’s mind firmly on the present for the remainder of Bonfire Night, at least.

***

When all is said and done, Dan does recognise that his mum is trying to help him, albeit misguidedly. As such, he doesn't hesitate to ask if he can have extra sessions with Phil in the last week before his oral, and she doesn't hesitate to agree. The school doesn't have extra rooms free, though, so Phil ends up coming round to his house for half an hour each evening, a half hour in which he does his best to get Dan to speak in French only.

Naturally, he fails, but that's okay.

Every session starts out with talking about the topics assigned at AS - drugs, poverty, all the deep and dark shit that AQA seems to have decided 17 year olds should be made to talk about, and Dan's actually getting quite good at it now. Alright, so he'll never be able to casually drop the subjunctive into a sentence, but he knows his key words, doesn't screw up his prepositions so much any more, and most of all, he doesn't stare blankly at Phil for five minutes at a time when he says something in French

"Tu as fait beaucoup beaucoup de progrès," he tells Dan two days before his exam, and Dan understands straight away that he's saying that Dan's made lots of progress.

"Tha- I mean merci," he says.

Phil laughs. "Tu sais qu'il faut également répondre en français, oui?" You do know that you have to respond in French too, right?

Dan isn't quite up to the level of being able to snark in French (fortunately not a requirement on the mark scheme), so he just glares, which naturally just makes Phil laugh harder.

A knock on the open lounge door makes them both turn around; Dan's mum is hovering just outside. "It's half past six," she says.

Phil nods and gathers up the mark schemes he'd brought along with him. Dan watches with vague resentment.

"See you round?" he says to Phil.

"Bien sûr," Phil replies. "A tout."

He goes with Dan's mum to the front door, leaving Dan awkwardly behind. He waits until he hears the door shut to go after her.

"Why d'you do that?" he asks, trying to keep the resentment out of his voice. "He's really helpful, I've learnt so much from him, but you always kick him out as soon as it hits half past."

She turns away and goes to the kitchen; Dan follows. She does this, makes him wait for an answer, and usually he gives up and goes away, but this time he's determined to wait. His mum turns the tap on and starts to fill the sink to do the washing up, clearly ignoring him, so he leans against the kitchen counter and taps his fingernails on it in a repetitive yet slightly arrhythmic pattern. She’ll hate that, he knows.

“It’s for the young man’s own sake,” she says eventually, over the running water. “He’s only paid for the half-hour.”

Dan stops tapping. “He wouldn’t mind.”

“Well I would,” she says. “I will not be accused of underpaying him.”

She turns the tap off and picks up a mug from the side to be washed. Her hand is shaking slightly, and that’s what gives Dan pause. He’s never known his mother to lose her oh-so-perfect control.

“You know he gets a bursary from the university?” she says to Dan. “Michelle - you know Michelle from round the corner - she’s his supervisor. Apparently he’s taking a teaching job next year because it’s the only thing he can afford to do.”

Dan doesn’t know this, or at least didn’t until just now. He knew Phil was going to be teaching on his year abroad, but not the reasoning behind his choice. He shifts, uncomfortable at the breach in privacy, but doesn’t want to interrupt, not now his mother is finally actually telling him something which isn’t an instruction.

“I don’t know why on earth he picked French,” she continues, setting the mug on the draining board and picking up a glass. “I suppose because it’s a good transferable skill, a language, but it’s no guarantee of a job. I would expect more upper class students to be doing languages, really - it’s the sort of thing you expect from teenagers who can quite cheerfully afford to go traipsing round the world on a whim.”

“He likes French,” Dan says. “Why does it have to be more complicated than that? Why does it even matter?”

The glass slips out of her hand. It catches the side of the counter then falls to the floor and shatters.

“Shit,” his mother says tightly. She never swears. “It matters, Daniel, because when your father walked out on us, I suddenly found myself trying to get a job that paid well enough to keep the house, to keep a car, and to keep you fed, and I didn’t have a handy degree on my CV. I didn’t have a degree at all. I have spent the last sixteen years making sure you never felt like we were scraping by or hard off, doing the best I could with what I had, always trying to make life better for you, and it matters because you’re not doing that.”

Dan stares. "Mum..."

It would all have been a lot easier, in Dan’s opinion, if Phil had been a guy.

Or at least if she were insanely popular. Because then it would look totally normal, the way Dan’s making an effort to travel across half the country just to collab with her. The commenters on DailyBooth wouldn’t coo so much. His own mother wouldn’t be so insistent he take a strip of condoms in his overnight bag.

“She’s my friend,” Dan says for the gazillionth time.

“That may be the case right now,” his mum says. “But you put a teenage boy and a teenage girl in a house where there’s no adult supervision-”

“She’s not a teenager.”

“Ooh, an older woman?”

He stops arguing and lets his mother watch him put the condoms right at the bottom of the bag. As he does so, he catches sight of himself in the mirror across the room. He sees the image like a photograph, Boy holding Condoms c. 2010, entirely detached from the thought processes behind the action. The body in the mirror doesn’t match with his mind.

But how the hell do you show what’s going on inside your head, anyway?

Dan has absolutely no idea how he first stumbled across Phil’s videos. He used to watch gaming channels, plus the occasional fit American female vlogger. Not that Phil isn’t fit, but - well, Phil’s decent, but she isn’t fit. She’s pasty white, with long hair which was clearly first dyed black and straightened to within an inch of its life during an emo phase and has suffered for it since, slightly dry and cracking at the tips. Her eyes are too pale to be striking, and her nose is simply too big for her face.

She is funny though. And quirky. And she has a similar taste in music to Dan, and she also likes video games (and is considerably worse at them, which makes Dan feel better), and she’s - okay, she’s a bit girly what with the lion toy she puts in every single video, and she’s kind of a bit ridiculous with her whole sweetness and light thing, but somehow she’s become a mate. But not like that.

It took a while for her to agree to talk to Dan. She tweeted him back happily enough but didn’t follow him for months after they first started chatting, didn’t offer her Facebook details or Skype name until they’d been mutual followers on DailyBooth for a pretty long time. Dan quite likes DailyBooth for that reason - it’s really hard to pretend to be someone you’re not when you’re posting a new selfie every day. It was DailyBooth which convinced Phil that giving Dan her phone number wouldn’t lead to stalking or something, and the beginnings of his YouTube channel also marked a distinct change in how much she texted back. Even then they hadn’t ever really intended to meet up, not until Dan got an unconditional offer from Manchester University to read for a BA (Hons) degree in Law.

Dan Howell @danisnotonfire @AmazingPhil ahhh, coming to live in your neighbourhood!!!! twitpic.com/aklq34

Phil Lester @AmazingPhil @danisnotonfire omg well done!!! Unconditional! Guess we should actually socialise irl in that case?

Dan Howell @danisnotonfire  @AmazingPhil xD

Phil Lester @AmazingPhil @danisnotonfire we could do a collab video! let's do that!

Dan’s course doesn’t begin for a couple of months yet - it’s still June - but Phil offered to show him round Manchester a bit and, because taking the train up for a single day would be a complete waste of time, also offered to let him stay at her house. She’s still a little bit iffy about that, Dan can tell, because her parents aren’t going to be in. He kind of wishes she trusted him more, but then he is just some guy off the internet at the end of the day, even if he's now technically a YouTuber too. He decides to let it slide.

It’s her who hugs him first, though, so that’s okay.

“Look at you being real and stuff!” she grins. “And even prettier in the flesh. That’s just not fair.”

“Oh, I apologise for my face,” Dan says, rolling his eyes. “Also, pretty?”

“Yep. Or maybe you'd prefer pretty as a picture. Pretty as a picture of a princess. A pink picture of a princess.”

He huffs. “Pretty’s fine.”

“Thought so. So, grand tour of Manchester!”

Dan’s seen the university before on open days but they start there nonetheless. It makes sense to know where everything is in relation to campus anyway. From there they head into the town centre for a bit, take pictures at the Apple Store and post them to DailyBooth, then just wander round. Phil points out various landmarks, including both the Manchester Eye and the best place to get cheesy chips, and Dan tries his best to actually remember some of this.

“I’m gonna be glued to Google Maps when I get here properly, aren’t I?” he says.

Phil laughs. “Yep. No way round that. Actually, it’s kind of weird learning a new place, like - when I was in York, I learned so much of the geography from Google Maps that I started thinking like a sat nav. Bear slightly to the left and continue for seven hundred yards,” she mimics, deepening her voice so it sounds sort of smooth and faux-sexy. “It was kind of weird, I started thinking in terms of like ‘oh, this bookshop is a couple of minutes north of the minster’ - I couldn’t tell you where on earth north is back in Rossendale. I mean, I could tell you where on earth north is - but you know what I mean. Boys are supposed to be better at that, aren’t they? Knowing the compass points and that.”

“Not me,” says Dan. “Google Maps all the way. Don’t pigeons have, like, magnets in their heads for navigation and stuff?”

“You mean pigeons are magnetic? Could you stick tin cans to their heads?”

Dan laughs. “Um. Maybe mini tin cans? Is tin even magnetic?”

“Or is that aluminium?" Phil's nose wrinkles as she thinks about it. "I can’t remember which way round it is.”

“Me neither.”

This being June in Manchester, neither of them is particularly surprised when it begins to rain, although Phil scowls at the sky.

"I just straightened my hair this morning!" she complains, pointlessly.

"Oh, and the secrets come out," Dan teases. "Next you'll reveal your natural hair colour isn't actually black."

Phil blinks at him, deadpan. "Are those curls I see returning?"

Dan's hand shoots to his head to check before he realises he's been had.

"Okay, fine, shut up." He'd be blushing if that were a thing his skin did. "Come on, is there a Starbucks somewhere round here?"

Indeed there is, and they grab a table by the window where they can dry off and sip caramel macchiatos whilst also watching the poor passersby undergo the conversion from damp human to drowned rat.

"Ooh, she needs to invest in some waterproof mascara," Dan says, nodding at a twenty-something girl with noticeable black marks round her eyes.

"She might just have been rubbing her eyes a lot," Phil argues. "Maybe she worked a night shift last night and hasn't had the chance to sleep yet. Maybe she's actually leading a double life - she might be Catwoman!"

"Just so long as she isn't a makeup artist by day," Dan quips.

"You're no fun. Come on, who do you think he is?" She points at a businessman holding a briefcase over his head as he scurries past. "Office underling, secretly working to bring down the corrupt CEO?"

"Or maybe he is the corrupt CEO, and Catwoman's going to bring down his business empire somehow."

That makes Phil grin; she nods at the harassed barista clearing a table across the shop. "She could be her accomplice, putting hallucinogenic chemicals in the evil workers' coffees."

It takes Dan a little longer to spot a next potential cast member. "Sexy secretary by the post box over there, wearing the red coat. She's only on the CEO's side because he's rich."

"Brainless henchmen - those two guys under the awning of Marks."

"And the bedraggled dog next to them is basically the fluffy white cat. Catwoman, I've been expecting you," he says, deepening his voice dramatically, and ruining it by coughing.

Phil hides her smile behind her coffee mug. Dan clears his throat.

“So, is Phil short for Philippa? I never actually asked.”

“Yep. Predictable, right?”

“Why d’you go for Phil though? Why not… Pippa, or something?”

Phil shrugs. “Everyone else’s nicknames were just the first syllable of their names. I mean, you're Daniel, right? And I was friends with Sam - Samantha - and Tom - Thomas - and El - Eleanor - so we all thought that was how it worked. My mum calls me Pip, sometimes.”

“Has she got great expectations of you or something?”

Phil blinks. “That’s a reference to… the book?”

“Yeah, Charles Dickens.” Dan blushes. She knows that, of course she does. “Sorry, it was in my GCSE.”

He immediately regrets saying that, although he’s not sure why he’s embarrassed - it’s not like he’s only just finished his GCSEs, and Phil knows exactly how old he is. She doesn’t seem to notice, anyway.

“Oh yeah, Miss Havisham." She makes a face. "I probably should have changed my name for YouTube,” she says. “It’s not like with J. K. Rowling, where she could just, like, pretend she could be a guy - I just get a load of comments asking why I was pretending I wasn’t a girl. Apparently my face kind of gives it away. Or not, according to some of the trolls.”

Dan doesn’t know quite what to say to that, so he doesn’t.

They spend a while in the Starbucks until it becomes clear that this isn’t a passing shower, and that there are people who could really use their seats.

"Thank you," a young mother says earnestly as she places one child on Phil's seat, dragging the other onto her lap.

"Welcome," says Phil.

She trails Dan out of the shop until Dan remembers that he has no idea where he's going and waits for Phil to take the lead again.

Phil blinks again at the rain. "Cut our losses and get a bus back to mine?" she suggests.

"Sounds good."

They nearly miss a bus but manage to scramble on when the bus driver takes pity on them and delays closing the doors for a few vital seconds. To be fair, Dan doesn't see how anyone with half a heart could leave a bedraggled Phil out in the rain.

"Two singles to Rossendale Church Lane," she says.

Dan doesn't say anything then because they've already made the bus late, but once they've taken their seats he nudges Phil and says, "How much do I owe you?"

"For the bus? Seriously, don't worry about it."

"But -"

"Dan, you paid for your train fare to get here, and that was definitely way more than a single bus ticket. And plus, you're nearly a student. Gotta get used to taking free things wherever possible. Never turn down free food, always turn down free drink."

“Got it,” he says. He nudges her shoulder. “Thanks.”

They sit in companionable silence for a while. Well, mostly companionable. They’re still a little too new to each other, a little unsure how they fit together IRL. This is the first time Dan’s actually met up with someone ‘from the internet’ before, though, and he’s really pleasantly surprised how well the whole thing’s going. It’s less like beginning a conversation, and more like continuing one, even if he no longer has the chance to edit his contributions to that conversation before pressing send.

“It’s kind of a long bus ride. Sorry,” Phil says eventually. “I’d’ve driven, but Mum took me off the insurance policy on her car. Seeing as I’ve spent most my time in York for the past three years, and then I’m moving out soon, so-”

“It’s fine,” Dan says. "I'm spending the night with you, I'm sure I can stick a couple of hours."

They end up having an iPod shuffle competition - whose music is least embarrassing when all songs are shuffled? It's a close call, mainly because they don't have an impartial judge to agree with Dan that video game music belongs in video games, not on iPods.

"But it's cute!" Phil protests as ‘Interrupted by Fireworks’ plays gently away in their shared earphones.

Dan wrinkles his nose as he listens. "Maybe if it were done by proper instruments it would come out of the 'embarrassing' category. It's all thin and video game-y. It's like - it's like the difference between talking to someone on Skype rather than in real life."

"It can be your song, then. And if it's your song, you can't say it's embarrassing without also calling yourself embarrassing."

"Fine! You win on that one. Okay, let's try mine."

The argument about whether it's embarrassing or amazingly classy for a nineteen-year-old to have classical piano music on his iPod never reaches a satisfying conclusion, but instead tails off as Dan yawns.

"You tired?"

"No, you just bore me," Dan shoots back.

It only occurs to him a second too late that they might not be close enough for that joke to work, but Phil folds her arms and huffs dramatically.

"Oh, I see how it is."

Dan grins. "Nah, you know what my sleep schedule's like. Getting up for the train this morning was basically torture."

"Worth it, though?"

"Yeah."

Chopin's nocturnes give way to Paramore's 'All We Know', and the abrupt change breaks the moment. Probably for the best, Dan thinks.

Phil's house, when they eventually reach it, is a little bit spooky, although that may have something to do with the fact that it's dark and there's no one there. Phil's room is exactly how Dan expected it though, the background of videos and Skype calls suddenly made 3D. He stares for a couple of seconds at the blue and green checked sheets, and wonders why the reality of Phil’s room is so much stranger to him than the reality of Phil herself.

“You can sleep in Martin’s old room, if you like,” she says. “He moved out a while ago, so. Or you can sleep in here - we can get the camp bed out.”

“Proper sleepover style,” Dan grins.

And that’s what they do, after a dinner of stir fry which Phil makes and Dan hovers over, feeling slightly awkward. It’s the unavoidable effect of being a first-time houseguest - he’s not sure how much he should be offering to do to help - but as the night wears on, that sensation fades away. Phil's just so easy to be with; the conversation flows naturally and happily all evening, ranging from tips on video editing to discussions of uni life to the all-important question of which is their favourite Pokémon.

They don't stay up massively late - Dan's been yawning all day anyway after he got a grand total of four hours' sleep last night - and fall asleep around two, mid-conversation about... something. Dan will never remember what on earth they were discussing, although he has a feeling that llamas came into it somewhere.

The next day begins with a breakfast of super-unhealthy cereal ("do I even want to know what you're like when you've had too much sugar?" Dan asks) and making plans for their collab video.

"How many questions did people send in?" Dan asks.

"Loads! They're all kind of random, but random's good."

"I'm scared."

"You should be more scared of the fact that I'm editing it after you've gone home this evening. What time's your train?"

"Open return. Need to look up the times, and then given the bus journey..."

"We should probably make a start then. D'you want to go and shower while I wash up?"

By the time they sit down to film the video it's getting on midday, and if it weren't for the cloud cover the light from the window would make it far too bright to film.

"How we doing this then?" Dan asks.

Phil shrugs. "Read out the questions and answer them?"

For the sake of posterity, it's very very lucky that the first question is 'why do you always make cat whiskers on your face?'

"Cat whiskers!" Phil shouts, and scrambles over to her makeup bag, almost kicking Dan in the face in her haste. "My eyeliner's broken! Why do I never have a sharpener?"

"Just use pen," Dan suggests.

This will later prove a terrible idea when it takes half an hour to get the traces of black marker off their faces, but at the time it's just kind of hilarious; Dan's hand shakes a little as he puts the whiskers on Phil's left cheek, her nose getting in the way of his hand, and Phil only just manages not to sneeze.

"It smells all fume-y," Dan says, wrinkling his own nose as Phil returns the favour.

"We're basically going to get high filming this video, aren't we?"

"Yay, stoned videos!"

The fumes probably aren't half as intoxicating as the resulting video would make it seem. They muck around, collapse against each other laughing for minutes at a time which will need to be cut from the finished product, and it's like the giggles and the silliness are cumulative: they build up until they're frothing over, pouring out of them in a never-ending wave of happiness.

"What sound does a giraffe make?"

Phil makes a strangled sound in the back of her throat which sounds more like - well, Dan doesn't really know, but he can't contain his grin.

"I swear every animal makes that noise with you," he says. "Do a baby elephant?"

She obligingly makes the exact same noise again, and already they're laughing. It sets the tone for the rest of the video, and if they'd ever entertained any notion of answering a question seriously, it disappears immediately.

"Speak French," Dan commands.

Phil looks straight into the camera. "Je mange les petits enfants."

"Tu mere est... prostitute."

"Ou se trouve la salle de jeu - that's the only thing I actually remember from French at school."

"Tu mere est la salle de jeu," Dan insists.

"Well, tu mere est mange les petits enfants."

And off they go again.

"What does it feel like to be a real woman now?" Phil reads out. "Oh, I'm a real lady, I am. I have a sewing machine and everything."

She stretches over Dan's lap to pull said machine out from under her bed; it scrapes heavily across the floor.

"Really ladylike," says Dan.

"I'm a lady!" Phil protests à la David Walliams, which sends Dan off into further paroxysms of laughter.

The camera light starts blinking at them eventually as they approach the end of its battery life.

"We should wrap up," Phil says. "Ow, I actually have a stitch from laughing."

Dan fights down his grin and turns to the camera. "Well. This was the most fun I've ever-"

But that's as far as he gets, because Phil seizes him round the waist and pushes him to the floor. His hands come up reflexively to grab her but he stops them at the last second.

"Pinned ya!" she crows.

"I thought you had a stitch!" Dan splutters - half of Phil's hair seems to have made its way into his mouth. "Get off, your boobs are suffocating me."

She's still laughing as she pushes herself off him, though her giggles are interspersed with 'ow's. "Get up and say goodbye to the camera."

They make hand hearts into the lens at Dan's behest.

"This is so cheesy," Phil says.

"It's supposed to be!" Dan protests as Phil goes to turn off the camera. "Honestly, you have no appreciation for the art of the ironic cheesiness."

She laughs at him, and then groans. "Okay, now I really have got a stitch."

Dan laughs at her in turn, but then he catches sight of the clock on the wall and deflates.

"I have to go soon, don't I?"

Phil follows his eyeline. "Yeah, I guess. Unless - do you have to go back tonight?"

It's so tempting to say no, I can stay, please let me stay. "My ticket's only valid today. I don't - I mean, I'd buy another one but it's expensive, and I really can't-"

"It's okay. I'll see you soon, won't I?"

"Well, I'm coming up to uni in September. And - we can Skype, and stuff?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Sure you wouldn't survive without seeing my beautiful face for that long anyway."

Phil rolls her eyes, but she's grinning still. "Come on - is all your stuff still in your bag? We've got like half an hour to the next bus."

Thanks to the amount of time it takes to remove the cat whiskers, they run out of time to actually look up the train schedules and bank on the fact that there are always trains between Manchester and London, and then from London to Reading, and end up waiting for twenty minutes before the next train. Dan buys a sandwich and a packet of crisps for the train, and Phil buys a Snickers for the bus journey which, to be fair, is almost as long.

"I'm moving into Manchester properly in a couple of months, getting my own flat," she says suddenly. "Well, sort of. Gonna flatshare with my friend Charlie."

"Oh, cool. Did you get a job there then?"

"Yeah, but not like a graduate job, just working in a WHSmiths, starting next month. That plus the YouTube revenue, it's just about enough. And it'll be brilliant for people-watching, anecdotes and stuff."

"All the crazy people you seem to attract," Dan teases. "Maybe you'll make it big time on YouTube, end up with that as your job, like charlieissocoollike and nerimon, those sorts of people."

Phil laughs. "I'd need a hell of a lot more views for that. Also merchandise. Hey, maybe I could sell replicas of Lion."

"Absolutely. Totally feasible. Definitely not gonna run into trouble with the people who actually make the toy."

She sticks her tongue out at him. "Anyway, what I was going to say was that you're welcome to come round if the people in your halls are annoying, or loud, or have sex at inappropriate times or whatever. Not that Charlie isn't annoying, loud, and prone to bringing boys back for really enthusiastic sex, but at least there's only one of him."

"I'll probably take you up on that," Dan says. "Thanks."

"Welcome," she smiles.

Dan glances up at the noticeboard - his train should be arriving any minute. "Should probably go," he says. "Thanks for this - I've had an amazing time. Seriously, like, thank you for inviting me."

"Thank you for coming," Phil rejoins. "Text me when you get home."

"Will do."

This time it's Dan who goes for the hug. He's not all that much taller than her; he bends down slightly so they're on the same level.

"See you soon," he says.

"Not if I see you first."

***

The day that Dan arrives in Manchester, Phil comes round to help him unpack and generally tide him over the 'oh god this is the first time I've properly moved out' nerves. It's only the second time they've seen each other face to face, but Phil suddenly seems like the only safe thing, the only familiar thing. It's probably just the effect of being in a scary new situation.

"Brought you a present," she says cheerfully, brandishing a poster tube. "Gotta use that WHSmiths discount for something."

It's a Paramore poster, which Dan takes gratefully.

"Look at these walls!" he says. "It's like an actual prison cell! Was that the vibe they were going for, d'you think? Was the idea to make first years feel as uncomfortable and trapped as they possibly could?"

Phil glances round. "It is a bit... yellow."

"You think?"

It doesn’t take longer than half an hour to put all Dan’s things in drawers and the small wardrobe, and in the case of his shoes, under the bed for want of a better storage space. Phil flumps onto the newly made bed to test the mattress out while Dan starts organising the wires underneath the desk, including an ethernet cable. No wifi, that’s going to be weird.

“Well, the mattress isn’t too bad,” Phil decides. “And you can probably stretch the ethernet cable over here if you wanna use your laptop in bed.”

“Yay, I retain the ability to watch YouTube videos until four a.m.”

“That reminds me, congrats on the subscribers, by the way," she says. "You're nearly level pegging with me, and I've been doing this for two years now."

"Yeah, well, I got most of them from doing that collab with you," Dan says. "Never gonna beat that. Even if most of them seem to think we're going out."

Phil laughs. "Get used to it - every time I'm in a video with a guy, I'm supposedly having sex with them."

"Cos there's no way a guy and a girl can just be friends."

"Exactly." Phil makes a face. "What are you doing tonight, then? Have you met the rest of the people on your floor yet?"

Dan shakes his head. "| know I should."

"Go on. I can't do anything tonight anyway, got work in the morning. I'll go home and let you socialise."

"Ugh, socialising."

They're interrupted by a timely knock on the door. Dan throws Phil a melodramatic glance before getting up to answer it.

The girl outside is quite short, has a nose ring, and is smiling in a way that makes Dan think she’s probably been told that her normal smile isn’t actually that friendly.

"Hey, I'm Lizzie," she says. Her voice is lower than Dan expected. “Molecular biology, room 212. You?"

"Dan, Law, room - well, this room, obviously," he finishes awkwardly.

"It could have been someone else’s," she shrugs. "Like - sorry, what's your name?"

Phil gets up from where she was sitting on the bed and does a little wave. "Phil, not a student - I'm just helping Dan settle in."

"Oh, cool. Well, I was going to say that it could have been your room, but yeah, anyway.” She clears her throat. “I was just coming round to introduce myself, really. And does anyone have any plans yet? Like, I really don't feel like cooking, first night and everything, wanna go for a wander with the rest of the flat and find somewhere to eat? You're welcome too," she says to Phil. "The more the merrier, right?"

"I've got work in the morning, but thanks," says Phil.

"Yeah, that sounds good," says Dan. "Have you asked anyone else yet?"

"Nope, you're the first. Meet in the kitchen in a bit?”

“Cool. Nice to meet you.”

She smiles more naturally now, and yeah, she does look a bit sardonic, but also a lot more relaxed. “You too. See you in a bit.”

As soon as the door closes behind her, Phil nudges Dan’s shoulder. “See, not so scary.”

He shoves her shoulder in response.

Thankfully, it turns out that his flatmates aren’t bad people. Out of the twelve who will eventually share their windowless kitchen, only five have turned up today and Dan doesn’t clash with any of them, which is a good start. There’s Lizzie, who is a little bit intimidating but kind of talkative, and then there’s a guy called Steven who’s a bit of a lad, and Ben (“please don’t call me Benedict”) who’s quite posh-sounding and studying Classics to boot, and Noemi who has a bit of an accent but English grammar skills to rival any native’s. They stumble across a noodle place with fifteen percent off for students and grab a table, at which point they learn that Ben is a vegetarian and Lizzie is allergic to peanuts. Steven keeps trying to flirt with Noemi, very badly, and Noemi rolls her eyes every time and gently shifts away whenever he tries to put his arm round her. Given that she’s in between him and Dan, this means Dan is getting steadily closer to being pushed off the edge of the bench.

“Leave off, she’s probably got a nice boyfriend back in Spain who doesn’t want you touching his girl,” Lizzie says. Her voice is light, but possibly a little deliberately so.

Noemi throws a grateful glance at her and clears her throat. “Yes, actually.”

Steven backs up and raises his hands. “Sorry. Can’t help it if I think you’re hot.”

“So what about everyone else then?” asks Ben. “I suppose you’re single, Steven.”

“What a surprise,” Noemi murmurs to Dan.

“Dan’s got a girlfriend, haven’t you?” Lizzie says. “That girl round yours today?”

He shakes his head. “She’s just a friend.”

“Oh right. Well, it was nice of her to help you move in.”

“Yeah,” says Dan. “What about you, then?”

This is a smart move, because Lizzie happily complains about her Sixth Form boyfriend for a good ten minutes, and then Ben very quickly mentions his boyfriend (probably the reason he began the conversation, Dan thinks, to get coming out over and done with as soon as possible) and then the food comes and the conversation turns easily towards favourite foods, and how much each of them can cook, and whether they should consider cooking for each other, maybe on a rota or something.

By the time they get back to their halls, another three people have arrived, and Dan feels decidedly less nervous about joining everyone in the kitchen for a drink and a chat. He confesses as early as possible that he has a YouTube channel (“so if I’m wandering round with a camera I'm not just being a perv or something”) which naturally results in at least three calls of “ooh, let’s have a look!” and when he shows them ‘Phil is not on fire’ on Phil’s channel (no need to actually give them his own username straight off), Lizzie throws him a sceptical glance.

“Don’t say it,” he warns her.

She rolls her eyes, but nods.

***

Dan first visits Phil’s flat only a couple of days later. Lectures haven’t started yet; it’s just been a series of fire drills, emails from professors with terrifying reading lists attached, emails from various societies with even-more-terrifying social itineraries attached, and of course a fair bit of drinking. Freshers’ week is everything Dan has heard about and a lot he hasn’t - he’s fairly sure that at least half his flatmates have had sex with people they’ve never met before, and he’d never expected to be quite so knowledgeable about the various types of alcohol-flavoured vomit he’s seen spattered around campus, and it’s only day three. It’s not been too bad though. He spent a fairly hilarious half an hour with Lizzie trying to work out how the hell to turn the oven on in their windowless kitchen, only for Noemi to poke her head in and say “there’s a switch on the wall”. The whole uni experience can so far be summed up in the expression ‘muddling through’; no one has a clue what they’re doing, but they’re all fairly sure that nothing terrible’s going to happen if they muck up a bit. It’s an odd mixture of optimism and anarchy, and altogether very enjoyable.

It is a relief to visit Phil’s flat, though. It feels a lot more normal there.

“It’s a bit white,” she warns him as they ascend in the lift together. “And boring. We haven’t had much of a chance yet to do anything to it.”

“You have seen my room?” he reminds her.

And of course her flat is a lot nicer than his uni room cum prison cell. The lounge and kitchen are open plan and separated by a breakfast bar, with glass doors leading out to an actual balcony (which is still somehow less impressive than the breakfast bar, possibly because it looks out over Strangeways Maximum Security Prison), and Phil’s room is light and quite big. True to her word, she hasn’t decorated it much beyond the one wall that appears in her videos, but there are a couple of pieces of wirrow’s art up on the walls, and her familiar blue and green bedsheets add a burst of colour and character.

“I like the mirror,” Dan says. He’s seen it already in the background of a vlog, but it’s cooler close up. It’s a full length mirror, hanging on the wall next to the bed, but it’s not one piece. Instead, it’s made up of lots of circles of varying sizes, each with a normal silvered back, and the glass between them is tinted slightly blue.

“Thanks,” Phil says. “I got the ensuite on the basis that Charlie’s terrified of seeing the naked female form,” she tells him. “And it was also on the condition that all my friends use it rather than his bathroom, just so you know.”

Dan nods. "Got it."

They head back out to the main room and Phil goes to make coffee, kicking shut three cupboard doors as she passes them. "Sorry about the mess," she says.

"This is not messy," Dan tells her.

Or maybe it is, but the mess in Phil’s flat is different to the mess in Dan’s shared kitchen. There, it’s careless, uncaring - it’s seeing how long they can hold out before someone else will step in and do the washing up for them, and not really caring if that takes a week or even more. Here, it’s obvious that this is a home. There’s stuff littered round the lounge but it’s stuff that’s going to be picked up and used again: a black hoodie is left draped over the sofa arm, a cacophony of brightly-coloured mugs sit on the breakfast bar, a set of headphones is sinking slowly into a beanbag.

There’s a tripod set up too, camera still perched on top. “Were you making a video?” Dan asks.

Phil makes a face as she brings the mugs over. “There’s this competition thingy I found - some band wanting promotion for their song, so they’re getting people to make music videos for it. It’s called ‘Check Yes Juliet’ by We The Kings - have you heard of it?”

Dan shakes his head, taking his mug and sitting down next to the hoodie. “Thanks. So you’re going to enter?”

“Yeah, it’s just difficult to know what to do. The brief is that you’re supposed to do a day in your life, but you have to find the balance between going out to, like, the Manchester Eye and pretending that’s something I do every day, and showing the truth.” She brings her legs up on the sofa so she’s sitting cross-legged, her hands wrapped around the mug. “And then there’s how much I want to put in in terms of effects and stuff. I always worry that I’m gonna go too far, put in too much, and come out looking like I’m a sixteen-year-old trying out every effect on Windows Movie Maker.”

“But on the other hand, you’ve got a Masters in editing and you need to show that off,” Dan finishes. “Yeah, see what you mean.”

“Exactly. So, I was just filming some sort of stock images for that, but that’s all really. What about you - you haven’t put anything up since you got here.”

“I’ve only been here like three days! I’ll do a video once term’s actually started, just an update. I’m at uni now; no, Americans, I do not have a roommate; no, everyone else, there have been no gorgeous sexy parties, probably with lesbians making out in the corner; yes, my room does look like a nightmare, that sort of thing.”

Phil rolls her eyes at him. “But it’s alright, so far? Nothing’s gone horrifically wrong, you’re not drowning in work yet…?”

“Just in reading lists. I’ve got a library tour tomorrow morning, so I figure I can start after that.”

“And thus the procrastination begins.”

Dan sticks his tongue out. “Fine, I won’t come and see you.”

Naturally, this turns out to be a very empty threat. Within the next fortnight, Phil has to kick Dan out no less than three times so he’ll get to the library before it closes. It’s bizarre thinking that they’ve barely spent any time together in person; falling into friendship is as easy as falling off a log. But although Dan spends probably too much time round at Phil's, it's not until week three (and, as luck would have it, the first time that he sleeps over) that he bumps into her flatmate.

At nine o'clock in the morning. Whilst Phil is in the shower. And most importantly, before Dan's had a single cup of coffee. Fuck his life.

They stare at each other a second, Dan in his pyjama bottoms and newly acquired University of Manchester hoodie, and Charlie in what looks like the outfit of the night before, and before Dan can regain his wits enough to say something normal, like maybe 'you must be Charlie, hello, I'm Dan, nice to meet you'-

"Philippa!" Charlie shouts. "Why is there a straight boy in our kitchen?"

Either Phil elects to ignore this or she genuinely can't hear him over the shower, leaving Dan to blink, wrong-footed, and say the first thing he can think of.

"Why d'you think I'm straight?"

Charlie rolls his eyes. "I do watch Phil's videos, you know. You were all over her in that collab thing you did."

"She jumped on me," Dan protests.

"That's just what she's like, though. You were all puppy dog eyes and pulling her pigtails-"

The kettle clicks off, and Dan is reminded of exactly how much he needed caffeine even before this nightmare of a conversation started.

"-and generally flaunting your heterosexuality, and I don't appreciate your presence in our kitchen at a time which suggests you never went home last night when she's specifically told me she doesn't want you like that."

"I was on the sofa!"

"Oh, a straight boy who pretends to be a gentleman, even better-"

"Fucksake, would it help if I told you I'm bi?"

Charlie actually pouts as he considers. "No, probably not. "

"And it's not possible that I'm just interested in being her friend?"

"Tell me honestly you've never thought about her like that. You can't, can you, because you're a hot-blooded non-gay male, and put one of those in the same vicinity as a female..."

Dan's totally at a loss. He really did not expect to wake up to the Spanish Inquisition this morning, and definitely not before he'd drunk a mug of coffee. And - well, okay, the thought of Phil 'like that' has crossed his mind, in those small moments where she tips her head back to shake her hair away from her face, or grabs a pillow to hold to her chest whilst they Skype, and he thinks 'maybe'.

"See, not going to deny it, are you? Straight boys, you're all the same."

"I'm not straight...?" Dan says weakly.

"Charlie, stop terrorising my friends."

Phil's hair is wrapped up in a towel, and she's only wearing a thick blue dressing gown. Dan has never been so happy to see her.

"Just letting him know how the land lies," Charlie says primly.

"Yeah, I got the message, thanks." Dan winces at his own words. Is that a bit harsh? Not that Charlie hasn't been harsh, but he is Phil's flatmate and presumably one of her best friends. Probably best to stay on his good side. "Want a coffee?"

"Oh, and now you're offering me my own coffee."

"Charlie!” Phil scolds. “Be nice or shut up, okay?"

"Shutting up. Black with sugar."

With that, he stalks off, which doesn't really work in a flat which is really quite small and also quite open plan and results in Charlie slumped mutinously on a sofa less than five metres away from where Dan and Phil are still standing by the kettle.

Phil seems to be finding the whole thing quite funny. "You know, you two have a lot in common. Well. You have the general inability to function before midday in common."

"Thanks," Dan mutters.

She starts retrieving mugs and coffee from their respective cupboards. “Seriously, he’s sweet as a kitten most of the time. When’s your lecture?"

"Eleven. Two hours as well - who puts a two hour lecture right over lunch?" he complains as he grabs the sugar.

Phil smiles. “Kind of glad you’re clearing out - I want to really get on with editing today,” she says.

“This still the competition video?”

“Yeah, that. There are loads of entries up already, so at least I know what other people are doing now. I dunno if I’ve got a hope in hell of winning, but it’s worth a go.”

"You'll blast them all out of the water," Charlie calls.

Phil laughs. "You have to say that, the prize money would be going towards the rent."

Once he's finally gotten his caffeine fix, Dan goes and has his own shower (in Phil's bathroom, as per Charlie's rules) and returns to find Phil and Charlie watching some anime programme that Dan doesn't recognise. Charlie's laughing, perhaps at the show or perhaps at something Phil's just said, but as soon as he sees Dan he stops. He doesn't glare like he did earlier, but it's like Dan's mere existence is enough to put him into defensive mode. It occurs to Dan that perhaps it's not actually personal; it might just be a reaction to straight (as far as Charlie's concerned) males, which would kind of be a lot more reasonable. He decides he doesn't particularly like Charlie, but he doesn't actually dislike him, at least not yet.

Back at university, too, everyone’s sort of settling down into friendships and cliques, deciding who they like and dislike, moving on from the initial first impression of ‘none of these people is terrible’ towards ‘none of these people is terrible, but these are the ones I like hanging out with most’. Noemi and Ben have struck up a strong friendship because Noemi can speak her native Spanish with him; Ben has apparently never studied Spanish, but he did do French, Italian and Latin to A Level (definitely posh, Dan thinks), so he can understand a fair bit. It’s quite funny, listening to the pair of them talk: Noemi says something in Spanish, Ben replies in English, and on they go.

Dan doesn’t hang out much with either Ben or Noemi; they’re both a bit quiet and whilst he’s totally fine with quiet, he’s not so good with awkward silences. Apparently Noemi gets tired if she has to speak in English too long, anyway, and Dan’s grasp of Romance languages is next to non-existent. He’s probably closest with Lizzie, although most of their time together is spent with her talking and him nodding and saying ‘yeah’ at the appropriate juncture. It’s not an even partnership, not like with him and Phil.

One person who he is beginning to dislike is Steven, the other guy who arrived on the same day as him. To begin with, Dan thought he was alright - bit of a lad, yes, but with his heart in the right place. They’ve even bonded a little bit over video games - Steven actually brought an Xbox to uni and hooked it up to a cheap old TV he bought at a secondhand store, so Dan's spent a few evenings with him murdering lots and lots of pixels. Unfortunately, this seems to have given Steven the idea that this means they're mates, which is not quite how Dan would have put it. He’s just a bit… crass.

This is probably how he ends up showing him his ‘University Life’ video. Seriously, Dan could swear he hadn’t actually intended to say “yes, of course you can watch my latest vlog” but Steven had expressed interest and Dan just… hadn’t said no. Dammit.

“That’s fucking weird, man,” is Steven’s verdict.

“Thanks,” Dan says dryly.

“No, it’s cool, just weird. Play it again?”

This time through, Steven seems to get over the weirdness of the vlogging format which means he can pay attention to the content. He laughs aloud a couple of times, once when Dan zooms in on a random girl’s window, and again when he asks Noemi and Lizzie to make out for the sake of his thumbnail.

“Their faces!” he crows. “Fucking priceless.”

It’s at this point that Dan begins to wonder if Steven knows any adverbs other than ‘fucking’.

“And I swear that’s the most I’ve ever heard Noemi say.”

Possibly because you’re a douche so she doesn’t speak to you, Dan thinks.

The video ends with the random cat and Steven shoves him good-naturedly for the whole ‘you just lost the game’ thing.

“You get a lot of girls watching you?” he asks.

“Um, yeah,” Dan says.

Steven nods appreciatively. “Nice. Go with what you got, right?”

Which is possibly the most backhanded compliment Dan has ever received, and he reads YouTube comments.

“Anyway, I’ve got a presentation to do for tomorrow, so I’d better go to the library,” Dan says. “Sorry.”

“Nah, s’cool, I’m going out with the footie lads soon, gonna get on the pre-lash.”

“Right,” says Dan. “Have fun.”

As Steven leaves, Dan makes a mental note for future videos: maybe don’t try to exploit your female friends by asking them to make out, even if you do get permission from them to put the clip in, and definitely don’t zoom in creepily on girls’ bedrooms.

***

Phil texts Dan when her video goes up - it’s not something they normally do, but she’s been working so hard on this one for weeks now.

Eek, it’s online! Are you busy? Tell me what you think!

nope, not busy, give me a sec.

He opens a new tab and bypasses the subscription feed in favour of going straight to Phil's channel - YouTube being what it is, the video probably won't have arrived in his sub box yet. There are a couple of views already there on the video, although they're probably all Phil checking that it works at different qualities and so on. There are no likes yet, anyway. He clicks on the video and sits back to watch.

His first impression is that it's good. It's quirky, of course - when has Phil made a video which isn't? - and he likes the balance she's achieved between a realistic day in her life (scrolling through twitter, straightening her hair, giving lion a mohawk) and the odd little story she's put through the middle of it (including making herself a friend out of magazine clippings and becoming the victim of an alien abduction, because of course). There are quite a few effects, but what makes Phil's editing skills clear is the timing of the whole thing; the cuts are sharp and to the beat, and she's not afraid to use very short clips. She does seem to run out of footage as the three minute mark is reached, and the fanart, although very cool, probably flashes up a few too many times, but generally, it's a very good video.

He plays it through once more, and then grabs his phone again.

you’re making me feel bad about making videos with pombears on strings. it’s so good! well done you <3

It’s not too boring? Was trying not to go overboard…

no way! it has a freaking alien abduction in it! it’s fun. and plus it’s got you in a bra - what more could anyone want. :P

:/ I was worried about that too. And the shower bit.

it’s all shoulders and above, it’s fine. stop worrying, it’s a really really good video, promise.

:D Thank you. Gonna submit it to the competition website now - fingers crossed!

touching wood right now.

That’s what she said.

phil!!!

Dan watches the video once more that day, but doesn't rewatch it after that, and that's how he misses it. The explosion of views happens a few days later, and the first he knows that anything's wrong is when he turns his phone off silent after a seminar and his twitter mentions have blown up: "what's wrong with phil????" "is phil okay?" "DID YOU BREAK UP WITH PHIL?"

He goes straight to Phil's twitter, and sure enough, she tweeted whilst he was in the seminar:

Phil Lester @AmazingPhil 0_o okay this is scary

And then ten minutes later:

Phil Lester @AmazingPhil Um, taking a bit of a break from the internet for a bit guys! Not feeling good here right now. Sorry <3

Uncharacteristically, those are the only two tweets in the past hour; normally when Phil tweets something, she'll stay online for a bit to answer replies from her subscribers. Dan would be lying if he were to say he wasn't a bit worried. He exits twitter and texts her:

hey, saw your tweets, you okay? x

He waits ten minutes as he walks back to his room, but she doesn't text back. Okay, that’s a bit worrying. He opens Safari as he enters his building and goes to her tumblr, which is basically useless because there’s no time stamp and he can’t remember if he’s seen the first post or not. Finally, he uses the phone for what it was primarily designed for, and calls her. It goes to answerphone, and he hangs up.

By this stage he’s back at his room, door propped open as it usually is when he’d rather be interrupted than do actual work, so he flips his laptop open in the vain hope that he might have an enlightening email or something. There’s nothing there, of course, and in mild desperation, he goes to Phil’s YouTube channel.

That’s when he notices the view explosion.

Phil’s videos get a pretty consistent amount of views. Their collab got quite a few more, maybe one and a half times as many as the average, but generally there’s not much difference from one to the next. Dan’s views fluctuate a lot more, probably because he’s newer, and because - may as well be honest about it - he fits the mould of the popular YouTuber better. He’s a British boy with a fringe. People are more likely to randomly click on his thumbnails, but not subscribe. Phil, through years on the site, has built up a solid audience who watch her videos no matter what they’re about, no matter what they’re titled, no matter the length.

Her latest video, the day in her life, has five times the regular amount of views.

At first he thinks it’s probably just because of the competition - did she post it somewhere in order to enter? But then he sees the comments.

i’d do her

look at her tits

7/10

more tits!

pasty fucking bitch ugly as fuck

i would

And so on and so forth. Some of them aren’t too bad, just the sort of laddish thing he’d hear round uni all the time: the ratings out of ten, the ones which are sort of compliments. But then there are the ones which are outright - well, there are no words, really. He scrolls down a bit further and sees

i’ll rip ur fucking cunt in 2

“Ah, shit,” he says aloud. Okay, he can see why that’s scary, although it’s not like they’ll be able to find her. Not like they’ll even try. It’s just - well, it’s highly unpleasant. It’s not like it’s a porn video or anything, she’s just in a bra for about half a second, and there's a shot of her washing her hair which is strictly shoulders and up. It’s just annoying that they’ve taken a really good video and ruined it with such unpleasant comments.

A knock on the open door. “Hey, what’s up?”

Dan looks up. “Hey Lizzie. S’nothing, it’s just - um, you remember my friend Phil, the one who does the YouTube thing?”

Lizzie leans casually against the doorframe. “You mean the one whose house you’re always at when it’s your turn to clean the kitchen?”

“Shut up. Well, looks like some perverts have found her latest video or something. Look.”

He pushes the laptop towards her, and she comes over to the desk.

Her eyebrows raise as she scrolls through a few. “Shit, man,” she says.

“Yeah.”

She makes a face at a particularly vile comment that catches her eye. “Ew. I guess that’s just the internet though, isn’t it. If you’re gonna put yourself out there… What’s she gonna do, take the video down? Can you turn off comments or something?”

“It’s not just the internet though - it’s like, her livelihood. YouTube’s her job. And turning off comments…” He thinks about it, thinks about the community of people who follow her videos, considers the implications of shutting them out like that. “I don’t know, maybe just for this video, if she explained it. It’d be a bit like giving in, though.”

Lizzie straightens up. “Listen, as a girl who’s walked past a building site and over campus wearing a skirt which made my legs look fucking ace, I can tell you that I would love a button to turn off the comments. She should take advantage.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He shifts in his chair to face her. “But - like, sticking with the analogy, it’s not just turning the builders and the lads off, it’s turning everyone off. Her friends, the people who’ve watched her videos since like 2006…”

“So she’ll just have to deal then,” Lizzie shrugs. “Welcome to being a girl - either you shut yourself in your room or you learn to deal.”

The text on the screen shifts down suddenly, catching his eye, and he sees that YouTube has refreshed to accommodate a flurry of new comments. Dan shuts his laptop. “I’m gonna go and see her, I think. See you tonight?”

“If I’m not locked in the library overnight. I fucking hate lab reports.”

“Have fun with that,” says Dan, and laughs as she flips him a two-fingered salute. He grabs his coat, phone, wallet and keys and follows her out.

When he arrives at Phil's building, it’s Charlie who answers the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Charlie, it’s Dan. Is Phil there? Can I come up?”

There’s a pause as Charlie considers his options.

“Fucking heteros.”

It’s the only response Dan gets, but the door buzzes open, so he ignores it and heads swiftly for the lift. The journey to the nineteenth floor is long and boring as always, and he rocks back and forth on his heels, willing the lift to go faster.

Again, it's Charlie who opens the door, but he doesn't look as angry as Dan was expecting.

"She's in her room," he says. "I don't think this has really happened to her before. Not like this, anyway."

Dan nods. "Is she okay? Only I tried calling and texting-"

"No, she's not. Look - shit, I can't deal with this right now. Can you stay with her for a bit?"

"Yeah, course. See you later?"

Charlie snorts. "Probably not."

And he leaves, brushing past Dan towards the lift which is still there, still waiting on their landing. Dan watches him go before heading into the flat, shutting the door behind him with a gentle click.

Phil's bedroom door is closed; he knocks. "Hey, it's me. Can I come in?"

"Yeah, sure."

She makes a pitiful picture, sitting on her bed. She's not crying or anything, but she is very still, unnaturally still, and her laptop lies on the opposite corner by the foot of the bed like a snake or a spider she's trying to convince that she isn't there. Dan puts it on the floor and takes its place.

"Hey."

She smiles miserably. "Hey."

"Charlie went out," he tells her. "He looked a bit..."

"He's not got the best history with online hate," Phil explains. "Sort of what we bonded over. The same troll was calling me a man and him a girl. He'll be alright tomorrow."

Dan nods. "Is it - it's just the comments, isn't it? They haven't done anything else."

"No."

She doesn't seem inclined to expand on that. Dan clears his throat awkwardly. “Do you know where they came from?” he asks. “Like, how did they find you?”

"Give me my laptop?"

The tab with the comments is still open; she closes it quickly and goes into her YouTube analytics, to referral sources for the new video. Most of the list of URLs is standard: twitter, Facebook, tumblr, everywhere Phil normally advertises her videos, and then there’s the competition website bringing in a fairly hefty view count, and then -

snowwhitekinks.net

“The number keeps going up,” Phil says dully. “Every time I refresh.”

Dan can’t help but think it’s a fairly shit name for a kink forum. “What is it, have you looked?” he asks.

“I don’t want to look,” she says. “I really, really don’t want to look.”

There’s a heavy pause. “Do you want me to?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. God, what did I do? What have I done?”

“It’s not your fault they’re being dickheads,” Dan says.

“You’re just saying that, that’s just what people say. I put the video online, I put myself out there, I left that clip in - something made them embed my video onto a kink forum.”

Her whole body is tense, like a coiled spring, but there’s nowhere for the energy to go. She won’t shout, or hit something, Dan knows. She probably won’t cry, not whilst she’s angry at herself.

"Is there any way to get it removed?" Dan asks.

She shakes her head - a quick, stuttery movement, ever so slightly out of control. "Can't claim copyright because it's embedded or linked, not rehosted. Plus I couldn't claim copyright anyway - it's got someone else's music over the top. I'd have to get in touch with someone on the site, just ask them to take it down, and-"

And given that she can't even look at the site, that’s not going to happen.

"I don't want to think about it," she says abruptly. "Can we do something else, just anything else?"

They try. They steal some of Charlie's tortilla wraps and make fajitas, and they get Sonic the Hedgehog out and criticise each other's gaming techniques soundly, and Dan practises next week's presentation on property law, Phil nodding as if she understands despite the fact that it's mostly a lot of made-up nonsense because Dan doesn't have his notes or his slideshow with him.

"B+ for effort," she says.

But underneath all of it they know this isn't just a regular evening of mucking about. Dan has to keep resisting the temptation to check his phone, because he knows Phil isn't touching hers, and Phil is restless, continually glancing at the window as if there might somehow be someone out there, out to get her. Dan's tempted more than once to remind her that she lives on the nineteenth floor, but he knows that would be less than useful.

Charlie doesn't come back, and Dan sleeps on the sofa. He's woken up at seven by a sudden weight on his toes; he makes a muffled noise of protest.

“Sorry,” says Phil. She shifts slightly to let him withdraw his feet from beneath her. “Couldn’t sleep. I looked at the website.”

It takes Dan a couple of seconds to remember the events of yesterday, to figure out what website Phil’s talking about. He sits up, rubs a hand over his eyes. “You did?”

She nods. “Does what it says on the tin, apparently. They have a fetish for girls with pale skin and dark hair. That’s weird, though, isn’t it? What sort of a kink is that?”

“Everything’s a fetish,” Dan says. He’s not quite awake yet. “Seriously, though?”

“So what do I do about that? Dye my hair again, go back to ginger? Use fake tan?”

He has to blink away the mental image of a Phil with orange hair and orange skin. “What?”

“How do I get rid of them?” she asks urgently.

Dan shakes his head. “What d’you mean? It’s just the one video, isn’t it? They’re not - I mean, it’s terrible, yeah, but it’ll end soon.”

“You don’t - Dan, they subscribed to me. I’ve got like fifty new subscribers, and I can’t - I can’t - even if I block them, they can still watch me, and that’s just the ones with actual accounts - I don’t know how many of them are watching me and - and -”

“But they can’t do anything to you,” he says. “You’re safe, they can’t touch you.”

“They can watch me,” Phil repeats. “They can watch me and wank to my videos, probably on mute, and they can click from my channel to someone else’s - say Becky’s, or Lex’s, or the Five Awesome Girls - they can just keep doing that, and don’t you get it? Don’t you get how creepy that is?”

He’s not sure if she’s really talking to him, or just talking to herself. He wants to hug her, or at least touch her arm, but something’s holding him back.

“You know the worst thing is - most of the new subscribers, they don’t speak English. Or you go through their subscriptions and it’s just rows and rows of girls with dark hair and pale skin, and you just know they’re not gonna listen to a word I say, they’re not even seeing me like - like a human being. I’m just - just an image on a screen. Just a - a - a thing. It’s actually really scary.”

“Why’s that scary?” he asks. “Like, I get why it would be annoying or disgusting or - but why scary?”

Phil doesn’t answer for a minute. She twists her hands in her lap, picking at her nail varnish - midnight blue chipping away, flake by flake.

“You kind of really freaked me out when you first started talking to me, you know that?” she says eventually.

It doesn’t sound like a question, but it definitely should have, in Dan’s opinion.

“Seriously?” he says. “I got that you were being sort of - cautious - but I actually scared you?”

“Well, yeah. You were kind of insistent. Like, one day I woke up to comments on about twenty of my videos in a row, and you’d tweeted me, and you’d left a comment on yesterday’s DailyBooth, and then for days afterwards you just sort of kept going.”

Dan doesn't really remember it like that. "I think I was just bored one evening, and then - well, I stumbled across your videos and I liked them. I just wanted to - I don't know what I wanted to do, really. I don't think I was even trying to get you to notice me or anything, I was just - well, you like a video, you comment on it. That's just what you do. Same with the DailyBooth, really. Tweeting you, yeah, but-"

Dan's own YouTube channel has been going for about a year by now. He only turned off email notifications for comments a few months ago, and still has them on for DailyBooth. There aren't all that many people who actually use DailyBooth. He wonders when Phil turned off her notifications going through to email. He imagines waking up to dozens of emails telling him that one person has commented on every aspect of his online life, has followed him on twitter, followed him on tumblr, is following him. He wonders who came up with that terminology. There’s someone following me.

“I’m sorry,” he says weakly. “I didn’t realise.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she points out. “It’s just - society. Made me paranoid. Cos every time a man I don’t know talks to me, or looks at me weird, I have to think - am I prepared to deal with this. Whatever ‘this’ is. Every man is sort of guilty until proven innocent, or else I’m being stupid, but I haven’t - I haven’t seen many of the guilty ones, I guess. And now…”

And now she has to look at every man and consider him guilty until proven innocent of looking at her like an object. She has to consider him guilty until proven innocent of wanting to-

“I’ll be okay,” she says. “Just gotta adjust. There’s nothing to do, is there, so… I just have to deal with it.”

It harks back to what Lizzie said yesterday: the choice is between shutting yourself in your room or learning to deal with it.

“That’s not right,” Dan says.

Phil closes her eyes. “I guess not. It’s not my fault, is it? If it’s just… my skin, my hair. Just the image in the mirror, not actually me. But that’s life.”

***

Four weeks later and AmazingPhil is back in full force with a new video. Her hair is straight and shiny, unapologetically so, and she’s as witty and quirky and confident as ever, but for some reason what catches Dan’s attention is a gap on her bedroom wall. He stares at the patch of white, only half-listening to Phil’s light-hearted apology for being away so long, wondering what it is that seems different. That patch of wall didn’t used to be bare, he’s sure of it, but what was there before?

It’s not until Phil says “and today’s ‘draw Phil in disguise’ is!” that he realises that Phil has taken her mirror down.

fin

************************************************************************************ 

Author's notes: I have not looked up ‘snowwhitekinks.net’ to see if it exists; I made it up for the purposes of this fic. However, this was based on real events, just a different kink forum. Yay. Was a lot of fun, that.

I’ve played havoc with the canon timeline here, but here’s the major change which makes most of it fall into place: Phil started YouTube about a year later in this universe than the real Phil did. The other major change I made to reality was moving Charlie from Greater London to Manchester; please just assume he moved at some point because it’s cheaper in Manchester than London.

Dan’s university friends and acquaintances are figments of my imagination; the two girls are based on those in his video, but we know absolutely nothing about them beyond that one of them might be called Ellie or Lizzie, so consider them OCs.

CALENDRIER DES OPERATIONS

Voici le calendrier de toutes les opérations de rentrée depuis le jour de votre arrivée jusqu’à votre première journée d’enseignement…

And the next.

VOS CONTACTS EN FRANCE

Vous devez absolument contacter votre établissement avant votre arrivée en France. Vous trouverez ci-dessous les coordonnées de votre ‘Professeur Coordonnateur’ (la personne à contacter dans votre établissement)...

And there, for the first time, he sees the name of the school he’ll be working at. It’s a ‘collège’, roughly equivalent to a secondary school or middle school, so the kids will be between 11 and 15, and it’s in a town he’s never heard of and which he’ll have to google, somewhere vaguely near Nice.

What’s scariest isn’t the amount of massively important information, or even the fact that most of this massively important information is in French; Phil’s good at French, he can read all these functional documents with no difficulty, and even if he wouldn’t have known to use the word ‘opérations’ and has never even seen ‘calendrier’, he can immediately guess that a ‘calendrier des opérations’ is an itinerary. What’s scariest is just the tiniest of things, and it’s they’ve called him ‘vous’.

No one has ever ‘vousvoyé’ Phil. He’s never really spent much time in France, unlike most of his classmates (he did holiday there once when he was about six, and his proudest moment had been asking for ‘un, deux, trois croissants s’il vous plaît!’ in a little boulangerie) so he’s never had to be a customer in French, or a colleague, or a stranger even. The only role he has ever had within the French language is that of a student. His school teachers called him ‘tu’, his university lecturers and supervisors call him ‘tu’, his classmates call him ‘tu’. The only time he’s ever been ‘vous’ has been… Well. The only person who has ever called him ‘vous’ is Dan.

“It’s a bit… formal, though, isn’t it?” Dan says. “Like you said, you’re not much older than me. It’d be weird calling you the French equivalent of ‘sir’ the whole time.”

Phil feels a brief flicker of guilt, remembering how he insisted that Dan use ‘vous’, even if just to practise the conjugation and be ready to address an examiner correctly. He hopes he hasn’t screwed up Dan’s understanding of the tu/vous distinction forever by making him use - well, the wrong one. They’re so close now - they should have gone from ‘vous’ to ‘tu’ in no time at all, and he certainly should never have called Dan ‘vous’. Even if underneath everything, he always knew this day was coming.

The day Dan told his mother that he was going to do Geography at university rather than Law had been the first time that Dan had spent the night at Phil’s house. They ate a whole tub of ice cream (which was actually Carrie’s, but Phil replaced it the next day), watched Howl’s Moving Castle, and said nothing of any importance until three o’clock in the morning, when they were both in Phil’s bed, and Phil was already more than half asleep.

“Wish I knew how long it would take her to get over it,” Dan muttered.

Phil shuffled a bit. “But she will get over it.”

“Course she will. Just, you know. Hopefully within the next decade.”

“She will,” Phil repeated.

Dan ignored him. “Thanks for not kicking me out.”

“Wouldn’t. You’re warm and snuggly. Like a cat.”

That made Dan laugh a bit, and he curled a little closer. “Phil…”

“Ouais?”

Of course it was the accidental French which broke the moment, and Phil had been glad for it. He couldn’t get any closer. He couldn’t do that. They’d gone to sleep soon after, and ever since had existed in a sort of limbo, stuck between friends and -

He looks back at the calendrier. His first training day is October 1st. He’ll have to arrive in France at least a week beforehand to sort out a French bank account, phone number, somewhere to live; he’ll have to meet up with the ‘professeur coordinateur’, the teacher who will be his mentor at the school he’ll be working at. He’ll have to try and make some friends. He’ll have to get used to being ‘vous’, to being a teacher and a stranger to everyone.

For the past five months, since he sent in his application form to the British Council asking to be a teaching assistant in France for his obligatory year abroad, Phil has been aware that this was going to happen. He hasn’t really been planning for it, but then until he opened this letter he hadn’t known where on earth - well, where in France he’d be going. He’d expressed a preference for Nice, but mainly because of the sunshine more than anything else - he doesn’t know the region at all - and there was no reason for them to give him his first choice of region. His application form probably hadn’t been the best in the world - the only real thing he had to recommend himself was his tutoring job with Dan.

It’s at this point that he puts his head into his hands, and that’s how Carrie finds him when she barges into his room ten minutes later.

“Phil, sweetheart, I haven’t heard a peep from you all day. Are you okay?” she asks.

Phil nods. “I just heard from the British Council scheme. I got a school in Hyères - I haven’t heard of it, but it’s near Nice, apparently. Um. And, yeah.”

“But that’s brilliant! Everything’s nicer in Nice,” she sings at him. He stares blankly, not recognising the song, and she rolls her eyes. “It’s from The Boyfriend. We put it on in first year?”

“I think I escaped that one,” he says.

“So have you googlemapped it yet? And Wikipedia’d it?”

Upon realising that he hasn’t, Carrie happily commandeers his laptop to look up his home for the next scholastic year. He has to type the name of the town for her - given its pronunciation, he can’t really blame her - and she coos happily over its location.

“You’re barely any distance from Saint Tropez! And look, Hee-airs -”

“Ee-air.”

“- whatever - is the oldest resort on the French Riviera. The French Riviera! You’re going to be living on the Côte d’Azur!”

And he is excited, of course he is. Or he will be, anyway. It’s just - it’s just that -

“I’m gonna miss you,” Carrie says.

Yeah. It’s just that this.

“I’ll miss you too,” he says. “And everyone. And when I get back everyone will already have graduated. And then there’s-”

His throat closes around Dan’s name.

“We’ll visit you,” Carrie says, as if it’s that easy. As if every one of Phil’s friends has the money and the free time to just hop on a plane, spend a few days knocking around the South of France. As if they won’t all have moved on in a year’s time, found new friends, left him with no one to live with in his last year at uni… He’ll essentially be putting his life in England on hold, whilst everyone else forges straight ahead.

His phone buzzes with a text.

boo! i am so so sick of revision, i know you have no lectures, let’s hang out. x

They’ve been in stalemate for months. Phil knows that. He also knows it’s his fault, because he’s always known this was coming and so he’s never dared to try and move forwards.

For the first time, he wishes he had done the complete opposite, because now the entire past year just feels like so much wasted time.

***

2010

They felt they shouldn’t have to ask ‘what do you want for Christmas?’ That was a question for those who didn’t know each other, or those who had known each other so long as to forget to learn more.

They both ended up getting each other the same CD, and they laughed about it over Skype.

“Bit stupid, having two of them in the same flat,” said Dan.

Phil blinked. “Are you asking me to move in with you?”

“Well, I’ve sort of already moved in to your flat, haven’t I?”

“I guess you have.”

That was the real gift.

2011

Phil edited the Christmas special of the Super Amazing Project. Dan put his clips onto Dropbox; they had ten shared accounts under various email addresses because 2GB free of charge was rarely enough for them. Phil found the clip hidden in a folder meant for the news segment.

“Hey. Merry Christmas, you. Hope you’re having a good time with your family. Just wanted to tell you I love you. Have fun editing this monster on your own! See you soon.”

It was only a few seconds, but it put a smile on Phil’s face for the rest of the day.

2012

“What do you want for Christmas?” Dan asked Phil one day.

Phil frowned. “Um. Really I just want the new Nintendo.”

“You’re useless, you are.”

“You’re the one who bought yourself a load of new clothes last week. Who buys themselves stuff in December?”

The teasing was still a little bitter, laced still with the acidity which had characterised their last year together. Dan didn’t respond, and for a few minutes they sat in silence.

“Why don’t we buy ourselves the Nintendo? Together?”

The question was both out of the blue and the perfect solution. They still spent Christmas apart.

2013

Christmas apart once again, and this time it feels like more of a chore. For the first time it seems an oddity to be parted for the holidays; for the first time they start to wonder when the word ‘family’ became so much more inclusive.

They have their own celebrations before Dan goes off to India and Phil ‘oop north’. They invite Bryony and Wirrow round for a party, and they give each other tiny little fun things, a lego mug and a novelty arty toy, because by now they know there’s nothing more they really need from each other.

2014