My day started out how every other day had started out this summer. It was probably somewhere around 8:30 in the morning on a typical Wednesday in July and the first of the standard four phone calls from my mother to wake me up again had just started. I was more awake than usual which was saddening. I wasn't too terribly sad though, seeing how VidCon started tomorrow and I was anxious to hear from Troye or at least see a fan sighting of him because the little shit just disappeared last week after changing his profile picture on all of his social media to three yellow petals with a white background. What are you planning, Troye... I snapped back to reality when the music from my phone floated back into my head. I had forgotten that it was ringing. I may have been more awake than usual, but I was definitely not fully awake.
I sat up and located my phone, answering it with a soft utterance of the word, "Hi."
"Oh, you're up," my soft-spoken mother replied, shock evident in her voice.
"Yeah, I'm up, Mom."
"Just, by the sounds of it. Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were up and moving. Do you remember everything that you have to do today?"
"Yeah, Mom." That was a blatant lie. I had no idea, but I could figure that out when I was more awake. I knew that if I answered the phone, I wouldn't get the next three calls from her because she would think that I was awake. She had this habit calling me at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, and eleven to make sure that I was awake. Each missed call would be accompanied by a frustrated voicemail, her tone becoming angrier with each one.
"Okay, sweetie. Have a good day and call me if you need anything."
"I will, Mom. See you tonight."
"Alright, kiddo. I love you."
"Love you too, Mom."
As I hung up by hitting end, then tossing my phone to my carpeted floor, I yawned and nestled further into my nest consisting of 5 pillows and my down comforter. The phone had landed with a soft thud and probably slid across the floor a little. I was pretty sure that the hems of my sweatpants were somewhere around my knees, but that's what I got for wearing oversized clothing to bed. My hoodie on the other hand, was still situated on me like it had been when I went to sleep about 3 or 4 hours ago. The sleeves still covered my hands in the sweater-paws Dan Howell fashion and the bottom of it went just past my butt.
I was comfortable, and I really didn't want to get up. I knew that I had to go on a run today if anything. But I just wasn't feeling it. I mean, I still had six and a half months before I got shipped out, right? I had time...
As I was about to fall back asleep (which was no huge feat considering the sunlight streaming in through the window perpendicular to my bed and hitting my face), I heard my phone buzz loudly.
"Fuckin' hell..." I muttered. "Stupid thing must be up against my clarinet case or something..."
With a groan, I sat up, disentangled myself from the comforter and placed my feet on the floor because obviously the world wanted me to be awake right now. As I stood, my sweatpants, which had indeed been squished up to my knees, slid to their full length. They were too long by at least six inches, and the hems pooled gently around my feet. I reached my hands above my head and closed my eyes, stretching. There were certain drawbacks to sleeping in a ball. My back popped a couple times like it usually did and I sighed, letting my arms fall to their resting position. My forearms each made rather loud contact with my hips. I bent to pick my phone up off the ground and it had, in fact, been pressed up against the sticker-covered clarinet case.
I hit the end button and watched the screen light up, revealing my abstract purple lock screen background along with the time. It was 8:47. I saw the little yellow envelope symbol indicating that I had at least one message. I ran my thumb over the screen, flinging the display to the upper right hand corner of the screen. A half second later, a keypad appeared for me to type my passcode in. I quickly did so and my home screen appeared. I smiled just like I did every time I saw it. It was the first selfie that my best friend and I had ever taken and we looked ridiculous. Granted, we both were attractive, however... The amount of pink that we were both wearing was excessive.
My old glasses were slightly too low on my face, I noticed. Then again, that wasn't anything too unusual. Sat in the band like we usually were, we had used pink eyeshadow to write the number 15 on our faces, one number on each cheek. I could see the large maroon bass drum in the background. I wore a necklace that she had given me 5 years ago that had black and pink eighth notes and treble clefs on either side of a guitar. We each had a pink hair band around our heads, and the simple hot pink one that matched hers was around my neck. The one around my head was metallic pink and silver, and I could not for the life of me remember where I got it. All I knew is that I really wanted the matching one that was teal and purple to come back from whatever depths that it had disappeared to. We wore matching pink shirts that read "TH15 IS OUR HOUSE" on the front with "SENIORS '15" on the back. Color Wars at our school was an intense thing, and our color was obviously pink that year.
It was hard to believe that this picture was 10 months old and I was an official graduate of high school. Most of my friends were getting ready for college, and then there was me. I was one of the three kids in my class going into the armed forces. I was going to be a Nuclear Electrical Technician in the Navy. Weird to think that little old me from west bubblefuck upstate New York where nothing ever happened was going to be someone who could help change the world.
I shook my head and realized what I had unlocked my phone to do. Check my messages. There was a red bubble above the green message button that had the number nine in it. Well, at least I like the number nine. It was probably mostly Twitter notifications, there was no way I was this popular this early in the morning. I tapped the icon and sighed. Yep, just as I suspected, there were 8 messages from Twitter. I quickly flicked through each individual message and hit the back button to go back into my inbox. I tapped the 'More' button in the lower left hand side of the screen and slowly scrolled through the options until I found the 'Go to Vault' one and tapped it. My phone asked me for the vault code and I quickly entered it. It took me to my vault inbox and I saw a message from one of my younger friends, claiming she didn't want to be awake this early. I rotated my phone to the left and slid it open, touching the 'Reply' option on the screen. I quickly typed out my response, telling her that I didn't want to be awake either, hit send, slid the phone shut and tossed it onto the bed, the pink faces of my best friend and I smiling up at me. I had a basic phone. It was touch screen, but it slid to have a keyboard. It could call, text, take pictures/videos and that was it. I didn't need a smartphone though, I was perfectly content with the basic phone that I had.
I turned on my heel and walked out of my cluttered room, not before grabbing my glasses from on top of my closed dark blue laptop on my even more cluttered desk. I was heading for the kitchen on the opposite end of the house to grab a pear. If I was going to run, I was not doing it on a completely empty stomach nor with a lingering feeling of nausea. The nausea wasn't too awful bad considering it was ten minutes to nine at this point, but it was still there. Besides, I guess I was kind of used to it, considering it had been a pretty much daily occurrence for the past two years if I woke up before ten. Which was almost every day. I grabbed the pear and walked back to my room to change into my running gear and felt a sudden but persistent pounding in my head.
"Ugh... Don't tell me I have a headache this early in the morning. That's bullshit..." I said before taking a bite of my pear. It made a crunch as my teeth sunk into it, clearly it wasn't ripe yet. That wasn't going to stop me from it eating it though. I enjoyed pears, be they ripe or not quite.
I realized that I spoke aloud and shook my head. I didn't know why I kept doing that, there was no one here to listen and understand me. Both of my parents were at work, I had no siblings, and the two cats couldn't understand a word that I said. Although, it seemed typical that I would randomly voice my thoughts, it was too quiet in the house.
I got back to my room and pulled out my running clothes- a tighter pair of sweatpants that weren't as bulky as the ones that I was wearing (to be honest they were a little form fitting) and one of my nine plain grey 'wife-beater' tank tops. I finished the pear rather quickly and regretfully got changed out of my comfortable pajamas and into my running gear. I put on a pair of grey socks and sat on my tan carpeted floor to put my white and purple Nike shoes on.
I was in the middle of tying the second shoe when the headache that I successfully ignored until now became about ten times worse. I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, feeling my glasses shift repeatedly as I moved my fingers in a circular motion trying to relieve myself of this now killer headache. With a sigh, I gave up and finished tying my shoe.
I gave a grunt of exertion as I stood up, head still pounding. I should probably reconsider going out on this run but I was already dressed and there really needed to be a limit on how lazy I could be. My vision all of a sudden became blurry and my brow furrowed.
"What the fuck..." I muttered before I felt myself start to fall and everything went completely black.
Phil was in the living room making us some lunch while I cleaned up the office from filming a video. Not just any video. It was March 26th and today was the day that the trailer for mine and Phil's book would be uploaded on my channel. He and I had just finished filming a video that explained things about it, and I was so excited. I couldn't wait to see how everyone reacted to it. It was going to be fantastic.
The majority of our gear was deconstructed and put back where it was supposed to be when we weren't using it when I heard something fall in the lounge with a soft thump and I stood up straighter. Had Phil dropped something? I walked out to check on him, sticking my head into the lounge, only to find the room empty.
"What?" I said softly. I stepped further into the room, and froze as I saw something on the ground. Not something, someone.
There was a body on the floor in the middle of our lounge.
"PHIL!" I yelled out the doorway.
"Dan? Is everything alright?" I heard his faint response gradually grow in volume as he walked out of the kitchen. His face was slightly contorted in worry as he stood in front of me. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"
I took a slow breath and looked into his eyes. "There's a body on the floor of our lounge."
/ / / / / / / / / ~ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \
I hope you all enjoyed my first posted fanfiction. I've written stories before, so this isn't the first time that I've written something, I've just never had the courage to actually post anything. XD
I'm really excited for all of you to read this, I'm quite proud of it. Expect more chapters to be up soon, but don't expect a specific updating schedule (not unless everyone really likes it haha).
Cover art is my own.
Shoutout to tumblr user humhowellelujah for being my beta reader!
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