hey! so this is an idea i had a while back while listening to, you guess it, muse. i was listening to absolution and just kinda realised how each song stood so well alone and how kinda nice it would be to write fics based off them. so i decided to do it, and this is the result. i guess this is gonna be a bit like the phan a-z but with an album instead, yknow? each of the fics will be stand alone and have nothing in common, apart from that they centre around dan and phil.
summary: Phil is drafted by the army to fight, to leave Dan behind.
intro/hysteria
"I have to."
"No. No you don't."
Phil laughs softly, fingers knotting in Dan's hair and gently tousling through. "I do, though. I'm of age and healthy. I have to fight." He brings Dan's lips to his own, kissing the frown tenderly, curving his own lips up.
Dan drags himself away. "You can't get out of this by kissing me, you know?" Phil opens his mouth to protest, but Dan hushes him. "Why don't you say you're gay or some shit? Fake your death, you're fatally ill."
"We're not in the middle ages, the army aren't actually allowed to be homophobic anymore. Plus, they have full access to my hospital files. Can't fake it. Can't even refuse on 'moral reasons' anymore. I don't want to go either."
Dan grumbles and kisses him until they almost both forget.
The goodbye kills him. It feels too permanent; their final kiss too final. He knows it's just in case Phil doesn't come back.
He watches Phil climb aboard the ship and waves until after he can't see Phil anymore, until Phil is just a speck among the other soldiers on the deck. Until Phil is no longer in his life.
Maybe Dan worries too much. He curses himself sometimes, curses his faulty heart for stopping him fighting, curses Phil for being healthy. It's fucking stupid, he knows it, but it's what he does.
It's unhealthy the amount of time he spends worrying about Phil, from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep, but he can't stop. His mind doesn't quite function right until their fortnightly phone call; before which he has to live with the constant paranoia that Phil is injured, lying somewhere on a battlefield, bleeding to death.
Every minute of his life is reduced to nothing but another sixty seconds of breathing. He feels futile, oddly powerless over his whole life, like there is no purpose to his existence. There is nothing he can do to help, so he sits and watches the news with his daily allowance of electricity and then cooks his tea with his gas ration and then tries to sleep.
Sleeping is the fucking worst. He dreams of Phil's face, blood-streaked and pale, eyes telescopic and dull, staring straight ahead. He dreams that when Phil comes back he's a changed man and no longer loves him, has moved on. And the worst, the worst thing possible because it's something that could actually happen: he dreams that an officer knocks at his door and delivers the news, pats him on the shoulder and then parts with the words: "His body is being flown over. I'm very sorry for your loss." He always wakes up sobbing.
Phil delivers the news a week later: his phone time is being cut. That means one call every month, and Phil's already nabbed the 1st of each month. Phil's tone brightens, though, when he moves on.
"My regiment are being withdrawn next month. That means I can come home and then I don't have to go back! I'm done, Dan!"
Dan's breath catches and every fibre of his body itches to kiss Phil, but he's hundreds of miles away. "Fuck. I love you so much." He breathes, "stay safe until then, you're about to get cut off. I love you." He hears Phil form his reply just as the line goes dead.
That night the bombs rain over London. Dan hides in the cellar and worries about Phil, thinks about how the noises from outside are probably everyday for him and cries himself to sleep.
In the morning Dan can smell smoke, but it's from miles away, drifting from the deep flames somewhere over the rooftops. Dan doesn't know for sure what's burning and he doesn't want to know. There are sirens all morning and for the most part he resists turning on the news until he worries about Phil.
He spends the next four hours moving all of his and Phil's important items into the cellar for protection. Then he makes tea and eats it in his makeshift den downstairs. Before he falls asleep he flicks through their photo albums, back when times were easier and they were together, and laughs at the pictures. There's a strange burning sensation in his heart, a heavy weight of melancholy and as he opens the next album it gets worse.
The first picture is them together, huddled under a cherry tree, Dan's head rested on Phils chest. Dan still remembers that day, remembers how nervous Phil was, how delighted his parents were at his new boyfriend. That was the day, when he thinks back, that he realised he loved Phil. Dan stares at Phil's easygoing, gentle smile and wonders whether he ever looks back; whether Phil ever thinks back to the days when they were first falling in love. He hopes he does.
Dan sleeps with a weight on his mind that he can't identify with any emotion but dread.
Something hammering on his door pulls him from sleep.
He pulls on a hoodie and some shoes and trudges upstairs, trying vainly to pat his hair down. When he opens the door his stomach swoops at Phil's face, smudged with tears and bloody. There's still a helmet perched on his head and his hair is matted to his forehead with sweat, mud streaked along his jawbone. Dan sees the wound on his chest, the thick scarlet leaking from the gunshot wound and he knows. Phil leans forward and kisses him softly, strokes a line down his cheek and then the apparition fades, yet Dan knows what he saw, what he felt.
He walks to the television, turning it on to the news channel and waits. He is numb.
There's another knock at the door and an officer delivers the speech, hands him a file with Phil's possessions. "We're sorry for your loss," he says, "he was truly a good man and he loved you very, very much."
Dan reads the letter in the file, weeps at the irony of it all. Phil would have been coming home tomorrow. He curses the world and god knows what for being so fucking cruel, for snatching his Phil away from him. Life is fucking unfair, he knows that, but he didn't realise to what extent.
While he cries the news carries on playing, and the newsreader with with her monotone voice almost speaks directly to him.
"...Identidied as Phillip Lester. His family have been told."