2000 words Phanfiction written at 3.30 am when I have lectures at 9 am and an end term paper which is screaming for attention. Because, priorities.
Title and the few sentences in italics are lyrics from the beautiful song Disease by The Ark.
Warnings: The usual, which is that English isn't my first language (please bear with me). Swearing. Possible trigger (though probably not, I just get anxious): illness.
He had always been dancing on the edge of things, for as long as Dan had known him. Too close, for Dan's liking. Always testing how far you could take things, and then make sure to take it just a littler further that point. Because he could. Leaning over the railing of the bridge a little too much – not because he wanted to die, he'd explain, but because he wanted to live. Phil was the definition of reckless in Dan's book, and the single most intriguing person he had met in the 17 years his life spanned. For the first couple of months he constantly had the sort of sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, the same one you experience when you're at the highest point of a roller coaster and know that there is only one way to go, and that way is down. Phil would laugh at him, and if it had been anyone else he would feel hurt, made fun of. But this was Phil, older, sexier and more exciting than anyone Dan had ever dreamed of being with. And slowly, so slowly he almost couldn't make out the change himself, he began to approach the edge himself. Accompanied by a steady arm around his waist and eyes that shone of a million unexplored dreams and promised to take him with.
They were well into their third month together when Dan finally managed to materialize those words that plagued him. They plagued him because he knew that they were words you didn't ask someone who was searching for he next kick with almost manic resolution.
"What is this? That we have, I mean. What.. are we?"
They were spread across the slightly-too-narrow bed of Phil's, post sex entwined and breaths and heartbeat not yet settled down. Dan closed his eyes waiting for the answer. Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. There were no we, of course. He expected Phil to withdraw, to distance himself and stop running lazy circles with his index finger on Dan's hipbone. He didn't.
"This? This is sex, at its best." he smirked, unable to take the question wholeheartedly serious despite to the severity of the questioner. "In a bigger perspective… This is living. You're only just getting the hang of it, kid."
And then, like he senses that Dan's throat tightened and that a small but apparent knot of disappointment had settled somewhere inside of him, Phil added:
"It doesn't mean that this doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean that you don't mean anything. But let's not go down that road, Dan. I like it here."
By the fifth month, Dan had broken out of the bubble he'd always experienced between him and the rest of the world. To his parents' great distress, it seemed. While his father was somewhat calm about the change in his son's behaviour, his mother tried with all possible approaches to bring back the son that had caused her the absolute minimum of grief you could expect out of a teenager. She tried grounding him for not coming home on Saturday nights. She tried reasoning with him about why it was important not to let his grades slip now, when he'd spent all his life struggling to be at the top. She even resorted to beg him to come home, one of the times where he'd spent four nights in a row at Phil's apartment that had slightly stained carpets and small speckles of mould on the bathroom floor but still felt a hundred times more like home than the sterile walls of his own home. Eventually she'd realised that no matter what she did, she kept driving him further into his arms. That 21 year old man that was stealing away the teenage son she knew and replaced him with someone else. Someone who had more life shining out of his brown eyes, but also had an edge to him that she didn't recognize and which scared her to no end when she was lying sleepless at night. It couldn't be right, she thought. But had to admit defeat.
On the sixth, going on the seventh month the initial crush that had been residing in Dan and, though he tried to hide it away somewhere deep down, had turned into something else. Something more calm, but something that also wasn't as easy to brush aside. It prepossessed him in ways he'd never experienced before, and perhaps ways that only the first love that had made it through the crush stage and out of the other side stronger than before could. One night (or was it to be considered morning, when it was 6 am and they had not yet fallen asleep from their second round that night, and they were so, so tired but also had gone past the stage where you could get a proper coherent sleep) he discovered he didn't have the energy or will to keep it bottled up anymore. And so he cried into the crook of Phil's neck silently. Scared, like you are when you for the first time knock down all walls in front of someone and spill tears all over another person's naked skin. The physical nudity had long ago started to feel carefree after every patch of his skin being touched, kissed and loved by Phil. This nudity was new and scary and so he hid in that space where shoulder meets neck and spilled his tears where they couldn't be seen but only felt.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Phil. I know I wasn't supposed to. I didn't mean to, but I love you."
And Phil just brought him closer, holding him so tight he would have realised it hurt a bit if he'd had any space left for that kind of thinking, which he of course hadn't.
"I know. I know. I didn't mean to either."
It was their eleventh month when they were sitting on hard chairs in an insipid room. They were less than a month away from Dan's 18th now. It had seemed like a big deal, somehow. Perhaps it was some childlike hope on Dan's side that people would take him, them seriously once he passed that milestone and entered the adult world he imagined would magically become available for him from that day on. But in that moment, this was probably the last thing on his mind. In fact that thought wouldn't ever return to his mind again after that day. 18th stopped mattering. A lot of things stopped mattering. This three-letter combination started to matter a hell of a lot more than anything else, that day.
"I assume you two have…"
"He's my boyfriend." Dan's voice was hoarse, rough, he didn't recognize it himself. "Yes."
"Ever unprotected?"
"…yes."
"How old are you, Mr Howell?"
"17." Going on 18, but that didn't matter anymore. The way her eyebrows knitted together suggested she had something to say about his age, this situation, his boyfriend sitting in the room next to this when really Dan had never before needed him more by his side than in this moment.
He didn't have it. For some reason he would never understand and never forgive the universe for, he didn't and Phil did. God knows how, because cautious was the absolute last thing they've been. The history books and the sex ed had rooted a terrible fear in him, along with so many others, of this godforsaken disease. Back then, when his sexuality had seemed like the end of the world that had been just another part of the shame. A punishment, uneducated and hateful people had said through the years. But when he left that shame behind, he had left parts of that fear behind as well. It was something abstract, something terrible that happened to someone else and not him, not 17 year old Dan and not 21 year old on-top-of-the-world Phil. Except it did.
"I want you out! Take your stupid stuff and go home."
Phil's eyes were rimmed with red and then underneath the red a deeper shade of blue standing out against his otherwise pale skin. Still, he hadn't cried during the two days Dan had been by his side since that last hospital visit. But he probably hadn't slept either, and now it was like he'd woken up from a dreamlike state and he was collecting all of Dan's things in a fury, throwing them either at him or just as close to the front door he'd manage. It took Dan all the physical strength he had in his slender body to hold Phil and not let go through his furious attempt of pushing him of. His fighting subsided first. Then the screaming. And then it was just a shaking body and a constant stream of words in a broken voice left.
"Don't touch me. I'm never touching you again. Leave. Get out. Just fucking go. Don't fucking touch me I can't ever fucking touch you again."
But he did. Because Dan refused to leave and beyond all his fear, Phil didn't want him to either. They worked on accepting it, a little bit at the time and with daily backlashes. But they tried. It was still the same horrible disease, but this was well into the 21st century and it was different now, wasn't it? The doctors and the medicines and the research and it all improved with every day, didn't it? Dan caught himself thinking that I believe I could get through it; I can even get into it. For Phil, he could do it. He was staying and the reality was that they would still fuck, this was a poison that seeped into everything they shared and every aspect of their lives, but they also realised they couldn't stop living. Phil had just showed him how to, and they couldn't just admit defeat. But gone was the careless Phil, the one that didn't care about but's and what if's.
Sometimes Dan just wanted to forget. But then he'd open a drawer, and it didn't matter if it only contained fucking utensils or videogames – there'd be a couple of condoms thrown in there. Because they could never, ever forget. They could never be careless, or lazy, or stupid. And again, he thought, that he could go through this too. It was impending doom. When was the day when he wouldn't be as lucky, or (this he didn't want to think about but couldn't not) the day when it was really going to start to take a toll on Phil? He'd read the horror stories. Belly aches, hair falls off. Skin gets covered with liver spots. Blood in the mouth, and a racking cough. Head gets filled with feverish thoughts.
Phil's words were no longer furious, he wasn't screaming. Instead they came soft, fell out of his mouth and onto Dan's skin after sex. Sometimes before, conflicted and delivered through moans and kisses.
"You should get out. I'm diseased."
Usually Dan settled with tightening his grip around the other male. But once he dared to say what had been on his tongue since pretty much that day in the waiting room.
"If there is disease in you, I want to have that disease too."
That discussion ended with him promising Phil never to utter these words again.
He never did. But he still meant them, even more so for every day that passed. And then one day, when Phil was out having coffee with some old friend from school, because life didn't stop and people still had coffee and talked about the weather, apparently. Then he picked up the piece of paper with a needle stuck through it that he'd nicked from his mother's sewing accessories just days earlier. He'd seen this on television; on ridiculous daytime soaps where everything was dramatic and nothing realistic. But when he poked holes in every single condom that Phil had placed around the apartment, he wasn't being an obsessive boyfriend who wanted to trap their girlfriend. He was just doing the one thing he could do other than waiting for the inevitable day when either something went wrong despite Phil's efforts to make sure that didn't happen, or the day Phil forced him to leave – which ever would happen first.
His mother had feared the pull the older man had on her son. Perhaps rightly so, perhaps a mother's intuition really is flawless though no child would ever recognize that. Dan kept his promise to never again speak of his want to not helplessly and wrongfully healthy stand by and see Phil's life be clouded by the hideous disease. But the promise didn't stop him from thinking it, while he methodically poked the needle through the plastic wrappers.
If there is disease in you, I want to have that disease too. 'Cause if you die, then I should die beside you.