Tumblr (where you can read my fics first since I tend to forget to post here): still-in-blossom
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Something has always separated speech from action in Dan's brain; like two rooms divided only by a thin wall, both fully functional if it hadn't been for the fact that they forgot to connect the two rooms with a door. It was a faulty design that could be held responsible for countless ruined opportunities in his life. Like the time in secondary school when his friend and moreover crush had timidly asked him if maybe, possibly he fancied her back? Something within him had chanted yes yes yes, finally, yes – and yet he had spluttered something about liking her as a friend and promptly witnessed the hope in her eyes crumble to pieces.
"I want to be an actor" he confined in people that seemed trustworthy enough to deserve that slice of truth, or those simply nice enough to not laugh at such suggestion, but he still found himself doing absolutely nothing to fulfil that dream. He's an actor who doesn't act; he merely dreams about it. Big and colourfully, he spends so much time dreaming about it he simply hasn't got the time, nor energy, left to take the necessary first steps. It's the reason he is pushing himself further onto a path, a career choice that doesn't feel right in his bones, but it sounds about right when his tongue forms the words. He gets nods, pats on the backs, encouraging smiles. Sure, it makes his body ache, like it's already being weighted down with the weight of the law books and the responsibility, but the announcement gets him too much confirmation to fully take it into account. So he keeps forming the world "law" in conversation after conversation, feeling as if he's carving into a stone slab with no room for modification.
It's definitely the reason why it had felt so easy to say the words "I really want to kiss you. A lot," to Phil with hours worth of travel distance separating them. And so hard to do, well, anything when he's standing in front of him, undoubtedly real and undeniably beautiful.
For some reason that would forever be beyond Dan, Phil managed to become that opening between those two rooms. From the very first time Dan laid out the speech about a pending career in law, instead of the perpetual hums of appreciation Dan was met with the words "it doesn't sound like it's something you really want to do, though." And just like that, Phil took a sledgehammer to that wall, and for every time it was built up, he would reopen it again with a patience that never seemed to falter.
That first weekend together they got caught in the rain. They weren't even anywhere near Phil's house when the first drops fell, so they didn't even bother to pick up the pace, sure to be soaked within minutes anyway. Dan's smile was definitely dopey and too broad when Phil reached to intertwine their fingers, carefully thumbing over the back of Dan's hand. When they eventually got through the door, giddy and having childishly laughed about the impressive pools of water that were already forming on the floor around the both of them, Phil threw a thick jumper over at Dan. And despite how intimate it felt – Dan had never been one to be careless with things that had the slightest bit of romantic undertone – he wanted nothing more than to pull the jumper over his head, hoping it didn't come straight from the washing machine, and revel in the feeling of being cared for. He instead found himself explaining he didn't need to borrow one, with an explanatory nod to a dry jumper of his own, all the while he cursed himself for the contradictive words that fell out of his mouths at all time.
"Don't be silly, this one's much warmer." Phil said. And that was that.
Later, when borrowing items of clothing was no way near the most intimate thing he had with Phil, Dan came to realise how many aspects there really were to enjoy about sharing clothes. There was the feeling of carrying a little bit of someone else with you wherever you went, and not caring in the slightest about the level of sappiness you reached just forming that thought alone. There was the idea that you'd settled in a place in someone's life where nothing is off limits; not the favourite shirts they wouldn't loan someone else, and not even the rattiest ones the actual owner itself wouldn't be caught dead in. Whatever it was that Dan picked out of Phil's drawer on the days where he felt he needed that extra bit of pick-me-up, Phil would only blink at him when Dan nervously fiddled with the material while almost expecting Phil to demand it back. His smile would grow and be accompanied by a comment about how good it looked on Dan, voice heavy with adoration that formed a pool of emotions deep in Dan's stomach.
And if Phil ever caught on to how Dan sometimes deliberately dressed in clothes too thin for the temperature in hope of being bundled into a University of York hoodie, he never said anything.
In their first months, those filled with goodbyes that kept getting harder and harder to press out between tight set jaws, Dan came to cling to those stupid clothes swaps. It took a while for him to catch onto Phil, but eventually he realised that when he settled on the train once again, it always was clad in one of the shirts that Phil had some kind of connection to that wasn't just threads and seams. It had a warm feeling spread through him, on an abstract level, where he wasn't sure why it mattered, only that it did. And when Phil kissed Dan breathless at the station yet again, hands fisted into the jumper that was his that Dan wore over the shirt that didn't originally belong to Dan, there was no stopping the shiver that rippled over Dan.
"Do you want to borrow my jacket as well?" Phil breathed, mistaking the cold as the cause and stepping impossibly closer. Dan doesn't need to; the nights aren't that cold and he's always been warm-blooded. But he wants to, wants to walk through the door at home with a jacket his mother have never before seen. Want to be engulfed in warmth that doesn't only come from the multiple layers. And with Phil's hands all over him, the door is wide open, and the empathic yes can travel freely through his mind and find its way out in the open.