"What is with the stickers? Why do you put them fucking everywhere?"
Phil's thumb was smoothing out another cat sticker on Dan's arm; Dan pulled away, frowning. Phil ignored the protest, reaching to smooth it out again. Dan yanked his arm back, hitting the keyboard by accident. He groaned in frustration. "Seriously, stop that." He went to take it off, but at Phil's disappointment and dejection, he couldn't bring himself to remove it right in front of him. He huffed. "Why are you doing that?"
"You seem stressed." Phil leaned with his elbows on the desk. Dan sighed; he wasn't wrong. "I came in after I heard what sounded like something breaking," meaning the mouse Dan had slammed down on the desk. "I thought you could use some cheering up. Kittens and stickers cheer people up –kitten stickers should do twice as well!"
Dan laughed humorlessly at that, and swatted his boyfriend's hand away when he tried to put another sticker on the monitor. "Stop that. I have a lot of work to get done and I'm tired." He just wanted to sleep. His eyes were watering with exhaustion and anxiety.
Phil hated to see Dan stressed like this. His viewers could be too demanding sometimes, and Dan –bless his soul— always wanted to please them. "Want me to take over? Or make you some coffee to keep you alert and working properly?"
"No, I want you to put the fucking stickers away." He winced; he hadn't meant to snap, and thought to apologize, but Phil was already slinking out of the room. He just hoped Phil would be as understanding as he always was.
"Goodnight, then." Phil's voice was small and tired.
"Goodnight…"
"Oh, and by the way, I only put stickers on the things I love. And I love this whole damn place, because it's ours. And I love you the most."
Dan spared him a small smile, blushing a bit. "I love you, too."
Phil smiled back and headed to bed. He would wait awake for his boyfriend to join him.
Over time, it seemed, cheap stickers started to lose their stick. At first sign of peeling, Dan thought, good riddance. Lately he's been making sure they hold up with small slivers of tape. Phil's diagnosis sort of changed that –Dan still thought the stickers were dumb and useless, but maybe the dumb, useless things that had once made his boyfriend light up like he did would help ease the depression.
If nothing else, this proved to Dan how mental illness could strike anyone at any time. Of all people in the world, his Phil was the last person he'd expect to be stricken so severely depressed. Dan could only watch as his once bubbly lover stopped posting videos and shrunk away from his (reasonably worried) viewers.
Dan, though reluctant to bring the very personal matter to the world, made a video of his own to try to explain the situation. Phil was lying in bed in the other room, and heard everything he said. Phil didn't speak to Dan for two days following, until Dan came into the room one day and pressed a sticker to Phil's nose. He hadn't smiled, or said a word, but meekly pulled Dan into bed with him, kissing his cheek softly.
The stickers continued to peel, and Dan continued in vain to keep them up. Tape just didn't seem to hold them anymore.
Dan was playing his piano, knowing Phil would hear through the thin walls and hoping it would lighten him a bit. There was a small but almost special kitten sticker on the weary instrument, but today –for the first time, in fact— that too was starting to fall. Dan stopped his playing abruptly upon noticing it, and took a piece of tape larger than the others had been. He covered the entire sticker with tape.
The door creaked open; Phil was out of bed for the first time in days. He leaned heavily against the doorway, eyes sunken and smile horribly forced. Dan, relieved to see his boyfriend up and about despite the phony demeanor, went to greet him with a kiss. Phil's voice broke the silence of the room before he could stand up.
"I think I might kill myself."
Dan's world crashed around him. He thought for a moment he might have imagined the words, but tears were rolling slowly down Phil's cheeks now, and it was all too real. Dan stood, shaking, and quickly wrapped his arms around his lover before he could slink back to the other bedroom.
Dan wanted to tell him not to; wanted to say how much it would hurt him if he did; wanted to beg Phil not to leave him like that. But he didn't. It all seemed to selfish to talk like that, but the issue had to be addressed. Phil wouldn't say that just to warn him that it would happen –he was clearly going to Dan for help. And Dan needed to fix him.
Dan wanted to say anything that would take the horrible thoughts from his boyfriend's head, but was silenced by Phil's voice ringing softly through the room again, reverberating where it had been so long absent.
"Promise me that if I do, you won't come after me?"
And Dan couldn't bring himself to say anything against it. He'd do anything for Phil –if this was what Phil wanted, Dan would indeed promise.
"I swear it." He kissed Phil's cheek sweetly; he didn't budge. "I love you."
But all the love and kisses, all the soft piano music, all the goddamn happy cat stickers in the world may not be enough to change Phil's mind. The thought of Phil killing himself killed Dan, too.
A horrible week went by, and Phil was acting strange again. Not satisfied with the solitude he got from lying in bed, and ashamed now that Dan knew what he'd been debating for months, he started to go on walks. Dan was anxious –this was strange, and felt like the weeks prior to the diagnosis all over again.
"Promise me you'll come back?"
"I always do."
A week earlier, Dan had stuck a kitten sticker to Phil's wallet. He noticed today that it was still there, and he smiled.
Dan was the first contact in Phil's phone at the time, and was immediately contacted. Phil had been hit by a car, they said, and rushed to the hospital with head trauma and internal bleeding. Dan asked if he would be alright, but rushed out before he could. Out the door in seconds, he returned only for a hasty moment to grab the emergency pack of stickers, shoving them into his pocket as he ran to the hospital.
It was a mile and a half straight running; Dan didn't feel a thing.
His boyfriend was already in a coma by the time he arrived in the room. When Dan asked the doctor if he would be alright, his lips said only time would tell; his eyes said something else.
Dan sat at Phil's side for two days. In those two days, he gradually covered his lover in stickers, on skin and on heavy bandage. He wasn't asked to stop; he wouldn't. The doctor and nurses simply worked around the little things, accepting that the pale man's fate was sealed, and his boyfriend grieved in an odd way.
The grieving really started the next day, when Phil died covered in whimsical little stickers.
"Why did you leave me like this?"
The cause of death (rather, the incident itself) was ruled an accident. Dan knew better.
He kept taping the stickers up, only now more passionately, obsessively. Because Phil couldn't be dead, not as long as this stupid thing he started was still continuing. He was here –Dan could feel him in every silently meowing fucking kitten sticker. And he loathed the things, the abominations, but they were his boyfriend and always would be. If the stickers held up, Phil was still with him.
And so when they started to fall again, and tape couldn't hold them up, Dan went into hysterics.
It was a hot, damp day, so hot and damp that the stickiness of the tape simply couldn't hold up. Everywhere around Dan seemed to be melting; he sat naked on the floor as he desperately tried to keep the sticker on his piano in place. All the rest in the place had been felled without hope. This was the only one left to stick, and Dan was desperate to keep it that way.
"Don't leave me, Phil. I feel you here; I know you're here, holing up in this fucking stupid thing. I just lost you –don't make me lose you again."
But despite his best efforts, the tape wasn't holding, and the sticker continued to peel until it was just barely hanging on. Dan's fingers bled, cut up from the serrated edge of the tape dispenser, and it smeared on the dark wood of the piano, sliding over the tape masking the sticker. He was sobbing and numb and just wanted the damn thing to stay up.
The tape ran out; he had no more. Reality crashed down around him as he stared with wide, fearful eyes at the quivering sticker.
Dan sobbed out, broken. "Why do you go where I can't follow?"
And the last sticker fell.