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The only reason that Dan even says it in the first place is because he’s drunk and they really, really need a new toaster.
“So what’d you and Phil end up getting them?” Louise asks as they stand together in the queue that is slowly shuffling towards the gifts table. The DJ had begun playing a very dubious Elvis set, and apparently everyone else under the age of thirty-five had also decided to leave the dance floor and drop off their gift for the happy couple all at once.
Dan pulls the card from his back pocket. “We just wrote a check to help with the honeymoon expenses,” he admits. To tell the truth, he and Phil had gone to the department store with intention of buying a set of sheets, but they had left empty-handed after spending a lively half-hour debating between silk and Egyptian cotton and failing to find the precise set of sheets that matched the registry. (Heaven forbid one might give away sheets with a thread count of 650 instead of 700). “Lazy, but PJ and Sophie will enjoy it when they’re lying on a beach somewhere in the south of France,” he shrugs.
He watches as Louise winces and switches hands, visibly struggling to hold her gift bag. “What did you buy them, a refrigerator? Jesus.”
Louise allows her bag to drop to the floor, and it lands with such a loud clang that even the three people still bravely dancing to ‘Suspicious Minds’ turn and stare at them. Louise shakes out her wrists and sticks her middle finger up in Dan’s direction. “No, I bought a toaster off the registry. Like a nice, normal wedding guest.”
“Money is a completely normal gift!” Dan says defensively, crossing his arms over his chest. “You know what—I’m going to buy you a toaster for your next birthday, and we’ll see how you like that.”
Louise brightens. “Buy me this toaster, then, would you? Look,” she says, drawing back the tissue paper to reveal the toaster’s massive box. “It’s got eighteen different heat settings and a radio and wi-fi!”
“Louise,” Dan says reasonably. “You know I’m the world’s number one supporter of having internet access at every possible opportunity…but why the hell does anyone need wi-fi on their toaster?”
Louise shrugs, still looking delighted by her purchase. “Look, you can play Tetris on it while you wait for your toast! And it’s completely waterproof!”
“How can something even have eighteen different heat settings? Aren't things just 'hot' or 'slightly less hot' after a certain point?”
“Admit it, you’re jealous of this toaster,” Louise challenges, neatly tucking the tissue paper back around the box and hefting the bag up on the table.
The truth is, Louise’s toaster is fucking awesome.
The toaster that he and Phil have at home is shit—it takes ten minutes to heat up and then, paradoxically, it burns everything to a crisp, no matter how low of a setting it’s turned to. Three of the kitchen houseplants had died last month, and Phil is convinced that it’d been due to some sort of radiation from their evil (although, according to Phil: "It's not evil, Dan. It's just...chaotic neutral.") toaster.
(Also, the plants might have died because Dan swore he’d water them when Phil was visiting his parents for the weekend, and then he'd completely forgotten to actually do it.)
Fortunately, he is saved from having to admit to the epicness of Louise's toaster when the song ends. Everyone waits with bated breath and heaves a sigh of relief when the opening notes of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' drift over the crowd. Across the room, a beaming PJ pulls Sophie towards the dance floor.
Next to him, Louise looks thoughtful.
“You reckon it’ll be the two of you next?” She asks over the music, motioning to the happy couple.
Dan laughs. “No way,” he says. “Phil and I? Seriously?”
Louise frowns. “Well, why not? You’ve been together for…what, seven years now?”
“I dunno,” he says, shifting his stance; suddenly feeling uneasy as he watches the way that Sophie throws her head back and laughs when PJ spins her and then pulls her close again. “Phil and I just…aren’t ready to get married, I guess. Too young, and all that.”
Almost as if summoned, Phil suddenly appears on the opposite side of the dance floor, back from a trip to the loo. He grins and mimes a dramatic guitar solo at Dan.
“Well, I guess that’s my cue,” Dan says, eager to escape this conversation with Louise. He pushes the unsettling thought of marriage out of his mind, throws back the rest of his drink in one swig, and heads out onto the dance floor.
Dan is thinking about breakfast food when Phil pushes him up against the front door of their flat after the wedding and kisses him. It’s the kind of kiss that promises more to come in the very near future, and Phil’s hands are somehow managing to be everywhere at once—fumbling with the keys and the lock, skimming down Dan’s side, pushing the door open. Tangling in Dan’s hair as Dan kicks the door closed behind them.
And okay, maybe breakfast isn’t the sexiest thing that Dan could be thinking about at this precise moment in time. But toast is good. And Phil is good. And this night has been really, really good. And he just wants the goodness to continue into tomorrow morning. With sex. And toast.
(And perhaps some water and aspirin at some point to stave off the god-awful hangover that he can already feel looming.)
He is momentarily distracted from this tragic line of thought when Phil’s fingers slip down to tug at the buttons of his collar. He shifts a half-step back to allow Phil better access, only to find himself biting back a moan as Phil follows, pressing even closer and expertly fitting a leg in between Dan’s with practiced ease. He can feel the smile on Phil’s face as Phil resumes kissing him, and really, this is the kind of thing that should probably start to feel old and rote after over seven years of being together, but somehow it never does.
“I’ve missed this,” Phil murmurs as he continues to struggle with the same button of Dan’s shirt. His eyes are bright and his cheeks are flushed from the dancing and alcohol. They’ve spent nearly the entire day less than an arms’ length away from one another, but Dan knows what Phil means.
“Me too,” Dan replies softly, because they’d just gotten back from the Australian leg of TATINOF three days ago, and they’ve barely had time to sleep the jetlag off, much less to spend any semblance of meaningful time together.
“D’you want to—” But whatever Phil had been about to suggest is cut off by the familiar jangle of their tour phone. (Dan had changed the ringtone from the boring default to Toccata and Fugue in D minor after the horrifying and memorable night when 3 separate Australian venues had called to cancel on them.)
“Ah, shit,” Phil says, wrestling the phone out of his pocket and checking the caller ID. “It’s the tour DVD people.” He sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “God, maybe one day they’ll learn about time zones. I should take this, though—”
“It’s fine,” Dan says. He smiles because it’s nicer than sighing, pressing in for a final, chaste kiss before Phil picks up the call. “Thanks for dealing with it,” he says gratefully.
Still, damn the tour people for cockblocking him when he’s drunk and tired and he just wants to have happy, uncomplicated, post-wedding-celebration sex with his boyfriend. He traipses up to the kitchen as Phil begins pacing and talking in the hallway, because if he can’t have sex, at least he can have toast.
By the time Phil gets off the phone, Dan is sitting slumped over in bed with an empty plate in his lap, dozing lightly.
“You’re getting crumbs all over the sheets,” Phil says, and there is a note of exasperation in his voice, but he patiently moves the plate off the bed and brushes the charred crumbs into his hand before dumping them into the trash.
Dan startles awake. “Do we have to make any other calls tonight?” He yawns, attempting to surreptitiously wipe a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth.
Phil shakes his head, shucking his dress pants and unbuttoning his dress shirt. “It can wait until the morning,” he says, and he looks so weary that Dan vows to change the tour phone ringtone to something even more somber and depressing than Toccata and fugue in the morning.
“C’mere,” He says, patting the bed beside him once Phil is down to just his boxers. Phil flips off the lights and obediently crawls into bed, looping his arms around Dan’s torso and pressing his face into Dan’s shoulder.
Dan contentedly notes the way that the lights from the street flicker against the ceiling, his eyelids heavy and his body lax. He’s not quite as drunk as he had been when they were crying of laughter over Felix’s dance moves at the reception, but the room is still swimming pleasantly.
“How was your toast?” Phil asks after a moment, sounding half-asleep already.
“Burnt,” Dan grumbles. “That toaster is a piece of shit.” He thinks longingly of the toaster that Louise had bought for PJ and Sophie. What he and Phil need, he decides, is an excuse for someone to buy to two of them a nice new toaster with wi-fi and radio and eighteen heat settings.
“Hey,” He says with a sleepy grin, tracing an absentminded pattern on Phil’s arm with his index finger. “You know what? We should get married.”
He’s expecting Phil to laugh. Maybe a sleepy, amused huff; maybe an actual, proper laugh. Maybe just a silent poke in the ribs for making such a stupid joke.
He’s not expecting Phil to abruptly prop himself up on his elbows and peer intently at Dan through the darkness, his eyes earnest and dark in the moonlight; a look of hopeful disbelief blossoming across his face.
He’s not expecting the way that the fingers of Phil’s right hand come up to skim feather-light against Dan’s jawline; tentative almost, as though Phil isn’t sure if he’s dreaming or not. He’s not expecting the hoarseness in Phil’s voice when Phil smiles, eyes slightly watery and over-bright, and says,“Yes.”
Dan is still attempting to process the enormity of the colossal misunderstanding that had just transpired when Phil abruptly pushes off the bed with a small laugh.
Oh, good, Dan thinks, profoundly relieved. He knows I was just kidding. He knew all along.
But then Phil rummages around his sock drawer for a minute (seriously, the sock drawer; why is Dan’s life such a giant cliché?) and he emerges with a small black box clutched triumphantly in his hand. Dan’s mouth is suddenly so dry that he can hardly breathe.
"You know, I never thought you’d ask me before I got around to asking you,” Phil remarks with another laugh. He’s beaming so hugely that it makes Dan’s face hurt in sympathy. Or wait, maybe that’s actually his chest that hurts, with a strange mixture of panic and confusion and some other emotion that he can’t quite name.
“How—how long have you had that?” Dan chokes out with a sense of mounting alarm, the words like sawdust in his mouth.
Phil takes a seat on the edge of the bed next to Dan. His expression is so soft and open that Dan almost can’t bear to meet his gaze. “I bought it after that last trip I took alone to Florida with my parents. I was waiting until all the book and tour nonsense died down to ask you, though.”
Dan remembers that Florida trip well—it had been one of the only times since they’d first moved in together that they’d spent more than a few days apart, and they’d both been a bit of a mess by the end of the two weeks.
“Phil,” he rasps. “Phil. That was almost two years ago. You’ve had that thing for two years? And what happened to the whole ‘marriage is just a piece of paper’ thing?”
Phil smiles. “That was always just about other people, Dan. About people who are unhappily married.” The gentle curve of his ear is illuminated by the moonlight, and he pops the black box open. “But that won’t be us.” He says it like a promise; like a vow, reaching out and brushing his fingers against the soft, vulnerable skin of Dan’s wrist, right over where Dan’s pulse is.
And that’s the story of how Dan accidentally proposed and then actually went and got himself engaged because of it.
I’ll tell him in the morning, Dan promises himself as he lies in bed and stares up at the ceiling, still wide-eyed with disbelief. The metal of the engagement band is cold against his finger. It feels slightly too tight. Restricting.
It’s not that he doesn’t want to marry Phil one day—because he does, really. He can’t imagine being married to anyone besides Phil.
But he also can’t imagine being married in the first place. He’s just…not ready. How can anyone be ready for marriage? How can Phil be ready for marriage?
Phil, who can’t even decide on his favorite ice cream flavor, wants to tie himself to Dan for the rest of his life?
Next to him, Phil twitches a little bit in his sleep, rolling even closer. When Dan risks a glance at Phil’s face, he is still smiling in his sleep. Dan suddenly wants to jump out of bed, shove the ring back into the box, stick the box back in the deepest recesses of the sock drawer, and pretend that none of this had ever happened.
In the morning, he resolves. I’ll tell him then.
Dan awakens to a line of kisses being pressed down his neck.
As far as ways to wake up go, it’s definitely not the worst.
“G’morning,” he smiles, sleepily blinking his eyes to half-mast, and that’s all it takes for Phil’s mouth to press against his. There’s something he’s supposed to tell Phil, he remembers dimly. Something really, really important. But Phil’s hands are shucking Dan’s t-shirt up towards his ribs, and one hand is creeping down towards the hem of his boxers, and Phil’s lips are somehow both soft and unyielding all at once, and there is no room in his mind for any thought but the comforting weight of Phil’s body against his own.
This is all quite atypical, however, as Phil is by no means a morning person. He won’t even talk to Dan before 10 AM most mornings, let alone initiate sex with him.
Also unusual is the way that Phil keeps stopping to smile down at Dan through his lashes after every single action he takes. Normally Phil staring at him and grinning while holding a tube of lube would just be extremely creepy, Dan reflects, but today his smile is so unmistakably fond and tender that it’s not weird, it’s just…a little out of the ordinary.
It isn’t until they’re mid-sex that Dan actually remembers why Phil is acting this way. Phil laces his fingers through Dan’s and Dan becomes aware of the unusual sensation of cold metal around his own ring finger. His stomach instantly drops, and not in a fun, sex-related way.
It’s not the right time to say anything, though, he quickly realizes. Their sex life is pretty vanilla, for the most part—it’s basically just an extension of their typical bantering and easy exchanges of affection—but Phil is unusually quiet and intense this morning. He presses his forehead against Dan’s neck with his eyes closed, holding Dan close like he is something precious and breakable.
“Dan,” he gasps right before he comes. His voice is reverent and it trembles slightly, breath ghosting against Dan's collarbone, lashes fluttering against the hollow of Dan's throat. “Love you," Phil whispers raggedly, as though those two words are the answer to all the questions in the universe.
So yeah, there’s really no good time in the midst of all that for Dan to slip in a quick ‘Hey, remember when I proposed yesterday? Yeah, that was just supposed to be a joke. My bad.’
“You okay?” Phil asks afterwards, when they are standing in the bathroom and brushing their teeth and waiting for the water in the shower to heat up.
“Fine,” Dan says, hoping that the excess toothpaste in his mouth garbles the slight panic in his voice. “You?”
Phil beams at him sweetly, reaching over the sink to touch the simple silver band around Dan’s ring finger in response. “I’m just really happy that we’re getting married,” he shrugs, and there is such earnest, unstudied excitement in his voice that Dan feels like the worst person on the entire planet.
Well. Maybe sorting this mistake out isn’t going to be as easy and clear-cut as Dan had first thought.
It certainly doesn’t help matters that Phil keeps telling people.
“Phil,” Dan says one evening, narrowing his eyes and elbowing the door to the lounge open, arms laden with food. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about why the pizza man just congratulated me on ‘finally locking it down with that dark-haired bloke,’ would you?”
Phil pauses his episode of Househunters International to come and grab his dinner.
“Yeah,” he shrugs, voice muffled by a bite of pizza. “I told him on the phone that my fiancé would be answering the door. Shit, this is hot!”
“Phil! Now we can’t get pizza from there anymore,” Dan groans.
It’s Phil’s turn to narrow his eyes. “What d’you mean?” He asks with obvious confusion, wincing and dabbing at his burnt tongue.
“What if he tells someone?”
Phil cocks his head to the side like he always does when he’s trying to figure out a particularly difficult level of Candy Crush. “Who is Darryl from Domino's going to tell? Even if he watches our videos, he doesn’t know who we are. Not to mention the fact that he’s always higher than a kite when he comes here—I could be David Cameron and you could be the queen and we could be having a torrid affair and Darryl wouldn't even notice. There’s a reason I said 'no' when he offered me a free brownie on my birthday, you know.”
“Hang on,” Dan says indignantly, several occurrences suddenly making a lot more sense. “You gave me that brownie. I ate that brownie. And furthermore, three of our neighbors in this past week alone have ‘just happened to notice' my ring in the hallway—have you been going around and calling me your fiancé in front of everyone?”
Phil nods, smiling a bit helplessly. “I just like how it sounds,” he says so dreamily that Dan wonders if Darryl had included any brownies with the pizza today. He's torn between thunking his head repeatedly against the table and demanding a list of every single person Phil has interacted with in the past two weeks.
“But you’re right,” Phil continues, sounding slightly more like the reasonably mature adult he is supposed to be. “I shouldn’t just go around telling random people. We should start telling the people who matter to us instead.”
“Yes, exactly!” Dan exclaims before Phil’s final words sink in. “I mean, wait, what?”
“You know,” Phil says, looking positively inspired. “Some of the London YouTube crowd is getting together next weekend. I can just call Louise and drop a hint that we have some news, and we won’t even have to do any work to tell people! It’s perfect!”
Phil takes out his phone and immediately dials Louise.
Well, that had backfired.
"Daniel Howell!”
They walk into YouTuber board game night and Louise is immediately on him, her expression as fierce and as focused as Phil’s always gets at the Yankee Candle Co. store. She smacks him on the arm and then pulls his hand close to examine the plain silver band (and everyone keeps doing that, even though there’s no diamond to see). “You little shit! Why didn't you tell me? I asked you when you two were going to get married at PJ and Sophie’s wedding and you laughed at me!”
Phil looks over at him curiously, and Dan resists the urge to step on Louise’s toes.
“Uh...because I didn’t want to say anything preemptively until I’d asked and he’d actually said yes," Dan lies, trying to keep his statement from rising like a question at the end.
Louise quickly drags him away from the Scrabble tournament to ‘hear all the details!’, and she absolutely refuses to believe him when he swears that he didn’t ask during sex.
“It was very romantic,” he says as convincingly as possible.
“Romantic, my ass,” she accuses. “You didn’t even give him a ring—I bet you planned something at the very last second.”
You have no idea how right you are there, Dan thinks.
“Louise,” he says in a low voice, a little desperate for someone to understand his perspective on this whole mess. “Don’t you think that maybe…it’s not such a good idea for me and Phil to get married right now?”
“No; why would I think that?” Louise wrinkles her nose at him.
“I don’t know—it’s just…marriage? Right now?”
She blinks at him, clearly still waiting for an actual reason.
“In this economy?” He tacks on.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Louise scoffs. “Invest a little more in your stock portfolio; reevaluate the LSE and the DOW-JONES next financial quarter, and then you should get married.” She rolls her eyes. “You’re such a weirdo, Howell. Hey, I can be your maid of honor, right?”
Shit. So much for support from his friends, then.
Then comes the fateful day when they break the news to their families.
“Um, Phil,” Dan says when they pull up in front of his parents’ house for his mum’s birthday party. “Is that your parents’ car?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, it is,” Phil says distractedly, utterly failing at parallel parking. Dan is suddenly very glad they’d opted to get insurance at the rental place that morning.
“…why are your parents at my mum’s birthday party?”
Phil blinks and looks back over at him. The car jerks and rolls dangerously close to the mailbox. “I invited them, of course. I mean, I called your mum and checked that it’d be okay first. But I thought it’d be a really good opportunity for us to finally break the big news! And for our families to have a chance to hang out together.”
“Oh,” Dan says. “Phil, you didn’t—you didn’t mention the engagement to my mum, did you?” He asks cautiously.
“I alluded to the fact that we had some news to share, yes,” Phil nods. “I’m pretty sure your mum got the hint, though. She seemed quite excited.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Dan says faintly. He feels like he might be having a stroke. (What were the symptoms of a stroke, again? He’d taken a class when he was fifteen, and there had been some kind of acronym—Face, Arm, Speech, Time? Absolutely Do Not Bring Your Accidental Fiancé Home to Meet Your Family Under Any Circumstances? Dan doesn’t remember, but it’s probably one of those two.)
“There are a lot of cars here,” Dan notes weakly. “Normally we just do birthdays with the immediate family—”
“She must have invited the extended family to hear the news!” Phil exclaims happily. “That’s great; I’ll finally get to meet all your aunts and uncles.”
“Oh, shit, that’s—that’s Great Aunt Bertha’s car. Phil, she hasn’t come round to a family party since the Great Punch Bowl Debacle of 1995! Why is she here?”
“It’ll be like a big family reunion,” Phil beams. He puts the car in park, turns off the ignition, and sets off towards the house. Dan scrambles to un-do his seatbelt and follow. He doesn’t even take the time to comment on the fact that Phil has parked half the car on the grass and half on the street.
“Phil,” he gasps, catching up with Phil’s long strides on the front walkway. “Are you sure this is a good—”
But the front door swings open before he can finish speaking, and then his mum is standing there and radiating such an aura of deliberate casualness that alarm bells are immediately wailing in Dan’s head. (Or maybe that's the car alarm on their rental, come to think of it—Phil had also parked with the front fender touching the bumper of Uncle Kevin's new Buick.)
“Hello, boys,” Dan's mum says warmly. “Come on in.”
Feeling slightly like he is walking to his own execution, Dan follows Phil closely into the house.
It’s even worse than he’d been anticipating. Worse than the time he accidentally lit the tablecloth on fire and ruined Christmas dinner, and that is saying something. (They still make him sit at the kids table, even though he's twenty-five.)
At least forty of his distant family members are standing crammed into the family room, all of them staring intently at Dan and Phil. Dan counts no less than five of his younger cousins sitting on people’s shoulders in order to physically fit in the room.
“I’m pretty sure having this many people in here is a code violation,” Dan jokes.
Nobody laughs. They all just keep staring expectantly.
Phil grabs Dan’s hand, and Dan assumes it’s just for moral support, which, really, would be very understandable. But then Phil holds Dan’s hand aloft so that the silver band around his fourth finger is visible, and everyone goes absolutely mental.
Dan shakes so many people’s hands and accepts so many congratulatory hugs that he’s fairly certain he’s guaranteed to catch some heretofore unheard of strain of the plague. His dad’s cousin, Lisa—an event planner by trade—immediately claims the right to be their wedding planner and demands that Dan tell her his intended color scheme, the floral arrangement he wants to use for centerpieces, and the cut of suit he and Phil are planning to wear. Even Great Aunt Bertha shakes her cane at him and barks that she expects great grand-nieces and nephews by the end of the year.
To top it all off, Dan’s mum disappears for a few minutes and then reappears with a small jewelry box.
“Here,” she says, pressing the box into Dan’s hand. “It was your great-grandfather’s wedding ring. You two should have it.” And then there is a lot of happy sniffling in the background, and the next thing he knows, Phil is wearing his great-grandfather’s ring and everyone is admiring how perfectly it fits.
“Oh, Dan,” Mrs. Lester remarks, coming up to congratulate them, her eyes misty. “Planning to give Phil your great-grandfather’s ring all this time—just beautiful.” She sighs, looking between him and Phil. “Oh, my boys. I’m so happy for you both.”
And Dan is pretty sure he’s just crossed over from ‘in slightly over his head’ to ‘standing at the bottom of the Marianas Trench with weights around his ankles and a backpack full of rocks pulling him further and further down.’
The worst part of it is, it turns out that Phil really likes being engaged. That Phil is, in fact, the number one fan of this whole Dan-and-Phil-marriage thing.
He develops some odd new tendencies as a result. First there’s the morning where Dan awakens to Phil staring over at him and smiling to himself.
“Wha’d’you want,” Dan mutters grouchily.
“Oh, nothing,” Phil sighs—actually sighs like some kind of Victorian heroine—“just thinking about how I’ll get to call you my husband in one month.”
“’Kay, cool,” Dan grunts, pulling a pillow over his face to block the sunlight. “I’m going back to sleep.”
(And that’s another thing—Dan has no memory of ever actually choosing a date for the wedding. He recalls briefly seeing his mother and Phil’s mother with their heads bent close together over a calendar, and the next thing he knew, they had a date less than three months from when Dan had originally made his accidental proposal. All because ‘you want to think about how tight everyone’s schedule will be once the holidays roll around, boys’ and ‘wouldn’t it be nice to take an early winter honeymoon to somewhere warm and tropical?’)
And then there’s Phil’s sudden obsession with Dan’s ring.
To Dan’s great relief, they take their rings off when they film and most of the time when they’re out and about around the town (because, Jesus Christ, Dan can’t even admit to himself that he’s engaged, let alone deal with the response of millions of their viewers to the news.)
But every time Dan takes off his ring now, Phil is in the habit of kissing the bare skin of Dan’s ring finger as a reminder of what's missing. And when Dan is wearing the ring, Phil is constantly trying to hold his hand.
“I can’t wash the dishes if you keep trying to hold my hand in the sink,” Dan sighs with no small amount of exasperation as he tries and fails for a third time to get both of his hands on a dinner plate at once.
“Just run the dishwasher,” Phil shrugs, moving close to kiss Dan’s neck. His thumb rubs against Dan’s ring finger, splashing bits of soap everywhere.
Dan takes a small step back, looking down at where their hands are joined.
“What is this; some kind of new kink for you? Have you been harboring a secret ring fetish all this time or something?” He means for it to come out as a joke, but there’s an edge to it, and he can tell that Phil hears it too.
“No,” Phil says. His hand slips out of Dan’s and his face closes off in slight confusion and hurt. “No, Dan, I just—”
Dan takes a deep breath against the sudden sharpness in his chest, because he’s never been able to stand hurting Phil. “Don't,” he exhales hastily. “It's my fault. I'm just—stressed."
Phil’s expression softens. “That’s okay,” he says. Somehow his understanding only makes Dan feel worse. It hits Dan, all of sudden, how much he hates feeling like there’s this huge thing that he can’t talk to Phil about, because in seven years of being together, he’s never once felt like there was anything he couldn’t tell Phil.
“Hey,” Phil says, pulling Dan into a hug, even though they both have wet, soapy hands. “Anything I can do to make it better?”
Dan doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry about the fucking irony of it all.
So, anyway, that’s how Dan finds himself planning a wedding. His own wedding, specifically.
None of it quite feels real—he approves flower arrangements, tastes a metric fuckton of cake, and stares at so many identical color swatches he thinks his eyes will start bleeding (although according to Lisa, “They are not identical, Daniel! There is a massive difference between ‘sandy cove’ and ‘beachwood sand,’ and you’ll ruin the whole tone of the wedding if you pick the wrong one!”).
Incredibly, a month somehow slips by. Then two.
He puts on a calm face and manages to make it until they are actually standing inside the venue. And then he loses his shit, a little bit.
Okay, maybe a lot-bit.
It’s exactly one week before the wedding, and they’ve driven up north to the church where Phil's parents had gotten married—a little white chapel just outside of Manchester that is so picturesque, Dan almost expects a BBC filming crew and David Attenborough to pop up and start narrating a running voice-over at any second.
He mostly just stands there as the minister drones on about the different parts of the ceremony, numbly going through the motions when they practice standing and sitting at the appropriate times. It's all very reminiscent of when he made his first communion, minus the part where the wedding ceremony is, y'know, permanent, lifelong, and legally-binding (but who's thinking about that, anyway, right?).
Then it comes time to practice the procession.
Nobody had quite known who should stand at the altar and who should process in, so he and Phil had decided to both just walk down the aisle separately with their parents. Phil goes first, and then all of a sudden, Dan is standing at the back of the chapel and looking at Phil waiting for him at the altar and he just—can't.
He can practically hear David Attenborough's voice in his head: And here we have an unusual specimen, about twenty-five years old, frozen in fear at the mere thought of long-term commitment. Very primitive stuff. Stay tuned for more displays of male idiocy up next!
It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room, and he is aware of a dozen pairs of concerned eyes pressing down on his shoulders. He realizes that the organist has played the part where he is supposed to start walking four times.
"I—" he croaks. "I need some air."
And then he is pushing past the double-doors and flying down the lane.
It doesn't take him long to regret his hasty flight from the church. First of all, because it's very difficult to do the whole dramatically-running-through-a-meadow-while-having-a-personal-crisis thing when you're in northern England and you have to carefully pick your way through all the sheep shit in the field instead of focusing your attention on running angstily.
And secondly because—well, he just feels like a massive disappointment. Phil wants this so much, and he wants to want what Phil wants, but he's just...not sure. What they've had these past seven years has been the best thing Dan has ever done with his life—even better than YouTube, the book, the tour...all of it. And he doesn't want that to change. He doesn't want anything to change.
He can admit that to himself now.
"I'm afraid of marriage changing things between me and Phil," he admits to a nearby sheep.
The sheep just stares at him blankly in response, but it doesn't recoil in shock or gasp in horror, and Dan feels better for having said the words out loud.
"You're right," he sighs, taking a seat on a mossy log and pulling out his phone. "I need to talk to Phil. I should've talked to Phil ages ago. We can—we can figure this thing out, right? He'll understand if I can't—if I'm not ready."
The sheep stares at him with doleful, betrayed eyes and walks away when it realizes that Dan doesn't have any food. Figures.
His phone starts ringing just when he has finally mustered up the courage to call Phil.
He takes a deep breath. Just do it, Dan. Like ripping off a band-aid.
He accepts the call and immediately starts talking.
"Look, Phil, I'm really sorry about running out of there, but there's something big that I really need to talk to you about and I just don't know how to say it, but I think it has to be said—"
"Dan."
It's Martyn's voice, unusually serious.
"Oh, sorry, Martyn—I thought you were Phil." He laughs nervously. "Er...I know what I was just saying sounded like a pregnancy announcement or something super dramatic, but I swear—"
"Dan," Martyn repeats.
"—I'm not pregnant," Dan says, feeling a need to make this fact abundantly clear.
"Dan."
Dan's stomach instantly sinks for some reason.
"Listen to me—Phil went out looking for you and he's been hit by a car. The hospital just called—"
Martyn keeps talking, but everything sounds like static to Dan's ears.
"—you hear me, Dan? The doctor said he's unconscious, and we're all heading over there right now—"
Visions of comas and quiet hospital rooms and an empty space in bed fill Dan's head. A called-off wedding, a honeymoon trip never taken.
A life not lived.
He ends the call and takes off at a dead sprint.
Dan runs.
Later, he will look back and think about how much more efficient it would’ve been to take a cab; how much quicker he could’ve gotten to the hospital had he not chosen to take the two miles at a dead sprint. (Pokémon GO has been great for getting a bit more in shape, but honestly, he still hasn't run more than a mile straight since a particularly disastrous day in PE in sixth form.)
In the moment, though, it feels like the only choice. He can’t just sit in the back of a car; he needs to be doing something.
So he runs.
As his feet pound the pavement, all he can think about is Phil, hurt and alone in the hospital. About the way Phil's hair smells when he has just gotten out of the shower, like cinnamon and vanilla and Irish spring soap. About his sleepy smile when Dan finally crawls into bed after a late-night gaming session. About all the things that Dan hadn’t said when he’d had the chance, like we were supposed to have an entire lifetime to be together, and I love you so much, and please don’t go and—
Well. Dan runs.
"Martyn," Dan pants, bursting into the waiting room. "Martyn, where is he? I have to see him!"
Martyn looks up from his phone. "Room 208," he says, sounding quite bored for someone whose only brother had recently been hit by a car. "He's not much use right now, though—drugged up to his eyeballs. He told me my shirt was a stupid color." Martyn scuffs his shoe against the floor with a slightly petulant expression.
"It is pretty stupid," Dan agrees apologetically, and then— "Wait, he's awake? I thought you said he was unconscious."
Martyn nods. "He was unconscious—the only thing wrong with him is a cut on his arm, and he passed out as soon as the nurse pulled out the needle to do his stitches. Typical." He rolls his eyes and crosses his arms over his chest. "Also, you should remember that I'm giving a speech at your wedding, so I'd think twice before talking shit about my shirt if I were you."
Dan doesn't stick around to appease Martyn. He's already taking the stairs up to Phil's room two at a time.
"Phil," Dan gasps, actually going physically weak at the knees in relief when he rounds the corner and sees Phil sitting up in bed and nonchalantly eating a cup of pudding. There is a small bruise blossoming under his left eye and a thick white bandage on his forearm. His grin is a bit slow and dopey when he sees Dan standing there, but he's conscious and awake and alive, alive, alive.
Dan's feet have carried him across the room before he's even aware of moving, and there are so many things on the tip of his tongue that are warring to be said, but what comes out first is: "Marry me."
Phil blinks, heavy-lidded and drowsy-eyed. "Wait a second," he says, voice slightly slurred in the way it sometimes gets after a third glass of red wine during dinner. "Did I hit my head and lose my memory or something? Because I could have sworn that you asked me that months ago. I thought we already agreed we'd get married. If I hallucinated all of those god-awful tux fittings for nothing—"
A familiar thoughtful line appears in between Phil's eyebrows, and Dan abruptly feels his throat go tight and thick with emotion, because that little wrinkle is such a mundane little detail in the vast lexicon that is Phil Lester, but Dan has never really stopped and appreciated it before, and he could've lost his chance earlier when that car had—
Well. Anyway. He doesn't want to take things like that for granted anymore.
"Phil," he says, taking a seat on the edge of Phil's bed and staring fixedly at the IV drip so his voice doesn't wobble with emotion. "Phil. Marry me."
"Why're you all sweaty?" Phil asks, squinting hazily up at Dan.
"I ran here," Dan says, waving off the question. "Because I love you. And I want to marry you, I swear."
"I know you do," Phil says, and even though he must be on some really good painkillers, he still manages to reach out and tangle his fingers with Dan's in one smooth motion. Dan can feel the cool metal of his great-grandfather's ring around Phil's finger, and he suddenly understands, for the first time, why Phil likes the sensation so much: because it's like an anchor; like a promise; like a reminder that neither he nor Phil are ever truly alone. That they each carry a piece of the other wherever they go.
The IV bag has gone completely blurry in Dan's line of vision.
"Phil," he whispers, voice teetering on broken. "I've always wanted to marry you. You have to know that."
"I know," Phil repeats, clumsily patting Dan's hand. "I know, Dan." And even though he passes out ten seconds later with a half-eaten cup of pudding balanced precariously on his stomach, there is something in his sleep-slurred voice that makes Dan believe that Phil really actually does know. That he always has. Even before Dan did.
Late that night, after the graveyard-shift nurse has sworn that she will sign Phil out herself AMA if he keeps asking for more pudding cups, Dan squeezes onto the tiny hospital bed, his limbs cramped and tangled with Phil's in an uncoordinated jumble.
"Do you think us getting married is going to change things?" He asks softly, staring up at the ceiling.
Phil is quiet for so long that Dan assumes he has drifted off to sleep. "Maybe," Phil says finally. "Probably. But I think all the important things will stay the same."
Turns out, that's all that Dan had needed to hear these past two months.
Phil shifts slightly in bed. "Jesus, is that your elbow? I just figured you'd brought a knife to bed with you or something."
"That's pretty ironic coming from someone who's got their knee lodged halfway up my spine right now," Dan grumbles.
Phil laughs and shifts closer, and it reminds Dan so much of when the two of them used to crawl into Dan's twin bed in the uni dorms, so young and desperately in love that they couldn't bear to spend the night apart, that Dan loses his breath for a moment.
They fall asleep holding hands, and Dan sleeps better in the hospital bed that night than he has any other night of the past two months.
Epilogue
The wedding itself is a blur, and to tell the truth, it's not the perfect fairytale that everyone had always promised Dan it would be when he was growing up.
As it turns out, Lisa had been right: beachwood-colored tablecloths and sandy beach-colored napkins actually clash quite horribly, and Great Aunt Bertha nearly starts a Great Wine Bottle Debacle of 2016. The salad has cilantro in it, and Dan's entire side of the family has that weird cilantro-hating gene. The DJ accidentally plays the song 'Get Low' by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz instead of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' during Dan's first dance with his mum, and Dan finds one of his cousins making out with one of Phil's cousins in a broom cupboard when he goes to get his jacket at the end of the night.
Dan had vindictively refused to put a toaster on the wedding registry, so naturally, five different people have taken it upon themselves to buy him and Phil one.
But Phil is waiting for him at the end of the aisle in the little white chapel at precisely 3:00 PM, his smile steady and his gaze sure, and it feels like they are the only two people in the entire universe when they stand up there and make their vows. And when Dan closes his eyes and sways against Phil during their first dance at the reception, he can see a lifetime stretching out in front of them, bright and luminous and full of possibilities.
"Hey," Phil murmurs in his ear after they finish their slices of cake. "You want to get out of here?"
"To go have sentimental, boring, vanilla, old-married-person sex?" Dan asks.
Phil looks slightly nervous for a second. "I think there's probably a lot of that in our future, yes," he says slowly, his eyes carefully searching Dan's face, perhaps looking for some sign of cold feet or buyer's remorse.
Dan allows his smile to break free. "Great," he says, finding Phil's hand with his own. "Let's go. I can't wait."
"For the sex or for the future?" Phil jokes, his expression easing, a bit like sunlight breaking through the clouds after a long rain.
"Both," Dan says honestly. "Both."