#Noticed this while watching an edit and quickly skimmed over clips of her I saved to realize this is not a one time occurrence

[gallonwghost]

Very normal observation I made

[itsmyusualphannie]

an elemental match

Title: an elemental match (ao3) Author: itsmyusualphannie Artist: fay-pepper - check out her amazing art here!! it’s so good. like how. <33 Beta: m0xicity - thank you sm for your help!  Word Count: 8.5k Rating: T Warnings: Blood, broken bones, earthquake Summary: “one moment can change a day, one day can change a life, and one life can change the world”  - not buddha dan and phil, who like everyone else in their world have some level of superhuman powers, are out and about when tragedy strikes. they have powers, though. they can fix this, right? right. (right?)

Author Notes: i’ve been wanting to do a powered-dnp (not superheroes) for a while now, so this was super fun to write! it went a tad darker than i intended, but don’t worry, it has a happy ending! (sort of?)

~~

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick. Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

“Nope!” The chair’s legs screeched against the floor under Phil as he slid back from the desk. He rolled his shoulders and stood, shoving the chair back into its place. His open laptop on the desk was brightly lit, cheerfully mocking him. He frowned at it. “No. I’m done.”

The clock tick-tocked again from where it hung a few feet above the desk. Phil wondered why he had even gotten it. He turned and left the room.

He found Dan in the living room, prone on the floor with his face upturned toward the ceiling. His eyes were closed, mouth opened slightly as he breathed steadily. Phil stood over him and nudged him with a socked foot. “Hey, Dan.”

“Shh, fuck off,” said Dan without opening his eyes. “I’m...meditating.”

“You look like you’re about to fall asleep.”

“Meditating,” Dan insisted.

Phil poked him in the side again. “You said you wanted to look at the video once I finished editing it.”

“Ugh. You suck,” but Dan had opened his eyes and he was heaving himself up now. His fingers dug into the rug as he gained his balance, and then he stumbled to his feet, grabbing Phil’s arm for balance. “Whoo,” he said. “That’s fun.”

“Don’t pass out,” Phil told him. He reached to nudge a curl that had fallen across Dan’s forehead. 

Dan let him. “So you’re finished editing, then? I thought it’d take you longer.”

“The clock was driving me insane,” Phil admitted. He tucked the curl back to rejoin the tumbled mess on Dan’s head. The bare skin it revealed felt too intimately naked, so Phil replaced the curl with a quick kiss. Dan laughed when Phil’s lips pressed against his forehead. “Dork.”

Phil shoved his shoulder half-heartedly. “I’m romantic. Shut up.”

“Sure you are,” Dan agreed, too quickly. He headed toward the office. “Come on, I’ll look over your video.”

Phil let Dan go ahead of him while he detoured to the kitchen. Although they had eaten lunch a few hours ago, he felt like a snack was necessary right about now. He opened the first two cabinets and, finding nothing good, left them wide open as he wandered to the next cabinet. Finally, he found a pack of Haribo that had been shoved to the very top of the self just out of reach of his fingers.

“Phil!” Dan called from the other room. “You’d better not be getting something to eat. We’re going shopping as soon as I’m finished with this.”

Phil glanced up at the bag of sweets, then toward the office. Making up his mind, he turned back toward the cabinet. He stretched his hand up to the high shelf and flexed his fingers, wiggling them a little in a come-hither motion. The bag, untouched by his physical fingers, nevertheless heeded the mental call. It shifted on the shelf, and then, in an abrupt movement, threw itself off the shelf into Phil’s waiting hand. Phil hurriedly ripped it open and dumped a handful of the gummies into his other hand, then held the bag in his palm and lifted it back toward the shelf. The bag floated off his hand and back into place, adjusting itself between two other containers.

Phil abandoned the kitchen, leaving the cabinets open as he popped a few gummies in his mouth. “Nope, not eating anything!” he assured Dan. He pushed open the door to the office and crossed the room in a few strides, stopping behind Dan, who was seated at the desk chair in front of Phil’s laptop.

Dan didn’t look back at him, but his voice was amused. “You know I can literally feel that you’re lying to me.”

Phil shoved the rest of the gummies in his mouth, hastily chewing them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said around his mouthful. He glanced over Dan’s shoulder at the video that was playing on the laptop. “Any suggestions so far?”

“I’m only two minutes into it,” but Dan paused the video. “Actually, yeah, here. This transition is a little weird. I’d cut it a second or so sooner.”

Phil watched as Dan rewound the clip. The Phil on-screen was laughing as a handful of glitter floated around his head like a halo. Dan, with a few swift clicks, deleted an awkward segment that Phil had missed in his editing earlier. He pressed play again, and now the video showed a smooth flow between the moment Phil had been easily controlling the thousands of particles of glitter and the instant he had released his power over them and they had all cascaded over his head. Since Phil had filmed all of this in one take, he’d had to be careful with the use of his powers, not eager for a headache. If he overused them, one of his dreaded migraines would creep up on him, and not even Dan’s empathic powers could help him. In this case, though, the abrupt release of the objects he was controlling hadn’t been intentional - he had heard a dog barking outside, and naturally, had lost his concentration.

Rubbing at his hair in memory, Phil grimaced. “That was two days ago and I still have glitter in my hair.”

“Please don’t remind me,” said Dan, his gaze still affixed to the screen as the video continued. “I have glitter in my pants.”

He laughed. “Well, you didn’t have to let me - ”

“Nope. No. We’re stopping that line of conversation.”

Still chuckling a little, Phil didn’t finish his sentence. He kept watching as Dan finished the video, making a few more small adjustments that Phil hadn’t caught. He was pleased with the small reactions he got from Dan’s perusal, the involuntarily laughs and moments of surprise. This was one of his favourite parts of the video-making process.

The video was barely ten minutes long, but Dan took his time looking it over and it was a good half an hour later when Dan saved the file for the final time and sat back in the chair. “It’s good,” was all he said.

“Good?” Phil huffed a laugh. “Is that all?”

Dan stood up in an elegant movement, spinning and draping his arms over Phil’s shoulders. “It’s fantastic. It’s creative. The bit with the glass dildo-looking thing was a bit much, but I love it. So will everyone else.” He punctuated his input with a lingering kiss.

Phil hummed against Dan’s lips, letting his hands drift to loosely hold Dan’s waist. “Mmm, okay. Good. Thanks.”

Dan pulled back and cast him an unimpressed stare. “You taste like Haribo.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Phil blinked widely.

Dan scoffed but gave him another quick kiss. “Twat. Come on, we need to go shopping.” He pulled back from Phil’s grip and left the room. Phil grabbed his phone from the charger on the desk before he followed, checking to make sure that it was fully charged.

“Are we just going to Tesco?” Phil asked after Dan, swiping at his phone as he wandered into the living room.

“Unless you want to go somewhere else!” Dan yelled back. He had detoured to the bedroom, apparently.

Phil pulled down the notification bar on his phone and frowned at the bright news alert that was visible. He clicked on it and was directed to a BBC One news article. “Uh...maybe Starbucks!” he called absent-mindedly. “After we’re...done shopping…” He trailed off without noticing it, his finger tugging up the article page so he could quickly skim it. There had been another tremor on the east side of London. Specialists were considering it minor, as it was under a 4.0 on the Richter scale and was barely noticeable. Still, it was one of several that had happened over the past few months, and the tremors were never located in the same place.

“Weird,” Phil mused to himself. He jumped as a hand landed on his shoulder.

“What’s weird?” asked Dan, peering over his shoulder. He sounded breathless, tugging down the bottom of the shirt that he had apparently just changed into. His hair was mussed, but artfully so. He must have gone by the bathroom for a moment.

Phil showed him the screen. “Another tiny earthquake.”

“Huh.” Dan thoughtfully regarded the article for a moment, then turned away to grab his shoes from the rack by the door. “There’s been a few of those, haven’t there?”

Phil closed the article and set his phone down on the table in the hall beside him, joining Dan to slip on his own shoes. “Yeah, it’s a little odd.”

“I dunno,” said Dan. He tied his shoelaces and stood, glancing around. Clearly spying what he was looking for, he trotted across the room to grab his phone from the coffee table. “It could just be nature. Y’know, the world is ending and whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised. It could also just be some kid coming into their powers and still figuring out what’s going on.”

Considering that, Phil admitted to himself that it made sense. Every child on Earth was born with some power lying dormant in their genes, which usually revealed itself at puberty or during some traumatic stressor in their life. Few were truly powerful; most were just tiny, usually-ineffectual powers like an abnormally strong bladder, tasting by touch, changing colours of fabrics, and being able to moisten objects by touching them. Most people had versions of their parents’ powers that were easily recognized once they manifested.

Phil’s own power had been a sort of combination of his parents - his mum could manipulate bursts of wind and his dad could make anything float as long as he had touched it in the past few hours and was able to physically lift it. Phil’s power might have been on the higher spectrum of abilities since he could manipulate many objects at once such as thousands of glitter particles, but since he couldn’t do it for very long, he wasn’t considered particularly powerful.

“That could be it, I guess,” Phil acknowledged, “but if so, it’s odd that they wouldn’t have been identified yet and taught to control it.” Since most powers were so various and weak enough that they couldn’t affect anyone’s surroundings much, there wasn’t any specialized public education for them, but in the case of stronger manifestations, there were private schools to help individuals control them.

Dan just shrugged, fishing the keys from the bowl on the coffee table. “It’ll be fine. Unless it’s nature, then we’ll probably all die.”

“Dan,” Phil scolded.

“Global warming,” He said darkly. “It’s going to kill us all.”

Phil shoved him toward the door, laughing despite himself. “Stop it!”

Unlocking the door, Dan ducked outside, chuckling. “Oh, you know I’m right. The icecaps are melting and the penguins are - ”

“If you say one more time that all of the penguins are dying out, I’m going to revolt,” He threatened, snatching the keys from Dan’s hand and locking the door resentfully.

“I can feel that you think I’m funny,” Dan laughed at him.

Phil waved a finger at him. “Stop reading my emotions when I’m pretending to be upset. You could just...you could single-handedly save the penguins, is what you could do.”

He scoffed and held up one hand in demonstration. “This thing? I touch things with it to cool them off. I can’t refreeze the entirety of the polar ice caps. That’d be nice, though.”

“What would be nice,” Phil shot back, hesitating only briefly, “is your mum.”

Dan shoved him this time, huffing a laugh. “Oh my god, shut the fuck up.” His hands were cold against Phil’s shoulder even through his shirt, a clear demonstration of Dan’s secondary power.

That - his hands - was what automatically placed Dan in the top 1% of humans with powers. Neither of Dan’s abilities was remarkably strong - his empathy power and his ability to chill his hands to the freezing point of 0° celsius - but having a second power at all was incredibly rare. Like Phil, however, overusing either of his powers resulted in a negative drawback. Dan’s was mind-numbing exhaustion.

Dan’s secondary power also gave them an...interesting bedroom life. Before he met Dan, Phil would never have thought he’d have any sort of wild kinks. Now, though…

Dan poked Phil in the cheek with his cold finger. “Oi,” he said. “Stop thinking about sex.”

“I’m not!” Phil protested. “Besides, you can’t read my thoughts.”

“I can sense your sex emotions,” Dan said, unimpressed. “We need to get groceries, and if you start imagining us in bed before we even leave the building then we’re not going to get anything done.”

Phil cast him a haughty stare. “That’s just proof of your lack of self-control.”

“We’re leaving,” Dan declared.

“Coward,” Phil retorted, but followed him toward the stairs without further argument. They trundled down to the ground floor and made their way out onto the street. It only took a moment to hail down a cab, and then they were on their way to Tesco.

“Did you get the list from the fridge?” Phil asked a few minutes later, a belated question since the cab was already pulling over to let them hop out at Tesco. It was, after all, a little late to go back and fetch the list.

He looked exasperated as he shut the door behind him. “No, Phil, I told you to get it.”

“What? When?”

“When I was changing!”

Phil considered that. “Oh. Huh. I didn’t hear you.”

Dan rolled his eyes, but it was more fond than annoyed. “I knew you would.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket as they walked inside Tesco. “I took a picture of it last night just in case.”

“Oh, good. We need cereal too, since I added that to the list this morning. For...no reason. I just decided that we need more...to add to what we already have.” He grabbed a trolley and pushed it ahead of them while they headed for the far side of the store.

“Sure you did,” said Dan, clearly not believing him. “And it’s definitely not because you ate the rest of it during a two a.m. snack spree.”

Phil nodded. “No, definitely not,” he agreed innocently. He swerved the trolley into the bread aisle. They didn’t actually need any bread, since they still had half a loaf, but Phil didn’t think they would go shopping for another few weeks so it wouldn’t hurt to stock up.

“Do we have any tortillas?” Dan asked, trailing beside Phil as he swiped at his phone. “It’s not on the list, but I wanted to make fajitas tomorrow night.”

“I don’t think so,” Phil replied after a moment of thought. “I don’t remember using them all up, but I haven’t seen any.”

Dan leaned to grab a loaf of bread and toss it in the trolley as they walked. “Oh, didn’t we have those wraps last Saturday when PJ and Sophie visited?”

“Oh yeah, we did.” Their friends had come over right before lunchtime, so Dan and Phil had offered them the easiest food they could make quickly. Phil recalled the tea that had cooled as they chatted, and PJ briefly using his ability to warm liquids and reheating it with a wave of his hand. “And we ate the rest of the biscuits, add those to the list, too.”

Dan complied, tapping away at his phone. The rest of the shopping trip commenced this way, wandering down aisles searching for items on the list and occasionally getting distracted by things that weren’t. Phil had to convince Dan that he did not need four of the exact same candle since one would serve the same purpose, while Dan was very firm about not getting a massive chocolate bunny.

“But we need it,” Phil had insisted.

“Philip Lester. No. You’ll get high on the sugar.”

And that was that. They were leaving Tesco only an hour after having entered it, arms laden with bags.

“I have realized our mistake,” said Phil as they stood on the pavement outside Tesco, waiting for the Uber that Dan had called.

“What?”

“Well, I wanted to get coffee. But now we have to take these groceries back or the refrigerated stuff will go bad.”

Dan shrugged, glancing at the phone balanced in one hand to check for the status of their ride. “We can go back out. We need more exercise anyway, we’ll just walk to the one a few blocks from our flat.”

“I guess,” he agreed reluctantly. Dan was definitely more into the exercise than Phil was - they had already both gone jogging this morning and Phil was perfectly happy with that level of effort for the day. Coffee would be worth it, though. He was jolted from his thoughts of exercise and coffee by a bag that was starting to slip down his arm. “No,” he told it, eyeing it suspiciously. It didn’t listen, the weight of the bananas inside dragging it further and leaving faint red lines on his arm. He loosened his grip on the bag in his other hand and wiggled his middle and index fingers at the bag. It obediently slid back up his arm, ignoring gravity to settle in the crook of his elbow.

A car up in front of the pavement and Dan waved briefly at the driver. “Uber’s here,” he told Phil, already heading for the trunk of the car. The driver hopped out and helped them load their groceries into the back of the vehicle, putting the most fragile items into the safety net. Once they had everything arranged, Dan and Phil climbed into the backseat and they were off back to their flat.

~~~

“Straw?” Phil asked hopefully, but the barista had already turned away, harried and rushed with the line of customers out the door. Phil looked down mournfully at his drink. The straws by the door were gone and Dan was already tucked into their usual table in the corner, sipping at his macchiato as he swiped through his phone.

Excuse me, Phil heard from a woman slipping past him to escape the Starbucks. He only had time to notice her arms piled with coffee and a bag of chips clenched in her teeth before she was gone. She must have mentally projected the words at him using her power, he supposed. Taking a step back as another customer navigated through the line in front of him, he craned his neck to see if there were any straws left in the container behind the counter. There were some left, in a half-full box of straws tucked beside the syrups. A barista snatched one and handed it, along with a drink, to a customer, then immediately went back to making drinks. Phil squinted, making sure he was focusing on just one straw - he didn’t want another incident to occur - and then casually, unobtrusively stretched his fingers toward them. Nothing happened for a moment, and then a straw wiggled in place. It squirmed free from the confines of the other paper wrappers surrounding it, then leapt high in the air, above the customers’ heads. Phil released his control over it, then hurriedly snatched it before it plummeted to the floor.

Pleased, he unwrapped it and shoved it in the lid of his drink as he made his way to the corner, where Dan was still on his phone.

“I can’t believe yours was done first,” he said, sliding into the chair across from Dan. “And then you abandoned me.”

“I can believe it,” said Dan, not looking up. He sipped at his own boring-looking drink. “I got something normal, and you got that...monstrosity.”

Phil glanced down at it. It was pink and glittery and ...definitely different. “I had to try it,” he protested. “Look, it’s delicious.” To demonstrate, he slurped deeply from the straw. He could feel his face collapse into disgust as soon as the first sugary drop hit his tongue. “Um.”

Dan laughed, finally glancing up, probably to take a mental picture of Phil’s expression. “It’s a good thing everyone here isn’t an empath, or that raving recommendation would turn them all away.”

“It’s...unique,” Phil insisted. He took another sip and resisted the grimace that wanted to live on his face.

Dan set down his macchiato and sighed, reaching out for the drink. Phil handed it to him unhesitantly. Taking a brief sip of the drink, Dan winced and shook his head. “Sometimes, Phil, you don’t need to try new things.”

Phil stole Dan’s drink to wash the taste from his mouth. “Well...now I know not to get it. Besides, it’s limited.”

“Float it over to the trash bin,” he instructed, shoving the colourful drink back to Phil and taking his own back. “Limited doesn’t mean it’s good.”

Rebelliously, Phil drank from it again. “I’m not going to waste it.” He set it down after a few moments when the icy cup became a little too much for his hands. Dan was having no trouble with his own iced macchiato clasped unflinchingly in his free hand - but then, he wouldn’t, with hands that were unaffected by the cold.

It was unfair, Phil decided, that Dan could consistently keep his drinks cooled to the perfect temperature. To retaliate, he stole his drink again.

“You’re going to buy me another one,” Dan threatened mildly. He was on his phone again, though, and Phil didn’t feel particularly intimidated.

“Who’re you texting?” he asked around the straw in his mouth.

“Cornelia. I was asking her about a new merch idea.”

“Ooh, the gloves one?” Phil thought that one would sell brilliantly. Dan’s secondary power was the one most prominently used on his channel - in fact, only diehard fans even knew about Dan’s primary empathic power. It just wasn’t something that could be visibly touted in his videos. As a consequence of that, while both Dan and Phil had sold merch themed around their abilities, Phil had a logo shaped like a burst of wind that was stamped on some products while Dan’s was an icicle, only marketed toward his secondary power. One of Dan’s most recent items - a foam cup holder that chilled drinks while keeping hands warm - had sold out in the first week.

“Yeah, she likes it, but she thinks they need to be a different type of fabric.” Dan frowned at his phone and typed out a message that was disturbingly fast for only one hand. “As if leather isn’t practical.”

Phil laughed. “Dan, just because your hands never sweat doesn’t mean everyone else don’t.”

“I mean, I was joking about the leather, but I don’t want them to be solid wool. That’s just as hot, right?”

Shrugging, Phil took another long sip from Dan’s drink. “I don’t know anything about fabrics.” He glanced down at the cup, noting the liquid dipping below the melting ice. He probably would have to get Dan some more.

“What kind of useless gay are you?” asked Dan half-heartedly. He sighed and set down his phone. “I don’t feel like figuring out merch shit right now.”

“Tired?” Phil regarded him, a little concern niggling at him. Dan didn’t look exhausted, particularly, but if he had been overusing his powers, it might be weighing on him.

Dan waved a dismissive hand. “No, I just...don’t want to deal with it. It’s really busy here, too. It’s a little distracting.”

Sometimes Phil forgot that Dan couldn’t particularly turn off his empathetic ability. He could narrow his focus onto one person to read every aspect of their feelings, or even project his own emotions, but unlike Phil, it wasn’t something he had to consciously activate to use. Phil remembered Dan once describing it as “street noise, like cars driving past outside. You’re not always paying attention to them, but you know they’re there. And when an angry or upset person is near, it’s like an ambulance going past with its sirens on.”

“Any sirens?” asked Phil. They used the analogy often, an easy way for Phil to gauge what Dan was feeling from the people around them.

Dan shook his head. “Maybe in the distance. It’s just...heavy traffic.”

There were quite a few people packed into this small Starbucks. Phil pushed the macchiato back toward Dan. “Here, have a drink. And chill it again? The ice is melting a little.”

“You’re so generous.” Dan’s lips twisted wryly, knowing. He could feel Phil’s attempt to distract him from their surroundings. “It wouldn’t be melting if you hadn’t stolen it.” His hands had already gripped the cup, and Phil watched, unendingly fascinated with the way condensation spread in tiny frozen crystals as Dan’s long fingers wrapped around the plastic. Phil sometimes wondered what would happen if he had gotten a secondary power along with his telekinetic abilities. He doubted the results of any other power would look as elegant as Dan’s.

“Are you going to finish yours?” Dan asked, raising an eyebrow at the drink Phil had forgotten existed. It was still sitting abandoned, pink and bright and eye-searing, by the puddle of melted water that Dan’s cup had left.

Phil took a stubborn sip from it, refusing to let himself react to the explosion of bitter-sweet that soured his mouth. His eyebrow twitched defiantly. “Yes. I spent almost four pounds on it.”

“Sometimes, we just have to acknowledge that an experience wasn’t what we wanted it to be, and chalk it up as a lesson learned. Sometimes, we just have to move on from our mistakes.”

Phil glowered at him and his wisdom. “I hate you.”

“You hate that drink more, though. Are you really going to continue to suffer just to prove some sort of asinine point?”

“I could,” Phil said mutinously. He tried to take another insistent drink, but his mouth refused to cooperate. The straw tap-tapped vainly a few times against his lips before he gave up. “Ugh, fine. Shut up,” he added before Dan, his mouth parted in a wide, silent laugh, could say anything. He glanced around for a trash bin, ready to push his failure of a drink through the air and dispose of it.

“Come on, let’s head back to the flat,” Dan interjected. “You can throw it away on the way out the door.”

Phil dubiously eyed the crowded line of coffee-impatient customers stretching out the door and down the sidewalk. “It’s too bad neither of us can teleport.”

“That would be convenient,” Dan agreed, standing and fetching his phone and halfway-finished macchiato. “Do you know how many awkward situations I would have just abandoned?”

“Who needs to converse when you can reverse?” Phil added, then frowned. “Wait, that’d be a time power wouldn’t it?”

Dan laughed. “Yeah, like that kid I told you I knew in primary who could like rewind twenty seconds of time? Everyone knew when he did it, though - he got uncontrollable hiccups for like an hour after.”

Phil didn’t like getting a headache if he overused his powers, but he couldn’t imagine it happening every time he used them. “Poor kid.”

Dan made his way determinedly for the door of Starbucks, going just slow enough for Phil to navigate past two teenagers and catch up. “Well, you know, the more powerful the ability, the stronger the body’s backlash. I think it’s a good thing, so we don’t have time-warping and mind-destroying supervillains trying to take over the world.”

“It sounds so ominous when you say it like that,” Phil squeezed behind a rotund woman happily chattering away on her phone and found the bin just beside the door. It was almost full, but he dropped the drink in anyway. He mournfully watched it fall into the rest of the rubbish and thunk heavily against an empty cup, taking a moment to wish it had been a better drink.

Dan had already ducked outside. He tapped the window, raising an amused eyebrow at Phil’s inability to keep up with him. Come on, he mouthed.

Phil shrugged helplessly back at him. He had to grieve for such a beautiful monstrosity - it was only right. The sugar deserved to be missed. Dan just rolled his eyes at him.

Fine, Phil mouthed back. He waited a moment for a gap in the line of customers, and then he edged his way between them. He had just reached the door, swinging shut as someone stepped inside, when he felt it. It was just a tiny shudder at first, and Phil thought maybe someone had nudged against him, but then the floor trembled beneath his feet.

It took a few seconds for everyone around him to become aware of the ground’s awakening, but a more violent palpitation caused a visible disturbance and the conversation in the Starbucks abruptly ceased, a loud silence falling among the inhabitants. Phil became aware that someone was gripping his arm, their nervousness allowing them to abandon civility and grasp onto the nearest stationary object. He could see the display case to his left quivering minutely and an abandoned cup atop it wavering, undecided whether to topple to the floor. The floor juddered again, and Phil felt his knees knock against each other in an attempt to keep him standing. The cup fell.

A hesitant scream breached the silence of the room, testing if it was the right reaction. It trailed away after only a moment, and now Phil could hear a low rumble somewhere deep beneath the ground.

Then the panic started; It wholly infected the group within seconds, and there was an instant rush for the door as dozens of people simultaneously decided that getting outside was their best option. Phil’s ears rang with screams, but since he had been directly in front of the door, he was immediately shoved out of the door and onto the pavement before he could even attempt to react. He staggered as his feet hit the concrete, almost losing his balance, but regained his equilibrium and forced rapid steps away from the pushing, sudden mass of bodies exiting the store. The ground still rumbled warningly beneath him, threatening worse. He could feel the intensity of the tremors increasing. The sign on the pavement that proclaimed the coffee and pastry of the day bounced a few feet and then, with a heave of the concrete beneath it, toppled sideways and was immediately trampled by urgent feet.

Dan. Stricken by the thought, and that his brain had abandoned it until now, Phil backed into the side of the store to get away from the stream of people and stood on the tips of his toes to look around. The brick dug into his back, rippling uncertainly, but he ignored the movements to scan the crowd. He and Dan were both taller than most of these people, but he couldn’t see Dan’s familiar curls or sloped shoulders anywhere.

“Dan!” Phil called, but it was drowned by the yells and screams of others around him. Someone bellowed “Earthquake!” but everyone already knew, and everyone was already running, as if there was any way they could escape the earth’s rebellious upheavals.

He attempted a step away from the wall, but an angry roll of the earth split the pavement in front of him and he moved back hastily, his shoulders thudding painfully back onto the brick. Feet juddering for balance beneath him, he couldn’t tear his eyes from the crack in the pavement. It seemed surreal, the casual rip through the concrete as if it was paper. Phil’s thoughts grasped desperately at his memory of that very morning - the article, the one with the earthquakes. The possibility that it would happen here seemed so infinitesimally low, but here it was.

Call 999. The idea came to him so suddenly that he realized it wasn’t his own - the woman who had pushed past him only a few minutes ago must have still been in the area and was projecting her thoughts to everyone in the area. And stop running.

Phil couldn’t see a single person stop running - projection didn’t control anyone - but there were a few people that scrabbled for their pocketed phones. A phone, he should call Dan. He reached for his pocket, but his fingers slipped uselessly against the empty fabric of his jeans, and he remembered with sinking despair that he had put down his phone on the table back at the apartment and forgotten to pick it up again. “Dan!” he called again, a vain effort lost amongst the noisy crowd now filling the pavements. The other stores along the block were emptying, all of the customers desperate for the open, freeing space of the street. Phil was vaguely sure that, in an earthquake, people were meant to get beneath a table or hold onto something and not run outside, but he had no way of stopping the panic from spreading as quickly as the tremors had begun. He felt utterly useless.

Someone screamed, just another noise amongst the commotion, but Phil’s attention was grabbed by the sound. It seemed like it was still inside the Starbucks, the one he had been unceremoniously propelled from in what seemed like hours ago but couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. His gaze jumped involuntarily from the panic before him to the glass door of the Starbucks just a few feet to his left. It was juddering in its frame, the glass shimmering in place as it threatened to break. There was another piercing wail from inside, and Phil was suddenly sure that someone had been left inside.

He moved without thinking, feet dancing around the shallow crevices that were splintering the ground to make his way to the door. Aware that the glass could shatter at any moment, he grasped the handle and tugged gently, but the door didn’t move. Glancing down, he found the cause of its impediment - the stone around the frame had climbed to escape the ground’s movements and imprisoned the door.

“Help!”

Phil’s gaze snapped up and past the shuddering glass of the door, and now he could see where the screams had originated. There were two teenagers in the far corner of the store. One was sprawled on the floor, a leg twisted at a grotesque angle. She was grasping it with both hands, her head bowed as if she was fighting against the pain. Another girl crouched beside her, trying to hold onto both the wounded girl and a table beside her at the same time. She shivered minutely, but Phil couldn’t tell if it was from pain or the ground still trembling beneath them. She opened her mouth to yell again, but then her gaze locked with Phil’s and her expression collapsed into relief. Waving, her voice shuddered as she spoke. “Help, please! My girlfriend tripped and we can’t get out!”

Phil was quite sure that coming outside, amongst this disaster and panicking people, wouldn’t help, but he wasn’t going to leave them. A few details of the scenario jumped out at him: the flickering lights in the shop; the abandoned coffee cups and pastries strewn abandoned across the tables and tumbled to the floor; and then, the worst of everything, the cracks climbing the darkly painted walls of the Starbucks. It was that which made up his mind more than anything.

“Keep holding onto the table!” he called through the nervously warping glass. “Give me just a second.” He braced himself against the next fierce roll of concrete beneath him. It felt like surfing a wave of brittle, uncertain catastrophe. He had never surfed, and he didn’t think he ever wanted to now.

A cautious tug on the door handle did nothing but anger the glass. A crack seared across the top corner and Phil hesitated. He didn’t want to shatter the glass if he could avoid it. The solution sprang to him as soon as he glanced back down at the frame that was held captive by the upheaved ridges of the stone walkway. Releasing the handle of the door, he flicked a finger and a mental order at the jagged edges of the rock. It resisted him for a moment, yearning to obey the more powerful force of the yawning earth beneath him, but he insisted, and it reluctantly complied. The obstruction sank into the walkway, the stone seeming to melt as it reformed under his power, freeing the frame, and he opened the door instantly, careful but persistent. It took him more than a few moments to navigate inside and across the trembling floor, almost tip-toeing to keep his balance when the ground heaved beneath him. He couldn’t help but glance up at the cracks that were webbing across the wall just beside the two girls on the floor. There was something almost anticipatory about the scrawled lines and the way they stretched eagerly for the ceiling. This building wasn’t safe.

Phil wasn’t sure anywhere was safe right now.

He knelt beside the two girls, ignoring the way his knees dug into the powdered concrete. He didn’t bother asking if they were okay - they weren’t, and neither was anyone right now. The wounded girl, her chin still tucked to her chest, was breathing shakily, her fingers bloodless at the grip on her own leg. Her hair, cascading around her face, shuttered her expression from Phil’s view.

The other girl had watched Phil’s approach with anxious eyes, and her voice sounded gritty now when she spoke. “We need to get out of here.” Her own hand was tightly gripped on the other’s arm.

Phil glanced up briefly at the wall and its spreading cracks. “Yeah, we do.” He surveyed the wounded girl’s leg, then, a hasty inspection that made his stomach twist. Her knee was twisted beneath her in an unnatural position that felt wrong to look at. At least there was no blood. “Do you think you’ll be able to move?”

She simply shook her head, the tips of her hair swaying. Phil could see the tiny purse of her mouth, the pain-tight crinkles that squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m suppressing her nervous system,” the other girl hastily explained. “That’s my - I can do that, but only when she isn’t moving. Can you...you pushed down the ground outside? What can you - ?”

“I can control small objects,” Phil said, and then hesitated. “...Usually. I might be able to float larger objects, but it’s a lot harder and it doesn’t always work.” He had rarely, other than a few playful mental shoves during his childhood, actually moved a human being. Skin and muscle and bones were so much more fragile than blocks of wood and malleable concrete. Experimenting wasn’t really an option with this aspect of his power, not when he could easily injure delicate skin or breakable bones with the wrong mental nudge, and torn humans did not zipper back together like a ripped piece of fabric would under Phil’s attention.

Something was prickling at the back of Phil’s mind, a bubble of suggestion that felt familiar, but he dismissed it with little effort. When he focussed back on the nerve-suppressing teen crouched beside her girlfriend, he could see her eyebrows furrowed tightly together.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her. She hadn’t seemed injured, but she must have been the one screaming earlier. He might have missed something obvious.

She blinked, then nodded. “No, I’m fine. I just got...tired for a second.”

The floor shook beneath Phil again, gritting bits of crumbled wall into his knees, and it shook his awareness back to the store around them. He studied the cracks again, noting their rapid spread. His throat felt tight, too tight. Spreading cautious fingers, he tilted his palm toward the corners where the wall met the ceiling and prodded at the cracks, little more than a mental brush against them, in an attempt to gauge how deep they went.  He needed to know if the structural integrity of the building was compromised. A few pieces of plaster crumbled and showered all three of them, mocking his efforts, but he got his answer only a second later when the ceiling creaked ominously above them.

“Okay, we need to leave,” Phil ordered.

Both girls started to move at the urgency in his voice, but they had all waited too long. With another heave of the ground and a groaning protest from the wall supports, the ceiling lost its will to stay perched precariously on the rebellious walls.

The ceiling fell.

Phil threw up both hands instinctively as the lights, plaster, and wooden beams crumpled inwards and down toward them. The entire building was crashing down upon him and he could feel the weight of it sink past his fingertips, past his desperately outstretched hands, past his arms and shoulders and chest, and settle deep into his bones. It wanted to crush him, and all he had to hold it back was the tightly wound threads of his ability that were twisted around his mind. The strings, those bits of energy that he associated with his power, yanked tight around his head and he clenched his eyes shut against the sudden, searing pain that blossomed in his mind. It was all-consuming, an instant migraine worse than anything he had felt even on his worse days. Briefly overusing his power and regretting the headache it invited was nothing compared to this. It had been less than seconds, and his blood was fiery pain in his veins, his bones quaked, and his skin crawled at the whispered sensation of air against it.

But...he could feel the air. He wasn’t physically crushed beneath a tonne of destroyed ceiling. The cords of his power were strangling his mind, but, somehow, he was still alive.

Phil opened his eyes. Around and above him, the building hung suspended in broken fragments, chunks of plaster, thick beams of wood, and glinting pieces of shattered lights all frozen in terrifying stillness.

“Oh my god,” breathed one of the girls.

He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t move. If he moved even one hand, still flung out at the mass of destruction hovering above them, then he didn’t think he could maintain it. He didn’t even know how he was doing it, not really. There was a part of him that felt detached and silent, observing the display of frozen destruction in a quiet curiosity.

“Oh my god,” said one of the girls again. He could feel her looking at him, shaken. “You’re bleeding.”

One of the threads of Phil’s power reached out for her with anticipation, but he let it slip away. The words that she had spoken registered faintly in the back of his mind, and yet it seemed inconsequential through the haze of pain that surrounded him. He could feel it, though, the blood creeping from the burst vessels in his nose and pooling in the dip above his upper lip.

“Holy shit,” said the other girl. It was the hurt one. Her voice was tight with her own pain from her leg, but she sounded clearer than Phil felt.

He had to force his thoughts to arrange themselves. Most of himself was vacant, wrapped around every misplaced molecule in the air above him, but the strings strangling his mind were drawing ever tighter and he knew something was going to break. Blood dripped from his lips when he spoke. “You need to get out of here.” His throat clamped around the words, and he had to force them out. Slowly, slowly, he let his gaze drift to the way out - and there was still a way out. It was narrow, and surrounded by dangerously suspended bits of the ceiling, but there was a path to the still-open door.

“We wouldn’t leave without you!” Her voice was desperate, but Phil knew in a distant sort of way that yes, she would.

But he could move. He had to move.

“Wait, can you...here.” The girls were moving now, and one hissed with pain, but Phil didn’t dare let his concentration shift enough to take notice of what they were doing. They were done in only a moment, and then they were standing beside him, one leaning heavily on the other. He was still in a half-crouch on the floor, and his fingers trembled in the outstretched pose he maintained.

“Please,” said the girl supporting the other. Her eyes were ringed with white, and she trembled in fear, but she held out a hand unhesitatingly to him. “Please, stand!”

The ground rumbled beneath them again, very briefly. Phil hadn’t noticed that the quaking had stopped until it moved again. It was only a brief slip of concentration, and Phil snatched back control in half a second, but one of the threads digging deep into his mind stretched, and stretched, and snapped.

It started in the corner of the room first. A whisper of suspended plaster pattered against the floor, and then a heavier particle of a lightbulb shattered on an overturned table. Phil clung desperately to the strings of his power, but they were fraying and his mind ached and he was so, so tired.

He was lurching to his feet before he even thought about it. His hands still outstretched, he swayed in place, half-expecting the ground to collapse beneath him or the broken chunks of the building to come crashing down upon them all, but somehow, there was no immediate consequence. His lungs stuttered in his chest, and he sucked in a breath, realizing that he hadn’t been breathing for a few long moments. His chest heaved, and he hurt. Tearing his gaze from the effects of his ability that surrounded him, he met the wide-eyed stares of the girls. The threads of his power began slipping from his grip.

“Run,” he said.

They ran. The injured girl cried out each time her wounded leg hit the floor, but her girlfriend was gripping her waist with a ferocity that Phil would have approved of if he wasn’t distracted by his own mind ripping free from the destroyed ceiling that he held in midair.

A beam, heavy and wooden, crashed to the floor behind the crumpled counter of the shop. Another string tore in Phil’s mind, but he fought against the others trying to wrench themselves from his grip. He took an unsteady step after the girls, who still hobbled desperately for freedom. If the ground moved now, he wouldn’t make it to the door.

The ground didn’t move, but the ceiling did. More clutter fell piece by piece, raining down upon the floor and crushing tables beneath them.

Phil held on, and he held on, and he slowly made his way for the door, and he held on.

And then he was stumbling out of the door just after the girls, and the store was crashing down behind him in a thunderous, bone-rattling roar, and his thoughts were warping terrifyingly inside him. He could taste the blood on his lips, mingled with the fresh air of freedom he had gained. His eyes felt glazed, and he stumbled off the pavement to get further from the store, still tumbling and settling in its ruin. Something crumpled, and Phil realized it was him. Someone caught him, but he didn’t know who it was. His mind was too loud, crashing against every nerve in his body. He felt hyper-sensitive, every touch and smell and glimpse of light screaming pain into him.

Suddenly, blissfully, it all quieted, and Phil let his eyes slip shut to embrace the warming darkness that enveloped him.

~~~

Phil woke up slowly, his thoughts piecing themselves back together as his eyes blinked open. It was dark in the room he was in, but he could make out a slumped form in the chair beside his bed. A slow, steady beeping came from a machine on the other side of him. He was in the hospital, then. He lifted careful fingers to his forehead as if to check that it was still in once piece, and was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing...hurt. He would expect his head to be splitting with a migraine after the bits and flashes of what he could recall.

“You got the good stuff,” came a gravelly voice from the person beside him. “A doctor with a healing ability was in here earlier.”

“Dan,” said Phil. His eyes stung, tears prickling at the corner of his vision as emotion swamped him. “You’re okay.”

“Fuck you,” said Dan, but it was too soft to be anything but fond. He moved abruptly, leaning halfway out of his seat to drape himself across Phil and bury his face in the crumpled neckline of Phil’s hospital gown. “God, you dick. You scared me so much.”

Phil’s arms had moved instinctively to grip him. “I couldn’t find you,” he said, the memory of that frozen panic flashing back to him. “You were just...gone.”

Dan’s laugh was a half-sob, muffled against Phil’s chest. “I couldn’t find you,” he said. “I got shoved across the street somehow and when the tremors stopped and I made it back to the Starbucks, it had already collapsed. I only found you because these two girls were bawling beside you thinking you were dead.”

“Are they okay?” Phil asked, suddenly urgent with the reminder of the couple that had survived an entire crushing building with him. “One of them had a broken leg, I think.”

“Yeah, there were a lot of ambulances and shit that pulled up seconds after everything stopped shaking and falling. They’re safe.” Dan finally sat back up, swiping ineffectually at his eyes with one hand, but the other found Phil’s hand under the thin, sterile hospital blanket and gripped it tightly. “I would have given them my phone number or something, but I was a little preoccupied with you being fucking unconscious.”

“Sorry,” Phil apologized weakly, but Dan laughed, the noise wet and catching in his throat.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, you controlled an entire building. That’s insane.”

It was insane. Phil didn’t want to do it ever again. His head throbbed at the reminder of the crushing sensation and the terror he had felt when he slowly lost his grip over his ability. “Yeah,” he said. “It was...crazy.”

Dan sighed, and he looked exhausted suddenly. The evening sun peeked through the room’s blinds, highlighting his chest and face in rosy golden strips. “God, Phil. You scared me so badly. Never do that again.”

“I don’t plan on it,” Phil agreed. He examined the deep, blood-bruised bags under Dan’s eyes and patted the narrow space on the cot beside him. “Here, nap until the nurse comes to check on me.”

“I’m not going to fit,” Dan protested, but he was already climbing in beside him. His curls tickled Phil’s cheek as he settled in, and his body felt like the missing piece of a puzzle when he pressed himself into Phil.

Phil still didn’t know quite what had happened - what was causing these earthquakes, how he survived such an overextension of his powers, or even what tomorrow would bring - but for now, he closed his eyes and let his arm curl around Dan’s hip and he breathed.

They were both okay. That was all that really mattered.