#did i just tag phan in 2024

[aleksjeojuice]

terrible influences

[manchesterau]

[secretlywritingstories]

Go out with a bang as it were | phan one shot

Summary: The cursor was mocking Dan as he was trying to work on his Terrible Influence Tour script and he kept getting distracted thinking about his life with Phil and the relationship to their audience. Until Phil shows up with water, steals his laptop, makes him faint and promises to love him for 100 years.

Tags: Established relationship, 2024!phan, domestic fluff, introspection, Terrible Influence Tour prep

Warnings: Brief fainting (he is okay!)

Word count: 3k

A/N: My 100th phanfic posted. First one I posted back in September 2016 (this one) and now we're here. Can you believe it? I certainly cannot. I could never have imagined I'd get here and have recieved so much love for my phanfics. It's a gift and I treasure it. Dan also decided to personally award me (as I see it) with my first ever Twitter notice when I was editing this.

Read below or on AO3

Dan was aware that his and Phil’s life felt a bit too much like a fanfic at times. He never felt it more keenly than when he had to sit down and write something that reflected their life.

Still, he liked to lean into the absurdity, fate and grandness of it all because there was nothing more lovely than romanticising stupid, silly parts of their life. And they did also have a frighteningly number of actual fanfictions written about them. It had been overwhelming at first but now they were veterans. They understood how fandoms worked. They’d always encouraged creation in their viewers and creative writing borrowing their likeness was no different.

He was quite sure that the number of the fics written had dropped during the hiatus. It was the natural cycle after all. In general, when less new content was coming out, there was less engagement in the belonging fandom. There were exceptions obviously, but it was still the rule.

It had happened with his and Phil’s audience too. They had anticipated it but it was still strange to see. 2018 had been the era of giving the audience what they wanted, absolutely committing to doing the most ever, so that Dan could take a step back and work on something else.

Something new. Solo projects.

Stepping back had never been about his love for Phil. Their relationship had never been for the audience. It was for them and they chose to share glimpses. The community they had created had been a crazy by-product through their shared passion and goofing off on camera. Just for the heck of it. Because they liked each other so much and it was easier doing something when they could look over and find each other’s eyes.

It was what Dan had missed the most during his solo tour. He’d kept Phil updated through messages and video calls, just to see each other’s faces but it hadn’t been the same. He had missed sharing the stage. And now he was going to have it again.

Their third joint tour was happening. It had felt surreal ever since they had come up with the idea. Even now, a month out from the announcement and so many venues sold out, it didn’t quite feel real. It wouldn’t feel real until they stood in front of their audience again.

The cursor was blinking at Dan, almost mocking him for how he could get all lost in his head but he couldn’t get it down on paper. He was trying to edit a monologue piece for the Terrible Influence tour and he’d decided that opening a new document would be a good idea. Let only the best bits carry over instead of overly nit-picking his existing script.

Phil came into the lounge, glasses at the very tip of his nose and pyjamas pants slouching as he walked. He was carrying two glasses of water, only it was the tall glasses that they’d used for the mukbang video.

“Dishwasher overloaded again?” Dan asked, as he sat up a little, adjusting his laptop in his lap before reaching out for one of the glasses. They were trying to maintain healthy habits to be in good enough shape to endure so many months of tour.

Phil just hummed before he plonked himself down at the other side of the sofa. He didn’t reach for his phone or his laptop. Just held his glass with two hands and slowly sipped.

Waiting for something.

No, waiting for Dan.

“I’m fine,” Dan insisted.

“You’re rewriting again,” Phil pointed out. “The first show is in less than a month.”

“Diamonds are made under pressure,” Dan said, staring at the cursor again. Blinking judgingly at him.

When he was in the zone, the cursor was his friend, it stayed a little black line just appearing after the words. The words that spilled from his fingertips as easy as breathing. He knew this shit. It was a show about them. It should be easy to write.

“It’s meant to be fun, you know,” Phil said and cocked his head just a little to the side. His blonde hair had a slight silver tint at the moment and it was growing out just enough to flop adorably. Phil would get a haircut before tour but he’d wait until they were closer to the first date.

“It is fun,” Dan said.

And it had been. Gaming videos, even though that was a very loose definition of the kind of videos that they were putting on the joint channel at the moment, were fun and easy. Outsourcing the most of the editing had been a weight off their shoulders and made it sustainable in the long term to have active channels. But big projects were something different.

It was Dan’s greatest joy and his greatest enemy. Because he felt like it had to be perfect, even though he knew no such a thing existed. He still wanted to strive for it, maybe because he was trying to capture that fanfic-worthy essence of how his and Phil’s life had fallen together like long-lost puzzle pieces.

They were embracing the moment and trying not to think too far ahead, mostly for Dan’s sake, but this time, it could actually be the last chance for a tour to see their audience. An audience that was really their audience now. No longer people who thought they were cool because they were British, tall, shippable and “popular” YouTubers. No, the ones still around now loved them for them and they were all a bunch of little weirdos, just like him and Phil.

Phil reached over and closed Dan’s laptop screen. He barely managed to pull his fingers back before they would have been snapped off.

“You want to cut my fingers off right before tour? You want to do tour with fingerless Dan?” Dan joked and shot Phil an accusing glare that carried no heat.

“No, your fingers are too essential. We can’t have them be gone,” Phil said and there was a glint in his eye that told Dan exactly down which kind of gutter Phil’s mind had disappeared into. It had been a while since they’d last done that.

But Dan didn’t rise to the bait. He tried to open his screen again, but Phil pushed it down once more.

“I can do this all day,” Dan said, attempting to open the screen again, just for Phil to shut it.

Again.

“Watch something with me,” Phil proposed. “Or we’ll be stuck here forever like that Syphilis guy.”

“Syh- PHIL, it’s Sisyphus! Syphilis is an STI!” Dan spoke with increasing volume and completely forgot about the computer in his lap. He was too busy staring at Phil in disbelief.

“Oh, my mistake.”

He was grinning. He was being a little shit on purpose.

“You said it wrong deliberately, didn’t you?”

“No? You know, I mess up my Greek mythology. That’s your nerdy area,” he said and he was a picture of innocence but Dan knew him too well. Just a tiny twitch of his left eye and it was enough to give away the lie.

“Don’t distract me with mythology, unless you want me to write a two-hour speech that ends up becoming the whole tour,” he threatened and wagged a finger in Phil’s face.

Phil, of course, simply tried to catch the finger with his teeth. His teeth actually graced Dan’s finger before he was able to pull it back without getting mauled.

“It doesn’t have to be that serious,” Phil said. “Just vibes.”

“It’s our lives,” Dan countered.

“Our lives are mostly vibes, if you think about it.”

Dan blinked at Phil several times. Worst part was that he was kind of right about it. He’d just put it so concisely that it was kind of annoying that he could be so poignant with so few words. Dan needed space to open up a discussion, arranging many words into sentences to make sure that he conveyed the right nuance.

Phil’s brain worked quite a bit differently.

“Fifteen years of vibes?” Dan asked, eyebrow raised, even as he tried to keep the smile off his face.

“It’ll be sixteen years when we’re on tour,” Phil corrected, and then he reached out to actually bop Dan on the nose. Clearly, it was just one of those impulse thoughts because he smiled so self-satisfied when Dan almost went cross-eyed trying to track the movement of his finger.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

“Yeah? Says the guy who got me a 100-day gift, and who made a point to figure out when we’d been together for 100 months too, now that I think about it. You could write about that? Your cute little thing about wanting numbers to be special. When will the next one be, when we’ve been together 100 years?”

Dan snorted. “You think we’ll get that old? Phil, our bodies will have fallen apart by then. We’re not getting to be 120 something.”

Phil shrugged, unbothered. “You never know. They could develop some kind of technology. We could just be floating brains in jars. Or like stretched-out like that lady from Doctor Who. Do you think we could reserve pods next to each other?”

Okay, Dan was taking back that part about Phil being poignant. His man was insane. Actually insane.

Even if his heart actually skipped a beat at the idea that even in some distant science fiction future, where they’d been turned into just skin or brains, Phil still wanted to make sure that they’d be next to each other. Obviously even in that scenario, they could not be separated.

“And be stuck with you for eternity while technology keeps us in some twisted kind of immortality? No thanks,” he said deadpan but his voice was too strained to be casual.

As he said it, he felt how his heart refused to fucking calm down. It was stupid. He knew Phil loved him. He knew Phil had chosen him again and again. It was their thing. They had gone through so much shit together that they wouldn’t let anything pull them apart. It was the long haul, and evidently also beyond mortal life, if Phil were to be believed.

But the reminder of that commitment never ceased to floor Dan. He’d not had a best friend for the first eighteen years of his life and now for the last fifteen, he’d had Phil. Phil who was his very best friend like he could never have dreamed, his favourite person in the whole wide world and the one person he always wanted to be around.

That was the kind of sentiment that he needed to capture for the monologue. Perhaps not that personal but to parrot Phil’s words, he should get the vibes of it at least.

He tried to open his laptop to grab the thought and get it down before it scurried away but he didn’t manage before Phil had evolved his tactic and snatched the whole laptop out of Dan’s hands.

“We’re watching anime, you still need a break,” Phil said, narrowing his eyes in a way that was perhaps meant to come off as threatening, but he just looked slightly constipated.

“I just need to get this down,” Dan insisted, jumping up from his sofa crease and trying to swipe the laptop out of Phil’s hands.

Only, he had probably been a little too overzealous and he’d once again forgotten that his stupid blood pressure and his stupid tall body liked to combine into a fainting nightmare.

“Oh, no,” was all he managed to say before he could feel himself falling forward.

His vision turned spotty and he was just in free-fall. He just had time enough to hope that he wasn’t going to hit their coffee table before he felt arms actually reach out to catch him.

Only to promptly continue falling while Phil was now yelping very loudly in his ear. It was enough to pull him back to the presence, even if his eyes took some more time to adjust.

They were on the floor.

“What happened?” Dan managed, trying to push himself up but feeling a little like his arms were jelly.

“You fainted again, idiot.”

“Thanks. I got that,” Dan said, dripping with sarcasm. “You caught me? Tried?”

“Tried being the opportune word here,” Phil said and he tried to sit up but he quickly gave up and just lied down on the floor sprawled out again when he realised it wasn’t easy to push Dan off him.

“You okay?” Dan asked, scrunching up his face and trying to make his eyes properly focus. He wanted to rub at his eyes but he knew that would only make the fussy sensation worse.

“You’re heavy,” Phil just said as a complaint, which Dan took to mean that he was actually fine.

“This is what happens when you try to steal my laptop,” Dan chastised and finally managed to push himself off of Phil. Only the prospect of actually standing up right now was a little daunting, so he ended up just rolling over to lie next to him. Now they were just both sprawled out on their backs net to each other.

“You need someone to steal your laptop every now and again,” Phil said and flopped his hand over so it hit Dan in the chest softly.

Phil was undoubtedly very right, but Dan wasn’t going to concede that right now. He wanted to tell Phil to shut up, get all whiny and annoying but really, he was a little too fucking emotional to commit to the bit right now.

“I hope we do make it to a hundred years of being together just so I can know I’ve gotten to annoy you for a whole ass century,” Dan said and tried to ignore how Phil had let his hand just rest on Dan’s chest after he’d playfully hit him.

It was a light weight, barely there, but it was resting right over his heart.

“An ass century?” Phil giggled.

He retaliated by trying to hit at Phil’s chest, mimicking what Phil had done to him. He’d planned to pull his hand back to himself but he found that his arm didn’t quite obey. His hand lingered, palm up, right on Phil’s chest.

Neither of them made a move to get up. Floor time was good after all. At least when it was this kind of spontaneous floor time and not the face-down existential dread kind. Phil was the one who pulled away that metaphorical laptop too, when he thought Dan had been down there for too long.

They probably made quite the picture right now. He wondered how it would have been described or pictured. It made Dan chuckle.

“What?” Phil asked softly.

Phil moved his hand a little, grabbing onto Dan’s old and soft T-shirt. The same shirt he’d grabbed hours ago when he’d pulled Dan into a lazy kiss good morning, which was really noon, because none of them could keep a normal sleep schedule unless forced.

“Just imagined if phan artists or phanfic writers could see us right now. Lying on the floor like this,” Dan said honestly.

Phil let out a thoughtful hum. “What’s sexy about fainting though?” he asked and pushed himself up into a sitting position, breaking the contact between them. “It’s just like super inconvenient.”

“It’s not about the sexiness and you very well know that,” Dan countered and found the strength to push himself up to sitting now that Phil had done it. It was always easier to do something when he had Phil doing the same right next to him.

Phil shot Dan a look.

“Sure, some of it’s about the sexiness, obviously, but it’s about the little moments too. The smallest moment can make a beautiful picture. What binds a good story together is the characters and how they care for each other or their surroundings. A story is nothing without that.”

“Must be why we’re so popular then,” Phil said with a completely serious face as he heaved himself off the floor. “But for now, let’s try to remember your fainting issue, so you don’t go out with a bang, yeah? Cracking your head open on the round marble coffee table would make a terrible end to our story.”

 Dan made an affronted noise at Phil’s even tone. “You wouldn’t even be sad?”

Phil rolled his eyes at him. “I’m the one that always dies, am I not?”

There had been a great deal of fic where Phil died. Dan had written one himself as well.

“No, that’s not allowed. You just told me you’re going to live until you’re 122. I’m going to hold you to that,” Dan said accepting the hand that Phil was extending, so he could get his ass off the floor. “A hundred years together, yeah?”

“Sure,” Phil said easily, as if it was something he could really promise.

Like the world would bend to his whims just because he’d said so. Like he believed so much in them that he trusted they would be together for as long as humanly possible and then even beyond that.

If anyone could manage it, then it would be Phil. It would hardly even be the strangest thing in their life. It would just be another curveball in the life of Dan and Phil.

“Seriously, let me just write a couple of notes and I’ll put away the laptop, yeah?” Dan said. “We’ll watch something together.”

Phil smiled like he had won and perhaps he had. But Dan had Phil, so he never really felt like he could lose in any way that mattered.