phan // one-shots

Little Black Box

summary: there's been this little black box at the bottom of dan's sock drawer for a while now.
(based off a really amazing prompt from tumblr I saw ages ago by "the-thorster")
word count: 2k

It's been a while. Of course it's been a while - Dan never likes to rush things, not really and there's always something else that's obviously much more important and gets in the way. It's the radio show. The gaming channel. The book. The app. The tour.
Something else.

Except sometimes, there isn't anything in the way, and sometimes Dan thinks he should just do it, because they're going to get married as some point anyway, right? He means, he can't ever seeing himself living without Phil - hell, they can barely spend a few hours apart and when they do it's like Dan's lost a lung or something, and he knows Phil feels the same way. And when there's nothing else that's gets in the way, Dan dreams of a quiet little house in the suburbs with a garden and a pool and a dog. And it's quiet and peaceful and perfect.

And it never lasts.

So, it's been a while since Dan bought the ring, and stared at it for a while, and hid it safely in the back of his sock drawer, waiting for the next thing to get in the way, waiting for the right moment, waiting for the perfect words so he can finally say he wants to spend the rest of his life with Phil. Something else always gets in the way, and Dan sometimes wonders if he'll ever do it, if he'll ever be able to tell him everything he loves about him, everything that completes him everything that makes his world turn and heart beat faster.
But then Phil gets in the way, and Dan wonders if maybe it doesn't need to be said at all.
Phil already knows.

***

It's two in the morning and Dan's staring at the little black box he has in his hands, popping it open, proposing to himself, Kanye, Evan Peters, and Jennifer Lawrence - proposing to a blank wall at two in the morning, and promptly seriously re-assessing his life. He stumbles over his words a thousand times, muttering to himself about blue eyes and black hair, coffee in the mornings, lion stickers and train journeys to Manchester. He runs his hand through his hair and checks the time and laughs, just a little too wildly because he can just about count the number of nights he's slept alone this year on one hand, and he can count the nights he hasn't been able to sleep like this on the other. Dan needs Phil to ground him, pull him back to bed when he paces the room, calm him down while he freaks out about the contents of the entirety of the universe.

This is what he does, when Phil isn't home - he goes to the bottom of the sock drawer, gets the ring out and proposes to a blank wall at two in the morning because he can't sleep and he doesn't know how to do it any other way.

***

There's a document on Dan's laptop, a certain text file that's full of endless, deep meaningful rambles and eloquent romantic speeches and spams of the letter e from where Dan's fallen asleep on his keyboard. This is what he's going to say, when they do, because of course they will, it's just they've both been so busy lately and Dan has a thousand half written speeches on that text file and still no idea where to start. Phil almost finds it, one day - he's absentmindedly scrolling through Dan's files to find a page of the book and sees the file "important things I need to say" sees it last edited last month at 02:04, gets curious. He opens it to find bullet points from the nicer internet video, questionable video ideas and at the bottom, "I love Phil."

He smiles, closes the file, and continues scrolling until he finds the page, completely oblivious to the file a few underneath it marked "proposal speeches", which just so happens to end with the exact same sentence.

***

A year passes since Dan went into the shop, smiled quietly when the worker asked about his girlfriend, corrected him politely and bought a ring, because it seemed like such a simple thing to do. This is what normal people who love each other do, right? One of them proposes and they get married. Normal people don't keep the ring in their sock drawer and spend a year trying to figure out what to say, they just get down on one knee and tell them stuff they already knew.