Two. (Phan)

6. Phil

When he got into his room that night, he saw the jacket.

Just sitting there on his bed, neatly folded at the bottom, with a little anime sticky note sat on the top.

Picked it up today and

thought you might like it.

No need to pay me back,

its not a big deal.

-Dan

He picked it up and held it to his face. Although it was new and heavily perfumed, there was a small trace of sweat and firewood and detergent and something that could only be described as boy.

Dan.

He breathed deeply and let his body hang. There was something about that smell that made him calm. Like the feeling of coming home after a long vacation. That's how dan made him feel and he wouldn't mind having that feeling around all the time.

He opened his eyes in shock and threw the jacket away from him, ricocheting across the room and hitting a mirror.

This couldn't happen.

Phil was straight.

He liked boobs and female genitalia.

He'd had girlfriends.

He couldn't do this to himself.

He needed a drink.

See, people were always saying how good his work was.

How the way he wrote was so raw and brutal. Like if he said it correctly, he could make anything happen.

And they weren't wrong.

See, his brain could work against him as well.

He could convince himself a lie he told was real and then have no recollection of the lie he told being anything else but the truth.

He could convince himself to be ill. If he had a feeling he was going to be sick, then he would be sick.

If he was stressed out, it could turn into a full blown anxiety attack.

There are no meds for anything like that.

and he, knew he took them all.

And not, under any circumstances, would he let himself think his way into being gay.

He knew being gay wasn't something you could just become and he had nothing against gay people at all, but he wasn't going to let his brain fuck up something as big as his sexual preference. He'd just have to fight it.

He was going to fight himself.

What kind of sane person says that.

He wasn't going to convince himself he was gay,

but he couldn't continue to ignore the way Dan was acting or the way he was totally okay with it.

This wasn't the only time he had felt these feelings.

They started a couple months ago and had been accuring more frequently lately, in the simplest places.

Like Dan making breakfast,

or making him laugh after a tough day at work,

or even just sitting around, hunched over on his computer.

He'd tried to debunk these feeling many times, but with no luck.

No, it wasn't just a strong friendship.

Phil felt too many butterflies in his stomach for there to be just friendship.

No, it wasn't just admiration.

Yes, Dan was very talented and on his rise to fame, but Phil first met the school boy Dan who hated his career path and had backed himself so far back into a corner it took ages to pull him out.

And no, go forbid,

It wasn't pity.

True, he had seen Dan at his lowest.

When he was face down on the carpet, the whole realisation of existence crushing him down.         

When his night terrors hit. They weren't as frequent anymore, but when almost every night, he would wake up screaming and shaking, his childhood suffocating him.

When he was too sad to get out of bed. When all the meds piled up.

When he asked Phil to take him to the hospital, because he was scared of what he would do to himself.

Dan had a lot of lows, and Phil was there for every one of them.

Never, in Phil's whole time knowing Dan, did he pity him.

Dan was here, in this moment, thriving.

After each obstacle he overcame, and the ones he was still working on, all Phil felt was love.

But now, he didn't know what kind of love that was.

If, and even if, it was the love love, was it possible he could feel that sort of attraction towards other men as well?

It was only 10pm but he shut himself in his room, sealing himself off from the things that could make him think in terrible ways.

But was it really so terrible anymore?