Best Friends (phanfic)

Black and Blue

Phil despised hospitals with a passion. They always reeked of death and depression. You could smell the disease and disenfactant loitering menacingly in the stale air, as a constant reminder that there is always someone out there. Suffering.

He fondly remembered the time when Dan had gotten sick with some weird kind of flu, and he had rushed worriedly to this same hospital, exactly like he was doing right now.

As he hurtled breathlessly towards the London Hospital, a dreary looking building with crude graffiti scrawled all over it's decaying brick walls, an uneven pavement tripped him over. He had fallen hard, head over heels, not to mention the fact that he had just fallen hard on his face.

The aqua-eyed boy groaned painfully and peeled his aching body off of the filthy, gum-ridden pavement like a pancake.

"Uuuggghhhh..." Phil winced, wiping his crimson stained hands on the fronts of his black skinny jeans.

He carried on running. One more street to go.

Dan's favourite colour had always been black, where his had been blue. Black and blue... Dan was probably bruised pretty badly. If only he had been there to stop him from stumbling drunkenly in to that traffic...

Why was Dan out so late drinking anyway? He had been alone, to further add to the mystery.

Phil stopped running abruptly, causing an elderly woman to tut disapprovingly and shake her wrinkly old head and mutter about "young people these days...".

Oh god. Was Dan drinking because of him? He had been wrong. Dan wasn't mad. He did care. He cared so much that he had gone out drinking to ease the pain that was searing his heart, which had been shattered in to pieces.

Of course, Phil still hadn't figured out that he had been drinking so much because he had a broken heart. He only thought that his best friend had been drinking so much because he was lonely. He felt painfully guilty all the same.

He came to another abrupt halt. He had arrived.

"Hi." he breathed at the front desk, sharply taking in ragged breaths of the hospital air that he hated so much.

"Name?" a weary, cold looking young woman sighed. She appeared to be the voice from the phone.

"Phil... Lester..." he could barely speak, having ran for ten blocks to be by his best friend's side.

"Your boyfriend is in ward thirty six, floor four. Dan Howl" she said the word 'boyfriend' with a clear look of disgust on her face, along with an equally as disgusted tone mixed in to her already cold and condescending one.

Phil gritted his teeth out of frustration and anger.

"It's pronounced, 'Howell'." he growled, surprised at himself for getting worked up so easily. "And he's not my boyfriend."

"Whatever you say, sir." the woman rolled her eyes irritatingly with her painted, slender hands up in a mocking 'I surrender' signal.

Phil seriously felt like strangling her. No. He didn't have time. He had to go and see his best friend. He sprinted to the lonesome, sludge-coloured staircase and ascended to the fourth floor of the hospital.

What ward did she say that he was on again? Phil couldn't even remember, furious at himself for forgetting such an important detail. Why had he ran all the way here only to forget about his best friend's location? In hospital.

Too humilited and ashamed of himself to return to the desk and frustratingly rude woman downstairs, he began wandering around the fourth floor.

Why did it have to be Dan? He was the person that Phil cared most about. No, he had his girlfriend. He cared about her the most. He kept telling himself that. Dan was his best friend. She was his girlfriend. He wanted to care about her the most, he really really did. But Dan kept edging in to his brain, claiming his rightful place. He loved his girlfriend, but maybe he had a greater love for-

CRASH!

The ebony-haired boy had been so deep in thought wandering around that he had fallen right into a patient.

"Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry! Let me help you..." he exclaimed, flustered due to his idiocy.

His clumsiness and inability to look where he was going had resulted in him falling head first in to the lap of a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair who looked work-worn and had several grey hairs sneakily appearing amongst long strands of mousy brown.

"It's alright, laddy." she chuckled, happy to finally have someone to talk to. "Who're you here for?'

"I'm visiting my friend Dan. Do you know what ward he's in?" Phil replied, thourally relieved that she wasn't screeching 'pedophile' at him and chasing him down sluggish brown corridors that seemed to wind on forever.

"Daniel Howell? That young lad in a coma? He's over at ward thirty six, down there." she gestured with a bony, sun-spotted finger to the worst looking ward in the entire hospital.

"Okay... Thank you... Sorry for falling on your lap..." Phil's voice got gradually more distant as he ran tiredly over to the other end of the corridor.

As he entered the ward cautiously, he could smell the stench of hopelessness and depression lingering about the place, especially around one curtained-off bed in the back right-hand side.

"Hi sir, are you visiting?" a chipper young nurse with a dirty blonde ponytail asked.

"Um... Yeah." Phil answered, slightly overwhelmed by her cheerful aura.

"Who is it you're visiting, sir?" the nurse enquired happily, producing a burgundy coloured clipboard and a pen from an overhead cabinet.

How the hell could she stay so cheerful in such a depressing, hopeless place?

"I-I'm visiting Daniel Howell."

"Right this way, please, sir!" she lead him over to the curtained-off bed at the back right-hand side.

As she led each rounded curtain ring around the dull metal rod, Phil's best friend was revealed.

What had once been the beautiful, small frame and handsome, dimpled face of Dan Howell had now been replaced with a battered, bruised and cut body.

He had a large white cast on one leg, held up by a dark blue sling that was connected to the stained white ceiling of ward thirty six. His face was bruised. A prominent deep purple smudge laying underneath one caramel-coloured eye's socket leered at him, while another faint violet mark stained his adorabley dimpled cheek.

It was a miracle that he hadn't had any deep cuts on his face. Phil didn't want him to be insecure about any scars. He couldn't even bring himself to scan the rest of his best friend's body.

He sank in to a nearby chair, telling himself sternly not to cry. He never listened to anybody anyway. Acidic tears soon began forming in the corners of his sad, worn eyes, and he began to cry.

He took his best friend by the right hand and cried. And cried. He apologized. He vented. He pleaded with the word 'sorry' more than fifty times. He cried about how it was all his fault. He cried again.

Then he noticed. Slowly taking up Dan's pale blue hospital gown sleeve, he saw it. Perfectly sliced deep crimson marks, horizontally littering up and down his best friend's arm. He couldn't even see Dan's pale, soft skin beneath all of them. Some of them were still bleeding.

"Why, Dan? Why would you do this to yourself?..." Phil sobbed, despising himself. It was all his fault. All of this. The drinking. The car crash. The self destruction. All of it.

It was all his fault.
--
Phillip no it's not your fault pliz