Misfit (Phan AU)

Chapter Fifty

*Dan's POV*

They weren't something that made sense, the dreams I'd been having lately. Phil kept asking me to explain them to him, so he could understand what was going on inside my head. Of course, I didn't have an answer to give him. I hadn't been answering any of his questions lately. I could tell he was getting frustrated with me. He was only trying to help, after all.

It just hurt to think about, let alone try and verbally voice how I felt.

So I ignored it, the same way I'd always approached the overwhelming emotions in my life. I bottled it up and swallowed it down deep, pretending it wasn't a problem even as it tried to eat away at me from the inside out. I was handling it. It was under control. Phil didn't agree with me.

It only ever caught up to me when I was asleep. The first night, I didn't sleep. Phil held me until the sun came out and then sheepishly tried to convince me to go to work with him. I refused, meaning I spent the rest of the day alone, mindlessly losing myself on the internet. The second night, I refused to go to sleep again, despite how tired I now was. I needed to stay awake, keep distracting myself so it didn't all come crashing down. I fell into a short, restless sleep on the couch with a computer in my lap. I woke up stretched out across it with a blanket draped over me, and there were soft snores coming from the floor beside me where Phil had fallen asleep.

After taking an unreasonably long amount of time to stare at his sleeping form, really taking notice of all the bruises and stress lines that'd gathered there the past few days, I resolved myself to sleeping properly that night. If nothing else, just to make sure he didn't have a nervous breakdown and end up leaving me too.

That third night when I crawled into Phil's bed, it was all I could do to keep from thinking about it. I thought about anything I could, mind switching from one topic to the next to make sure there wasn't a second where thoughts of Cat could catch up to me. It worked well enough, except it was impossible to fall asleep when I was forcing myself to concentrate on so many things. Phil woke up at some point through the night and only had to take one look at me before realizing what state I was in. He'd held me then as the tears finally started to spill, unable to be kept at bay in my sleep-deprived state. I'd cried until I couldn't think straight and then finally passed out.

A week had passed since then. I was sleeping now, though often interrupted by nightmares filled with dark figures and black voids. More often than not, I woke up through the night and pulled Phil from sleep with me. Despite his many attempts to get some explanation out of me, the moment I was awake my promise not to think or talk about the issue was back on. The last couple mornings he hadn't even said anything about it, knowing better than to waste his breath.

I had a feeling today would be different though, considering the way I'd curled into his side and sobbed for nearly half an hour after last night's nightmare. It wasn't getting any better, if anything it seemed to be getting worse. Surely Phil noticed that too, given he was with me through every minute of it.

--

I settled down at the table unceremoniously, slouching in my seat and watching through my lashes as Phil hurried about the kitchen. After he'd gotten up, I'd made a point of staying in bed for as long as possible, wanting to put off the confrontation that was sure to happen over breakfast. My stomach had betrayed me eventually though, growling insistently as the smell of food started to waft into the bedroom.

I wasn't sure whether to interpret it as a good sign or a bad one that Phil didn't immediately turn around to acknowledge my presence. It meant he was either far more casual about this than I'd been expecting him to be, or that he was putting an awful lot of thought into how to approach the situation.