Adore // Oneshots

Little Things (Phan)

ATEGORY: Fluff, School AU
FEATURING: nerd!Phil and quiet!Dan
TRIGGER WARNINGS: None
PROMPT: Phil can't help noticing all the cute little things about his classmate Dan.
WORD COUNT: Approximately 1,790

There were a few things that Phil Lester found slightly odd about Dan Howell.

The first being that he rarely spoke, not in class nor anywhere else. At least, not that Phil had noticed.

Phil thought that he would have noticed. He noticed a lot of things about Dan--the way he straightened his hair, even though it seemed determined to be curly; how he doodled on his hands with a blue pen during class; how a Totoro keychain hung from his otherwise plain black backpack.

Phil noticed these things about Dan because, admittedly, he had a crush on him. That was very Year Five of him, to have a crush on someone. Phil was seventeen now. He should have been going out with people left and right, hooking up every night, if you believe the stereotypes of the reckless male teen.

But Phil wasn't like that. He was kind of a nerd, actually. He wore contacts instead of glasses, but he did well in all of his classes, and he was a logophile, a term meaning 'lover of words'. Phil loved words, all words. He had a reasonably-sized notebook with page after page of words, all favorites that Phil had collected over the years.

If you took Phil's nerdy tendencies out of the equation, however, he was your average teenager. Maybe that was why he had a particular fondness for Dan, the somewhat extraordinary boy in his English class. He'd noticed him on the first day of the new school year, when the teacher, Mr. Iero, had introduced him.

"Class, this is our new student, Daniel Howell," Mr. Iero had said, lightly nudging forward the quiet boy, who had been hanging back.

"It's Dan, actually," Dan had said, in the softest voice that Phil had ever heard in a boy. That had really caught his attention, made him look from Mr. Iero, who was his favorite teacher, to the new student.

Dan was a little small for his age, appearing to be a few inches shorter than the other boys, and a bit on the skinny side. He had straightened chocolate-brown hair, and the eyes to match. On that first day, Dan wore a gray jumper with thin black stripes, which was just a little too big for him, a pair of denim skinny jeans, and black combat boots.

Mr. Iero directed Dan to sit at the desk directly in front of Phil's, which was unoccupied since Anthony Padilla moved away. Dan looked kind of like Anthony, actually.

But something about Dan captured Phil's attention in a way Anthony hadn't.

--- --- --- --- ---

The second thing that Phil found slightly odd about Dan was his apparent obsession with The Fault In Our Stars.

Every time Phil was in the school library (which he often was), he'd see Dan sitting at a chair in the corner, reading the famed John Green novel. AT first, Phil had wondered if it was taking Dan a very long time to read it. But one day, he would see Dan reading towards the end of the book and the next, he'd be back at the beginning. So Dan was likely just rereading it that many times.

Despite this, Phil had never seen Dan with a The Fault In Our Stars shirt on, or any other form of fan merchandise. Just the book.

Phil had even noticed Dan reading it under his desk a few times during English. If Mr. Iero knew about it, he didn't say anything. Maybe he had a soft spot for Dan. He certainly praised his essays enough.

Phil definitely had a soft spot for Dan himself, though in a different way than Mr. Iero. He noticed the little things. Phil had a crush on Dan, that was evident. All of the details about Dan, whether big or small, made him perfectly adorable in Phil's eyes.