Dragonfly; Phan

XIV

The next month and a half passed in a haze. Snow started to fall a few days after Dan had stopped crying and found it in him to admit the truth about his grandfather to Skye. The horrible news pulled on the spaces between them and drew them closer together somehow, so that their souls overlapped and everything fell into place. Dan gathered some snow in his hand one day and raced through the asylum to show the boy, who looked at it with sparkling eyes but made no pointless attempt to touch it.

Dan proceeded to tell him all the details about Christmas in his house. The fact that the tree touched the ceiling and the floor was always littered with presents and his mother made the best pieces of shortbread scattered in sugar. The fact that the lights they strung up outside the house flickered through an assortment of colours that illuminated on the bed of white.

As the season softened the edges of the town, the group of friends made a plan to destroy the asylum. At the centrepiece was Skye's lighter, and Dan went to bed every night with a cloudy image of flames at the front of his mind. He tried not to think about the word death, telling himself it wasn't really death at all.

Rather just peace.

Dan kissed him for the first time late on a Wednesday night at the start of December. They were buried underneath blankets, making shadows with their fingers in the light from the torch. It was safe, calm, and the air in that room knew them better than it knew anything else. It was their room, their spot.

"I've never kissed anybody before," Skye admitted, at the surface of the proposal 'we could kiss if you wanted'.

"No?" Dan looked at him softly. "Not even when you were Phil?"

Skye shook his head. "Have you?"

"Yeah. A couple times," Dan licked his lips. "Not really anything important though. It was the same girl I thought I was totally in love with when I was, like, twelve. Then PJ kissed her and it all went out the window."

"Wow," Skye smiled. "Didn't see PJ as the type."

"Neither did I," Dan laughed. He shifted in the little corner of the room and wrapped an arm around Skye's waist, brushing some of his hair out of his eyes and giving him a smile that felt like a secret.

"Are we going to, then?" Skye asked, a bit frightened. "I want to, like—I want it to be you. My first and my last."

The words were so tragic.

"I want to be, too," Dan said. "If you promise to remember it."

"I will," Skye slipped his cold hands around Dan's neck and Dan moved, nuzzling their noses together so that the boy giggled, and his heart seemed to settle. Dan let him turn his head just slightly, and push their lips together in the softest of kisses.

His stomach fluttered at Skye's action, and they remained in the same proximity, Dan breathing on his lips, until they closed the space between them with another kiss. It was a bit longer, lasting long enough for Skye to thread his fingers through Dan's brown hair and mutter his name against his mouth. Then, they broke apart just slightly, and Dan whispered, "What is it, lovely?"

Skye kissed across Dan's nose and rested a hand on his chest. "I fell in love with you here."

Dan slept beside Skye that night, all tangled up in his chilled frame. When he woke, he was laying against Skye's chest, and he looked up to meet his eyes.

"Hello," Skye whispered, fond. "You're probably gonna be late for school if you don't get going."

And, fuck, Dan almost was. But as he stumbled through the school's doors, looking like complete shit with bags under his eyes and a tire deep in his bones, he'd never felt happier. He didn't think it was possible to feel half the happiness that he did. Because it was winter and it was snowing and Christmas was around the corner and Skye was doing just fine.