If I'd stayed, if you'd tried

(The lovely woman at the information desk isn't lovely at all. She looks pissed and talks to Dan in an unfriendly tone, but she's the one that can tell him where Phil is and that makes her the nicest woman in the entire world to Dan right now.)

Phil lives on the second floor. The dorm building looks nice enough. It's festively decorated and now again students walk by Dan and greet him. Dan thinks he would like it here.

(He hopes that Phil likes it here.)

The door to Phil's room is gray. It's an ugly colour, just like all the other doors in this dorm building.

(So maybe it's not that pretty after all. Maybe it only looks pretty to Dan because he knows that Phil lives here.)

He can hear noises from the inside. Muffled. Giggling. It looks like Phil has a visitor over. It can't be his roommate because Dan knows that Phil lives on his own.

He knocks on the door, hard. His knuckles hurt at the impact and his hands are slightly shaking in anticipation.

"Just a second." That's Phil's voice, calling out to him, and Dan's heart speeds up as he hears it. It's been so long. He's missed the other boy so much, missed getting lost in his blue eyes.

The door opens quickly, but to Dan it still looks like it happens in slow-motion.

"Ye-" The word gets stuck in Phil's throat and his eyes widen as he realizes who stands in front of him. The words Dan wants to say get stuck in his throat as well, and his eyes widen too. Phil stands in front of him with a bare chest and a towel wrapped around his hips. Behind him, Dan can see his bed. He can clearly see the blond man looking back at him lying there, chest naked, hair ruffled.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going on.

(It takes Dan a long time to figure out what's going on.)

"Oh," is all that Dan can press out, and then he runs. His feet move on their own accord, faster than they've ever done before. He can hear his name being called by that familiar voice, the one that he had longed to hear speak his name for so long. It hurts his ears now.

People give him odd looks when he runs out of the building, and runs, and runs.

He's completely out of breath by the time he's at the station. He's sweating under his coat and jumper, and the backpack on his shoulders feels heavy.

(If his heart was the blue heart-shaped Christmas ornament from the Christmas market, it would have shattered into pieces.)

The next train to London leaves in fifteen minutes. Dan buys a ticket. He didn't buy a return ticket because he didn't know how long he would stay. He really didn't stay for long.

Why is he this surprised? Why does it hurt so much? Phil and him broke up months ago. Just because he's not over Phil yet doesn't mean that Phil is not over him yet either. They don't date anymore. Phil's free to do whatever he wants.

(But fuck it hurts like someone shoved a sword into Dan's chest.)

When the train starts moving out of the station, Dan realizes that life can't be like a movie.

PJ looks at him with concern when Dan comes back to their dorm room. He asks what happens, but Dan refuses to answer. Dan has left him a letter explaining that he'll go find Phil and might be gone for a few days, and PJ's smart enough to figure out what must have happened for Dan to return so soon. He appreciates how the curly-haired boy tries to distract him, but it doesn't work.

(PJ has his faults, but Dan has found a true friend in him.)

Christmas is coming closer with huge steps, but Dan is miserable.

When he comes home to his family a few days before Christmas, he refuses to leave the house again. Phil and him live close to each other, it wouldn't take much for them to run into each other. The last person on earth that Dan wants to see right now is Phil. He wants to see no one, but it would make his mother sad if he came home for the holidays just to hide in his room. So he eats cookies and forces himself to smile and have conversations with his family. The only comfort Dan finds is when the family dog sleeps in his bed at night.

Christmas passes by with foods and family, too much of both. On the 28th, the postman rings with a package in his hands.

It's small.

It's wrapped like a present.

It's addressed to Dan.

His mother looks at it curiously. Dan doesn't know who it's from and he doesn't want to open it in front of his family, so he takes it upstairs to his room. He opens the package with a pair of scissors, and finds a black box in it. Taking the lid from it, his heart stutters in his chest as he sees what's in it.

A blue heart-shaped Christmas ornament. With white letters, the words 'I miss you' are written on it.