Phan One Shots - jilliancares

Inspiration

Dan Howell had never thought that doing the things he wanted to do the most in life would be so draining. When he a kid, busy drawing on the corners of every worksheet and turning in papers saddled in doodles, he hadn't expected to one day find himself sitting at a small desk in his cramped dorm room, his eyes accompanied by dark purple bags and his pencil chewed so thoroughly that it was threatening to snap.

With a glance at his obnoxiously bright alarm clock, which revealed that it was already three in the morning, Dan groaned. He tugged viciously at his hair, already extremely ruffled from his previous tugs of frustration. His scalp was sore.

"Think. Think!" he muttered to himself, putting his pencil to the paper and willing it to just make something already. He considered the fact that he might be going crazy. After all, he was talking to himself, although this in itself was actually not so rare an occurrence. And of course, there was the fact, that for once in his life, Dan couldn't seem to make himself draw anything.

Normally, Dan was assigned an art project, and he went with it. He got headaches from how many ideas he had, and felt anxious at how many he had to discard, seeing as he simply couldn't do all of them. Now, he most definitely had a headache. And that was simply because his hands seemed determined to rip the hair out of his fucking head.

"God dammit!" He groaned, his head coming down to thunk on the table, as his breath whooshed out of him in something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. Dan refused to cry. He would not cry over an art project that he simply didn't seem to have any ideas for. Besides, it wasn't like the project was due tomorrow. It was due Friday, and it being Monday instilled more than a small amount of stress and anxiety into Dan. Of course, this was normally not a problem for Dan, getting his artwork done, but for the first time, he had procrastinated the thing he cared the most about.

Usually, Dan got his art done the second he could. He spent any and all free time he had neck-deep in his artwork. His hands were always covered in something, chalk, marker, the ever-frequented graphite pencil. His few friends, or acquaintances, more like, found him crazy for how dedicated to art he was. They simply didn't know what it was like to be doing the thing you loved.

But Dan's hands had never been more clean. There wasn't a spec to be found on them, not even under his fingernails.

Dan pried his head up from the desk, and forced himself to look at the clock. Fifteen minutes had passed. Fifteen more minutes, wasted! All Dan could seem to do lately was sit and sulk and wait and come up with nothing.

Grumbling under his breath, and ignoring how a normal, non sleep-deprived person would probably react to his strange behavior, he stood. Dan was simply sick of sitting here. Sick of waiting and waiting for an idea to come. One that clearly had no intention of coming.

And so he threw himself out the door and into the startlingly dark and quiet hallway, before making his way to the elevator. Because if there was one thing any sleep-deprived college student required on an all-nighter, it was coffee.

—

It was incredibly late when Dan finally arrived at the coffee shop— or more accurately, extremely early. It was a wonder that he'd even managed to find a 24 hour coffee shop, and he pitied the poor soul who'd been stuck with the night shift in the first place.

He was exhausted, and his body begged to have its veins replaced with caffeine. Dan stepped through the door, the shrill dinging of the bell hurting his sleep-deprived head, and took a deep breath. The shop smelled of coffee, unsurprisingly, and he was beginning to feel less tired already.

"Good evening," the guy behind the counter greeted, sipping a coffee himself. Dan didn't blame him, seeing as he wouldn't be able to power through the night without caffeine either.