phan one shots

sunshine

Summary: Dan is tired in a way sleep cannot fix, but Phil shares some of his sunshine with him.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: depression

"Hello sunshine," Phil greeted gently, pushing open the door to Dan's dim bedroom with a hesitant creak. The sound was painfully blaring in the heavy silence, the quiet so thick it could be sipped from the warm air. But neither of the men occupying that colored home could complain. Loud-silence was better than quiet-silence. His tangled, tattered thoughts fed off of the quiet his shadow was so adamant about holding onto. A true pair those two. (The Broken Shadow in Love With the Silence).

"How are you feeling?"

How are you feeling. Not, "Are you okay?" or "what's wrong?" All questions built by robotic hands devoid of warmth, untouchable and flimsy. Fickle enough to clutch your fingertips one second, and leave them bare the next. No one truly expected a real answer to those questions.

How are you feeling?

His voice lost its cherry blossom wind when it fell from his strawberry lips. It dwindled away slowly, dripping off his words like paint from a canvas. "Tired."

He faded away at the end of the word.

And tired he was.

For though he called him sunshine, Dan Howell certainly had been stained the darkest of blues. The worn out grays and thin, cheap lines, washed and run through too many times, were a smattering of sadness upon his face. His soft features had been blurred, fuzzy at the edges, unreal, and unreachable. The smile that hung from his mouth when he turned to him was one cut from a glossy, artificial magazine page, and glued haphazardly to his face. It looked wrong dangling from his lips, and it melted after only a moment.

He knew those eyes-or rather what was missing from them. The richness of those terribly soft pools had been swallowed and watered down. They were darker now. Dark enough for his pupils to hide behind them, and dark enough to blot out the hints of stolen sunsets like destructive ink.

He was exhausted. But not in the way regular people get exhausted. If regular was a thing that existed.

No. This exhaustion wasn't a feeling, a burden placed on his shoulders by exertion or bad days or work. This exhaustion was a living being. A living being interwoven with something deeper. A numbing blackness that filled your head with gray cotton and covered your eyes in drooping clouds.

It had latched onto Dan once again. Sunk its teeth into his skin, and turned his blood to syrup and his bones to flimsy pieces of lead. His lashes begged to lock together and kiss his cheeks for eternity, but he pried them open, determined to see the man who had captured the aurora borealis in his eyes, and held a sunflower too big for his body inside his chest. His brows were knotted and crinkled and he stared at him as though he were a crumpled piece of paper left out in the rain, and he carried something precious on his surface.

He didn't need to ask the question everyone always asks.

"Why don't you just sleep?"

Instead, he bobbed his head, slowly at first, and then firmer. His face remained open and gentle.

"Come here." He was a man made of flower petals. Dan was tempted to turn their apartment over searching for the flower crowns they had used for their pastel edits video, and place it on his head. (The Man Made of Petals with Flowers Growing Out of his Skin).

His lips pinched. "Why?"

"I'm going to share some of my sunlight with you."

Dan scoffed, eyes flickering. Like someone was hiding behind his irises and turning the lights on and off. Words drifting like a movie reel.