The first time they slept together, it was rushed because they were both incredibly drunk and when your inhibitions are down, hiding how much you want to rip the clothes off your best friend isn't as important as it normally is. It was frantic and messy and they fell asleep together afterwards, because they were still drunk and tired and spent.
When they woke up the next morning with hangovers delivered from the gates of hell, neither of them complained because it was enough to wake up in each other's arms.
If it was anyone but Dan and Phil they probably would have rolled out of bed and pretended nothing had happened. But, as it turned out, three years is a long time to wait for someone and even if it was the excessive intake of coconut-flavored rum that pushed them together, at least they're together at all.
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It surprised them both to find how easy life became when they stopped pretending what they felt for each other was nothing more than friendship. Of course, people were shocked to find out that they had finally claimed each other. Nobody really expected the two stubborn boys to get over themselves and end up together, no matter how painfully apparent it was that their love was of the epic variety.
Their lives changed very little, but at the same time they were altered dramatically. Dan became an extension of Phil, Phil an extension of Dan. It was obvious in the way they spoke in a language known only to them; spoken with the quirk of an eyebrow, with the affectionate brush of finger tips against the back of a hand, with the long sustained eye contact which was like a conversation entirely of itself.
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It eventually came to the point where nothing in the world mattered to one boy than the other. When they realized that, it only became natural for them to make their relationship public.
It took three months for the worst of the gay-bashing to die down. When the words became too much, the boys would close up their laptops and find solace in warm embraces, using their language to drown out the hatred.
Eventually, the comments became more tolerable and the words held less meaning when weighed against those of their family and friends who supported them without question.
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Dan had always been afraid of commitment, which was probably why when Phil presented him with a simple silver band and the words "Will you marry me?" he panicked and ran.
What terrified Dan most was how easily the word "yes" popped into his head. Dan was never Mr. Commitment. He was fiercely loyal and protective of the things he loved, but he was also young. He never planned on marrying at twenty-three, with so many things to do and so much of the world left unseen. He was afraid that letting that "yes" slip off his tongue would be akin to allowing all of his dreams and ambitions to flounder and die. And that; that was something Dan wasn't sure he was ready for.
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Phil was in many ways his opposite. When he found something he loved, he did everything in his power to hold onto it. Phil had never loved anything as much as he loved Dan, so as his nature would have it, buying a ring was the most natural thing in the world to do.
Phil also understood Dan in a way perhaps nobody else did, or ever will. That was why when Dan ran away, he was able to squash the flicker of devastation with the reminder that Dan would come back because he always did.
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Phil was, of course, correct.
It took Dan a mere five hours to overcome that particular existential crisis and realize Phil was more important to him than seeing the world and being young and all of that crap he believed was so fundamental for so long.
When he returned to their flat, it was with Phil's favorite pizza and an understated plastic ring purchased from a machine tucked in the corner of the pizzeria. Dan didn't share the fact that he left twenty-seven other rings lying on one of the tables in the restaurant, which was how many tries it took for him to get this one, which he wanted because it was blue like Phil's eyes, which was actually an incredibly cheesy sentiment, but Phil didn't care.
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Their wedding was simple and understated. They spent half an hour sitting in the lobby at the City of London Registry Office waiting for their names to be called. It took them less than a minute to sign their names on the marriage certificate and they didn't invite any family or tell anyone really which made them feel like a pair of irresponsible teenagers, but none of that mattered.
Phil slipped a gold band onto the fourth finger of Dan's left hand, to match the one on his own wedding finger. The blue plastic ring hung from a cord around Phil's neck like it had done since the night Dan said yes and like it always would.
For the first time in what might have been his entire life, Dan felt whole. And Phil was more than happy to be the person that filled those empty spaces.
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It took two and a half years before they started talking about kids.
Dan surprised Phil by bringing it up one night over dinner. It was not the first fight of their married life; far from it. Bickering remained as one of their favorite pastimes. But this was the first time that Dan did not come to their bed, opting instead to sleep in the spare bedroom that used to be his.
Dan had always wanted kids with a kind of fervor he had managed to hide from even himself. His most primal instincts burned to fill his protective nature with a father's love.
It nearly broke Dan to realize that the fact that Phil would be an incredible father seemed to have no impact on the fact that he didn't want kids to begin with. Nothing Phil had ever said to him hurt as much as the burst of laughter Dan received when he asked if he wanted to adopt.
Dan spent the night curled around his pillow, holding tightly onto it like that could possibly take the place of the husband who hurt him or the child he would never have.
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It took exactly forty-two hours and seventeen minutes for Phil to decide that Dan's happiness was more important to him than his fear of being a father. Dan asked him what had to be a hundred times if he was sure, and Phil answered his worries with happy kisses.
The next day, they paid a visit to social services and started the adoption process.
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It turned out that if you are a young gay couple, adopting a kid is near impossible. A year and a half before Dan and Phil had first been entered to the system, they were still without a child.
They were just about to give up hope, when they received a call saying there was a two-year-old girl named Elizabeth who had recently lost her parents and was in need of a home and would they like to take her to theirs?
Of course, the answer was yes.
They took the car they had bought almost a year ago for this exact purpose and drove four hours straight to the home where the girl was being kept. Phil clutched tightly onto Dan's hand as they walked together into the building.
The girl was thin and pale with wispy brown hair and huge green eyes. When Dan first took her up into his arms, he cried. She clutched her tiny hands into the hair at the base of his neck, and held on tightly, like she was telling him it was alright, she was here, she was theirs.
They signed the appropriate papers and buckled her into the car seat they had bought so long ago. Dan asked Phil to drive and took a seat in the back beside the tiny little girl he had been praying for.
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Elizabeth grew up quickly. For the first two months, she slept in between her fathers. Phil usually woke up first and took her downstairs to watch him make breakfast, leaving Dan to sleep in late as he was the one to who stayed up with her when she was being fussy.
While she napped, they decorated her room; painted it bright yellow and covered it with all the things she pointed to when they went shopping together. It turned out relatively horrific as the two year old had less design taste then her fathers, but it didn't really matter.
As they worked on their daughters room, the men laughed at how utterly domestic their lives had become.
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When Phil woke up one night and rolled over to find the other side of the bed had grown cold, he was not alarmed. He knew exactly where he could find his husband.
With this knowledge, he padded softly down the hall to his daughters room where, sure enough, Dan was leaning over her crib, watching as she slept.
Dan let out a surprised sound as Phil wrapped his arms around his waist and rested his chin on Dan's shoulder to look down at Elizabeth. He muttered to Dan that he needed to sleep, to which Dan responded by yawning and telling Phil to go back to bed, he'd be there in a minute, "I love you." Phil pressed a kiss to the base of Dan's neck, right where the collar of his t-shirt started, and returned to their bedroom.
The next morning, Phil found Dan asleep in the chair by Elizabeth's crib, their daughter sleeping peacefully against her father's chest.
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On Elizabeth's first ever day of school, Dan and Phil were more nervous then she was. They went shopping and bought her new clothes, and a backpack and a lunch box and all the things a kid could possibly need for school and some stuff she would never need but what if. Phil packed her a big enough lunch to feed the army and Dan held her hand all the way until she tugged at him with the whine of, "Daddy! I can do it myself".
And she did.
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The summer after Elizabeth turned six, they took a trip to see the ocean. The water was cold and it was windy, but the sun still shone and it was a good day. Elizabeth ran up and down the shore, collecting rocks and shells and other things that little kids find interesting. She would come running back with each new find, beaming as she showed it off to her fathers, sitting with their shoulders pressed together as they admired whatever she brought to show them.
They slept in a hotel that night. The room had two beds, but the family opted to all share one and they spent the night pressed together, watching crappy television until they fell asleep.
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On Elizabeth's seventh birthday, they take her to the London Eye because she had begged to go on it and Dan and Phil were not in the habit of denying their daughter much of anything. The wait was long and the people were annoying, but it was all worth the sight of Elizabeth with her face squashed against the window, watching London turn beneath her.
When they got off, she proudly announced that she wanted to be a pilotress because pilots were boys and Dan and Phil laughed because their daughter was awesome and they let her have ice cream for dinner because it was her birthday and life was good.
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The year Elizabeth turned eight, PJ and his young wife agreed to babysit the girl while her parents went on a road trip for their tenth anniversary.
For that, Dan would always be grateful.
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It's terrifying how something as insignificant as a patch of black ice can change a person's life so dramatically.
Dan was driving. He usually drove at night, as the oncoming headlights bothered Phil's eyes. The night was clear, but cold. Phil turned the heat up a little before reaching over to interlock their fingers. He turned to admire Dan's profile, feeling with absolute certainty that he was the luckiest man alive.
"I love you," he sighed, smiling unabashedly at his husband.
When Dan remembered that night, he liked to cut the memory off there; hold onto the image of Phil looking peaceful and happy and saying those words he'd said a million times, meaning them just as much, if not more, as he had the first time.
He liked to forget how he called Phil a sap and how they started joking about how they better find a hotel soon and about the things they were going to do each other once they got there and how Phil rolled his eyes and dropped Dan's hand when he uttered something particularly dirty.
He especially liked to forget the shock of wheels losing traction as he turned a corner, sending the car careening into a tree.
And he would really really like to forget staggering out of the car and pulling Phil out of the wreckage, his head reeling as he tried to force Phil's heart to keep beating while he waited for the paramedics to show up and pull a white sheet over his husband's face.
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Dan didn't remember the next month.
He was only sober for the funeral. He knew people expected him to speak, but it was taking everything in him to keep the flask sitting in his suit jacket from his lips.
Elizabeth didn't come to her Papa's funeral. PJ's wife watched her as PJ himself tried to keep Dan in one piece.
Dan was silent throughout the ceremony; refused to utter so little as a single word. He spent that night asleep by Phil's grave, shivering as the night stole away all and any warmth, not that Dan had much left in him anyway. All the things that drove Dan had died with Phil.
PJ found Dan the next morning, curled up and trembling on the ground, tears mixing with dirt from his husband's grave.
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After that day, Dan fell.
He drank and drank and drank, choosing the oblivion of intoxication over everything else. In his rare moments of lucidity, he sat behind a computer watching Phil's videos over and over and over again waiting for it to feel like Phil was there with him, but that never happened. And when Dan realized just how absolutely alone he was, he drank until he passed out.
He kept drinking straight through the month, until he drank enough vodka to get himself hospitalized.
It was only after PJ came to his bedside, grabbed the fabric of his hospital gown and reminded him that he has a daughter, she just lost her father, social services are questioning whether or not to let him keep her, stop being such a tremendous ass, that Dan stopped drinking.
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The first thing Elizabeth did when she came home was crawl into Dan and Phil's bed—just Dan's now—and curl herself against her Daddy. He held her against himself, trying in vain to choke back the tears threatening to spill out.
After that, Dan made an effort to go back to some semblance of normalcy for his poor daughter whose life had already been so full of tragedy.
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If it wasn't for Elizabeth, Dan would have given up on life entirely. Of that, he is convinced. It would have been easier to let depression claim him. It would have been so easy for him to give in. But Elizabeth deserved more than to be left an orphan for a second time, so Dan did not kill himself like he so wanted to that first year.
He was lucky to have Elizabeth. She understood things she shouldn't have. When her father yelled at her for leaving the cupboard doors open, she left crying, only to come back to him late that night and fall asleep on Phil's half of the bed because she knew somewhere in her eight-year-old brain that Dan was just missing his husband.
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Dan had long forgotten how hard it was to fall asleep in an empty bed. Without meaning to, he would reach over in the middle of the night, seeking the warmth of Phil's body only to find cold sheets. And when he would wake up and realize his mistake, there was no point in even trying to go back to sleep thanks to the nearly unbearable pain that threatened to crush him.
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Elizabeth grew up too fast. She went from a sweet, dorky girl, to a smart and beautiful woman and that absolutely terrified Dan. Before he had time to catch up, she was demanding to be called Lizzie and bringing home boys that reminded him a little too much of himself at that age and Dan was feeling the anxiety and fear every father feels when his daughter thinks she has fallen in love at 16.
He found himself often wishing that Phil was there to back him up.
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He especially longed for his husband when his daughter went missing for a full 24-hours after a particularly nasty fight. He wanted Phil's arms around him to tame the worry that blossomed in his chest. He called the police, who refused to do anything until she had been gone for a certain amount of time. He paced the hallways of their house until he grew tired of that and found himself sitting on her bed, wondering what he did that was horrible enough to earn him a dead husband and a missing daughter.
When she finally did come home, she expected anger.
Instead, she was met with open arms and a sad, soft voice in her ear whispering pleas to never leave like that again I can't lose you, too.
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The year Elizabeth left for University corresponded with the year Dan decided to go out more. The apartment was too empty and his thoughts were too loud, so he sought the company of strangers.
People usually left him alone. Something about him smacked of dejection. Dan found he was okay with that.
One day, when he was sitting at a bar with nothing but a half-empty beer to keep him company, a woman approached him and asked if he was danisnotonfire, and what the hell happened to him. The rest of his beer quickly found its way down his throat as he pointedly ignored her in a way that was quite rude. Eventually she got the message and left.
After that, Dan stopped going out.
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There eventually came the day when a young man showed up at Dan's door and asked him for his daughter's hand in marriage.
Dan knew the boy was a good man and he was good to Elizabeth, so as much as he didn't want to let his daughter go, he said yes.
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Elizabeth married the man in a spectacular wedding that was nothing at all like Dan and Phil's had been. Even though he had years to get used to the idea, Dan never thought he would have to give away his daughter alone. That was hardest part.
At the reception, Elizabeth talked about Phil and how she missed him and wished she had more time with him and how he was a wonderful father to her and Dan cried. Dan knew Elizabeth didn't remember much about Phil because she was only eight, and despite the fact that Dan had spent a good portion of her childhood telling her stories, they were only stories and Elizabeth mostly talked about him for Dan's sake which was sad, but true.
After the wedding, Elizabeth moved away, settling up north near her husband's family, which was alright with Dan.
He didn't want to hold her back.
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After awhile, Dan stopped going out at all. Vodka tasted just as good out of his coffee mugs and it was a fair lick cheaper.
He heard less and less from Elizabeth, which was to be expected as she went on with her own life and her own job and her own children. She still called every Sunday like clockwork, refusing to abandon her Daddy.
Dan lived for Sundays.
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By the time Dan turned sixty, he had given up. His liver had given in to cirrhosis from his diet of hard liquor, and his heart had grown weak from too many years of missing.
When the day came that he collapsed in his kitchen with terrible chest pains and absolutely no control of his body and when he realized that this was a heart attack and he was dying, he couldn't find it in himself to care.
He just wanted it to be quick.
Maybe if Phil was still alive, he would have gotten to a hospital in time to be saved. But Phil not being alive was sort of the problem. If Phil was alive, Dan would have fought harder and drank less and loved more. If Phil was alive, Dan wouldn't have died alone on the floor of his kitchen.
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They didn't find him until Elizabeth called the landlady Monday afternoon to check on him and she found him dead on the tile floor.