Outcast ✧ Phan

Fourteen

re·lease
verb
allow or enable to escape from confinement; set free.

trigger warning: tiny trigger at the end babes

Dan Howell was thirteen.

A lot of time had passed since him and Louise's make-up back in grade three. The years seemed to kinda blur together, days cruising by in what seemed like no time at all. But all the same, it still felt like it passed, like how you feel when you wake up from a really long nap and realize you just slept 13 hours in a blink.

They stayed friends over the course of grade school. They had their little arguments, but nothing broke them to the point it was permanent. Just kinda fused them back stronger, the same way bones do.

Louise was Dan's only and truest friend. He trusted her completely, and she the same. They knew each other inside and out, every flaw as indifferent appearing as their own.

Dan was, for once, doing okay.

Everything was still a little hard, but if anything it was bearable. His mum's death remained indented into his memory, but he tried not to think about it much. He vaguely knew memories worked like everything else in the world, that overtime they don't effect you as badly if you just take the time to get used to them, to embrace them head-on. But Dan was still only a five-foot-two thirteen year old that didn't like to deal with anymore pain than necessary, so he stuck with not doing any kind of memory embracing. For now, at least. Maybe he would when he was older.

His dad still beat him as if he were a giant slab of raw meat, like the kind you see in cartoons like Tom and Jerry. But it, again, was bearable. He told Louise about it, and she was a nice help. She was a nice help with everything, really. Dan had became accustomed to associating her bright cotton-candy blue eyes and blond curls with support; she was slowly building him back up, picking up his broken pieces and clicking them into place again.

Currently, the two were texting, neck-deep in a conversation about the secrets of armadillos. Dan was lying on his bed, belly-down.

It was pretty late, probably somewhere past midnight, and Dan was having trouble staying awake. He yawned loudly, typing out his next reply on the topic and propping his head up with his arm.

He blinked sleepily at the phone screen, taking a few seconds to realize the message he sent didn't deliver properly. There was a little red ! by it, which normally meant either he or her had lost connection. Dan frowned and checked, but he had five bars. He even tested it by googling something, but everything was working better than ever. So, it had to have been her.

Louise probably just had to go or something, or maybe her wifi cut out. Dan might've believed this if he wasn't aware that Louise hadn't even been home; she told him not too long ago (pre-armadillo era in the chat) she was walking to the store up the road from her house. Unless she had gained teleportation abilities over the course of the last fifteen minutes, she shouldn't be home yet.

Dan shook his head, shooing away the nagging worries starting to nibble at the outer edges of his conciousness. She was okay, she had to be. It was late, and his brain wasn't working the right way. He just needed sleep.

Yeah, that's it, sleep.

Dan locked his phone and clicked off the lights, tucking into bed and closing his eyes. He slowly fell down into the caverns of rest, his dreams dark and blurry and ringing with screams of painfully familiar voices.

-

Dan awoke the next morning--or early afternoon, moreover--to his phone screeching out a muse song. He fumbled for it drowsily, peeling open his eyes, albeit with great effort against the bleaching sunlight, when he couldn't locate it. He blinked around, saw it buried in the covers at the foot of his bed, and tapped the screen, which was already lit.