Not On Fire (Phan AU)

15 | teenage dirtbag

By the next day, Louise has already responded, but Dan--slightly worried to hear her response and feeling slightly put off by the fact that it took her so long to respond--hasn't read it yet. He's already forgiven her--it's not about that--but has she forgiven him? For some reason the thought had even crossed his mind until after he sent the text. Usually his apology is all it takes for them to go back to being best friends, but this time wasn't like normal, at least to him anyway. Maybe he's overthinking it, but he can't help it, not now that he's decided to be a better person, that is.

It's a Monday. Normally, that'd mean school, but--despite the fact that it had been starting to warm up, or come as close to warming up as it can in this god-awful state in the middle of fucking February--Mother Nature decided to be a bit of a bitch--or a goddess, depending on how you look at it--and make it drop way below zero overnight. Naturally, this means no school, and it also means that Dan, who is still too worried to open the text from Louise, has nothing to do and no one to hang out with. Of course, there's always Phil, but Dan's not sure if they're at the point in their friendship where they are able to handle hanging out for two days in a row without running out of things to say.

This would clearly be a great day to make good on his resolution to better his relationship with his parents even further. After all, he can't expect for all the rips to have been mended yesterday in such a short time, especially considering how they reacted to one groan, but even though school was cancelled for him, that didn't mean the same for his parents and their jobs, so that's out of the equation.

He could write, too, but even if he's able to trick himself into thinking that he has enough motivation to do that long enough to turn on his laptop, he's no fool and he knows that as soon as he opens up a document to write, whatever motivation he had will disappear, leaving him staring at a blank page for a few seconds before he gives up, opens up a new tab, and logs in to tumblr. And if he's going to end up wasting his day on tumblr, he'd rather skip the middle man completely and just go straight on it.

The thing is, however, that he really doesn't want to waste his whole day on tumblr. There are so many better things that he can do to be productive, but if he even goes on tumblr for one second, he knows he's not going to want to do anything significant for the rest of the day because he's a lazy asshole among many other things.

He's almost tempted to start planning his next fire as he hasn't done one in what feels like forever, but it seems almost stupid to be thinking about such a thing when the weather is in such a state. He'd only be teasing himself, something that he's not quite fond of doing, so he decides against it (at least for now), fully aware that he'll probably crack by the end of the day if he doesn't find anything better to do.

If he were to just look at the text, maybe he'd be able to hang out with Louise, but there's no guarantee that will work at all. Even if it did, does he really want to hang out with her? What would they do? Usually, they either watch movies or mind their own business, both of them on their phones--which means that Dan's on tumblr and Louise is doing god-knows-what. Or Louise lectures him, but he can't think of anything in particular that Louise knows about that would make her want to lecture him, so he doubts that would be likely.

He could always just stay in bed all day, fading in and out of sleep, but that's even worse than spending all day on tumblr and he's never been a big fan of sleeping in all day because then he just feels like he missed something even if there was nothing to miss (which, let's be honest, there's nothing for him to miss right now anyway).

He's torn away from his thoughts by the sound of his phone going off, alerting him of an incoming text message. He almost doesn't feel like answering it and stays put for a few seconds, with his hands behind his head as he--once again--stares at the ceiling, but then it occurs to him that he's bored and if someone's texting him, it could be a good excuse for him to not spend the day all alone.