Symbiosis (Phan)

12: things might get just that little bit gay

Dan awoke to an incessant buzzing. It was far too early, too early for him to form proper thoughts, too early for him even to open his eyes, but the buzzing sound quickly grew louder and perhaps even more insistent, as it continued to demand his attention, irrelevant of whether he was in much of a state to give it or not.

It took him a full minute before he'd properly forced his eyes open, wincing as bright morning light flooded his eyes; it was just far too bright and far too early. He rolled over in bed, cursing the world and everything in it as he came to discover the source of the buzzing that had awoken him. The culprit was of course his phone, lying almost too innocently on his bedside table as it continued to buzz, its screen lighting up in intervals aligned with the buzzing.

As much as Dan had very much decided that it was pretty much just the last thing he wanted to do, he reached for his phone, forcing his eyes to focus on the screen and the messages he'd received. It really was far too early, and Dan was anything but in the mood for it, but from the sheer amount of messages he'd been sent, he had to assume that something at least moderately important had happened - the kind of thing he'd need to pay attention to, regards of whether it was just past half seven in the morning or not.

What shocked him the most however, was simply the fact that messages had been sent by Chris. The moment he realised it, he felt a horrible sinking feeling burst out of the pit of his stomach and consume his entire body whole. He just knew that he wasn't at all ready to deal with whatever Chris had to say to him anymore, because the thing was that sixteen messages just looked a whole lot too long to be an apology.

Dan really did want to ignore him. To put his phone on silent, or even turn it off entirely, put it back down and turn over in bed, close his eyes and go back to sleep, to think about literally anything besides the whole Chris ordeal for a few more hours, and then maybe attempt to fathom the situation when it was significantly closer to midday. Half seven in the morning just wasn't cutting it for Dan, not at all. In fact, he struggled to imagine just what was going on in Chris' brain that had him up so early. But of course, Dan had also struggled to imagine just what it was that had gone on in Chris' brain for him to assume that Dan had been playing some sick joke on him.

The part of Dan's brain that simply couldn't leave the mess as it was suddenly sparked up as he dragged himself back to the day before, to the mess that his and Chris' friendship had disintegrated away into. It was sad really. The pathetic kind of sad, because oddly enough, throughout the course of the whole day, Dan was yet to possibly cry. Instead he'd felt much more outraged than anything else, and if he knew anything, it was that outrage, seven thirty in the morning, and texts to your sort of ex-best friend weren't a good combination. Regardless of that, Dan unlocked his phone.

He would have liked to imagine that he could at least have listened to his own advice, but today had already made it apparent that it just wasn't going to be his day. Perhaps Dan would have been okay with that, perhaps he would have even accepted it, well, if it had been any other day, any other day where he wasn't dragged up at half seven in the morning to deal with a whole shitshow involving someone he'd happily called his best friend less than twenty four hours ago, but now felt like he didn't know at all.

Dan did very much know it was a bad idea as he opened his conversation with Chris. He made no point of lying to himself about it; it was far too early for all of that anyway. The thing was however, that the truth definitely didn't seem to have it within its power to stop him, and by the time he'd read the first of the sixteen messages, the damage had already been done.

'Hey look I know its early but I need to talk to you'

'Are you awake?'

'Whatever. Doesn't matter. Yesterday was fucked up though'