Symbiosis (Phan)

13: look here i am finishing the fic i say id never finish

It had been a week since that day. A week since they'd first kissed. A week since everything had finally begun to make sense, and no less than six days since they'd made it officially something. All in all, it seemed an awful lot like things were going alright for the both of them, and although the hopeless kind of lost feeling in Dan's chest was still very much present, it had faded out noticeably, and there really was a great kind of comfort in that.

Dan was yet to really bring the matter up to Chris directly, but he'd certainly no made attempt to hide it. That felt good. Freeing, somehow, like there was no longer anything he had to lock away inside himself. Dan reckoned it had been entirely too long since he'd felt that way. He felt anew somehow; he wasn't sure if he'd just wished he was enough to convince himself of it, or if something had actually physically changed, and if that was a whole new chapter in his life, or at the very least, just the start of it.

Dan had spoken a lot to Cat though. Cat had this habit of telling him things - the things PJ had confided in her with some element of secrecy. It was never intentional, it wasn't that Cat ever wanted to purposefully break his trust, it was just the simple fact that Cat talked and Cat talked a lot, and sometimes she really couldn't stop herself. It wasn't as if Dan was going to go around telling the world anyway. Instead, the things Cat told him that PJ had told her in secret were much more like a personal kind of comfort for him, because from what he was hearing, things were getting better, not just for him, but for Chris and PJ too.

Dan found a lot of hope in that. The hope that Chris would one day fully come around and accept himself in the way Dan had. It wasn't even that Dan was just tired of seeing him like this, it was that Chris deserved it. Chris was a good person, Dan's best friend, and he wasn't the kind of person who needed a mess of self-loathing pent up inside them.

More than anything, Dan had wanted to properly address the situation again with Chris, at least just his own part of it, to properly talk about Phil or something like that, but he liked to believe that he'd learned from the last time around, and that he'd learned enough to know not to push things again. He reckoned it might be best to let things be, to let Chris come to his own conclusions in his own time, and then take whatever he needed before he could begin to voice those conclusions aloud. However, Dan knew now more than he'd ever known anything that he wanted to be honest.

The solution came in drawing a firm line between Chris' business and his own and firmly declaring what he did and what he didn't have the right to be honest about. After all, honesty was perhaps the very thing that might help Chris down the right path on his own, but Dan did have to be very careful not to push him. He struggled a little like that, with knowing when something was too much, because Chris was his best friend, and he wanted the best for him, and from where Dan was standing the solution was just so much more simple. What was important however, was the fact that if Chris hadn't chosen it himself, it was hardly very much of a viable solution.

Dan had chosen to redirect all his concerns for Chris to himself, focusing on his own sexuality, and his own expression of that, his own life, and his own problems. It was calming: to be able to push everything away and be confident in that it was the right thing to do. Dan found that it really wasn't something he was awfully confident with, but of course, he held his hopes in the fact that things would change, as everything had changed so much already after all.

He'd spent a lot of time with Phil recently, as had been expected, and they'd spent what was perhaps a surprisingly proportion of that time just talking. It wasn't that talking was only the thing they dared to do or something along those lines, it was just that they both found themselves with quite an awful lot to say. It was a result of having just an awful lot up in their heads, and Dan really was giving the whole talking about your problems thing a go.