Our Red String Of Fate

Red

*Dan's POV*

"All I'm saying is that this says a lot about our ability to work together as a team, if you guys had just listened to what I was saying rather than charging blindly into-"

"Dan." Phil cuts me off, his tone short and exasperated. I bristle slightly, doing my best to shift my body as far away from his, though the trap doesn't allow much in the area of personal space. At any other time, I'm not the type to put much thought into the amount of personal space between Phil and I, or the lack thereof, but things have been tense between us with everything that had happened recently.

Noticing my very clear and very pitiful struggle to get further away from him and impishly ignore his response to my ranting, he somehow manages to jerk his knee upward and into the soft flesh of my stomach. I hiss out in pain. "We don't care what you're saying, not when you've said it all a hundred times over now."

"Sorry for trying to fill the silence!" I snap, giving up entirely in my efforts to evade him and instead deciding to face him directly. Of course this is a mistake, there isn't a universe out there where this wouldn't be a mistake, but I'd committed and that was that. My nose brushes against his, the flush of anger in my cheeks quickly dissipating into something I'm not quite willing to put a name to. I huff loudly, painstakingly aware of that fact that my breath is surely ghosting across his lips.

He doesn't seem nearly as affected by the closeness, though he never does. Effortlessly indifferent, able to hide his emotions with the ease of flipping a switch, I envy him endlessly. I have to strive for it, cling to the desperate fraying edges of calm at every given moment. I'm not a robot, of course I feel things, inconvenient as that may be given our situation... I don't expect it to stop, I just want to be able to hide it. Why the hell would I want anyone else to be able to be involved in something so clearly unrelated to them? They're my emotions, not theirs.

"I, for one, prefer the silence." Phil responds matter-of-factly, lifting his eyebrows expectantly and drawing me out of my thoughts. I narrow my eyes into a glare, leaning my weight away from him again and turning my face.

It almost seems like he's trying to bait me in, hassle me until I have no choice but to blow up at him all over again. He's been acting particularly childish ever since our disagreement earlier. Sometimes, usually, I find that sort-of thing vaguely endearing. Now I want to slap that stupid smug look clear off his face, probably would if I fucking could.

"He's right, your voice might attract some unwanted attention." Felix intervenes awkwardly, clearly at a loss as to what to do when the dynamics of the group are so clearly faltering. And maybe it isn't exactly his fault that his voices strikes me like nails on a chalkboard, that the mere thought of his presence makes traces of bile become known in the back of my throat, but I'm going to blame him for it all the same. If it weren't for him, surely, something... things could have been different.

Hell, we could have fed him to those monsters piece by piece and I wouldn't have so much as grimaced at the gruesome scene, anything would have been acceptable but how it had actually happened.

"Unlikely." Phil's voice rings out loud and clear, directly next to my ear in a way that makes feeding even him to the zombies sound tempting. He isn't normally the type to find difficulty when it comes to using an appropriate tone, regulating his voice for the occasion, which only proves that he's doing it on purpose to bother me.

I can hear the self-satisfied grin in his words as he continues, purposely shifting his body to press against mine again each time I manage to wedge any space between the two of us (at the cost of shoving him further into the uncomfortable ropework surrounding us, but surely he deserves that considering what he has the nerve to say at a time like this). "Dan's so desperate for attention at this point, I think he'd want that."