Chapter Text
Once they’re safely on board they’re steered into the mess hall before they can blink and wrapped to near immobility in layers of blankets, mugs of steaming tea placed into hands that can’t reach their mouths. Martyn fusses about them busily, turning Dan’s head this way and that as if checking for damage after a fight and, for some unfathomable reason, checking Phil’s temperature.
“Martyn,” Jack finally barks, grabbing Martyn by the shoulder and hauling him back. “Back off a moment. They need some space, not an eerily spot-on impression of your mother.”
Adra’s still a stag, taking up what feels like half of the room with his long legs and branching antlers. The ride back over in the lifeboat had been eventful with him like that, but no one had said a word to either of them, eager as they were to get away. As far as they could tell the woman Phil had met in the clearing was the only person left anywhere near the building, but they certainly weren’t going to stick around to find out otherwise.
Cae, meanwhile, has been shifting into successively smaller animals and is currently rooting around among Dan’s hair as some sort of small rodent that looks a bit like an angry cotton ball with disproportionately long back legs. Every once in a while they’ll poke their whiskered nose out between the curls. Each time Adra leans forward, snuffling muzzle leaning closer and closer to Dan’s head.
“Bed!” Phil says finally, when he becomes concerned Adra might actually snort Cae up one of his nostrils. Phil stands in one sudden motion and nearly tips over with the unexpected weight of the blankets. Despite the bite of the cold air outside and the snow continuing to fall, he can feel the sweat gathering under his arms and at the small of his back. “I’m going to bed. It’s late and I’m—it’s been a long night. Dan? Um, would you like to—are you—”
Dan interrupts him with a loud, theatrical yawn, shedding his blankets as he stretches his arms out wide.
“Bed sounds good. We’re fine, really, Martyn. Thanks, but I feel better than ever, honest.” He gestures up to his hair, where the only trace of Cae is their tail poking out near the back.
They walk back to Phil’s room in silence, neither bothering to pause when Dan could turn right and head to Martyn’s room instead. Phil is expecting to Cae to have turned into a tick and burrowed their head into Dan’s skin by they time they get there, or else for Cae and Adra to retreat to the corner to have their own private conference, but instead as soon as Dan closes the door behind him Cae springs towards Phil.
They land in Phil’s outstretched arms as a rabbit, their dark brown fur ruffled and fluffy, quite similar to Dan’s hair. Phil looks up to Dan immediately, but he’s just grinning at them. Still, Phil wants confirmation.
“This is okay?” Phil asks, shifting Cae in his arms so that they’re cradled more securely in the crook of his left, leaving his right free to touch once he gets the okay from Dan. Their fur is so maddeningly soft against his forearm, and he desperately wants to sink his fingers into it, but he’s going to wait this time until he hears express permission.
Dan rolls his eyes, but he’s still grinning so wide his dimples are out on both sides. “Yeah, it’s fine. I mean it’s mostly up to Cae, but I’m assuming they’re fine with it.”
Phil finally gives in and lets his fingers run gently over Cae’s side first, then once he’s confirmed nothing’s going to come crashing down, he lets himself bury his hand in their fur. He gets lost in it for a bit, the sensation of the silky fluff against his skin, of holding a daemon other than Adra. Of holding Cae. It doesn’t feel like the queasy stomach churning he’d expected ever since Dan had touched Adra or the electrifying jolt like the first time he’d brushed against Cae’s bat wings.
It doesn’t even feel like the all consuming fire he’d imagined as a child, watching his parents smile and laugh and kiss in stolen moments observing the way they seemed to love each other that was somehow different from anything he’d experienced so far. Listening to his mum and dad and aunts and uncles and Martyn and pretty much every adult he’d ever met try to describe this thing that would happen to him. This exciting, new, thrilling, overwhelming, warm, gentle, violent, sudden, enduring, indescribable thing that everyone wanted to talk about endlessly.
It just feels like...knowing Dan trusts him completely. Like holding some entirely new part of Dan that he’s let just Phil see. New but familiar and undeniably Dan.
Okay, so maybe everyone had been onto something with the indescribable bit. Or maybe Phil doesn’t know what it feels like. Probably, it feels like nothing he’s ever felt. It’s new and it’s buzzing or maybe those are just Phil’s nerves, but either way Phil feels lit up with the sensation of it.
He opens his eyes—when had he closed them?—and finds Dan and Adra still watching them intently. He’s got one of Cae’s velvet soft ears in his hand, rubbing it gently between his thumb and forefinger. Adra and Dan aren’t touching, though Adra takes up nearly a third of the room still in his stag form, and that somehow feels like a subtle rejection after everything. More pressing, though, is the growing guilt in Phil’s gut that Cae is in his arms right now, after everything all of them done to get Cae back to Dan. After all that time they hadn’t been able to touch.
“Don’t you want—” Phil doesn’t know how to articulate the call for proximity, for touch, for oneness between him and Adra. It’s such a constant in his mind that prying it apart from the rest of him to scrutinize on its own seems impossible.
Then again, Phil feels a similar sort of tugging at his attention now, a call for closeness, only one that’s wholly new, dizzyingly foreign. He can’t untangle that either: the knot of him and Dan, him and Cae, Adra and Dan, Adra and Cae. They all seem important, impatient. Standing still feels easier than taking a step in any direction.
“It’s been so long,” he finally chokes out, arms held away from his chest, waiting for Cae to climb off, jump to Dan.
They don’t.
“Cae can decide for themselves what they want.”
Phil needs to sit down. He’s tired and overwhelmed and terrified and he feels a bit faint, and collapsing would be overly dramatic.
“It’s too much,” he whispers finally, not knowing what he means exactly, but Dan seems to understand him anyway.
“Let’s just go to bed, yeah? We don’t have to decide anything or do anything, or, uh, not do anything, you know, tonight.”
Phil’s rarely heard him that jumbled and he starts to wonder if Dan is feeling just as nervous and overwhelmed as he is. Cae’s trembling slightly in his grasp and Phil squeezes them a little closer to his chest.
Adra shrinks down finally, shaking out his mane and whipping his tufted tail from side to side. Phil wonders if there’s a particular reason he’s favoring obviously male animals tonight. He’d tested Dan this way when they first met him, but testing Cae seems entirely unnecessary. As Phil thinks this, Adra flicks his tail again sharply and glares up at Phil and Phil is aware in a sweeping wave of nerves that Adra’s feeling just as uncertain as Phil had when he’d first started talking to Dan. He’s unsure of how to interact with Cae.
Phil wants to reassure him, but he hasn’t got a clue about social customs between daemons. He wants to reach out and place Cae back in Dan’s arms. He wants to take Dan’s hand.
In the end he does none of these things, opting to lower himself on the bed, loosening his grip on Cae. They melt slowly out of his grasp, dragging their way onto the mattress on their belly. Phil glances away for a moment to check on Adra again, and when he looks back he finds another lion, this one with a scruffy sort of half mane.
He wants to ask about it, but it feels like too big a question at the moment. From the surprised look on Dan’s face, this might be a form Cae’s never taken before.
Adra lets out a low rumble that seems to fill the whole room, freezing them all in place for a moment. He’s the first to move again, loping over to the bed in a few strides and climbing on.
Looking at the two of them on the bed, Phil wonders how he and Dan are meant to fit. It had already been a tight squeeze last night with Dan, Phil, and Adra, and Cae’s nearly as big as Adra in this form, possibly a bit bigger. Adra stretches himself out alongside Cae, pressed together from shoulder to hip, and tucks his head between Cae’s chin and the mattress. Phil doesn’t think they’ve exchanged a single word so far, but Cae’s working their tongue over the visible fur on Adra’s head. They both shift to allow Cae to reach more of his face, and now they’re taking up far more than their fair share of the narrow mattress.
Phil focuses on the logistics of it, because otherwise he feels like he might cry. It’s something he never knew to want, something he never imagined he would get to see. Adra in his favorite, most vulnerable form in front of someone other than their family. Someone else who didn’t care, who cared more for Adra than Phil could have ever dreamed, whose own daemon was stretched out beside Adra with a mane to match his. Someone to match Phil. Another person, different from Phil in so many ways, but same in all the ways Phil had never let himself think about before.
It’s not quite as neat and simple, of course, as Phil might have imagined if he had ever let himself do that. But it’s Dan and it’s Cae, and that feels far better than neat and simple ever could, he thinks.
He slips his shoes off and rolls sideways onto the bed, pushing into Adra until he gives a bit and shuffles over a centimetre or two. Phil wraps an arm over Adra to tether himself and his hand lands on warm, soft fur that he’s pretty sure belongs to Cae.
The light switches off, and Phil listens to the sounds of Dan moving around the room, taking off his own shoes, tripping over Phil’s, grumbling, throwing a sock at him, lowering himself down onto the bed to press between Cae and the wall.
Dan spends a few minutes turning and wriggling before settling himself, hand resting close to Phil’s on Cae’s back. Phil waits patiently but Dan’s hand doesn’t move. About 250 seconds into Phil’s count Adra hefts a loud sigh, shifting Phil’s arm so his hand is close enough to brush against the tips of Dan’s fingers.
Neither of them move for another minute or so, but Phil thinks he’s probably counting faster than actual seconds now so maybe it’s less. Dan still doesn’t do anything. Even though he has been the one to do and say all of the things so far. Most of the things. Maybe he thinks it’s Phil’s turn. Maybe Phil’s making all of this up in his head and Dan is completely unaware of how badly Phil wants to hold his hand.
Phil wiggles his fingers, slipping his middle, ring, and pinky under Dan’s.
Dan curls his fingertips ever so slightly.
It’s all Phil needs to move again, more decisively this time, flipping his palm up and sliding it until it’s resting against Dan’s palm. The angle is awkward and Phil’s only actually holding about half of Dan’s hand and their grip gets jostled by the continual rise and fall of Cae’s back, but Dan doesn’t let go so Phil doesn’t either.
Phil wakes slowly, drifting in and out of consciousness blearily several times before he finally surrenders to the painful process of dragging himself out of the warm, cozy haze. He doesn’t quite remember why he’s so tired, just that he doesn’t want to remember yet, and feels he deserves the rest. That he shouldn’t worry too much about where he is or what time it is or why his toes are so cold at the moment. Those are things for later.
He becomes aware of himself in pieces. The blanket dragged half off his body, pulled taught by another person in the bed. Another person in the bed. Adra, nearby but no longer pressed against him. His calves where cold toes press between them, his hip with fingers curled loosely around them. Dan’s face in front of his own, eyes closed but smile broadening like he knows Phil is watching him somehow.
“Morning,” Dan mumbles, pressing his face deeper into the pillow they’re sharing.
Phil is too shocked to move. Dan’s mouth is close enough to his that Phil can feel his breath on his lips, taste the sweet, damp must of it.
He thinks he must have lost his mind between the clearing and the boat last night. Dropped it somewhere in the dark, left it buried under the thin dusting of snow. Why else would he be calling Dan’s morning breath sweet?
Dan’s got his eyes open now, and the smile has shrunk down some. He’s watching Phil’s face intently and Phil wonders how it looks like this. Swollen and crusty from sleep and so close and probably betraying his panic. He tries to smile back.
“Morning. Did you sleep alright?”
“Better once Cae and Adra decided to fuck off,” Dan says, grinning again.
Phil rolls his head back, partially to try to find the missing pair, partially to get a break from Dan’s unwavering gaze. Phil started to wonder if he’d ever made successful eye contact in his life. How do people just look at each other like that? You can’t even look people in the eyes that up close; you have to pick one. Phil doesn’t feel equipped to pick just one of Dan’s eyes. They’re both more than he can handle at the moment, in fact.
Cae and Adra are hanging from the ceiling, both bats this morning. Their bodies reach just low enough that Phil can reach up and brush his fingers against Adra’s furry head, so he does. Except, he realizes with the sharp zap of an anbaric1 shock, it isn’t Adra’s head.
He turns back to Dan, but Dan is still just smiling gently at him, as if nothing had happened. Maybe he thought Phil had meant to do that. Maybe he wanted Phil to do that.
Phil finally asks the question that’s been sitting against the back of his teeth since they fled the forest.
“Why haven’t you touched Adra again?”
Phil watches the furrows gather across Dan’s forehead. He wants to lean forward and press them smooth and then he wants to roll himself off the bed for wanting such a clichéd thing. He’s never felt so full of wants, pulled in all directions by them, stretched taut between them.
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to. I thought maybe it being okay for me to touch him was just an under duress sort of thing. When it was necessary, you know. I don’t not want to. Or, er, you know...” He trails of, tugging at the hair at the back of his neck.
Phil feels something bloom, hot and heady in his chest, radiating out through every last bit of him. It’s something he knew, probably, if he stopped to think about it. That Dan still wanted to. Or didn’t not want to. Phil tries to suppress a smile. It makes it feel easier that Dan’s a bit bad at this too.
“You can,” Phil says, and then after a long pause he adds, “I want you to.”
Adra drops immediately from the ceiling, landing on top of Dan’s head with a heavy thump and a shriek from Dan. Adra scurries quickly down his shoulder, across his back, and up under his knee as some small, brown-grey mammal moving too quickly for Phil to process. He leaves again as quick as he came, returning to his spot on the ceiling next to Cae, bodies huddled together.
It seems like Adra and Cae have worked out their initial nerves, Phil thinks.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that we touch each other’s daemons?”
“Not really, no. I don’t go around touching everyone’s daemon, but I touched my mother’s. It’s not inherently sexual or romantic. It’s intimate. It means I like you and I trust you. Not that we’re destined to be together or some shit like that.”
“Oh.” Phil hears the dejection in his own voice, wants to suck it back down into his lungs, hold his breath forever. Adra snorts from above them, though whether he’s disgusted by Phil’s tone or his overly dramatic response to Dan’s words Phil’s not sure.
“That’s not a bad thing, idiot. I just mean, like, you don’t have to feel pressured by it. It doesn’t have to mean anything we don’t want it to. Right?”
“But what if I do want it to mean something?”
It feels like it had taken all of Phil’s courage to say those words, pulled from the farthest, darkest corners of him and scrunched together in the best approximation of bravery he could manage and Dan just shrugs, infuriatingly nonchalant, noncommittal as always. Phil feels the jiggling of his foot still pressed between Phil’s calves, though. And even if he didn’t, Cae’s dead expressive. They squeak and squirm above the bed.
“Make it mean something then.”
As they’ve been speaking they’ve drifted slowly closer together. Phil is waiting, has been waiting. He’d much prefer to keep waiting. It seems like Dan is waiting too.
Phil’s entire body is thrumming and his stomach is squirming worse than it was when Dan touched Adra the first time. Except this time he’s able to identify it as a pleasant kind of queasiness. One of them has shifted and now they’re even closer, noses just barely brushing.
Maybe Phil’s still dreaming. None of this feels quite real, but he wants it to be real. After all this time he wants it to mean something. Something he chooses.
He waits a little while longer still, just to be sure, but Dan doesn’t budge. He’s tempted, for a moment, to push back, to try to out-stubborn Dan. But if the last few days with Adra have taught Phil anything, it’s that being the first one to back down, the first to show others what you’re feeling, can save everyone a lot of pain.
Their lips bump together a little clumsily, a little off center, and Phil tries to pull away to apologize, but apparently Dan doesn’t seem at all interested in that. He tilts his head and leans in closer and presses fizzing waves of pure static into Phil’s lips that radiate through him. Phil thinks he’s fallen off the bed for a moment, when he remembers his body exists with a sudden swoop of sensation, but Dan’s fingers curled around his hip tug him back to reality, to the two of them on the bed, until Phil feels like he might burst and he drags his mouth off Dan’s.
Dan draws away slowly, eyes still open and intent and tracking rapidly over Phil’s face. Watching himself being watched so attentively is too much for him at the moment, so Phil presses his eyes shut until he sees bursts of white light behind his eyelids. Everything is quiet and still and for a little while it feels like if Phil stays like this, maybe he can just freeze time and live in this moment forever.
As soon as his head clears a bit, it snaps immediately to Adra. What might have happened now that Phil’s finally had a kiss that definitely felt like it counted for something. Phil thinks he should be able to tell. He reaches up to Adra with his mind, but he feels nothing but the same sort of fizzy happiness, no overwhelming sense of sturdy, steady, sameness. No indication if he’s finally settled or not. He probably should have. If there was a moment for it to happen, this is it.
And yet Phil still feels so incredibly unprepared.
But then is anyone ever prepared for the moment their daemon settles? Does it matter either way? Phil’s not crushed under a lion at the moment, so that seems to answer that question at least. But does that mean Adra settled as a bat? Just because Phil kissed Dan when it happened? Or because Adra was with Cae? Are they really meant to spend the rest of their life in a borrowed form just because—
“Should I not have…” Dan asks, voice withering halfway through his question.
Phil’s eyes snap open and his hand finds Dan’s elbow, Dan’s arm, all the way up to Dan’s shoulder. His fingers feel clumsy. Is this how you touch another person? It feels like he never has before.
“No! No, I just...” his voice trails off as he glances up finally. Adra’s a bat, but that doesn’t tell him much. Or maybe it’s telling him everything about the rest of his life.
But then Adra drops from his perch, and swoops down, landing softly on Phil’s chest to curl up in a pile of fluffy hamster. Phil lets out a long, deep sigh.
“Were you expecting Adra to settle?” Dan asks, voice gone quiet and gentle.
“No,” Phil lies.
“Are you disappointed he didn’t?”
“Maybe a little. Mostly surprised.”
“The kiss was that good, huh?”
Phil turns to Dan and he’s right up in Phil’s space, grinning and laughing and loose. Phil shoves him, unsettling Adra in the process. He shifts into a little wallaby between them, kicking Phil in the stomach as he propels himself back towards Dan. Dan and Phil tussle for a few minutes, Adra finally jumping off to the floor with an exaggerated huff to leave Dan and Phil on their own in the bed. They fall to a mutual stillness, Phil’s forehead resting against Dan’s.
Phil doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone look quite as happy as Dan does in this moment, and he doesn’t know what to do with the swell of emotion that floods his body.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” Phil whispers, pressing the confession into Dan’s smooth cheek, smudging it down into the crook of his neck. Dan stiffens for a moment, then relaxes in Phil’s embrace.
“That’s alright. We can work things out as we go. It’s worked out pretty alright for us so far, hasn’t it?”
“Just barely.”
Dan leans his body to pinch Phil’s arm between him and the bed, laughing and butting his head against Phil’s shoulder. This devolves into them wrestling some more, and perhaps kissing a bit more and generally running out of breath so that their laughter comes out in half-formed huffs and Phil stops making noise entirely until he has to beg for mercy.
Dan takes this as a cue to roll over and spring off the bed, disappearing below the frame as he tugs on a pair of socks that Phil’s pretty sure are the ones Phil was wearing yesterday. He can’t tell if he finds it cute or vile.
“I’m going to go on a walk,” Dan announces. Cae swoops down to his shoulder and attaches their little feet to the fabric of Dan’s shirt so they’re hanging upside down off of it.
Phil almost opens his mouth to stop him, but then he remembers there’s nothing holding Dan back from going out now. Besides most of the crew being gone, Dan’s got Cae back and he can go anywhere he wants. Which also means there’s nothing bringing him back here.
“I’ll be right back, no need to pout. I just wanted some fresh air. And maybe the two of you could use some time to yourselves for a bit? I know Cae and I have some catching up to do.”
He knows it’s a good thing that Dan can give them space now, and healthy that he’s suggesting it, but part of him wants to pull Dan back.
It’s stupid. Just a few days ago Phil would have been ecstatic to watch Dan walk out without having to worry about how long he’d be okay without Adra nearby. Now he watches them leave with a knot of emotions too convoluted to unravel.
Adra is the first to break the silence. “You like him,” he teases, drawing out the ‘i’ as if they’re ten years old on the playground again, worried about cooties and crushes.
It’s silly and juvenile.
Phil buries his face in his hands. “Shut up.”
Adra does just the opposite, crawling over to Phil on the bed, his little numbat tongue flicking out between words. “Do you regret kissing him?”
Phil feels the breath grow heavy in his lungs as he considers Adra’s question. Why he felt compelled to ask it. How Phil actually feels about it now that he’s more awake and able to process the implications and potential repercussions.
“No. I wanted to. Why?”
“I just wanted to make sure you didn’t feel pressured. Because I like Dan. That doesn’t mean you have to.”
Before all of this started, Phil would have said that wasn’t true, that they do have to have the same feelings, the same thoughts, just by definition of what they are. Human and daemon. But now that he’s a little more ready to face the complexity and depth of his own feelings for Dan, he’s starting to realize just how many of Adra’s emotions he’s been blocking out this whole time, and how sharply they had contrasted with his own at the time.
“How long have you liked him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the whole time. Not like you do now. It’s different anyway, I think, the way you feel about him and the way I feel about him. I think it always will be, at least a little.”
“But you felt this way before I did?” Phil still avoids naming it, as always. What way he feels. Now it feels more like he doesn’t quite know how to define it than actively avoiding an obvious definition. He thinks he’s alright to sit with that uncertainty for a little while.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
Adra bobs his head down into his body and then back up in what looks like an approximation of a shrug. “We don’t always have to agree.”
“We usually don’t.”
“I think we agree on a lot of things. Just not always how to handle them.”
“So how would you handle this?” Phil asks.
“Handle what?”
“Dan.”
“Talk to him,” Adra says simply, as if it’s the most obvious solution. It probably is. It’s all he’s been telling Phil to do this entire time.
“And what about us?”
“What about us?”
“I’m sorry I made you leave again,” Phil says, voice cracking a bit.
“You didn’t make me. We agreed. I’m glad you thought of it. It was scary. When I couldn’t hear you anymore and then when I heard you all of a sudden, screaming at me I—I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared. But I don’t think it was a bad thing that we split up. It doesn’t have to be bad.”
“You were a stag again.”
“Yes,” Adra says, voice slow and guarded all of a sudden, dropping down into a chilliness Phil instantly regrets causing.
That wasn’t what he meant, even though it’s what he’s always meant before.
“I tried to convince the woman Cae was my daemon, when I was distracting her. And then she got confused and thought I said Dan was my daemon, but she got really excited about that. She asked if I was gay.”
It’s ridiculous, but he’s never actually said it out loud. He can practically feel the tension drop from Adra’s body when he hears the word, like a sigh of relief radiating through his whole body.
“What did you say?”
“I don’t remember. Yes, maybe. Or I implied it. I called Dan my lover.” Laughing at Adra’s wrinkled nose, Phil protests, “Only after she did.” Phil protests. Being able to laugh in this moment, about this particular topic, feels like a small miracle, like something he’d forgotten how to do.
“Guess I proved her right, coming charging in with my twelve point rack waving around.”
“I think she was probably a bit more preoccupied with your antlers for other reasons. But I also think—” Phil cuts himself off and draws in a deep breath. Then a couple more, just to be sure. “I like boys.”
Adra doesn’t respond, just watches Phil, crawling closer to him on the bed, placing one small paw on his knee.
“And—and you’re male, and I don’t think those two things have to be the same, you know? And maybe people will think they are, but that doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. So I don’t want you to feel like you can’t be a stag or a lion or a peacock—though a peacock is a little showy for us I think; I know I like bright colors, but that feels a little like overkill. And your tail would probably get stuck in doors all the time, but the point is—my point is I should never have tried to tell you what animal you could and couldn’t be and I’m sorry and you can take any form you like for however long you like and I’m going to try to stop caring so much what everyone else thinks about it.”
Adra doesn’t respond right away, and Phil starts to worry something he’d said had upset him. But as his silence stretches on longer, he starts to realize something else is currently consuming Adra’s attention
Phil had always thought this moment would be more dramatic. Something like a glass shattering. The sinking stomach finality of something that can’t be undone. A capsizing of the world as he knew it. He’d spent so much time thinking about it. When it would happen, why it hadn’t happened yet, what was wrong with him, if it would ever happen at all. If he even wanted it to happen. What he would do if he hated the form Adra settled in, if it laid bare what felt like his most precious, precarious secret.
Now none of those things are on his mind.
He can feel it happening, feel the subtle clicking into place, the warm exhale of it through his whole body. He doesn’t look up immediately to see what form Adra’s in. What he will be for the rest of their lives. He knows this moment’s important, the most important of his life according to some people, and he feels like he needs to take a moment to remember how to breathe.
His mum had always told him it would happen when he was ready, and that had always felt so infuriatingly vague, but now it just feels undeniably true. It’s scary and strange and permanent in a way he’s never really faced before, but it also thrums through his body like a live, buzzing thrill. Something new that he hasn’t entirely sorted out yet, but that feels distinctly good. Kind of like kissing Dan, but then again entirely different. Distinct.
And Phil feels ready.
When he looks back up at Adra, he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe the fact that this form never had a specific meaning, a specific purpose in the language of Adra and Phil, should have been a hint.
“No mane?” Phil asks finally when he finds his voice. He looks at Adra in front of him, small, pointed face with black stripes running across his eyes. With his white stripes running down his red and black body, round and fuzzy and soft and perfect for holding close to Phil’s chest. Adra as he will always be from now on.
Adra with nothing obvious to mark him as male.
Adra looks down at his tufted tail, then back up to Phil.
“Guess not.”
“You’re not going to miss it?”
“There are a lot of things I’m going to miss. But no. I don’t know if I really need it anymore.”
“And you didn’t...feel pressured?” Phil asks, voice faltering a bit as he repeats Adra’s question from earlier.
“You know I don’t get to pick my settled form.”
“Still. You’re not going to resent me?”
“As long as you don’t resent me for being cuter for you the rest of our lives.”
Phil lets out a burst of laughter, letting Adra’s joke drain some of the tension from the moment. They have more to talk about. Weeks and months and years and probably a lifetime of talking to heal past wounds and prevent new ones. Probably to heal new ones too. They’ll probably never stop misunderstanding and hurting and disagreeing with each other. But they can save some of those conversations for later. For now, Phil lays back down onto the bed and Adra climbs on his chest and curls up there, nose damp and cool through Phil’s shirt.
Dan comes back about twenty minutes later, stopping in the doorway with a mug in his hand. Phil knows Dan can tell the minute he sees them, though he’s not sure how exactly. Is there some signal settled daemons give off that he’s never noticed? Does Dan see it in Phil instead?
He tries to concentrate on Dan and Cae, but he doesn’t notice anything different about them. Not that there’s any reason Cae would settle at the same time as Adra did.
“Hi,” Dan breathes out finally, and he makes it sounds like the first time he’s meeting them. A real meeting, not like the way they actually met. Maybe this is a new sort of meeting. Phil tries to remember what it was like to see his friends and their daemons for the first time after they’d settled, but it was so long ago now.
And of course this is different anyway.
Dan comes fully into the room, setting the mug down on the table before he reaches out a tentative hand. He still glances at Phil before actually making contact with Adra everytime. Phil hopes he’ll stop eventually, but for now it feels good. Phil nods and Adra springs up into Dan’s arms, flipping over onto his back to bare his pale, furry stomach for Dan to stroke.
It still feels a little strange. Not the act of Dan touching Adra itself. That feels soothing in a muted, distant sort of way. He knows he’s feeling what Adra’s feeling, what it’s like for him. It’s the watching, Phil thinks, that’s bizarre. Whenever he’s seen affection shared between his parents or Martyn and Cornelia, or anyone else for that matter, their daemons might touch each other, but the humans don’t touch the other’s daemon very often. Never in front of Phil, at least, and very rarely if ever at all, as far as Phil knows.
It’s the sort of slightly off feeling Phil has come to recognize as different, something that sets him apart from most of the other people he’s known. but not inherently bad or wrong.
“What’s it like?” Dan asks, voice hushed.
“Not all that different yet. It’s only been about half an hour. But...sturdier, I guess.” He could try to explain further, but he thinks it would probably come out as garbled nonsense. The only thing he can think is that Dan will know when he knows, as much as that sort of response used to infuriate Phil.
He glances over at Cae, hanging from a spoon Dan must have stolen from the kitchen and tied to the shoulder of his shirt. Phil can’t help but smile at the absolute absurdity of it.
“Are you trying to start new fashion trends? That’s very...unique.”
“I normally have clothes that they can hang off of easier if they’re a bat. Things with ties or pockets, or bits I’ve added on myself for a better grip. These t-shirts of yours aren’t very convenient for bat daemons.”
Phil laughs. “Sorry for not anticipating that. If Cae settles as a bat are you going to tie cutlery to all of my shirts?”
He realizes belatedly that his question seems to assume that Dan’s going to go on borrowing Phil’s shirts, and Phil holds his breath as Dan’s face darkens, the few seconds he takes to respond sending Phil into a spiral of catastrophe.
“I don’t...I don’t know that they will. Settle, I mean. Like at all, not just as a bat. We haven’t talked about it all that much, but I just feel like…” He trails off, watching Cae as they drop off his shoulder and flit around the room. “I think they’ll probably spend most of their time as a bat, but I think they like being able to change their mind. Not just being one thing.”
Phil’s still not sure that’s allowed, but then again he’s not sure who’s setting the rules and why Dan and Cae can’t break them if they want. They’re all breaking enough supposed rules between the four of them already.
“That makes sense,” he says, not sure what else to say.
“Would that bother you?”
“Why would it bother me?” Phil asks, genuinely taken aback.
“You were upset when you thought Adra wasn’t going to settle. You thought it made you stand out in a way you didn’t like. You didn’t like any of the ways he stood out, and Cae and I aren’t the most subtle either. If we—” He cuts himself off, blushing and looking back up at Cae again, and Phil can’t help but grin.
“If we?”
“I just meant if we spend more time together,” his words are slow and meticulously measured and Phil can practically see the careful transfer of them from his head to his mouth and out into the space between them, “we might draw people’s attention, and if you don’t want that—”
“I’m working on it, but don’t worry about me. I’m done dictating how other people want to express themselves.”
Dan looks a bit skeptical, but he doesn’t protest. Phil knows he’ll probably have to earn Dan’s trust on that front, just as he’ll have to earn Adra’s, and earn his own trust too. Instead of responding, Dan flops down onto the bed behind Phil, stretching his arms out wide to cover the whole width of it. He glances back up over his chest at Phil shyly, just watching him for a moment.
“I think it’s time for a nap,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the space beside him. “You could probably use one too. You tossed and turned all night. And you snored.”
“Did not!”
“You did. But it’s okay, I’m used to it. Cae snores too.”
“Don’t!” they protest from the ceiling in a high squeak.
“If I’m so horrible to share a bed with maybe I should just leave you to it,” Phil sniffs. “I could just drink the coffee you so thoughtfully brought for me.”
“It’s probably cold by now. Naps are better. I’ll suffer through your terrible sleeping habits.”
“So selfless,” Phil laughs, but he leans his body back down until he’s pressed up against Dan’s side, his face buried into Dan’s still outstretched arm. He feels absurdly, recklessly bold in this moment, but then again maybe none of this is all that drastic. Maybe it’s just a nap.
They sleep on and off for the rest of the day, Dan managing to sleep more than Phil. He probably has more to catch up on. Phil doesn’t think he slept much at all when he was apart from Cae. When Phil finally wakes up fully, he has Adra bring him his book and spends some time reading. And maybe a little time watching Dan and Cae sleep. Cae does snore just a bit, in a high, nasally whistle from the ceiling, and Dan’s drooling onto the pillow.
Eventually Phil’s stomach starts to rumble, and he shakes Dan all the way awake to offer to go look for food. Somehow Phil winds up heading to the kitchen accompanied by Cae instead of Adra. He feels a bit nervous, shuffling through his brain for something to talk about as if they’re on an awkward blind date.
“Thank you again for helping Dan while we were—” Cae doesn’t finish their thought and Phil gives them a moment before responding.
“Of course.”
“I know he can be a pain in the arse though. He’s got a lot of thoughts and feelings and opinions and sometimes when he gets overwhelmed by them he thinks it’s best to shove them out onto someone else. Especially when there’s a lot going on and he feels insecure, he tends to over project confidence and it can come off as a little brash I think.”
“You don’t have to apologize for him. I wasn’t exactly the most pleasant to be around either.”
“Still, I think he makes a better first impression when I’m there to temper him a bit.”
“He made a fine first impression.” It may have been more like a second or third impression, but Phil thinks it had just as much to do with his own hang-ups as it did with Dan’s...unique energy. “But I am really glad to meet you. Dan talked about you a lot.”
They chat easily the rest of the way to the canteen, making fun of Dan and talking about Cae’s favorite forms to take. Phil stays far away from anything too serious and Cae does too, but it doesn’t feel like something they need to talk about right now. It’s nice to be able to just get to know them through simple, easy things. Just have a normal conversation.
Bernie’s eyes track them as they move through the canteen, and Phil knows he can tell who Phil has with him. He tries not to let it bother him and mostly succeeds, though the plates rattle together lightly in his hands and he’s happy to finally get back out into the anonymity of the empty deck.
He doesn’t know if getting to know someone else’s daemon is a normal thing people do when they’re...interested in one another. Probably not. For one, it’s not something most people would be physically capable of doing, at least not the way Dan and Phil are doing it now. But even if they could, he doesn’t think most people spend time getting to know the other person’s daemon specifically. Maybe they wouldn’t even be doing this if Dan hadn’t spent so much time getting to know Adra separately. But Cae feels so distinct from Dan, while still obviously a part of him, and Phil wants to get to know them too. Both of them.
If Adra were here Phil thinks he’d be nudging him with a reminder that they don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Phil does his best to remind himself on his own.
When they get back to the room Dan is passed out again with Adra curled up on his chest, and Phil takes a moment to smile at them. Then he sends Cae to flop down onto Dan’s face, wrapping their wings around his head until he sits up.
They eat and play a few games of cards and this time Cae turns into a polecat and tussles with Adra while Dan and Phil argue and slap each other’s hands away from the cards. Phil finally admits defeat after losing four rounds in a row, and suggests they head to bed, blushing the entire time. There’s more room in the bed now that Adra’s smaller, and Cae mirrors his form once again to curl up next to him in between Dan and Phil. Between all the napping and excitement throughout the day Phil had expected it to take him a while to fall asleep, but he finds himself drifting off almost instantly, lulled by the warmth emanating off of Dan and Cae’s rhythmic snores.
Phil wakes early the next morning and goes out to the deck, a hazy fog sitting heavy on the river to match his murky morning brain. He had left Dan sleeping still, and that was harder than he’d ever imagined. Every last centimeter of Phil had longed to crawl back into bed with Dan and curl up into the warmth of him. Phil had always loved cuddling with just about anyone he could get his hands on, and Dan radiates enough heat to keep Phil snug indefinitely.
But his thoughts had eventually grown loud enough to crowd him out of bed and out into the open air. Martyn had found him there, shivering and silent, and brought him a mug of coffee. They were nearly home, he said. He didn’t try to talk anymore, probably recognizing Phil’s mood. He also didn’t say anything about the numbat perched on the railing beside Phil. Maybe he didn’t notice. Probably he didn’t expect a response either way.
He leaves Adra and Phil alone after a bit, taking the empty cup with him as he goes. Hebe nuzzles Adra quickly then runs after.
“What are we going to do now?” Adra asks after a while, voice seeming to get swallowed up by the moisture thick in the air.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?”
It seems a bit like a Dan question. Or at least a question Adra might not have asked him before this whole journey. Not right away at least. Phil takes a moment to consider.
“It might be nice to travel a bit. See a little more of the world; see if it’s really that different from Rawtenstall.”
“That’s rather adventurous of you.”
“We’re adventurous now, didn’t you know? Besides,” he adds, after Adra sticks his long, curved tongue out at him, “it might be easier with a bit of company, if we can swing it.”
“They should probably lay low for a while.”
“I think between Martyn, mum, and I we’ll be able to convince Dan to stay with us for a few days at least.”
“Are we going to just leave those kids—”
“No. I don’t think Dan will drop it, anyway. Maybe we can figure out some way to help without putting all of us in quite so much danger again. What do you think? What do you want to do?”
“That all sounds good to me.”
Phil slides his hand along the railing so it’s close but not quite touching him. Adra rearranges his body so he can rest his chin on Phil’s fingers, a layer of warmth so distinct from the bite of the cold metal beneath his hand. They stay there, watching the banks along the river grow more and more familiar until the crowded grey clump of his town becomes visible in the distance.
At some point Dan comes out to stand beside him, Cae still hanging from the stolen spoon. They both watch the distant harbor growing closer, not saying a word. Phil wonders what they’re thinking. If they’re planning their escape as soon as their feet touch solid ground, or if they might be persuaded to come back home with Phil and Martyn, for some lunch at least. Maybe dinner. Maybe a night of sleep in a decent bed. Maybe enough time to let things die down and make some travel plans, maybe with an extra travel companion.
Phil slides his other hand the opposite way down the railing, stopping just short of where Dan’s fingers curl around the cold metal. It doesn’t mean anything, he lectures himself as he tries to regulate his breathing. Either way, whether Dan takes his hand or not, it doesn’t tell Phil what he’s going to do or how he feels or how the future will turn out. Nothing can tell him that, except maybe his dreams, but even they aren’t that reliable.
His breath still catches, though, when Dan lays his hand on top of Phil’s, warm and large enough to cover all of Phil’s skin.
As the harbor grows close enough to start making out the details of individual ships and faces on the docks, Phil isn’t worrying about what he’s going to do or what job he’s going to get or when he’s going to leave his childhood home and finally make a full adult life for himself. Instead he focuses on the warmth enveloping each of his two hands, the way it leeches up his arms and into the rest of him, staving off the chill of the morning air. That, he thinks, is more than enough for now.
- Anbaric=electric in this universe. [ ▲ ]