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dvp95 · 5 years

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quiet on widow’s peak (6)

pairing: dan howell/phil lester, pj liguori/sophie newton/chris kendall rating: teen & up tags: paranormal investigator, mystery, online friendship, slow burn, strangers to lovers, nonbinary character, trans character, background poly, phil does some buzzfeed unsolved shit and dan is a fan word count: 2.9k (this chapter), 19.7k (total) summary: Phil’s got a list of paranormal experiences a mile long that he likes to share with the world. Abandoned buildings, cemeteries, and ghost stories have always called his name, and a particular fan of his has a really, really good ghost story.

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

Hope my friends and I didn't make things weird for you yesterday. We're heading to the city around noon if you're still up for helping us with the boring part.

noon?? fucking alright i guess i gotta put pants on

lmao yeah, sorry. My parents woke us up at EIGHT like that's a normal time to be awake????

desgostang

What?

ill send u the link later and also no i didnt feel weird yesterday you guys are nice

That's good! And hey I wanted to ask. You were kind of put on the spot with introducing yourself, would you rather we called you Dan or Winnie? I just wanna make sure we aren't making you uncomfortable at all lmao

no its all fine you can call me dan idc and actually its best if you do call me dan when youre in my work lmao

Are you totally sure?

why would i lie abt this. dont be an idiot it isnt a good look on you

haha okay. I’ll see you around noon.

“Christopher is a nice boy,” Phil’s mum is telling him as she helps him with their fancy new coffeemaker. There are so many buttons and Phil is so, so tired. “And Sophie is lovely, such a soft-spoken thing. Why haven’t we met them before, dear?”

“Dunno,” Phil says instead of the truth, which is that he’d had no idea how he was supposed to introduce them. “You have now, though.”

His mum laughs and reaches up to pat his cheek. “True enough. I’m so happy that you’ve got good people around you, Philip. I’ve gotten quite worried about you down there by yourself, you know.”

“I’m not by myself,” says Phil. “I live with, like, thirty people.”

“Bunch of strangers, I’ll bet,” she says, because she knows him. “Aside from those three.”

The thing is, she’s not wrong. Phil’s obviously exaggerating about the number of people under the roof of the creaky Brighton house, but the truth is that he can’t keep track half the time. A lot of the rooms get sublet out randomly, or a significant other will start spending so much time around the place that they might as well pay rent, and Phil really isn’t good with new people. He gets along fine with Holly and Dave, but they’ve been there as long as he has and the closest they’ve ever come to a heart-to-heart was comparing anxiety meds over burned pancakes.

Chris and Sophie were there when Phil moved in, and they’d taken one look at him and decided to just keep shoving into his space until he liked having them there, like they were on a mission to adopt PJ’s sad, ghost-obsessed friend from the internet.

“You might be right,” Phil says, feeling a smile tug at his lips for the first time all morning. He’s already had a coffee - and a half, when PJ declared that not even Kath could make coffee taste good and shoved the rest of his Phil’s way - but he still doesn’t feel fully awake. “I’m only really friends with Chris and Soph because of PJ.”

“PJ is a good friend to you, isn’t he?” his mum hums. That slightly pointed tone doesn’t get to Phil the way it usually does, because he knows that she’s just trying to understand him.

It doesn’t escape Phil’s notice that he’s looking into a mirror whenever he sees his parents watching him carefully, waiting for him to tell them something he hasn’t explicitly said, because he’s been doing the exact same thing to his housemates for nearly two years.

Maybe he’ll tell his parents when he’s got someone serious or even, like, semi-serious. Longer than two dates would be a record at this point. But right now he already feels like he’s been one misstep away from disappointing them, and he doesn’t want to take the gamble that his sexuality will be that misstep.

He’s not up for this conversation, though, isn’t sure he’ll ever be, so he just says, “Yeah, he is.”

Dan is late. They’re so late, actually, that Phil’s wheel of worst case scenarios has been spinning silently and getting faster and faster the more caffeine he chugs. They roll in with flushed cheeks and a jacket that looks too thin, apologies on their shiny lips that Phil doesn’t even hear for a couple of seconds because he’s too busy staring at them.

“No worries,” Sophie says, interrupting their rambling before they lose another half hour to it. “You want something? I’m getting a refill.”

“No, no, let me,” says Dan. They shrug off their jacket and hang it on one of the empty chairs. Phil and his friends have co-opted the largest table in the place so they can spread out with their laptops and notebooks, and it doesn’t escape Phil’s notice that Dan has decided to sit next to him when they’ve got a couple of options. “I get free drinks if Gabe’s in a good mood. Anyone else need a refill?”

“Me,” Chris says, not looking up from his screen. “Not Phil. He’s cut off.”

“Hey,” Phil protests weakly. His heart rate really has picked up since they sat down, so he knows Chris has a point.

Dan grins, their soft cheeks giving way to the dimples that Phil is very quickly growing obsessed with. He just wants to make Dan smile and laugh constantly, to hear them cackle and see all the lines in their round face deepen with happiness.

Right. Phil watched a horror movie with PJ instead of unpacking this fluttering start of a crush last night, and now he’s just got to deal with it for the rest of the day.

As if it’s a compulsion, Dan clears the empty mugs from their table before heading up to the counter. Phil focuses on the EMF readings so he doesn’t get caught up on Dan holding four mugs by the handles with total ease.

PJ has got headphones on and his eyes closed, so he might not even have noticed that Dan is there. He’s been going through Sophie’s footage and his own audio recordings to try and find some anomalies while Chris looks for the weird visual stuff - they’re a great team at that, and it makes Phil feel like he’s not doing enough. Sure, he could find those things on his own, but not as quickly as they can when it’s a team effort, and they’re on a bit of a tight schedule here. Well, his housemates are. They’ve got actual jobs to get back to once the weekend is over.

Allegedly, Sophie is doing research on sigils, but it looks to Phil like she’s just doodling. Not that he really blames her if she is. He’s barely been paying attention to the chart he’s making of spikes in electromagnetism because he’s been so busy watching the door for Dan.

And Dan looks… good. They’re wearing chunky boots and a shirt that falls to their thighs - a dress, maybe, but it looks like a regular black t-shirt that got extended at the hem - with tight white jeans. The only colour on them is the plaid shirt around their waist and the shiny red product on their lips to match it. Phil watches them lean against the counter and grin at the older barista, and he’s so distracted by looking at their profile that he startles when a foot connects with his under the table.

“Stop staring,” Sophie says, quiet and smiling. “He’s going to notice.”

Phil considers correcting her, but then he remembers that he probably doesn’t have to. Dan had said any pronouns, that they didn’t care how they were referred to, so it would definitely be weirder to act like he knows better than Sophie.

He knows he won’t be able to use masculine terms for Dan. Not because they aren’t true, because he’s pretty sure they’re no less accurate than neutral or feminine would be, but because thinking of Dan as a maculine person is only going to allow Phil’s brain to fall into the familiar traps of gender in ways he doesn’t want to allow.

Gay monkey brain doesn’t need any more leeway in finding Dan attractive, that’s for damn sure.

“So, what are we doing?” Dan asks, interrupting Phil’s thoughts, and, wow, four mugs is a lot more impressive when they’re full of hot liquid. Phil marvels at Dan’s ability not to trip and spill it all as they dole out the coffee and teas.

“I’m doing the boring part,” says Phil. He turns his screen so Dan can see the Excel spreadsheet and laughs at the face they make. “Yeah. It's not glamorous, but it's the easiest way to find patterns in the EMF readings. Honestly, most of my job is just staring at things and finding patterns in them. Like, uh, what's that guy? With the butterfly splotches?"

"Worcestershire," Chris suggests.

"Rorschach," Dan corrects him, lips twitching like they aren't sure if they're allowed to laugh in Chris' face or not.

“That’s exactly what I said,” says Chris.

“You know EMF meters don’t have anything to do with ghosts, right?” Dan asks, ignoring Chris completely and leaning a bit closer to Phil to get a better look at his laptop. “I mean, none of this has anything to do with ghosts, really, but you’re more or less just measuring electricity.”

Phil is aware of that. He wonders if Dan thinks he just stumbles into haunted houses with equipment he hasn’t researched and waits to be spooked. He’s too distracted by how close Dan is and how good they smell to work up to proper offense, though. “Yeah,” he says simply. “But don’t you think it’s weird that the place still has electricity to begin with? Who’s paying for that?”

“A Wilkins, I’d imagine.”

“But why? If they’ve forgotten about the property or abandoned it on purpose, surely they wouldn’t still pay the bills.”

“Maybe they don’t handle their own finances,” Dan suggests. “How rich were these assholes?”

“I honestly don’t know,” says Phil. He taps his fingers in an erratic pattern on the edge of his laptop, trying to spark something in his mind.

It’s almost disappointing when Dan pulls away to dig out their own sleek Macbook out of their messenger bag, but Phil is also glad for it. He can think a lot easier when the warm scent of spice and mint isn’t clogging his brain.

Dan slots into the work as easily as if a space was left for them. They’ve got dozens of tabs open already and they start to go through them, cross-referencing magic things with Sophie in quiet tones and digging deeper into the Wilkins family than Phil ever would have thought to. Every so often they tap Phil on the arm and drag him into whatever rabbithole they’ve fallen down, chatting animatedly.

Phil knows, objectively, that Dan is a fan of his and that Dan is weird about research. It’s another thing entirely to watch it happen in real time, to see Dan pull up local census PDFs from the eighties and explain why chaos magic is bullshit in the same breath.

An hour or so goes by like that, all of them working on their own things with minimal words exchanged by everybody but Dan, and then Chris shouts loud enough to make the barista jump. Nobody else is in the coffee shop right now, which is lucky, because Dan’s got a hand over their chest and Sophie has slopped tea down her front. PJ, with his headphones on, simply cracks an eye open.

“What the fuck was that about?” Phil asks, putting his own palm against his chest to feel his heart race. Dan raises their eyebrows and looks at Phil, seemingly distracted from the startling, wordless exclamation.

They don’t get a chance to say whatever they’re thinking, though, because Chris is turning his laptop to the rest of the table and grinning wide like the Cheshire Cat. “I found something.”

Everybody gathers round, PJ getting up to lean over the back of Phil’s chair and Sophie getting so far into Dan’s personal space that Phil is certain they’re uncomfortable with it, and then Chris presses play upside down. It’s part of Sophie’s footage, Phil standing in the dim foyer and looking frustrated. Even without sound, Phil can tell that this is when he was arguing with Sophie about going upstairs. He squints, but he can’t see whatever it is that’s got Chris being so loud.

“What am I looking at?” PJ asks when the short clip ends, and Dan hums an agreement. Chris makes a frustrated noise like they’re being obtuse on purpose and rewinds to the beginning.

"There," Chris says, excited like he hasn't been since they got to Manchester. He taps his finger against the laptop screen. "D'you see it? D'you see the shadow?"

Now that Chris has pointed it out, Phil does see something. He moves his own laptop and notebook out of the way to pull Chris’ closer with a frown. Chris lets him do that, bouncing in his seat a little bit.

“That’s straight up a person,” Phil says slowly, tracing the outline of the shadow with the mouse. It’s behind him, in the entry to the kitchen, and it looks tall. Quite a bit taller than Phil, anyway, if he’s remembering that doorframe correctly. He decides to measure it next time they go so he isn’t going off memory. “I knew we weren’t alone in there. Like. I’m not crazy, that’s a human being.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Chris. “But press play.”

So Phil presses play. He watches the shadow stay perfectly still in the kitchen doorway until, suddenly, it’s not there anymore. He blinks, rewinds, and watches it disappear again.

Phil’s caffeinated brain is firing on all cylinders now. He grins and shoves his sleeves up to his elbows before he starts fiddling with the clip. The lighting gets played with until the shadow is more obvious and then he slows it down to 0.25 times speed to see if the shadow really just vanishes.

He presses play again. This time, with a very slow-motion Phil talking in the foreground, he sees the shadow move. It runs sideways, further into the house.

“What the fuck?” Dan breathes.

“We are not going back there without some serious protection,” PJ says, even firmer on the topic now.

“What, like sigils?” Dan asks, their pretty eyes wide even as they scoff. “You’d be better off with a fucking, like, baseball bat, mate. That doesn’t look like something that wants to be your friend.”

“I’ve got a crowbar in PJ’s trunk,” Phil says, absent-minded as he plays with the clip some more.

“Excuse me? When did you put that in my car?”

“Couple months ago.”

“Huh. How have I not noticed?”

“You’re not the most observant person I’ve ever met,” says Phil. He looks up at Chris, who’s got the same exhilarated look that Phil is sure he’s mirroring. They don’t get evidence like this very often, something so clearly there that it’s even got a skeptic’s mind racing. Phil exports the edited clip and then the original, putting them both into the Cloud and emailing them to himself. “Was this the only time you saw it?”

Chris nods, accepting his laptop back when Phil is done with it. “I’ll look through everything again, now that I know what I’m looking for and all, but I think that’s it.”

“Okay, cool.” Phil looks around at his friends and Dan, beaming. “Something weird is happening. I love it when something weird is happening.”

“I hate it when something weird is happening,” PJ says, which is a blatant lie.

“Well, we can’t go snooping around until it’s darker out, anyhow,” Sophie reminds them.

“Wait, we’re snooping?” Dan asks, their voice going up an entire octave in disbelief. “Like… you just saw that someone is there and probably not happy about people sneaking around, right? Don’t you have enough for a video already?”

“We’re spending the night,” says Phil. “It’s what we do.”

“It’s what you do,” PJ corrects him.

“Okay, yeah, you guys don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“No, I’m coming,” says PJ.

As if she can’t hear them bickering, Sophie turns to Dan with a sweet smile, her eyes twinkling with the same excitement in Chris’. They love this, just like Phil does. “What about you, Dan?” she asks. “Are you going to have a ghost sleepover with us?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Dan says, their eyes still glued to the back of Chris’ laptop like they can see the shadow through it.

“Guess you don’t have anything to be afraid of, then,” says Chris.

“Uh, axe murderers, maybe?”

“We know what we’re doing, Dan,” Phil reassures them. He reaches a hand out to pat at their arm, feeling a bit awkward about it. “But you don’t have to come with us if you’re scared.”

That makes Dan’s gaze shift. Suddenly, those brown eyes are staring right into Phil’s soul, defiant and beautiful and impossible to look away from.

“Who said I was fucking scared?”

#phanfic #phanfiction #dnp fic #words words words #quiet on widow's peak #this chapter is a little short thanks to me prioritizing my mental health BUT i am still happy with it #so i hope you like it too #even if you might think the plot is slow!

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