#(there's a lot of very similar premise fics that have their own quirks and charm and i just had to make sure i was thinking of the right on

[pyrriax]

For fic recs, outsiders and lifesteal.

cracking my knuckles

(for both of our sanity, i'm going to avoid recommend any of my own work, though it most definitely is out there, lol ;; fics aren't in any particular order than the order i remembered them in!)

Outsiders SMP:

Six Flares Series by kmsquill — Warnings: Major Character Death, Lots of Angst, Blood & Violence — An always recommendation for reading, though I haven't finished the rewritten version, Quill's work is always good. This is focused on the general cast, though different fics diverge and focus on different characters, it runs c!Rasbi-centric Sick, Sick, Sick! by ORPHIC__CAE — Warnings: Drowning — One of my other favorites! I won't say too much to avoid spoilers, but it's focused on c!Owen post-reunion Poor Wandering Man by tbhmellohi — Warnings: N/A — An unfinished fic that can read like a oneshot, it's yet another in the list of c!Owen-centric fics, this one is canon divergent and just overall lovely. Pretty Much Dead Already by tbhmellohi — Warnings: Major Character Death — This one comes with a not-quite warning, since it's a c!Ori-centric zombie apocalypse AU. It is what it says on the tin, however! The characterization here is one of my favorites. Would It Have Been A Mercy To Accept His Fate? Series by Fluffyfifi22 — Warnings: Major Character Death — An AU where c!Owen survives the Meltdown and tails the group during their escape attempt, it's one of my absolute favorite series and a big inspiration to me personally Two Sides Of The Same Coin by Cantspell — Warnings: N/A — Want a break from the angst train? This is about as fluffy and a little silly as it gets. A crossover fic that entails c!Owen and r!Owen winding up in the same world and having to get along, it's sweet and silly for the most part (Self-Indulgence Recommendation) Where The Dust Settles by AvoxUtopia — Warnings: Character & Animal Death, Violence, Blood & Injury — The only fic of mine I'll recommend here: a fan season of the STARR series, it follows a menagerie of original characters in the same settings as Outsiders SMP. Currently in the last stretch of the 3rd Arc!

Lifesteal:

Glass Box by raetae — Warnings: N/A — An s3 Vitalasy-centric fic, there's a lot of references and mentions of people's projects and alliances; it's a good break from the typical contenders for fics! Heartstruck by tempurabbg — Warnings: Violence, Injury — Branzy-centric, it's recently been updated and it's one of my current favorite fics in the fandom Blood Is Sweeter Than The Taste Of Home by EclipsedMoons — Warnings: Cannibalism — Planetlord is a fallen star, he has to eat. Honestly that's just the fic summary but it puts it perfectly. I've talked about this fic briefly on tumblr before? Dear Prince, Held At Arm's Length by MaNicWriting — Warnings: Violence, Body Horror — A royalty AU centered around Branzy/Clown, it's one of the fics I've recommended to multiple people before. Looking Through You, Not At You by Thrills — Warnings: Almost Character Death, Fate Worse Than Death — Vigilante / Superpower AU, this is one I won't say much about because it's one that's 100% worth a blind readthrough aside from reading the tags (Archive Locked) La Petite Mort by whichlights — Warnings: Major Character Death, Violence — Do I have words for this fic? Nope. It's just wormed its way into my brain and will not leave. Digital in Reciprocation by Anonymous — Warnings: Referenced Suicide, Violence — Another one that's wormed its way into my skull. I'd type more about this one (it deserves all the words, frankly) however it's 6am and I should sleep

Aaaaaand that's a wrap for now! I can probably scrounge up some more good recs when I've had a chance to actually work through bookmarkings the fics I like (I keep forgetting to do that and digging through my history is an experience in and of itself.)

Also, to answer this! I did go for some more basic fics, since they're always a safe bet, but basically everything here is actually fics I recommended to one of my friends when it was getting into the fandoms :3

[danandphilsecretsanta]

Fix: A Fic For Tati

To: @dilhowlter1991

A speculative phanfic (are those a thing?) based on the premise that Phil first contacted Dan way back in 2009 for more unscrupulous and selfish reasons. This is the product of a lot of wishful and derailed thinking.

Title: Fix Tags: Mentions of non-explicit sexual interaction and an explicitly-banned video; Phil makes questionable decisions; Some fluff; A whole lot of angst

I hope you have fun reading it! (for now, disregard the {bracketed numbers} until the end!)

|| 2016 || 7 ||

In London, two men of some note dwelled. Tucked away in a small little road lined with identical grey-brick buildings. Squat little things, arranged in neat and tidy rows. Two ranks of foot soldiers, filed and ready to march into battle. Behind one window of many was a tiny square. Aglow with the warm flush of light and painted in vivid technicolour by the assortment and array of indiscernible knick-knacks.

And there, in the centre of a gentle calming storm of possessions — but more importantly: belonging — sat the two. Men of note. Some. Reclined, comfortable, and doing exactly what they did best.

“Any TATINOF spoilers yet?” Phil asked.

“Mm, not yet.” Dan turned his laptop for Phil to see. “Although there is a video of us ‘kissing’ behind the screen.”

“Was it in Toronto?” Phil asked, leaning over to glimpse the 10-second clip, and the city in the title. “Oh, wait, not that. Never mind then.”

A half-smile quirked at Dan’s lips. “‘Obviously they aren’t’,” he read from the notes and replies. “‘They’re always so careful, do you think they’ll fuck up? In public? With thousands of fangirls watching question-mark question-mark question-mark?’”

“They give us too much credit.”

Dan scrolled past. Now and then he quipped through the silence with a comment or a quote that had gotten his attention.

“‘Who got the room in the bus in the end? They both said yes when asked.’”

“‘Two tall nerds on one bus, what a nightmare.’”

“‘Damn Daniel, back at it again with the light-up shoes.’”

“I still haven’t forgiven you for that one yet!” Phil crossed his arms. “You could have gotten one for me too.”

“I don’t know your shoe size,” Dan deflected expertly. “And you have bigger feet.”

As Phil watched, a sly smile unfurled over Dan’s lips. He could practically hear the words before they had even tumbled. “And you know what they say about bigger feet,” he said for him, rolling his eyes even as his own lips twitched.

Dan edged closer, sliding his laptop far from the couch. Safe from harm’s way. He closed his eyes, and found Phil’s cheek unerringly in the darkness behind his eyelids to guide him into a chaste kiss they both knew well. “God help me, if you say ‘big socks’, I’ll sock you.”

~~~~~~

|| 2009 || 3 ||

Phil slammed into Dan. Dan, in turn, slammed into the wall by the door. Never once pulling away, Phil reached out and flung it shut. Against the jamb it shook, rattling the hollowed house with it. Giants’ footsteps roared, but Phil’s door bellowed loudest.

“Eager,” Dan broke away to laugh. There was a heat in his voice that came from the southward rush of blood, from the fire in his lungs that ate away his air and shortened his breaths to small, undignified whines. His hands rested lightly against Phil’s chest, but his knuckles and palms arched away from the green plaid shirt, as though he feared one touch too earnest, one brush too free — and gone Phil would be. A mirage, disappeared, the product of a feverish nocturnal imagination driven to distraction by overwhelming, unanswered want.

Phil tipped his forehead closer, swayed his hips — knowing, aware — and grazed the front of his jeans with Dan’s. From their hair, to their clothes, to their arousal, they matched. They could have been mirror images. They could have been completely incorporeal except to each other. Insular in this room that had grown with Phil, every inch plastered with posters and personality. Home to one boy, and temple to another. “You make me that way.”

He didn’t hide his smirk from Dan’s answering tremble. His bottom lip quivered — delicious — and his knees shook so hard, they knocked. He didn’t reply. Only leaned forward, and poured everything he had into Phil with surprising surety.

And Phil — treacherous, conniving man that he was — Phil let him.

The guilt would haunt him for years.

~~~~~~

|| 2016 || 6 ||

“You’re beautiful.”

Once upon a time, that might have earned him a blush, perhaps a giggle if he had purred the words and yanked Dan closer with greedy, grabbing hands. A little after once-upon, and Phil would only have invited a scowl and a scoff if he’d dared utter two simple words. They might as well have been fuck you.

The statement never changed, the sentiment never wavered. Through the years all that had shifted was Dan. He was a riptide current, the push-and-pull of the water beneath the frothing waves. Temperamental. Unpredictable. Loath to pull innocents from the near shore, and then send them back floating with the tiniest crash and wave, as though to say, Thank you for playing with me! Come back once all the water has been pumped from your lungs!

Loath to pull victims from the shore on other days, and never return them.

Not one crash. Not one wave. The murmur of running water the throaty gurgle of death. The softest demolition, the quietest robbery.

Now, however, Dan swept Phil’s fringe from sleep-prickled eyes, so that he could see Dan smile a blurry smile from where he hovered over Phil. His lips turned upwards. Very different from his frowns. Phil had been quick to learn and discern. “Should it distress me that you only say this in the morning? When you’ve just woken up?”

“Hey, if I think your flesh-coloured blobs look good to me in the morning, guess how blown-away I get the rest of the day when I actually have vision?”

“If flesh-coloured blobs are what do it for you, then we need to have a talk.”

Phil framed Dan’s face with his hands, pressing his cheeks and squishing his features into a pliant muddle. “This flesh-coloured blob in particular. Only this one, and none else.”

Dan burst out laughing. It was a hearty laugh — a hyena’s cackle. He threw his head back, and his chest rose and fell quickly and painfully with the straits of his laughter. They never faltered once, even as Phil rolled them over and eased Dan’s back against the mattress.

His eyes — brown as ever, closely indistinguishable from the slashes of chocolate of his hair — peered up at Phil in narrow slits, scrunched into small creases and wrinkles by the laugh-lines carved into his face that winged his eyelids.

“You know, it probably doesn’t translate when I’m speaking,” Phil said, “but when I wake up and see you, I happen to be counting my blessings. Me commenting on you really means I’m lucky to have been your choice too.”

The crinkles below him deepened imperceptibly. By the corner of his mouth, dimples sprang from his chin. Phil felt a hand curl around his neck, and stroke the fine down along his nape. “Phil the poet,” Dan whispered.

He smiled and leaned down to punctuate each word with a kiss. As though, by the power of mere insistence, he could stamp the truth beneath Dan’s skin “You’re. Beautiful.”

~~~~~~

|| 2009 || 1 ||

Phil, when he wanted to be, was a proficient stalker

He looked at the boy’s profile, and could almost swear that was his own hair, cropped and photoshopped expertly to frame another’s face. It suited him. Brown to brown. Complementary. His messages were nice too. But all of them were. A mailbox full of praises and clamouring voyeurs. Nothing special, except say in the staggering rate at which this one boy spewed them out. A comment on every video, issued with lightning speed. It had to be a record of some kind.

Next, he scrolled through his profile. He was young, 18. Phil’s intrigue piqued at that. They shared so many interests, so many commonalities. They listened to the same music, were mad for the same computer games. It was as though this boy had been planted in the stadium below his videos, just so Phil could stumble upon him and remark on their similarities. Coincidental collision. If you were lucky, you could walk from it alive.

Phil flicked his fingers, to read the boy’s name. Dan Howell. Lover of Muse, player of MarioKart, viewer of AmazingPhil. Quick succinct person. Personality compact, nothing garrulous. Phil found that charming.

“He could be a madman,” Phil mused, pretending to hover over indecision for the show of it. “He could skin me alive or sell me on eBay.” A strange risk, a minor risk. A risk he could take and laugh at.

So he clicked the message button. Dashed out words, smattered with emoticons and cheery symbols. Closed the window, folded his arms behind his head, and waited for a pretty boy like Dan Howell to snap the bait.

~~~~~~

|| 2012 || 4 ||

When it happened, the day was quiet. Unlikely, for the two new inhabitants of a London flat with thin wallets and even thinner tempers. But the day had been quiet. Phil should have seen it for what it was: the calm before the storm.

“The fucking V-Day video again,” Dan had blustered when the clock was just shy of lunch. “Come on, we’re talking tactics now.”

For hours, they had sat at the table. War generals presiding over a battle they had already lost. But Dan was belligerent. He would not emerge from the bunker without a plan, and Phil — complicit as his partner — must be there to talk through contingencies, to iron out the flaws of his logic and conceive an elaborate hoax that could make thousands of fans forget.

As it was, Dan’s power and will alone were enough to slog their ankles through a shit-fest of their own making. They formed an alibi. (It was an April Fool’s prank too cruel for the public eye. Phil was supposed to do it as a joke, wasn’t he, Phil?) They scoured it from the Internet. (“It’s not enough to just delete it from your channel. You have to report the copies. Get any reproductions taken off with a copyright claim. There. See?”) Dan was particularly scathing towards the asks that exploded his inbox. For perhaps a moment he transformed into a bona fide Vernon Dursley. Astounded by the flurries of mail, almost reduced to catatonics as he sputtered and devised empty response after hollow reply.

In the middle of a storm of lies, Phil took Dan by the elbow. “Dan, I need to tell you something.”

~~~

Two boys who had reached through their computer screens and plucked the other’s heart. Their’s was the stuff of legends, of folklore and romantics. Boys who had stumbled across each other on an infinite web, and decided to spend their finite lives with each other in an infinite universe.

Phil never knew why he did what he did. Why he grabbed Dan’s arm, propped up a spine already bent by the tribulations of reality, and burdened him with truth. Perhaps watching Dan spin his lies while the day slipped from them like youth tired him. Perhaps being privy to Dan’s slow ruthless drive through a scalding desert of untruths convinced him a sip of honesty might just save his friend — because that was what they were now.  It was all they could be. Friends, only friends. Regressed, but friends.

Or…perhaps…he had seen Dan tear down everything they had built together. Seen the ease with which he could demolish their legacy and past, towers and mountains they had built together, scaled together — and paint it over with cheap replications and flat tales that dishonoured the path they shadowed. Watched, helpless, as Dan succumbed to pixels scrambled into images and words and reduced their three years of companionship and trust into a fangirl’s wet dream. Dan, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps unaware, mocked all they had propped up between them with his tirade, before Phil’s eyes.

He saw Dan destroy their world with furore and an inlaid calm and thought to help him do it just the slightest bit faster.

~~~

Phil could not remember when they migrated from the sofa to the carpet. Perhaps somewhere between his second attempt at explaining and Dan’s first wail of anguish. He wondered if birds meant to soar far and travel the world were prone to that same disorienting jolt, of discovering themselves planted suddenly in the wrong scenery after instinct and evolutionary predisposition returned their will to them once again. If they flapped their wings with epiphany and, remembering the miles they had flown under duress of nature, thought: Huh. So that’s why my wings are sore.

And, if so, if the fear and dawning realisation that glittered in their bead-eyes resembled anything like the sporadic spurts of implausible emotion in Dan’s own eyes.

“You’re saying…we only met, because you were horny?”

This was old hat. They had gone through this so many times before. “No, Dan, that’s not all I’m say— ”

“Well, it sure as hell sounds like it!”

Tired, cantankerous, and exasperated, Phil threw down his hands. Threw down the gauntlet. Ran the gauntlet. “I took a risk, Dan — when I answered your messages and let you in my house!”

Blow one. Make Dan seem any modicum of desperate. He hated that. Hated the aspersion that he could possibly need anyone else. That he could text Phil, nudge Phil, once more than he strictly needed to grasp his attention. Lone wolves let the void swallow their howls once, and after that became mute. Why announce his solitude? Why parade it for the moon to hear?

Dan ground his teeth. Phil could hear it. It sounded like minced bones, like a record screeching silently, distantly. “A risk, did you?” Another imaginary sound. It sounded like ceramic shattering. Hold a clay heart in your hands, hurl it to the ground. Watch it explode in shards and blood and see its ghost leave in a drift of smoke and dust, like huffed-away trust. “I took a risk, that you could break my heart.” A dam broke. Water glittered in Dan’s eyes. Phil was reminded of chemistry experiments in school laboratories, remembered hunching over a steady teardrop flame, willing yellow crystals to wink their firsts in the evaporating dish balanced delicately on the tripod.

Blow two. Make Dan cry. “I took a fucking risk too. I just didn’t know it,” he spat, dashing tears from his eyes even as they fell. Drip, drip. Too copious to well, too heavy to cling to his eyelashes.

“Dan, I didn’t — ”

“No.”

He whirled around, and stalked towards the door. His face was scrunching up, like a paper someone had balled up with crunching, crushing crinkles, ready to pitch towards the waste basket. Thoughtlessly. Already poised to forget. His footsteps echoed through the apartment. The slam of his door sliced through the night’s quiet even more sharply. Alone in the living room, bereft, like a ship left in the harbour and then abandoned for decades, Phil stood. Perhaps he was waiting, perhaps he was frozen. Perhaps he was dreaming, and any moment now…

Blow three. See Dan cry.

~~~~~~

|| 2009 || 2 ||

Phil was jittery, and he had no idea why. No reason at all, officer. I’m dressed in plaid and ready to get laid.

He had planned to leave at seven and stroll to the station in an hour.

It was six-fifty, and he had changed his shirt (twice), combed his hair, then mussed it back up deliberately. He had lain back on his bed three times — a modest estimation — and gotten back up another three. He had prowled the empty house on tip-toe, waiting, almost, for his parents to spring from cupboards and shadows and say, What have we said about stranger danger? And on the Internet too! Young man, you are in for it now!

But no mothers popped, no fathers jumped. It was as though all those nights messaging and Skyping Dan Howell had allayed all doubts of his authenticity. No murderous stalker would leave a digital trail of his obsession like a smear on the Internet. No, this was the dedication of a soft-spoken, enthralled fan, nothing more.

Three minutes to seven.

So why did Phil still scratch at his (deliberately) messy hair? Why could he not keep the shiver from his knees, the gooseflesh from his neck? He felt as though he were teetering on the precipice of a cliff, as though he had climbed so high to reach the summit, and only know realised what he had to lose.

“I could…” Phil began to mutter. He could what? “Lose my life?” The words lilted in a song, a questionable song, and the autumn chill in the house shook its breezy head at them. No, no, quite wrong, Phillip Michael. Not right at all. “Be robbed?” Quite wrong, quite wrong. “Get an STD?”

Nooooo, moaned the drafty air into the shell of his ears. Noooooooo.

He paced the house, his bag slung across him. This was a question with only one answer, and he had never been one to ask too many. His hand was on the door-knob, ready to leave, when the possibility occurred to him. Transpired in the slight mist of his breath and tremble of his fingers against cold metal. Dropped into his arms like a gift from heaven. “I could…fall in love.”

The autumn air fell quiet at last.

It’s just physical, Phillip wanted to protest. It will mean absolutely nothing.

The autumn air did not respond.

This was not his intention. Never had been. From the moment he had first replied to Dan Howell’s fervent messages and comments, there had been just one endgame in mind — and it had been a short-lived one. Of heavy breaths and stuttering hips. Of air warmed by two bodies and the motion of harmony in lust. This. This did not factor into his plans at all. It got too easily tangled in what was meant to be precisely without strings.

He could cancel. Pretend there was a cousin’s wedding (second-removed cousin) out of town, and his parents were dragging him along. Send regretful emoji after regretful emoji, and send Dan Howell far away from his little home by Piccadilly. Return him to the flat square box in the arena below his videos, and keep him there this time. He could walk away from this risk, and the world would be none the wiser.

I could fall in love. He whispered the words to himself again. I could. He could make me. He’s jumped the cliff way before I ever scaled the top. He could grab me and pull me off the rock. We could fall, and plummet, and hit the ground. A mess of broken bones, and no one to dust us off. We don’t have wings; we don’t have anything. I could fall in love, and that’s a dangerous thing to do.

Phil swivelled his eyes downward. His hand still clenched the knob, gripping for ground whipped from beneath his feet.

The knob wielded beneath his fingers. He pushed through the door, a minute behind time, but that was inconsequential. He walked, the wind in his sails. Summer was gone and frost waited at the fringes of their little town, waiting to descend and strike a chill into the hearts of quiet residents. But until then, the autumn air was fresh and exciting. It wound its tendrils through Phil’s hair and lent him, distinctly, the feeling of darting headlong into what could only be, an adventure.

~~~~~~

|| 2012 || 5 ||

“Dan? Dan, I screwed up. I’m sorry! I royally screwed up. Dan. Come on.”

The word ‘wife’ is debated to have originated from Proto-Indo-European means. It might have come from ghwibh, derived from a word meaning ‘shame’.

......

“Dan. I swear, it’s all different now. I was so stupid, and so immature back then. Please. Believe me.”

Maturation of the psychological kind doesn’t really begin, generally, until age 24.

......

“Dan, will you never speak to me again?”

There is an anechoic chamber in Minnesota. It might be the quietest place on earth. No one can endure more than 45 minutes in it.

It’s been four days since. Phil hasn’t heard his voice in so long.

…...

“Dan, please. Speak to me. Scream at me. Something.”

“If I start screaming now, I’ll never stop. Are you sure you want that?”

“Yes. Yes! Oh, pl— ”

“Like hell you do.” Phil drew away from the door.

One of the most toxic poisons in the world is called ricin. A Bulgarian named Georgi Markov died from it.

He was exiled and assassinated in London.

…...

“Dan? It’s been a week. Please, Dan. Let me explain.”

“I don’t want any explanations. I am so sick, and tired, of looking for answers.”

“Dan — ”

“I just want one more.”

A withheld breath. An exhaled breath. Cheek against wood. Fingers scrabbling for purchase, for the reception to hold. Dreading when the connection collapsed, and he was left on the other side, clutching silence. “Yes, what is it?”

A withheld breath. A shaky breath. “We—We need so much fixing right now.” A pause. A recollection. “Do you promise to fix us? With me?”

Relief as an emotion was tangible. Palpable. It was fearsome, in the way it seemed to escape from his every pore and orifice. His own body overfilled with it. Relief felt like sweat and tears, in the middle of a drought. “Yes. Of course, Dan. Of course.”

Finally, he opened the door.

~~~~~~

Secret Rave Tree note: Hello, Tati! I’m sorry the fic is a bit scrappy ^^“ I really wanted to make it perfect for you, but I got a little busy. Just as a quick clarification, in case the timeline’s a bit messy, you can follow the numbers behind the year that heads each different section. The numbers mark the chronological order of the chapters (i.e. || 2009 || [1] would mean that section was the earliest event in the timeline) I wasn’t going to add the last 2012 part originally, but I needed to give ‘em some closure. I hope the new year has been good to you, and that you’ll have a great time! Ho-ho-ho-out