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Based on the tweet by user @theamazingphil: “in an alternate timeline uni student dan is crying in the cheese aisle of asda because he doesn’t know how to cook and phil is high off a brownie three feet away trying to read labels because he’s avoiding jake gyllenhaal”
Phil Lester might be a little high.
Oh, fuck that, he’s high as a kite and he’s slowly coming down, and for some reason he’s in Asda with a bottle of dry shampoo in each hand, and he can’t read the damn label! And that isn’t even the worst part, you know? Because he doesn’t know where he picked those bottles up from, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t find them in the dairy aisle. The dairy aisle, which is practically empty if not for the vague blob (that might just be an employee) who’s sitting on the floor.
Hmm. Maybe the blob would know where the shampoo aisle is.
Phil walks closer to the blob, wondering where his glasses are because the world can’t possibly be this blurry normally, right? The fluorescent lights of the empty aisle flicker three different colours as Phil stumbles slowly towards the vague blob on the floor. Ooh, the blob has a fringe. Ooh, the blob is a person. Phil giggles and hopes the blob doesn’t hear as he pokes the vaguely human shape on the floor with a dry shampoo bottle.
“Hi. I’m shampoo and I need to find the Phil aisle, I can’t see Jake Gyllenhaal like this.” He hopes he sounds normal and not-high as he talks to the employee who he still can’t see properly. Ooh, the employee is crying!
Oh, wait. The employee is crying. Whoops.
“Uh, I’m not. Um. An employee, sorry.” The blob sniffles at Phil, and tilts its vaguely blobby head at him. “Did you say Phil?”
You know, if Phil wasn’t high, he probably would have left it at that. If Phil wasn’t on five weed laced brownies, Phil probably wouldn’t even have gone up to a formless sobbing blob on the cheese aisle, either. As a matter of fact, Phil’s wondering why he’s in the cheese aisle in the first place. He hates cheese.
But Phil is high, and Phil wouldn’t leave anyone sobbing on the supermarket floor even if he wasn’t completely frazzled by marijuana, so he does what any (in)sane person would do, and sits down next to the blob.
“Oh. It’s okay, vague blob. We’ll figure it out.” He sets a bottle down and pats the blob’s shoulder awkwardly, and the blob sputters at him.
Ooh, the blob looks like a person. It has brown eyes and it’s making a lot of confusing sounds at him.
“Wh- vague blob?” The blob– um, person? Scoots away from Phil. “Um. Thank you, I guess. Do I know you from somewhere?” The person doesn’t stand up, though, so Phil thinks he should reassure them some more.
“See, I dunno what you’re crying about, but I’ll take a guess and say it’s probably the cheese.” He nods thoughtfully. “I’d cry along with you, you know, but I can’t let the cheese win.”
“Wait, I do know you. You’re– You’re Phil! You’ve got to be amazingphil!” The sobbing person-blob isn’t sobbing anymore, and they’re looking at Phil like they can’t believe what they’re seeing. Well, at least Phil got to cheer them up.
“Oh, forget about who I am. Why are you?” He gets really woozy all of a sudden. “Um. Sorry. What was I saying?” He stares at the person next to him for a second. “Yeah. Why are you crying?”
“Are you… Are you high?”
“...Maybe.”
The blob is’t crying anymore, you know. The blob is giggling, and the blob is now doubled down laughing on the floor of an Asda, and the blob is positively wheezing at the idea that Phil Lester is high and he’s sitting next to me on a floor of a bloody ASDA.
Phil gets the vague sense that he should be offended at how much the blob is laughing at him. He doesn’t even know the blob’s name!
“Hey— it’s not even funny!”He glares at the blob, who’s doing this… odd wheezing-laughing thing, and pointing at him, and a bucket of cream cheese behind him.
Suddenly, the blob stops laughing. His eyes widen, and he stares at his hands.
“I’m going insane, right.” The blob (who’s probably a person, a male person, going by his clothes and hair,) drops his head to his hands and swears. The trapper hat he’s wearing plops right off his head and falls onto the floor.
Phil Lester is high. Highly confused.
“I haven’t been in this city for a whole week and I’m seeing things, I can’t even cook, I can’t go home and I don’t know what I’m doing in my classes—” The blob is crying again.
“Woah, woah, woah—” Phil grabs onto the blob’s shoulders and shakes him. “First of all, what. Also. No.”
“Huh–?”
“You’re not seeing things, vague blob. I’m real and you’re not crazy, and. Um. Welcome to Manchester?” Phil has this thing where he forgets what he’s going to say when he’s halfway through the sentence. “And it’s not that hard to cook stuff, you know, Mr. Blob? And I still don’t know your name and you should probably tell me what your name is because I can’t keep calling you vague blob.”
“Dan. I’m Dan.” Dan was wiping his tears with his sleeve, looking more confused than anything else.
“Okay, Dan. Welcome to Manchester. I’m Phil and I can cook, and I hate cheese so can we please get out of this aisle and find an employee who can keep the shampoo where it belongs?”
“You’re also high as a kite, you know.” Dan chews on his very chapped lips as he settles down on the floor.
“And you’ve never seen a tub of Vaseline in your life.” Phil says, casually.
Dan sputters. “Wh- what.”
“Thought we were pointing out the obvious, sorry, mate.”
“Then I think I ought to mention your glasses are on your head.” Dan pulls them down, and Phil can see again!!
“Woah, thanks, mate!” Phil can finally see the blob’s face, and he’d like to say it was a really pretty face. “Say, have I seen you before?”
Dan rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “I followed you on twitter in like, 2008.”
“Woah, are you the lad who posed with the resistance CD?”
Dan plunges his face back into his hands. “Forget I said anything.”
“Wait! So you’re also the guy that never responded to my friend request on Facebook.” Phil shoves Dan slightly. “That was mean.”
Dan mumbled something into his hands that sounded a bit like “Mmmpgh”.
“Can’t hear you.”
“I said,” Dan looked up again, “‘Stop.’ Can we talk about why you’re high with two bottles of dry shampoo in the middle of Asda, instead?”
“...I’m hiding from Jake.” Phil pats his fringe down awkwardly. Thinking back, why was he in Asda in the first place?
“...Jake who?” Dan looks over at Phil. “Also why Asda of all places?”
It’s Phil’s turn to hide his face in his hands. “Gyllenhaal, And I don’t know, okay. I’m high. I don’t know why i’m here at all.”
Dan laughs again, which makes Phil look up from his hands. He’s mouthing “Gyllenhaal” incredulously, and to be fair, it is a pretty funny situation, so he lets it slide.
“Okay, Dan. I propose a stalemate.” Phil hopes he looks serious when he says this, though he’s in bloody galaxy print clothes and he probably smells like stale dominoes. “You never tell anyone I was high off my ass in an Asda, and I never tell anyone I found you sobbing on the floor in front of the cheese aisle.”
Dan considers it for a second before shaking his head. “I mean, I’m not losing anything if you tell everyone in this whole bloody city that. I don’t even have any friends at uni so that doesn’t really mean much for my social standing anyway.”
“Oh. Fine, then, I’ll uhh….” Phil looked around until he spotted the shopping cart pushed to Dan’s side. “I’ll teach you how to cook.”
Dan basically squeals at that. “Would you really? Oh I’d be so grateful, Phil, I swear I won’t tell anyone—” He stops again. “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“Are you always this bloody skeptical?”
Dan nods.
“Alright, fine. I’ll give you the location to my apartment, and you can come over whenever and I’ll teach you whatever I know.” Phil stands up shakily, and dusts off his clothes. Holding out a hand, he says to Dan, “But only if you help me find an employee who gets these shampoo bottles away from me.”
Dan picks up the trapper hat that fell from his head earlier on and grabs Phil’s hand. “Deal.”
Five minutes later, Dan handed a very frazzled looking employee two bottles of dry shampoo, and checked out enough instant ramen noodles to feed him for a day or two, and off they went, Dan and Phil, for the first time ever. Dan had a phone number and address scribbled onto his hand in barely legible ink, and logged on to facebook as quick as he could to accept a friend request sent years ago.
Phil went home and washed the stale Dominoes scent off him, and felt something bubble up in his chest when he noticed the notification facebook sent him five minutes later. He knew something big was coming as he texted Dan for the first time, but safe to say, he didn’t yet know what it was.
And that was that, then. Less than two days later, Dan was outside Phil’s door, his wonky trapper hat still on his head and a bag of laundry over his shoulder as he stood on the WELCOME mat, saying “I hope you have a washing machine and a bit of spare time for me, Phil.”
—
Sixteen years and a few world tours later, they’re in a very purple basement on inflatable chairs when Dan says “Phil, when I first met you, I thought you were wearing a wig.”
“What?!”
"And don't even get me started on the Jake Gyllenhaal situation."