phanlight:

I wanted to write a lil something now just for the time being whilst I try to finish my other 20k fic which is proving to be a Monster to complete lol so look forward to that soon at some point!!

Happy (belated) birthday Dan. Hope you didn’t get too hungover today.

summary: the tour is ending, and after flitting from coast-to-coast, city-to-city and living in a bus for a month, dan and phil visit vegas again. copious amounts of alcohol later, dan realises he’s happy. and kind-of still in love. (loosely based on vegas by all time low [x])

warnings: emo 2012/2016 comparisons, smut (surprise surprise) swearing, getting drunk, I guess pretty much everything else you’d expect in a vegas fic lol

words: 5.6k

-

“But this time around, four years later, it’s like someone has turned the saturation of the city up. Turned up the contrast, the definition, the volume, the sharpness, brightness and every single other enhancement, and when Dan looks out into the view glittering in front of them, it feels like he’s wearing glasses for the first time. Everything just looks so much more beautiful through happier eyes.

Phil turns to Dan, and his eyes flit down to his lips for a split second. On a pocket-sized screen, four zeros line up.

“Happy birthday,” he whispers, holding up his shot glass.”

-

i.

Stepping into Las Vegas is like stepping straight into a movie.

It’s like stepping out of the monochrome clockwork routine of daily life and into a whirlwind of colours and buzzing machines; a world where rules and inhibitions are dropped like coins into a slot, and money is spilt like alcohol. For a place that’s famous for its drunken wedding vows and tattoos in unspeakable places, it’s really quite incredible that somewhere so outrageous actually exists in the world. It just sounds so fictional.

They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but since they arrived Dan hasn’t seen a single club, casino or shop that isn’t twenty-four hour. Flashes of colour and lights blink through every minute of every day, illuminating the land in neon excitement and spontaneity, and to be honest, even after travelling through state-after-state, flitting from town-to-town, Dan hasn’t seen a city quite this colourful.

It hasn’t changed a bit since they last came. The minute Dan’s foot had touched Vegas ground, he’d felt twenty-one again. It’s almost as if time stops here, like the past four years haven’t happened at all and the reason they’re even here isn’t because they’re reaching the end of their international tour, but instead simply because two guys with longer fringes with a following of way less than a million between them wanted a holiday.

Keep reading