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Dan was rocking lightly in an uncomfortable rickety wooden chair, editing a gaming video on his laptop, and Phil was lounging on the bed scrolling through Reddit on his phone. It was nearing 2 AM. While they made the decision to book separate rooms while on tour, they still made sure to spend a little bit of time together before going off to bed on their own.
“Dan, have you seen this thread?”
Dan rolls his eyes. It’s probably something about a dog saving a pedestrian again. “What thread, Phil?”
Phil crawls upward on the bed, lying on his stomach, and holds up his phone to show a Reddit thread with a blurred out image, the title reading, “I am a man who ate a portion of his own amputated leg, AMA.” Dan grimaces at the thought of it before even clicking to view the photo.
“Why the hell do you look at this stuff? Does it not make you lose your lunch?”
“It was just at the top of the homepage! It’s really interesting.”
“Do I even want to see the picture of the leg?”
“Uh.. probably not.”
Dan of course clicks on the view spoiler button anyway, he figures he’d been traumatized by worse on the internet. Dan immediately winces and groans in horror and sympathetic pain at the image of this online stranger’s gored leg, nearly falling off his chair.
“I said you wouldn’t want to see it!” Phil giggles uncontrollably, bringing both hands and his phone to cover his mouth.
“And people said my nightly Wikipedia dives were strange. You’re clearly twisted, Lester.” Dan sighs and turns back to his laptop.
“Hey, I need to look at several dog videos to scrub that out of my memory.” Phil says this, but keeps reading the thread anyway. They remain silent for a moment. “Would you ever eat my limb, Dan?” He's a bit quieter when he asks.
“Fucking excuse me?”
“I just mean like- if I were ever in a car accident and had to be amputated, would you want to have a nibble on my leg?”
“A NIBBLE on your LEG?” As always, Dan was left stunned at the words that seemed to just spill out of Phil’s brain and mouth. He stares as Phil tries to stumble his way out of sounding too weird but doesn’t think he can get out of this one.
“Like- okay like, if something like that happened to me, I think I would want to honor that part of my body, otherwise it would just go in the bin wouldn’t it. And I think of all the people that could eat a part of my body, I guess I wouldn’t be particularly comfortable if it were my mum or my brother.” Phil goes silent again. Yup, absolutely no way to make that not sound weird. But it makes Dan think for a moment. Would he eat a part of his friend to honor a lost piece of him?
“How would we cook it?”
“Dan!”
“I’m serious! I’d like it to taste good, Hanniphil Lecter.” Dan can’t help but chuckle, which of course makes Phil laugh, as dark as the thought is. “Would you eat my leg, then?” Phil takes a moment to catch his breath and to think.
“I would.”
“I’d have to be a five star meal. I’m not letting just anyone eat a piece of this.”
“So it’s a deal?”
“Is what a deal, the Dan-and-Phil Consensual Cannibalism Pact?”
Phil sits up on the bed and extends his hand toward Dan, looking a bit stern, but a smile still pulling slightly at the corner of his mouth. “God willing it never happens, but in the event one of us were to get in a horrific accident and need a limb amputated, we would both eat a part of said limb.”
“God willing, Phil, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I got in an accident where you weren’t right there next to me.” They both stare for a moment, and Dan finally grabs Phil’s hand and shakes on it. “It’s a deal, you weirdo.”
Phil smiles wide, and they both can’t help but burst into a fit of giggles again, still holding each other’s hand. Phil finally lets go and stands from Dan’s bed. “I should go to bed, we still have a show tomorrow. You still editing?”
Dan closes his laptop. “I can just upload it tomorrow. Try not to have any Hannibal-esque nightmares, will you?”
“I’ve already got plenty of dog videos queued up,” Phil waves his phone gently as he steps out the door. “Night, Dan,” he calls, closing the door behind him.
“Night,” Dan calls back, still chuckling to himself at the bizarre conversation they just had. He places his laptop onto the bedside table and crawls into bed, still a bit warm from Phil having sat there. He manages to drift off with no cannibal dreams that night.