Everyone has a favourite colour – at least, one they always pick when it's 3AM and they've wound up taking silly Buzzfeed quizzes to kill time until sleep comes… again. You probably know, at the very least, what colour clothes you like to wear or what shade of the sky is your favourite. What most people don't know, is that they also have a colour, one that defines their energy or spirit.

Phil can see these colours.

Most often, they appear to surround someone, a soft, glowing, halo of light. For some, the colours run through their veins or shine through the thin skin of closed eyelids. In rare cases, they race across palms, reaching from the fingertips like flames. It's something Phil never quite gets used to, and almost everyone he meets stays with him long after they leave his life, their colour lingering in the corner of his vision, just out of reach.

Not that he ever mentions this. Phil realised he was different when he was five years old, and a girl joined his class weeks after everyone had already started school. She had a wild mop of dark curls that bounced on her shoulders and wave after wave of gold rushed across her freckled skin.

She was so bright.

'You're glowing,' he'd tried to explain when he got the chance to talk to her, 'like a sunset.'

But of course, she didn't understand. None of the other kids did, because they couldn't see, and Phil went from the likeable, quirky, class clown to an outcast in the space of an afternoon.

Suffice to say, he doesn't like to talk about the colours anymore.

Now, he keeps to himself for the most part, and his greatest supporters are the handful of people who watch his YouTube videos on a regular basis. He prefers it that way, knowing he can't get himself into any awkward situations – that is, until he doesn't prefer it.

Until he gets into the most awkward situation of all.

Until he meets Dan Howell.

Dan's favourite colour is black. He jokes that it matches his soul, and that his clothes are all part of an ironic, edgy, aesthetic, but that's not strictly the case. He just likes feeling hidden, like he's a part of the shadows everyone walks past without a second glance.

In the least ironic way possible, Dan Howell wants to disappear. Has done all his life.

At some point, wanting to disappear… evolved. Into depression. Into disordered eating, self-harm, and suicide attempts.

Congratulations! Your ANGST has evolved into CRIPPLING MENTAL ILLNESS!

Not quite how he'd imagined his teenage years, but then he supposed that was just his luck.

Whoop-dee-freaking-do and yippee-kai-ay

Scowling to himself, Dan shook his head and dug his nails into his palms to snap himself back to reality. That 'crippling mental illness' was why he was here after all. Following his drunken suicide attempt three months ago, Dan's parents had decided their 16-year-old son needed a change of scenery in the form of a new school.

New town, new school, new life; couldn't be simpler!

Ha-bloody-ha.

But for all his cynicism, Dan was willing to try. He was desperate to escape the fog surrounding him, and if a new school could help with that… Well, how much worse could it get?

Bracing himself against the cautious hope starting to build in his chest, Dan took a deep breath and pushed open the door to his first class. He'd taken maybe two steps towards the desk at the front, hoping to introduce himself quickly and quietly to the teacher before hiding at the back, when a loud crash followed by a sharp intake of breath brought his head spinning round. On the back row, behind a sea of expectant students gawking at the new arrival, was a dark-haired boy fumbling to pick his things up off the floor. Though his slightly-tragic emo fringe covered half his face, Dan could see that the boys cheeks were flaming.

'What the hell did I do to you?' Dan muttered to himself, his hopeful mood quickly crushed.

'Ahem. Good morning, you must be Daniel,' came a quiet voice, and Dan turned his attention back to the small woman at the front of the room, 'I'm Miss Porter and this is your form, with whom you'll have most of your classes. Seeing as Mr Lester seems so excited by your arrival,' she added with a pointed glare at the boy who'd dared to disturb her classroom, 'you may take a seat next to him.'

Dan locked eyes with the boy at the back of the room and felt his own cheeks flush as the class broke out into muffled snickering.

So it was like this already was it?

Just great.