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“I hate you.”
“You like me,” Phil says, from where he’s curled on the couch, aimlessly messing with his phone.
“Fuck you.” He pokes at a button on the thing. It’s just like Phil to buy this and then not read the instructions, and not set it up either.
“I could do it,” Phil says, like he’s read Dan’s mind. He probably has.
“You’d just set it free,” Dan says glumly. “We have to – like, teach it. Like a human child.”
Phil snorts. “It’ll be alright, babe.”
“Making me be a teen dad, you dick,” Dan mutters, reading through the paragraph again to make sure he’s got it right.
--
“It’s not a dog,” Phil says. Dan’s – admittedly, hovering over her a little bit. He just wants to make sure she understands where she’s going and doesn’t fall down the stairs or anything.
“It?”
“What?”
“It’s a she and her name is Alice.”
Phil gapes up at him, rocking back on his heels to get the angle of his expression just right. He nearly crashes into the fridge, but – whatever. Maybe he deserves it.
“I thought we weren’t assigning the gender binary to things anymore.”
Dan might have said that, but that was in the before times.
“This is – she’s – girl power. Shut up.”
“Okay,” Phil says, slowly. “She’s still not a dog.”
“Make your toast and mind your business.”
--
“Why’s Alice got eyeballs now?”
Phil hums, wiggling closer. Alice wanders by, googly eyes wobbling wildly.
They’re allegedly watching a movie, except that Dan keeps having to get up to redirect her, and Phil has been inexplicably scrolling through his emails from 2016, looking for something for Martyn that honestly is beyond Dan’s understanding.
“She’s got a soul,” Phil says.
“What?”
“Eyes are the window to a Roomba’s soul,” Phil says, patient like Dan’s an idiot.
“Okay.”
“Everyone says that.”
Dan rolls his eyes, even though Phil is entirely not paying attention. “Really appreciate the clarification, mate.”
--
“Alice,” he’s saying. “Come here. No, come here. Alright.”
He lunges for her, swooping her into the air for a moment. She whirs impatiently back. She can’t quite wiggle, but the weird vibration of her little motor communicates the message well enough. He plops her down and she zooms off, buzzing happily.
“Daniel,” Phil says from somewhere upstairs.
“I’m busy!” he calls back.
Phil appears at the top of the stairs after a moment, like he was just around the corner the whole time.
“Are you going to the studio?”
“Yeah. I’m teaching Alice to do the stairs, and now she’s down here so I’m going to make sure she understands everything.”
“I think the point of a robot –” Phil starts.
“She’s a baby.”
“A baby robot. With programming? Like, to do her job?”
They both jump at the sound of Alice crashing into something in – whichever room she’s run off to.
“Tell me your pet robot didn’t knock over a light,” Phil says.
“I put them away for her first but – I mean, I’ll check,” he says, darting off to see what she’s up to.
--
“She’s trying to eat my sock,” Phil says, waving a spatula in Alice’s direction. He’s wearing his favorite apron over just pants, which is – a look.
“What?”
“She’s trying to eat my sock,” he repeats. He gives Dan a smug look like he knows that Dan isn’t just sitting on the counter for emotional egg support. He mostly is, considering how much Phil has been cooking and also whinging about cooking, but – well. He’s a man of many motivations.
He hops off the counter with a sigh, shuffling over to where she is indeed trying to munch on Phil’s sock. There’s some crumbs on the floor just next to her that apparently aren’t as appealing of a snack.
“No, we don’t do that,” he informs her, scooping her up and plopping her down next to the crumbs she’s missed. She whirs towards them for a minute, before veering off course to lunge for the sock that Dan hasn’t quite rescued.
He snatches her back into the air. She whirs in annoyance.
“How dare you,” he tells her, sternly. “I’m your father, Alice.”
“Listen to your dad, Alice!” Phil calls from the kitchen, giggling like losing a sock would be the greatest thing that could happen to him.
--
“Who do you love more, me or the robot?”
Dan looks over his shoulder at Phil, whacking away at his Switch, trying to catch a tarantula with a weird trap situation that they had been devising. Alice beeps crankily again.
“Um. Alice?”
“I’m gonna call the authorities.”
“Alice doesn’t have spiders. And you, like, maybe have spiders. So.”
“I’m gonna call the authorities,” Phil sings, voice cracking in the middle.
Dan scoops Alice up, ferrying her over to where her charger is waiting. He hurries back as soon as she’s settled, plopping back down in his spot next to Phil.
“What authorities? The Roomba company?”
“The boyfriend police.”
“The boyfriend police?” Dan repeats, leaning in to press a kiss to Phil’s jaw. He meanders over his face, kissing his cheek and then his nose, and then his other cheek, and then back to his nose.
“For boyfriends,” Phil says, “by boyfriends –”
“ – jesus – “
“– about boyfriends. Whole society,” he mumbles against Dan’s mouth, stubborn. Dan tries to stick his tongue past Phil’s teeth, just a little bit.
“Get off,” Phil squawks, shoving at him. “I’m busy fucking up these spiders, you clown.”
Dan huffs, flopping over so his head is in Phil’s lap and his feet are dangling over the armrest.
“Gonna make a robot make out with me. Gonna be – sexual Elon Musk because my Phil neglects me,” he says.
“Robot fucker,” Phil informs him, like Dan didn’t literally just say that was his plan.
--
“Your daughter’s eating my socks again.”
Dan shrugs, staring Phil in the eyes and taking a long sip of coffee instead of responding.
“Maybe if you didn’t leave them on the floor where she eats her breakfast,” he finally says.
“She’s going to get a stomach ache.”
“She’ll go around.”
Phil comes over, then, peering over the counter at her. She rumbles around it for a moment, before running directly over it. She makes a terrible crunching noise. Her little motor mumbles to a halt.
Phil blinks up at him, grinning.
“So. Can a roomba barf?”
--
“Where’s Alice?”
“Downstairs,” Dan says. He’s – well. Surrounded by bits of earring parts, and then buckets of resin and silicone, and some fake plants for Norman, and – generally not in control of the situation anymore. Phil did not know what he was getting into when he’d designated this as Dan’s project table.
“Alone?” Phil says, slowly.
“Yeah.”
“Eating socks?”
“I picked them up,” Dan says, fiddling with something caught between his pliers.
“But – alone?”
Dan looks up, finally, slowly surfacing like he’s been underwater for months.
“Yeah. Do you want me to go down there?”
“I mean. No, if there’s no socks. Just thought you were – you know. Treating the vacuum cleaner like a puppy.”
Dan frowns at him, stubborn.
“She’s an adolescent, now,” he says. “She needs her freedoms. And she’s not just a vacuum cleaner.”