Chapter Text
Spring hesitates to arrive, in 1996.
On the college campus, it shows itself in tiny fragments: in the snow reluctantly retreating from the edges of the paths, in the grass trembling into view in pale, uncertain tufts, in the air smelling faintly of wet earth, and then everywhere, inexplicable, hidden in the students’ laughters.
The corridors are filled with giggles, as everyone’s favorite professor passes through, slightly nodding towards the ongoing chorus of: good morning, professor Byers.
( It’s a bit funny, being on the other side of life, on the other side of the classroom: Will clearly remembers being a student and seeing the teachers as something immense, statuesque, impossibly far away. He recalls the impression of feeling light years away from them, who would have never taken off their shoes to wear his, who would have never traded their fountain pens for his dirty hands.
When he got the job, he kept on asking himself: how can I make myself small again? How can I become a man on earth? How can I teach my passion to so many bowed, bored heads, drowsy souls that were never shaken by inexplicable questions? What does it really mean, to be an art teacher? )
It’s now been just a year, a single orbit around the sun, but it feels as if this life has always been pointing towards this: a one room apartment full of art, students with sparkly eyes, Hawkins now buried in old nightmares and bad memories. Sometimes, when he’s in the mood, there’s even a date, a cocktail offered in a well-hidden gay bar; the new millennium, the scary 2000, is fastly approaching, but there has been no apparent improvement in Will’s freedom of being.
First of all, he had to lie in order to get the job: he had the blatant courage to say that he’s still single because he’s too in love with art. The principal almost seemed touched by this confession, and he shook his hand with enthusiasm: Will thought deeply about that handshake, that only happened because he lied. The world outside was still grieving Freddie Mercury.
Whatever. Will, who now responds to the name professor Byers, really loves this job. So, it’s worth the lies. It’s not that he’s not used to lying.
He crosses the quad at the same hour as every morning, satchel worn soft at the corners; he nods, smiles, listens and answers. The perfect image of a teacher.
Sure, no one knows and will never know about his past, and he might not be free to live his queerness, but he’s free to forget (even if forgetting is definitely impossible) the odd episodes of his childhood.
That’s already huge improvement. He can’t complain, really.
Inside the art building, the radiators click and sigh, and the tall windows reflect a sky that refuses to commit to either gray or blue. Will unlocks his classroom, turns on the fluorescent lights, and stands for a moment without moving: the room smells of graphite and turpentine. It sucks, but it’s also warm and familiar. On the walls hang reproductions he had chosen carefully, of bodies rendered with a suffering beautiful enough to be studied. Nothing too explicit; or rather, nothing that invited questions he didn’t want to answer.
He sets his notes on the desk and, for the briefest moment, lets his hands linger on an old leather sketchpad. A faint memory tries to scratch his mind, but he swiftly blinks it away: there’s no time for ghosts. There’s a lesson to prepare and, above all, there’s a course to supervise.
The program waits still in his bag, he had picked it up from the faculty lounge, sandwiched between a forgotten newspaper and a dirty flyer: it’s about a seminar with a famous author.
The principal asked him to supervise it, murmuring something like: oh, professor Byers, since you’re the last hire, you should really participate in these experiences! Yeah, sure. Will is actually certain no other professor cared enough to participate. Still, he shrugged and accepted without further questions, it might even be interesting, and it’s a great addition to his resume. What could go wrong?
Except, well, everything.
Will almost forgot about it and, to be quite honest, he’s fully regretting his decision: writers are dangerous. They speak too much, they try to explain the unexplainable, they live in memories, and then – and then there’s that. That thing he-won’t-think-about. The leather sketchpad seems to thrill again in forgotten memories.
Will tries to shake those away, eyes now quickly scanning the program: Visiting Writers’ Course, it reads, in neat serif font. It seems kinda boring, in full sincerity. Five lessons about composition, how to structure a novel, yadda yadda yadda: there’s nothing that Will despises more, as a teacher, as these obsolete canons that are still imposed.
Art should be free, as love, but that’s a discussion for another time.
To really think about it, actually, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea accepting this job: he might add his insights into these old-fashioned ideas, teach something different, fight with some verbose elderly writer who doesn’t even know who Allen Ginsberg is. The usual. Could even be fun.
Will’s gaze wanders all over the program, searching for the name of the famous invited writer, when he finally sees it. There’s a name printed plainly.
Michael Wheeler.
Oh this must be a sick fucking joke.
The paper trembles in his hands, and for a moment, Will can’t decide whether to fold it, burn it, or hide it away in a ditch. No one notices. A colleague pours coffee. The world continues, oblivious to the impending weight a single name can have.
A gulp stucks in his throat: it has been years since Will had allowed himself to think of Mike as someone real rather than a puzzle of memories, a presence bound to a feeling he didn’t dare name. And yet, even now, the feeling brings a quiet ache that stretches through his chest like a cord pulled taut. He had assumed, without ever consciously deciding it, that whatever version of Mike existed now, lived very far away from him, in every sense that mattered.
Well, he was wrong: fame, it seemed, had not carried him far enough.
Will folds the program carefully, trying to convince himself that maybe there’s another writer called Michael Wheeler, in the world, or that maybe he’s still in time to withdraw from supervision. Both are equally, woefully, unlikely. Damn it.
Still, the breakdown has to wait: the class begins to fill with giggly students. Will, now in the embodiment of professor Byers, speaks about composition and negative space, about what is left out being as important as what remains. A blank space can speak as much as colors can.
His students nod, absorbed, unaware of the chaos rumbling into each bone of their teacher, and it’s so weird living a life where his name is not automatically bound with Mike's. No one knows. No one has seen the flyer about the course, and has thought: oh, Michael Wheeler, he’s professor Byers’ best friend, no? No. In Will’s life, now, Mike is nowhere to be found, to be read: no colleagues know him, no neighbors, no pencil, no window. His scent isn’t lingering on any bed, his favorite order isn’t remembered by any tired barista. His whole being is abiding in the thin strings of the universe, an instrument long forgotten, only Will’s fingers recalling the tune.
But there was a time.
A tiny smile betrays the calculated composure of professor Byers.
That night, alone in his minuscule apartment, quiet except for the ticking of the kitchen clock, Will sits at his table and listens to the answering machine rewinding and rewinding itself. No new messages. There rarely are, except for when his mom keeps on asking if he’s eating well, or when Jonathan rambles about his life as a New York photographer. Life keeps on happening, as simply as that: the past, Hawkins, seems irremediably far away.
He remembers his last day in that claustrophobic city. He spent hours with his hands lingering on walls, as to impress his fingerprints on each organ of that huge asleep body, Hawkins softly stirring under his touch. A tiger that must not be woken up, never again. Nevertheless, Will tried to absorb each of those memories, to fully let them go after. A vengeance.
He remembers Joyce crying in the kitchen when the boxes were already sealed, the relief and the guilt braided together in his chest: Hawkins had taken so much from him, years folded and bent, never quite lying flat again. It had given him monsters and silences and a childhood that never really happened, a language he would spend the rest of his life trying to decipher, and it was finally time to take it all back. All that time, all that pain. To begin anew.
But, threaded through it all, impossible to untangle, there was Mike.
Mike leaning against his bike with the sun in his hair, Mike talking too fast when he was nervous, Mike’s hand warm and solid when everything else felt like it might dissolve, Mike’s eyes, always searching Will’s face, always finding it.
Mike is the only memory that refuses to soften at the edges; if anything, time has sharpened him, crueler in its precision. He still feels the way he looked at him in those last weeks, already grieving what was still standing in front of them. Mike followed Will everywhere, lingering in doorways, on sidewalks, by the fence in Will’s backyard, staring and staring and staring: he was trying to imprint Will’s face into his pupils. Pupils black as if someone poked them with a needle. Two black holes, trying to suck him in.
Especially the afternoon when he said it out loud, his hands shaking still now in remembrance of that moment, I got accepted in Vermont, Mike, he told him, eyes fixed on a crack in the pavement because he couldn’t bear to see his face. Vermont sounded unreal even to himself, a place of forests and snow and distance, a place that was not Hawkins, not here, not them.
He clearly recalls the silence that followed, the way Mike swallowed hard and nodded like he understood, like he was being reasonable and mature and not fucking young and terrified; he smiled, a tiny brave thing that broke Will’s heart, and then he said something stupid, a joke about vengeance against the cold. Promised to write, promised to visit. A funny deja-vu. Promises and promises stacked delicately between them, already cracking under their own weight.
Will remembers almost wanting to take it back, wanting to say I’ll stay, or Come with me, or anything that would have stopped the look in Mike’s eyes, with that open, unguarded hurt. But he didn’t. He went, and went, and went.
That is the version of Mike that comes back to him now, almost seven years later: not the famous writer with his sharp interviews, but that boy standing on a Hawkins sidewalk, trying to be big, hiding behind his too long curls. Will can still feel the itch in his skin, the want and the need to swirl those ringlets around his calloused fingers.
Will presses his palms flat against the table, breath hitching. This isn’t good.
He makes tea, let it steep too long, as always, and stares out the window at the street below. A couple walks past, their hands brushing, and a bittersweet smile appears on his lips. The nineties had promised clarity: adulthood, he’d been told, would come with answers. Instead, it arrived with a new vocabulary for avoidance: for being yourself, sure, for loving art, loving beauty, loving people, as long as none of it pointed too clearly in one direction. He learned early that the only queerness slightly allowed is the hypothetical kind, the sad queerness that lives in books and music: bearable, as long as it’s shaped into something abstract. Everyone laughed watching Robin Williams act gay in The Birdcage.
So, Will had to act as well: it wasn’t hard to do. It wasn’t hard to hide. Will had been practicing since he was a boy, since the first time he understood that wanting could and will be dangerous. He learned to live inside this play, and it fit him like a well-made dress, except for the narrow elbows; a little restrictive, but manageable, if you kept your arms close to your body. If you didn’t try to reach too far.
What he never learned was how to act when the past decides to return, with even a scheduled arrival time. Isn’t the past supposed to stay, well, in the past? Life is all about moving forward, forgetting. It is not supposed to be about seeing that name again, printed neatly on official paper. On skin. On bones.
Another groan leaves his lips.
The famous writer Michael Wheeler will arrive next week.
The week seems to stretch itself through months.
It’s a continuous loop: boring rhythmic alarm, ringing in sync with Will’s heart, that still beats, nonetheless. No new messages, no one reaching out, no good mornings, no good nights. Class. Gossip. Teachers elbowing each other in mischievous coalitions. Falling asleep on the couch, trying to watch a movie, gaping dozily at the same clichés, at scenes he’ll never live, fantasizing about feelings he’ll never feel. The usual.
Except for a tiny detail, a minuscule fragment of dust ravaging a methodical system.
Today’s the day: let’s bite this bullet once and for all. There is no more postponing it, no more vague future tense to hide behind. Mike will arrive, he will teach his seminar, shake hands with colleagues, occupy too much space in Will’s carefully curated present, and then he will leave. A beginning and an end. As easy as that!
Will repeats it to himself like a mantra, fully engaged in an internal debate while idly staring at the water dispenser, watching the slow, hypnotic spiral of bubbles rise and vanish. He nods along to his own reasoning, frowns, and then even lifts a hand in protest when his psyche attempts a particularly daring question about what Mike might look like now. That, Will decides firmly, is beside the point! Entirely irrelevant. He really does not need to imagine Mike’s face.
Still, there’s a buzzing curiosity lingering under all the noise, coated with a sort of sadness: he used to know every inch of Mike by heart. He knew him by instinct, by muscle memory. He could have painted the precise curve of his shoulders, the exact shade his curls turned in the sun. He knew the geography of Mike’s hands, each long finger mapped and memorized, every bone familiar as his own. At that time, it seemed impossible to imagine a future in which Will had to wonder what Mike might look like: the idea of a future in which Mike became a question instead of a constant would have been unthinkable. Absurd. Like picturing a world without air, or color. Mike had been a given, as essential and unquestioned as gravity.
And now Will swallows, still staring at that damned water dispenser, and prepares to meet a version of Mike he no longer knows.
(There’s even the lingering question: will I recognize him? Will he recognize me?)
The water dispenser stares back, but its steady hum offers no answer. Maybe the coffee machine would be more talkative? Will sighs once again, and finally gives up on negotiating with inanimate objects, deciding to walk towards the faculty lounge. Early afternoon light spills across the quad in a broad, golden swath; the campus feels suspended, its breath held in anticipation. Will slows without realizing it, his attention snagged by movement at the edge of his vision.
A solitary figure crosses the square.
Something in Will locks into place: all the dumb, futile doubts he has been nursing for days dissolve at once. How could he ever have believed he wouldn’t recognize him? How could he have imagined anything else?
He can’t even see his face clearly, from this distance, the sun flares just enough to blur the details, but still, he knows. He knows in his bones.
Michael Wheeler.
He is really there, moving through the world exactly the way Will remembers, as though time had politely stepped aside, as though years and interviews and book jackets and acclaim have been nothing more than a strange detour. He’s taller now, undeniably, his shoulders broader, his posture marked by a new, deliberate care. But the tilt of his head when he scans the buildings, the habitual lift of an eyebrow, the loose, unconscious flick of his wrist as he adjusts the strap of his bag, all of it hits Will with surgical precision.
Will’s chest tightens, breath catching halfway in. Fuck.
He had rehearsed this moment in a hundred different ways: he had told himself, and the water dispenser, countless times, that he could have met this person casually, with grace. He had told himself he could be composed, that he could be the calm art professor just welcoming a visiting writer. However, already, there is a small, visceral betrayal in the knowledge that Mike still exists in this world, here, at this exact moment, and there is nothing Will can do to bridge the distance between them, nothing that allows him to reach out and touch the proof of it.
Mike pauses at the base of the main hall steps, adjusting once again the strap of the bag that looks far too heavy, eyes flicking over the campus, on the art building, on the tall windows, on the banners fluttering lazily in the breeze. A shiver runs cleanly down Will’s spine: Mike hasn't fully arrived, and he is already everywhere. Occupying space. His space. And now what? Should he hide in an empty classroom, pretend to be absorbed in lesson plans? Should he stay exactly where he is, make himself visible, let inevitability do the work? Should he breathe at all? His lungs feel optional, suddenly. The questions crash into one another and collapse, leaving behind a single, razor-thin thread of awareness, stretched taut inside his chest. Mike is here. Mike is real. Mike is present. There is no language large enough to hold it, no distance left to negotiate.
( The bell then rings, sudden, announcing recess, and the quad erupts back into motion. Students pour out of buildings, laughter breaking open the stillness, voices overlapping, papers shuffling, backpacks thudding against spines. The world resumes, obedient to its own schedule, but all of it reaches Will only as a low, indistinct hum, background noise to the private emergency unfolding in his body. )
Every movement feels amplified by memory, refracted through years of absence; the air itself seems to vibrate with recognition. Will relives, in a single instant, everything.
No, not the woods, or the lab, or the shadows, or the cold. Nor the fear. Just, Mike. Mike. The way he had once looked at him, unguarded, for a fraction of a second too long. The way his voice had sounded when it wasn’t filtered, when it hadn’t been sanded down to survive youth, adulthood. And the night before departure... That thing happened. Two breaths colliding. The brief, uncertain press of a mouth against his, tentative and reverent all at once, a sin confessed. The way Mike had frozen for a heartbeat and then leaned in, barely, scared to shatter the whole world. It had been quick, almost nothing. Easy to dismiss as a mistake. Impossible to forget. The memory flickers and retreats, leaving warmth and ache in its wake.
They never spoke again.
Will can feel the hum of his own breath, fast and uneven, ricocheting against his ribs: his chest aches with the memory of hands he is no longer allowed to touch, of the hallways of Hawkins, dimmer, linoleum floors worn thin; walking side by side with Mike, their shoulders slightly brushing, a careful choreography of proximity, moments so brief they barely existed and yet lingered for years. Oh God, this is bad. Mike finally reaches the alley of the art building. He slows, hesitates, glances around, and Will wonders whether their past versions, those two kids, might also appear here, lingering in the corners. His pulse stutters. Every instinct screams at him to step forward and to collapse the impossible distance that years have carved, but he can’t move.
For a heartbeat, the room is silent except for the faint hum of the radiators. Will knows, with a certainty that shakes him, that since Mike is here, and though no words have passed between them yet, though no hand has touched another, though nothing has happened at all, everything has already changed.
There is no distance left to negotiate.
“Hi,” Mike offers, low and awkward.
It is absurd, hearing that word. Small. Harmless. Will feels it in his teeth.
“Hi,” he answers, a fraction of a second too late, voice steadier than expected. They stare at each other, now, both clearly unsure what comes next, the distance between them having long erased the script they knew by heart.
Up close, Mike is different, and still the same.
His hair is longer than Will expected, darker too, pulled back into a low ponytail at the nape of his neck. The sight of it is almost a physical blow. His gaze catches on it despite himself, on the loose curls escaping the tie, on the way the line of Mike’s neck is suddenly, achingly exposed. Will looks away too late.
Mike clears his throat. “It’s been… a while.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Will says, and immediately regrets the attempt at humor. Mike’s mouth curves anyway, just slightly, a familiar almost-smile that twists deep inside Will.
“Yes,” Mike says softly. “Yeah. Definitely.”
There is a pause, then another. Silence stretches thin and fragile between them, until Will’s eyes drop, searching for an excuse, and that’s when he sees it.
A ring. Gold. Settled easily on Mike’s left hand.
“Oh,” he barely exhales, before he can stop himself, the sound barely more than a breath.
Mike follows his gaze and nods, fingers curling reflexively, as if only now remembering it’s there. “Oh. Yeah,” he murmurs. “It’s... just an engagement ring, tho. Still haven’t officially tied the knot.”
Will swallows, forces himself to smile, to lift his eyes back to Mike’s face. “Well, congratulations,” he manages. Yes, it sounds convincing enough. Years of practice pay off in moments like this.
“... Thank you.” Mike hesitates, searching Will’s expression, not quite recognizing what he sees: it’s been a long time since they could just liaise telepathically. “And what about you? Are you–”
“I am very occupied with my job,” Will interrupts him, moves quickly away from the discourse, acceptable, vague, leaving no space for furthermore questions – or that’s what he thought.
“I see. So… you teach here,” Mike continues, unnecessarily. “I didn’t believe it was you at first.”
A lie, probably. Will lets it pass. “Yes,” he says. “It’s my first year here. I teach art.”
“You teach art. That makes sense. I should’ve guessed.”
“And… you’re a writer.”
Mike huffs a quiet laugh. “Yeah. Apparently.”
“Apparently,” Will echoes. A hidden question mark in his voice.
“I mean,” Mike continues, rubbing the back of his neck, a gesture Will remembers from long, long, long nights ago “I keep thinking I’ll wake up one day and it’ll turn out someone made a mistake. That they meant to publish a different Michael Wheeler.”
Will almost smiles, almost. He quickly grounds himself. “In the program I read that you write mainly about memories,” he says instead. “ – about how the past shapes people.”
Mike exhales. “Yeah, that’s what the critics say.”
“And what do you say?”
Mike hesitates. His thumb brushes the ring, an unconscious movement that Will cannot not see. “I don’t know. It’s not done on purpose. Some memories…” he murmurs. “ I just keep circling them, hoping they’ll finally make sense if I write them down.”
Will’s fingers tighten around the folders. He understands, with a clarity that’s too close to relief: he has spent years thinking about explaining Hawkins to people who could never believe him, softening the truth until it was palatable, translating into metaphors. Here, now, they don’t have to hide anything. In some way it’s oddly comforting, being able to relieve the pain.
“And do they?”
Mike’s smile falters. “Not really.”
Will only nod in silent acknowledgment, then swiftly stares at his watch. “Now I should – I have class. The principal's office is right there, he’ll explain everything to you.”
“Right, yeah.” Mike nods. “Thanks.”
A pause.
“Will, listen – I’m glad you’re fine,” Mike’s words are as heavy as stone, his stare even heavier, “I mean, here, at the college. I didn’t know where you’d ended up. You didn’t leave a number to call, nor an address. For a while, I thought…” He stops himself. Shakes his head. “Never mind.”
Will swallows. “I’m fine. I was here.”
Mike smiles at that, unreadable. “Yeah. Now I see that.”
Will turns before he can say or question something reckless. As he passes, he catches the faint scent of Mike’s cologne, familiar beneath the years, and is hit by the quiet, terrible certainty that someone else knows this version of him. Someone else hears him speak in the dark. Someone else reaches for the hand with the ring.
He does not look back.
Inside the classroom, Will closes the door and leans against it, heart racing, breath uneven.
A writer, he thinks. Almost married. A fucking ponytail.
He straightens his jacket, smooths his sleeves, and steps again into the life he has built with care and caution. Professor. Observer. Quiet. Yes. Alright. Let’s go.