Chapter Text
Spring hesitates to arrive, in 1996.
On the college campus, it shows itself in tiny fragments: in the snow waking up, 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. That’s right – the new millennium, the scary number 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. Would he have touched it anyway, if he had known? 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. It's not like he ever breathed freely, with full lungs.
He just keeps going.
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 slowly wake up the ambience, and the tall windows reflect a sky promising rain that, in reality, will not arrive. Will unlocks his classroom, turns on the fluorescent lights, and stands for a moment without moving: the room seems alive, and it smells of turpentine and teenage sweat. To be quite honest, it does suck, but it’s also warm and familiar. He walks around the classroom and approaches the walls, on which are hanging reproductions he had personally chosen, of bodies rendered with a suffering beautiful enough to be studied. Nothing too explicit, of course – or rather, nothing that invited questions he didn’t want to answer. Thankfully, as he explained during his first lesson, there are no bodies, in art, there are no footprints and, above all, there are no questions to be made.
You are the question, he said, and art is the answer.
So, no one ever uttered a word about the face, body, curly hair and freckles, that Professor Byers used far too much in his examples. Those are questions only for Will and himself.
He proceeds to set his notes on the desk and, for the briefest moment, lets his hands linger on his old leather sketchpad: it still smells of the basement where he used to potrait, late at night, the unsuspecting face sleeping on the sofa. No, stop. 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 that course to supervise.
God, that course. The program waits still in his bag, he finally remembered to pick it up from the faculty lounge, where it stayed sandwiched between a forgotten newspaper and a dirty flyer: it’s about a seminar with a famous author.
Some weeks ago, he was suddenly summoned mid class, and 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, and the hierarchical pyramid just has him at the lowest point, so he is simply forced to do what no one else wants to do. Whatever. He shrugged and accepted without further questions, thinking that it might even be interesting, and it’s a great addition to his resume. It’s just a course, what could go wrong?
Except, well, everything.
Will almost forgot about it and, to be quite honest, he’s now 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. Yawn. 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, a time that is still far away, when drawings on walls can be painted with the colors of the rainbow, but not yet. Not yet. You just have to be patient and give your all to art.
Yes, that’s exactly it – maybe it wasn’t a bad idea accepting this job: he might add his insights into these old-fashioned ideas, teach something different, make the not yet a little closer, and 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 his shock. His entire existence is fragmented before everyone's eyes, but no one notices. A colleague slowly pours coffee. How can the world continue, oblivious to the impending weight a single name can have?
A gulp sticks in his throat: it has been years since Will had allowed himself to think of Mike as someone real, way too much real, rather than a puzzle of memories, a presence bound to a feeling he didn’t dare name. He doesn’t dare name. Even now, the feeling brings a quiet ache that stretches through his chest, a cord pulled taut directly into his lungs. 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.
He sighs, swallowing the weight of the breakdown: it has to wait, the class is already beginning to fill with giggly students, and if there's one thing art students know how to do, it's observe. So he forces himself to forget, to cancel, to make nothing of the feeling that was once his everything, and greets the incoming students: the curtain has risen and it is time to perform.
Will, now comfortably inhabiting the practiced cadence of Professor Byers, turns the lesson toward composition, though before long it becomes clear he is speaking about perception itself. He invokes the work of M. C. Escher, whose impossible staircases and tessellated worlds depend as much on absence as presence, on the eye's willingness to complete what is never fully given. Negative space, he argues, is not an emptiness to be filled but an active participant in meaning: it shapes the visible by defining its boundaries, directing attention through omission rather than declaration.
A void becomes a figure; a border becomes another image entirely. What an artist withholds can generate more tension, mystery, or clarity than what is explicitly rendered.
"A blank space can speak as loudly as color," Will says, letting the thought linger. "Silence has a structure. Absence has weight."
Absence has weight. It sure does: it’s all on his shoulders, now.
His students nod, absorbed, suddenly aware of the invisible architecture around every image, but unaware of the chaos rumbling into every bone of their teacher. It’s so weird, living a life where his name is not automatically bound with Mike's. No one knows. They can see and understand Escher's stairs, but they don't know. No one has seen the flyer about the course, and has thought: oh, Michael Wheeler, he’s professor Byers’ best friend, no? No. No one knows.
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.
Oh, 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 its 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, all those 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 can still feel 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; then he smiled, a tiny brave thing that broke Will’s heart, and 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 witty 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.
Fuck. He presses his palms flat against the table, breath hitching. This isn’t good. He needs to distract himself.
He makes tea, lets it steep too long, as always, and drifts to the window overlooking the street. Below, a young couple walks by, their hands brushing almost accidentally before finally intertwining: they're tentative, laughing at something only they understand, still clumsy with the thrill of a first date and bold enough to imagine a second. A bittersweet smile tugs at his lips. They have no idea how ordinary this moment is, how effortlessly the world makes room for them. Yeah. There it is: the why. Why he left.
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.
But he really can’t deny that 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 traced the slope of his shoulders with his eyes closed, painted the exact amber his curls caught in the summer sun. He knew the landscape of Mike's hands, with the long fingers and sharp knuckles, with the faint constellation of veins beneath the skin that he knew as if they belonged to his own body.
Back then, the thought of not knowing Mike was unimaginable: the future had never contained blank spaces where Mike was concerned, there was no version of tomorrow in which he would have to wonder how age had settled into his face, whether he'd grown a beard, whether laughter had carved new lines around his eyes. The idea of a future in which Mike became a question instead of a constant would have been, in short, unthinkable. Absurd.
And now Will swallows, his gaze fixed on the humming water dispenser, and braces himself to meet a man who still carries Mike's name, but whose face has become a question.
(There’s even the lingering doubt: 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. The early afternoon light spills across the quad and paints everything in a golden swath: the entire 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 immediately 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 flared just enough to blur the details into gold, but it doesn’t matter. He knows. He knows him how migratory birds know north. He just… knows.
Michael Wheeler.
He is really there, moving through the world in the exact same way Will remembers, time politely stepping aside, to allow teen-Mike to walk unhindered through the man he became. The interviews, the book jackets, the acclaim, the decades in between—they all recede into a strange detour, oddly incidental, a long and complicated footnote.
He’s taller now, undeniably, his shoulders broader, his posture marked by a new deliberateness, but. But. But then he tilts his head while searching the buildings, one eyebrow lifting in concentration, and he readjusts the strap of his bag with a flick of the wrist, and here he is: Mike. The gestures arrive like an echo.
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, adjusts once again the strap of the bag that looks far too heavy, his 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 breaks open the stillness, voices overlap, papers shuffle, backpacks thud against spines. The world resumes, obedient to its own schedule, but all of it reaches Will only as a low hum, only background noise to the private emergency unfolding in his body. )
Every minuscule movement feels now amplified by memory, refracted through years of absence; the air itself around Mike seems to vibrate with recognition, and Will relives, in a single instant, everything – but no, not the woods, or the lab, or the shadows, or the cold. Nor the fear. Her warm face. Tears and mess and blood. No: Mike. Mike. Mikemikemike. How he once looked at him, unguarded, for a fraction of a second too long. How his voice had sounded when it wasn’t filtered, when it hadn’t been sanded down to survive youth, adulthood. And when, the night before departure... that thing happened.
Two breaths colliding; the hesitant press of a mouth finding his own.
It had barely qualified as a kiss, containing more question than answer, a trembling act of faith disguised as an accident. Mike's lips had touched his with such care that Will had almost believed they weren't touching at all, and then, for the smallest fraction of a second, Mike had gone perfectly still: Will remembers that stillness more vividly than the kiss itself. He remembers the panic in Mike's eyes, as if the world had cracked open beneath them. He remembers thinking: it’s alright; it’s a mistake. Tomorrow I’ll be universes away, and he just confused the missing with affection.
They never spoke again.
This tiny ridiculous memory suddenly comes, bright enough to burn – but is immediately retreated once more into the secret karst curves of his brain, in the place where all the things he has loved and lost have been stored.
Will can now feel the hum of his own breath, fast and uneven, ricocheting against his ribs: his chest heavy with the memory of hands he is no longer allowed to touch, of the hallways of Hawkins, dimmer, linoleum floors worn thin; of 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. 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, giggling about these two dorks that seem to play hide-n-seek. Will bets that, if they could see their adult versions, they would tease them to tears: Will, that's just Mike – Mike, that's just Will. Making a den free for all should be the easiest thing in the world, but how long has it really been since it was easy? 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.
Will knows, is certain, 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, evidently awkward: it is absurd, hearing that word. Small. Will feels it in his teeth.
“Hello,” he answers, a fraction of a second too late, his voice steadier than expected.
They then just stare at each other, both clearly unsure what comes next, the years between them having long erased the script they knew by heart.
Up close, Mike is different, and still the same.
First of all, his hair is long – way longer than Will expected, pulled back into a messy ponytail at the nape of his neck. The sight of it is almost a physical blow. Will’s gaze catches on it despite himself, on the loose curls escaping the tie, or maybe in the way the line of Mike’s neck is suddenly, achingly exposed. Will looks away too late.
“Yeah, hello,” Mike repeats, then 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. “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.
Mike follows his gaze and nods, fingers curling reflexively, as if only now remembering it’s there.
“Oh. 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, way too much, with clarity that edges on 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 – but here, now, between them, they don’t have to hide anything. In some way it’s oddly comforting, being able to relieve the pain.
“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 terrible realization 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.