Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Birds are singing, sun is shining, there’s no commotion from outside, and it’s not too hot, just the best temperature for lazying around in bed when there’s absolutely nothing urgent to take care of.
There’s also an amazing smell wafting through the slit at the bottom of the door to Dustin’s room. Someone's started making coffee already, which is nice, in theory, except... isn’t it too early still?
Dustin's lying on his stomach, one cheek smashed into the pillow, one leg tangled in the blanket, trying to decide whether consciousness is worth the trouble, when someone bangs violently on his door.
He jumps so hard he gets a cramp in his shin.
“Son of a...” Dustin groans into his pillow, kicking the mattress once and immediately regretting it. “Ow. Ow. I hate everyone in this apartment.”
The door opens.
“Rise and shine,” Mike’s voice announces, far too awake and far too pleased with himself. “You’ve got ten minutes to get out of bed before I drag you out of it.”
Dustin lifts his head just enough to squint in the general direction of the door. Without his glasses, Mike is mostly a tall, blurry disaster-shaped shadow.
“What?!” Dustin shouts.
And then, a second later, it hits him like a punch in the face.
The conversation from a few days ago. The end-of-semester party. The celebration that's technically also his birthday party, even though his birthday was in May and everyone was too buried under exams, deadlines, final papers, presentations, and the general academic collapse of their souls to celebrate it properly then.
So they celebrated late.
Which means Dustin turned 22 weeks ago, but apparently his friends decided the only legal and moral response was to buy him shots until his brain disconnected from his mouth.
Dustin doesn’t even get drunk often. Not properly drunk. Not the kind of drunk where memories turn into badly labelled files and his dignity leaves the group chat. He usually knows his limit, respects it, and treats alcohol with the same suspicion he gives unknown USB drives.
But this was his birthday. And the end of another year. And everyone was happy, exhausted, relieved, and aggressively generous with terrible ideas.
That's where the real trouble starts.
Him being drunk. Him celebrating another successful year in college with his friends. Him being an idiot who's drunk enough to agree with a dare.
The dare being: join a gym.
Not just any gym.
The gym.
The gym he’s been deliberately passing by for some time after he accidentally saw a guy once as he was leaving said gym after a workout, hair pushed back in a way that really shouldn’t survive sweat, T-shirt clinging enough to suggest that discipline and genetics had teamed up in a deeply unfair way, and a smile that had no right to happen directly in Dustin’s line of sight.
Not that Dustin’s been walking past the gym every day like some kind of Victorian ghost haunting a very modern fitness center. He has standards. Low ones, apparently, but standards. Sometimes he walks. Sometimes he bikes around campus and takes a route that's not technically necessary but also not technically illegal. Sometimes the gym just happens to exist between him and somewhere else, if one is generous with geography.
His friends aren’t generous with geography.
And fine, Dustin can admit what started it. He isn’t blind. He has eyes. He can recognize when someone’s attractive without turning it into a whole research project.
But that’s not the part that keeps bothering him.
If it were only that, Dustin could’ve filed the guy under objectively attractive stranger, unfortunate sidewalk incident and moved on with his life. He’s done that before. He’s seen attractive people, admired the aesthetics, maybe thought wow for three seconds, and then continued existing like a normal person with laundry and deadlines and caffeine dependency.
This is different.
The guy had looked at him with those eyes, something between green and brown, hazel but not quite, warm and bright and weirdly focused, and Dustin had almost collided with a lamppost at the side of the sidewalk.
It was a near thing.
Which, of course, hadn’t gone unnoticed.
The guy had smiled.
Not a big smile. Not even a flirty one, probably. Just amused, soft around the edges, like Dustin had accidentally given him something funny without meaning to.
Dustin had cursed at himself and hurried away from there, not looking back.
But the thing is, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him.
Which is stupid. Extremely stupid. Historically stupid. Dustin doesn’t do that. He doesn’t see strangers on the street and immediately start building weird little mental shrines to their hair and eyes and smile. He isn’t Mike, who fell in love with Jane in that intense, dramatic, world-ending way that made everyone around them feel like background characters in a romance novel. He isn’t Lucas, who can be charming when he wants to be, even if Max had needed approximately one hundred years, several arguments, and at least three accusations of stalking before she admitted she liked him back.
Dustin is different.
Not completely different, maybe. He’s attracted to people. He can notice a nice mouth, good arms, pretty eyes, someone’s voice, the way they laugh, the way they move through a room like they know exactly where they belong. He’s perfectly capable of appreciating physical attributes. He’s not some emotionless robot pretending to understand humanity through field notes.
But attraction is usually where it stops.
Aesthetic admiration? Sure. Curiosity? Sometimes. Desire? Rarely. Relationship? Complicated.
Trust is the locked door.
He’s talked about it with Will, because Will was actually a huge support when Dustin realized that things worked differently for him than they seemed to work for Lucas, or Mike, or most of the people around him. It’s not really easy for him to connect with another person romantically, let alone sexually. He’s not a virgin, mind you, but it still felt different and too forced and exhausting enough for him to stop trying just because everyone else seemed obsessed with it.
He reads about it. Researches it. That’s what he’s good at. Labels are useful until they aren’t, and he finds words that help. But sometimes it’s still confusing because he doesn’t really get the way other people talk about relationships like attraction automatically means action.
For Dustin, it doesn’t.
He can look at someone beautiful and think, objectively, wow.
That usually doesn’t mean he wants to know them.
That usually doesn’t mean he wants them to know him.
That usually doesn’t mean his brain keeps replaying one stupid smile from one stupid sidewalk like corrupted footage he can’t delete.
This time, it does.
Or at least it tries to.
And that’s the problem.
He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know the guy. He doesn’t know his name, his voice, his personality, if he’s funny, if he’s boring, if he collects antique spoons, if he believes pineapple belongs on pizza, if he’s secretly a terrible person with great hair. Dustin knows nothing except that the guy smiled at him once, and Dustin’s brain apparently tried to install Be_Normal_About_This.exe only to freeze halfway through and throw up an error message: Application not responding.
Fast forward to now, and Dustin remembers very quickly how stupid he is with his friends, encouraged by beer and the many birthday shots forced into his hand by people he used to trust.
Mostly Lucas.
Lucas, who doesn’t even live with them anymore because he and Max have their own apartment now like functional adults, even though Dustin strongly believes that anyone who owns three separate basketballs and calls cereal “not a real breakfast” shouldn’t be allowed to claim functional adulthood.
Lucas is studying physiotherapy, plays basketball, and has opinions about posture that Dustin considers personally invasive.
So, of course, Lucas is the one who starts it.
At the party, Dustin had been rambling.
Just a little.
Possibly more than a little. He remembers the shape of it, unfortunately. Not every word, because alcohol is useless like that: it deletes details, but never the embarrassment.
Will had listened with the patient, careful expression he gets when Dustin's circling something emotional but isn’t ready to land. Jane had smiled like she knew something Dustin didn’t. Max had looked amused in the dangerous way that usually means someone’s about to suffer. Mike had smirked into his cup, probably filing every word away for later blackmail. Lucas had leaned forward like he’d just discovered a new sport.
“So let me get this straight,” Lucas had said, one elbow on the table. “You’ve been walking past this gym for weeks because you saw one hot guy outside it once?”
“I didn't say hot.”
“You said Adonis.”
Dustin had pointed at him with the confidence of a drunk man losing an argument. “That's a classical reference.”
“It's a horny classical reference,” Max had said.
Jane had tried to hide her laugh behind her glass and failed.
Mike’s smirk had widened. “So talk to him.”
“Oh, yes, thank you, Michael, brilliant strategic insight. I’ll simply walk up to a man who looks like he was built in a secret government lab for athletic excellence and say, hello, sir, your face has become academically inconvenient.”
Will had put his hand over his mouth. Max had actually snorted.
Lucas, unfortunately, had looked like he’d just seen his opportunity.
“You know what? Dare,” he had said. “You join the gym.”
“No.”
“Just for the summer.”
“No.”
“You need exercise anyway. You sit like a shrimp when you code.”
“I sit like a professional.”
“You sit like your spine owes you money.”
Dustin had gasped, offended. “You study physiotherapy for one year and suddenly you think you know everything about spines,” he said, gesturing wildly.
“Three years,” Lucas had corrected.
“Worse,” Dustin huffed.
Mike had tilted his head, eyes sharp and teasing. “You don’t even have to talk to him. Just go. Sign up. Stop haunting the sidewalk.”
“I’m not haunting the sidewalk.”
Max had raised one eyebrow. “You described his eyes for five minutes.”
“I was being thorough.”
“You said they were ‘hazel but emotionally devastating.’”
Dustin has no clear memory of this, but judging by everyone’s faces, it must have happened.
Then someone (probably Lucas, definitely a criminal) had put another shot into his hand.
And Dustin had agreed.
He’s an idiot, and he should definitely stop drinking at all if one rare drunk night is enough to turn him into a man with a gym membership and a pending identity crisis.
“Dustin,” Mike calls from down the hall of their apartment. Dustin still doesn’t understand why Mike stays here and pays rent when he’s at Jane’s all the time. “Breakfast.”
That’s it. Just breakfast. Calm. Simple. Completely suspicious.
Dustin rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling.
The ceiling doesn't help.
“I wanna be very clear,” he shouts back, “if this is eggs, I’m suing you.”
“It's eggs.”
“I’m suing you twice.”
“You need protein,” Mike says, and Dustin can hear the smirk in his voice.
“I need peace.”
“You lost that when you agreed to the dare.”
Dustin grabs blindly for his glasses on the nightstand, knocks over an empty water bottle, finds a charging cable, finds what feels like a sock, and finally finds the frames. He shoves them onto his face. The world snaps back into focus, unfortunately.
Will appears in the doorway, already dressed, mug of coffee in one hand, hair still a little messy from sleep. He leans against the frame with that calm look on his face, always the voice of reason, except when he isn’t, because Will can be deceptively mean when he wants to be.
“I told you not to drink those shots,” Will says.
“Yeah, yeah, give me a break. You should’ve stopped me before I agreed to this stupid dare.”
“I did.”
“You should’ve stopped me better.”
“I took the shot glass out of your hand twice.”
“You should’ve anticipated my tragic weakness for peer pressure and dramatic speeches.”
Will sips his coffee. “You called the gym guy ‘a Greek tragedy with hair products.’”
Dustin freezes.
From the kitchen, Mike makes one quiet, strangled sound that means he’s trying not to laugh and failing with dignity.
Dustin closes his eyes. “I did not.”
“You did,” Will says, far too gently.
“No. I would never say that.”
“You also said his thighs made you believe in higher powers.”
Dustin sits up so fast the shin cramp returns with the force of divine punishment. “William.”
Will hides his smile behind the mug. “I’m just saying, maybe Greek tragedy wasn’t the most embarrassing part.”
“I’m moving out.”
“You can’t,” Mike says from the kitchen. “You signed the lease.”
“I’ll fake my death.”
“You’d still owe utilities.”
Dustin flops backward again and drags the pillow toward his face, only to remember far too late that he’s wearing glasses. The frames dig into his nose, and he yanks the pillow away with a wounded noise before settling for covering his forehead instead.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Then it buzzes again.
And again.
Dustin doesn’t need to look to know who it is.
He looks anyway, because he’s weak.
The group chat is already active.
LUCAS: Gym day.
MAX: Funeral day.
JANE: Good morning, Dustin. You can do this.
MIKE: He's awake.
LUCAS: Define awake.
WILL: Conscious. Angry. Mobile status unknown.
MAX: Sounds normal.
LUCAS: Stretch before you go.
DUSTIN: I hope your next basketball lands in wet cement.
LUCAS: That’s not very birthday boy of you.
DUSTIN: My birthday was in May.
MAX: You accepted birthday shots in June. Time's fake.
MIKE: That's legally binding.
DUSTIN: None of you are lawyers.
MAX: None of us need to be.
Dustin stares at the phone with the deep, spiritual exhaustion of a man betrayed by everyone he loves.
Honestly, maybe it’ll do him some good to get some exercise between studying and research during the summer break. This time he’s not planning to go home for long, just a week to help his mom with the garden and repairs around the house. He needs to finish his latest research now that he’s in his last year, and he’s been spending way too much time hunched over his laptop like a goblin who discovered caffeine and academic ambition.
He’s not in terrible shape. Not really. He walks everywhere, bikes around campus when he’s running late or pretending he’s going to start being a person with habits, and carries groceries up three floors because their building elevator's older than civilization and breaks every other week. He’s not helpless.
But compared to people who actually go to gyms on purpose?
That's completely different.
Dustin's never cared much about his appearance. His curls do whatever they want. His T-shirts are mostly comfortable, nerdy, and clean enough. His glasses are practical and necessary, not some carefully chosen fashion statement. Without them he can’t see much, which seems like a major disadvantage in a place full of heavy equipment designed to crush fools.
Basically, he’s a nerdy type. And not in the stylish way. More in the “lost computer science student accidentally wandered into a protein commercial” way.
So, yes, the idea of walking into that gym makes Dustin feel like his skeleton wants to leave his body and start a new life. The fact that one specific person might be inside isn't helping, but Dustin's choosing to classify that as secondary panic for now.
“Dustin,” Will says, softer now. “You know you don’t have to do this if it makes you uncomfortable.”
Dustin lowers the pillow just enough to see him.
There it is. That look on Will’s face. Gentle and serious, with no teasing now. Will understands better than most people what it feels like to be pushed toward something before you’re ready. He understands how much courage it can take to simply exist in your own feelings without everyone trying to turn them into a joke.
And that’s probably why Dustin trusts him.
“Nuh,” Dustin says after a moment, voice muffled by the pillow. “I’ll do it. Plus, it makes sense to do something for myself. Maybe the guy won’t even be there anymore. Who says he goes there at the same time every day?”
Will tilts his head.
Dustin glares. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve just said something mathematically unlikely.”
“You do like patterns.”
“I hate that you know me.”
Mike appears behind Will with a plate in one hand and a mug in the other. The eggs are only slightly burned around the edges, which is irritating because Mike doesn't deserve any domestic victories this early in the morning, and the coffee smells good enough that Dustin almost forgives him for existing.
“Breakfast,” Mike says, holding both out.
Dustin eyes the plate suspiciously. “That looks like breakfast served before a disaster.”
“It’s eggs.”
“It’s a threat.”
“It has protein.”
“Stop saying protein like you’re Lucas.”
Mike’s mouth twitches. “Lucas says you should stretch.”
“Lucas can stretch himself into traffic.”
Will hums. “That was aggressive.”
“I’m being persecuted before noon.”
Mike gives him the coffee first, which is manipulative, targeted, and unfortunately effective.
Dustin takes it. “I’m accepting this under protest.”
“Noted,” Mike says. “Also, I packed your bag.”
Dustin slowly turns his head. “You what?”
“I packed your bag.”
“Michael.”
“Gym shorts, shirt, towel, water bottle. Clean socks.”
“You went through my drawers?”
“Barely.”
“Barely isn't a comforting word when discussing drawer crimes.”
Will makes a thoughtful sound. “Drawer crimes sounds like something you’d write.”
Mike looks at him. “Don't bring my writing into this.”
“Your last chapter had a wizard staring at a door for three pages.”
“It was symbolic.”
“It was a door.”
“It represented grief.”
“It squeaked.”
Dustin takes a bite of eggs because apparently his body has decided betrayal's acceptable when accompanied by breakfast. “You two realize I’m the victim here, right?”
Mike leans against the doorframe and smirks. “You are the hero.”
“No.”
“You are about to begin a legendary quest.”
“No.”
“A quest of sweat, growth, and a possible gay crisis involving the thigh guy.”
Dustin points his fork at him. “I will put this in your eye.”
Mike doesn’t look even slightly threatened. “You’d have to get out of bed first.”
“I’m highly motivated.”
“Then I respect the danger.”
Will’s phone buzzes. He looks down and immediately smiles.
“What?” Dustin asks.
“Max says to remember that confidence is mostly lying with your shoulders back.”
“That's actually useful.”
“Lucas says don’t ego lift.”
Dustin frowns. “What is ego lifting?”
Mike’s smirk deepens. “Exactly.”
“I hate all of you.”
“No, you don’t,” Will says.
“I do in several programming languages.”
By the time Dustin gets dressed, he's gone through three shirts and hates all of them equally.
The first one is too tight, which is impressive because he's pretty sure it fit last month. The second has a faded graphic from some tech conference, and while Dustin respects the shirt on principle, he suspects it doesn't say “casual gym visitor” so much as “please ask me about Linux distributions.” The third is plain, dark, and probably a gift from Eddie, because Eddie believes every self-respecting nerd needs at least one black shirt for emergencies involving dignity. Dustin isn’t emotionally prepared to admit Eddie might have been right, but he puts it on anyway.
He stands in front of the mirror and adjusts his glasses.
His curls are untamable but not awful. His face looks like his face, which is unfortunate only because he's currently in the mood to blame someone, and the mirror's available. He has a little softness around the middle, not bad, not anything worth panic over, but suddenly very noticeable now that he's about to enter a building full of people who probably treat chicken breast as a religion.
He puts on his cap, takes it off, looks at his hair, then puts it back on.
There. Better. Or at least covered, which isn't the same thing as better, but Dustin is willing to lie to himself today.
He exhales through his nose.
“Okay,” he tells his reflection. “You are Dustin. You've survived finals, group projects, Mike’s cooking, and one time in middle school when you accidentally called the teacher Mom. You can survive a gym.”
From the hallway, Mike says, “Are you giving yourself a motivational speech?”
“No!”
“He is,” Will says.
“I heard that!”
“You were meant to.”
Dustin grabs the gym bag from the floor. Mike has indeed packed it. Somehow, he's even included clean socks, which is disturbing. There's also a sticky note attached to the water bottle.
Dustin peels it off.
In Mike’s terrible handwriting, it reads:
ASK ADONIS HIS NAME OR YOU OWE ME TWENTY.
Underneath, in Will’s neater handwriting:
Only if you actually want to. Also stretch first (which is suspiciously added in a different ink colour).
And underneath that, somehow, in Max’s handwriting, which means one of them planned this in advance:
DON’T DIE. IT WOULD BE INCONVENIENT.
On the very bottom, in Lucas’s handwriting:
Seriously. Stretch first.
Dustin stares at the note.
Then he folds it carefully and shoves it into the side pocket of the bag, not because it's sweet, obviously, but because littering is bad and he's a responsible citizen.
When he comes out, Mike's waiting by the door with the smug expression of someone who deserves to be abandoned in a forest. Will's sitting at the small kitchen table, sketchbook open beside his coffee, pencil moving slowly over the page.
Their apartment is a mess in the way student apartments always are. Books piled on the table, mugs everywhere, Will’s art supplies taking over one corner, Mike’s notebooks and loose pages claiming another, Dustin’s cables and spare parts colonizing every flat surface like a technological fungus. Jane’s hoodie hangs on the back of a chair because Mike's apparently decided their apartment is also her secondary wardrobe.
It's home, somehow.
Chaotic, too small, badly insulated, and currently full of people who love him enough to make his life unbearable.
Mike looks him up and down. “You look fine.”
Dustin narrows his eyes. “That was suspiciously sincere.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Will doesn’t look up from his sketchbook. “You do look fine.”
“Okay, now it’s weird.”
“You’re going to the gym, not a fashion show,” Will says. “No one’s going to care.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You can wear some old sweater, draw sad things in a café, and somehow make it look intentional.”
Will blinks. “Thank you?”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“It sounded like one.”
Mike grabs his keys from the counter. “I can walk with you.”
“No.”
“It’s on my way.”
“To Jane’s?”
“Everything's on my way to Jane’s.”
“That's both romantic and deeply pathetic.”
Mike lifts one shoulder, unbothered. “I contain multitudes.”
“Jane needs to know you said that.”
“She already knows.”
Dustin’s phone buzzes again.
LUCAS: Do ten minutes walking first. Warm up.
MAX: Or walk in, see pretty boy, combust, leave.
JANE: Please don't combust.
MIKE: He's still in the apartment.
LUCAS: Coward.
DUSTIN: You live with Max and still start fights in group chats?
MAX: He feels safe because I’m eating toast.
LUCAS: I don't feel safe.
WILL: Good.
Dustin pockets his phone.
Mike watches him for a second, and the smirk softens into something less annoying. “Seriously. You don’t have to make it a thing. Just go in, sign up, do one machine badly, leave.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“It’s realistic.”
Will looks up. “And you don’t have to talk to him. Seeing him from across the room and not walking into furniture would already be personal growth.”
Dustin points at him. “That's the kind of support I can accept.”
Mike tilts his head. “Counterpoint: talking to him would be iconic.”
“Counter-counterpoint: I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
“I do in several languages.”
“You already used that one.”
“I contain multitudes.”
Mike’s eyes narrow. “Don’t steal my thing.”
“Don’t have stealable things.”
Dustin slings the bag over his shoulder and steps out into the hall. The air smells faintly of someone’s laundry detergent and the questionable curry their downstairs neighbour cooks at all hours of the day.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m going.”
“Proud of you,” Will says.
Dustin softens despite himself. “Thanks.”
Mike leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. “Name or twenty.”
Dustin flips him off as the apartment door closes.