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ginouza · 5 years ago

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ginouza · 8 years ago

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Will gets several job offers from a career fair at Samwell. They’re all in Boston.

He tries not to complain about this problem; being able to select your job is a privilege. He worked for it, sure, but a lot of other people worked really hard and weren’t in his position.

It’s also true that he could keep trying to apply for jobs in other places if he wants to go back to Maine, or go to California or New York--for example. In reality, with his grades, his major, and his work experience, he has a pretty good shot.

But the certainty of the offers is too good to pass up. Besides, Shitty and Lardo are still in Boston, and Jack and Bitty are in Providence. The SMH team will still be at Samwell. It’s not like he has nobody around. So he picks the one for his top choice company, even though the pay is a little lower. It’s still much more than he’s ever had.

And suddenly he’s celebrating his two-year work anniversary, and he can barely trace his current life back to its origins.

His coworkers have lunch brought in and it’s nice, cute, and the food attracts other people from departments they don’t interact with much--well, IT tries not to interact too much with anyone, in general. People tend to be using them to bump their technical support tickets higher in the system queue.

And after work that day, his boss takes his team out for drinks, and he has too many.

“Hey,” says Steve, “if this is your two year anniversary here, that means it’s a little over two years since you graduated from college!”

“Yep,” Will says. “Good math.”

It’s not significant to deflect. “What about your college friends, man? Aren’t they in the area?”

“Yeah, some of them. I still see them.”

It’s true, even. Shitty and Lardo make time for him more often than he would have expected, and it’s a pleasant surprise. They weren’t particularly intimate friends, so Will kind of imagined it sort of fading out, and he’s pretty glad to be wrong. Especially considering how busy they both are, since Shitty hasn’t risen through the rankings yet (though of course, neither has Will) and Lardo spends a lot of time working on promoting her own work, something that seems incredibly exhausting to Will, though he’s seen how much it can be worth it when her work is shown somewhere.

Bitty is great at keeping in touch. Will had kind of imagined a future where Bitty was too distracted by Jack, and baking, and his vlog, and just life in general to even think about any of the younger members of the team except Chris. But Bitty may be the person from the team he sees most often, because Bitty has a tendency to invite people over, and Will has a tendency to say yes. Sometimes Jack is there and it’s been long enough since he’s seen him that Will is a little starstruck. He tries to play it off, though. It’s always in the back of his mind that he sees Jack Zimmermann a lot more frequently and a lot more personally than most people.

He thinks about that now, too, as they ask him about his college friends, but bringing up Jack is firmly in his “things not to do” column in his brain.

Will has also talked to Chris, at least via text, literally every day since they graduated. He’s so grateful sometimes it overwhelms him, even though they’ve only seen each other once, when Chris came to visit everyone, but especially Bitty, Will, and Derek.

“Good, good,” Steve is saying. “I don’t talk to any of my college buddies… I wonder what they’re up to?”

Will hums. He doesn’t particularly care about Steve’s college friends, no offense, but the bar they’re at is playing decent music and he’s pleasantly buzzed, so he doesn’t mind.

“But you,” Steve says. Oh, no, Will thinks. “You must have had some good romance in college. Any girls still around?”

That’s awkward, Will thinks. Clearly they’re not at Samwell anymore, where heteronormativity was abnormal. Not unheard of, but certainly uncommon.

He curses the time, a little over two years ago, just before graduation, when he and Chris were much, much drunker than Will is right now. When he’d sort of unloaded a lot of his fears for the future, how he wanted to help his family even though he knew they wouldn’t want to accept it, how his job wasn’t his passion, just the first steady thing to come along when he needed it. That being away from Chris (and, begrudgingly, Derek) meant being away from some of the most honest friendships he’d ever had, and he wasn’t sure that he could handle losing that now that he knew what it was like.

He’d said all that and Chris had hugged him fiercely, told him that he had his own fears about the future, too, some of them incredibly similar. That he worried about losing touch with Will and Derek, or that being back in California with Caitlin full time would mean losing what brought them together in Massachusetts, and that maybe they were just a college romance. But that if all of them wanted to remain friends, they would be able to do it, because all it takes is effort on each person’s part.

Will regrets this now, because that’s when he promised to be honest whenever he could, when he realized that he had no more time for posturing or lying except where absolutely necessary.

“There was a guy… or, there was almost a guy. But nothing really happened, and then I moved here, and he went back home to New York.” Will looks at Steve to gauge his reaction, grateful that the rest of their group is still playing pool behind them.

“What?” Steve sputters. “That’s not even that far! And you didn’t try to see each other again?”

“It was too weird. I mean, we were friends, sort of. How do you say, hey, let’s travel for over four hours just to meet up and see how it goes?”

“First of all,” Steve says, with a swirling hand gesture that makes Will realize he’s pretty drunk already, “you meet halfway. Second, you say hey, we’re friends, let’s hang out! And then you see how it goes. You don’t even have to say that part, just do it.”

“Yeah,” Will says, “in hindsight. Anyway, we saw each other last year and nothing happened.”

“Alone?”

“Well, no.”

Steve just looks at him, but to be fair, Will already knows what that look means; he’s been thinking it for a year. Of course they should have talked to each other.

“Yeah, yeah,” he complains. “I know already.”

---

It wasn’t even that awkward when Chris came to visit. At first he was going to stay at the Haus, since they still knew a lot of the team members who were living there, but when Jack directly invited him to his Providence apartment, in the group text (the smaller group text, the one that used to be just “the frogs” and Bitty, until he asked if he could add Jack), it was hard to say no. Will and Derek were invited, too, even to stay the night if they wanted. There was only one guest room, but there were two couches. Will had declined, worried he’d be overstepping, and Derek had said the same after, even though his return journey was much longer.

They stayed really late, and to this day Will is suspicious that Derek got himself a hotel room rather than travel home or stay with Jack.

They stayed really late, and Will and Derek sat next to each other before dinner, during dinner, and then back at Jack’s--beautiful--place, and they participated in the conversation. They looked each other in the eye and talked about their current lives, joked about the past.

Nobody mentioned the last night before graduation, where Will and Derek had stayed up all night, talking low and close, closer than Will usually was to anybody for more than a moment. When Derek had brought up the fact that they were no longer fighting with each other, and Will had been thinking the same thing, and how they had developed a rather painful knowledge that they were both just struggling to keep their feelings safe. OK, so they didn’t phrase it exactly like that, but Will knows what they meant.

Nobody mentioned one soft kiss.

To be fair, nobody else knew about that.

---

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ginouza · 8 years ago

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Graduation brought a lot of weird feelings up in every member of the SMH team. Most of them were sadness and nostalgia, of course, but everyone dealt with them differently. Plus, Dex tended to add worry, and Bitty was proud of everyone, as he kept saying. Shitty and Jack too, and they were probably the least sad--those bastards, Bitty had said, through his tears.

Chowder was sad, too, but he was legitimately happy for people in a way that some of the team members seemed to be having more trouble expressing.

Dex had stopped despairing about Lardo’s exit after he’d gotten to know Ford, but he was still sticking close to her. Nursey was mostly just glad that he was over being mad at her about dibs, but he was kind of clinging to Lardo, Ransom, and Holster in equal measures as well, trying to get as much time with them as possible without monopolizing them.

But before they knew it, it was already time for everyone to leave. Dex’s ride wouldn’t be there until later, and Nursey was waiting to book transportation back until last minute. So when Nursey thought he could take a break, get some air, by going back into Lardo’s old room, he got interrupted.

It was his room now, but it was also Dex’s, he reminded himself, as the man in question walked through the door and froze.

Nursey had been sitting on Lardo’s bed. After a while of sitting on her floor while she was at her desk, he had eventually been given bed-sitting privileges, granted they were strictly platonic. He was always willing to help Lardo with papers, when they would come up, and Lardo was always willing to talk, or to read anything Nursey had written--just for tone, he always clarified, and she would smile. She was great at reading between the lines, anyway.

Possibly Dex’s sudden stop was more due to the fact that in this specific instance, Nursey may have been crying. Like, really barely.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he said, immediately.

Dex closed the door. “Nursey, I still can’t talk about Lardo leaving without panicking--oh, yep, there it is, thanks for that. The point is, I’m not going to laugh at you.”

Being called “Nursey” by Dex was a new development. It shocked him into sitting up, at least.

“You wanna sit?” he asked Dex, who did so without answering verbally. “I used to spend a lot of time here, once I’d graduated from the floor. Lardo’s just… so fucking smart, and real, and I’m going to be worse off without her here. And if she has to write any papers in the future she’ll be… well, actually, she can just email me.”

“I’m pretty sure she can help you from afar, too. Nursey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I acted like you didn’t deserve dibs,” Dex said. “I didn’t know what you’d done for her, but I still shouldn’t have assumed.”

“Thanks,” Nursey said.

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ginouza · 9 years ago

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Still excited, but I probably should figure out what to do

I’M SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS URL THAT I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO

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ginouza · 10 years ago

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