Will's pretty sure Dustin's mad at him, after that unexpectedly serious conversation the other week.
He'd thought they were fine at first, because they'd ended the discussion on pleasant enough terms, and when he'd tried to get out of bed the next morning, Dustin had pulled him back and mumbled something like "no, stay here, don't leave" without really waking up. Once he had been fully conscious, though, he'd been distinctly distant, not wanting to stay for breakfast and leaving without much of a goodbye, giving some vague excuse about an early faculty meeting and hurrying out the door. Will hasn't heard from him since.
He'd been resentful for the first few days, because he's not being unreasonable here. He'd been completely honest, and how can Dustin fault him for wanting a family someday? It's hardly as if he could raise kids with Dustin, when by the man's own admission, the very idea of being a father makes him break out in hives.
Even after that theoretical discussion, about a month ago, about kids and marriage and whether Dustin's ever wanted any of that, it had honestly never occurred to him to consider their relationship in that light. Three months ago, they'd still been using the term 'fuckbuddies' to describe it. (Dustin had, anyway. Will prefers 'colleagues with benefits.') This is just...experimentation. It's the kind of experimentation Will never had the chance to do in college, and he'd just been curious because that angry drunk kiss had felt so damn good, and it had gone way, way too far. And then it had just...kept going, until it didn't feel like too far anymore. Nothing really feels like it's too far anymore.
Maybe Dustin has a right to be hurt. Maybe Will's been blind to a few too many things. Maybe he's been dragging his feet for too long.
He can't tell everyone about this; he'll never be ready for that, and he doesn't think Dustin would be, either. He's not going to risk this getting back to his kids. He's not going to risk his professional reputation or Dustin's job, and he's not going to risk the kind of vitriol he sees kids fling at Kurt every day. But he can talk to the one person he knows can keep a secret, the one person who's never judged him. He tells Shannon everything.
"Let me get this straight," she says, aiming her beer bottle accusingly at him as they sit in the one quiet-enough-to-talk corner of Rosalita's. "You're sleeping with a dude."
"Yes."
"You've been seeing this guy for eight months."
Jesus, has it been that long? He hasn't thought about it that way. He'd stopped really counting the time after summer had ended, but...yeah. It's been that long. "I guess so."
"You've been seeing this guy for eight months, and none of us knew a damn thing about it? Hot damn, Will, if you ever get sick of teaching, why don't you just go on and join the CIA? They could use undercover skills like those." She shakes her head. "I get why you didn't want to go public with it, but I just can't believe I didn't suspect a thing. I always know when something's going on with you. Everyone knows when something's up with you. You suck at hiding things."
"Yeah, well, I hid this." Will sighs, rubbing his eyes. "I just...it wasn't supposed to go this far, but we just never stopped, and now it's at the point where I have to actually make decisions about it."
"Yeah, looks like." Shannon flags down a waiter and orders them a plate of wings. "So? What're you gonna do? What do you want from him?"
That's what Will's been debating with himself all day, but he still can't fully articulate it. He nibbles on a tortilla chip. "Companionship, I guess," he says pensively. "And sex. The sex is fantastic, which...I really wouldn't have expected. He's a surprisingly good listener, I mean, at least for some stuff. He's gotten better at it than he used to be. He's good at knowing what to say when something's bothering me, but that's the thing, he's not usually good with people. I've seen him with other people and it's kind of ridiculous. It's just like...he's more in tune with me than he is with anyone else."
"Mmhmm." Shannon takes a swig of beer. "So he makes you feel special."
He does. He really, truly does, which never fails to surprise Will, given how their relationship started. And it isn't comparing himself to Dustin that makes him feel good about himself; it's not about feeling good at anyone else's expense. It's just the way Dustin looks at him. And the more he thinks about it, the more he wonders how much he really gives in return. He's always been so reticent, because he's told himself he can't really see himself with another man, but that doesn't sit right anymore. He's beyond the point where he can keep telling himself that.
"You in love with him or something?" Shannon asks, and Will shakes his head, but he's still thinking.
"I don't...I don't know," he says, eyes focused on the middle of the table without actually seeing any of it. "I never thought I was."
"Well, something's making you stick with him instead of followin' Emma all over the place like a prize bull in mating season. You think about him a lot? You get all jealous over him?" Will nods. "You do that thing where he mentions some little problem he's always had, and you have to come up with a big scheme to fix it?"
"He keeps saying it's not a phobia, when it obviously is. I could help him if he'd let me."
"And I bet he's got this one cute little quirk that makes you all moony-eyed, too."
"He has a laugh like a Disney villain." Will leans his head on his hand. "I swear to god, he really does. It's like there should be a thunderclap and a lightning bolt behind it."
"Right." Shannon gives him a look. "Come on, Will. Wake up and smell the barbecue."
"But what am I supposed to do about it?" he says, because that's the million-dollar question here, isn't it? "I can't have a future with him. I can't have kids with him. It's not going to work out like that."
"Who says that's the only way to have a future?" she demands. "Shit, just look at me. I'm pretty darn happy, aren't I?"
"Yeah, but-" But that isn't the same. And that matters, doesn't it?
"But what? But you've got your whole life plan all hammered out, and if everything doesn't go just right, then that's a bad thing? You act like falling for this dude is just messing everything up for you, and you have to get all back on track before it goes any further. Who says any of the chicks you've dated want to have kids with you either?"
That is a low blow, even though he has to admit he's never actually thought of it that way. Will runs a hand through his hair, exhaling with frustration. "You get how this is really hard for me to accept, right?"
"Yeah, sure it is. You didn't even realize you liked dick until you met this guy, apparently." Shannon shrugs. "Still looks like he makes you happy. You have plenty of time ahead of you to meet someone else and have babies if it doesn't work out with what's-his-face. If the only thing wrong with him is that you can't knock him up, why not just go along with it and see what happens?"
Will would protest that there are plenty of other things wrong with Dustin, but honestly, none of them are dealbreakers. By now, they're just...quirks, things Will doesn't mind anymore, or else they're things Dustin's working on. They've been good for each other, he's realizing.
"Maybe I was a little quick to tell him it wouldn't work out in the long term," he murmurs, absently scooping up some buffalo sauce on a chip.
"And you're wondering why he's not talking to you?" Shannon rolls her eyes. "Get him on the phone and tell him you were being an idiot. But do that later, because I haven't been able to drag you here in like two months and I've been planning my rematch with the mechanical bull."
By the time Will gets home that night, he knows he's far too drunk to have any kind of serious relationship conversation. He'd taken the battery out of his phone several beers ago, because he's learned his lesson from that debacle with Sue. But he thinks about it; he wants to call Dustin, because shit, he feels bad about that conversation. He should apologize for it, he should tell Dustin he didn't mean any of it and that it's all good and that he wants to stay and make this work, really work, because he loves singing in the shower with Dustin and he loves calling him and hearing his sexy voice, and he loves that deep supervillain laugh and god, he really loves the way Dustin holds onto him and strokes his hair and looks at him like he's the sexiest guy in the world. He's loved that since before they were even together, because he remembers Nationals, and he remembers that slow, lingering glance up and down and how it had driven him crazy and he hadn't known whether he was pissed off or turned on. He remembers how he hadn't been able to keep his hands off Dustin after that and he hadn't even realized he was doing it, but he'd just wanted to touch him, just wanted to get close to him and get in his face and feel him, and he'd thought it was because he'd hated him, and it wasn't.
He wants to tell Dustin all of this, right this second, alcohol be damned, but when he puts the battery back in his phone and dials his number, the phone just keeps ringing and nobody picks up. Some last little shred of common sense tells Will not to leave a message, because that's what got him in trouble last time, and Dustin's right between Quinn and Finn on his contact list.
He hangs up, and swears to himself that he's going to tell Dustin all of that and more tomorrow.
If this is what having a conscience feels like, Dustin wants no part of it anymore. He's been feeling sick inside ever since he delivered that list to Snitterman, because there's no going back now. He'd waited outside the man's office for twenty minutes before handing it over, agonizing about it, but in the end, he hadn't had a choice. Will hadn't left him a choice.
It's only a matter of time before Will finds out, and then it's over, and he's trying to steel himself for that. No matter how he reminds himself that they were on borrowed time anyway, it doesn't make him any less miserable, even when he tells himself that at least he's sort of ending it on his terms now instead of waiting for Will to dump him for that fruit-scrubbing redhead. He has a career to think of. His job will still be here in five years, as long as he keeps his head down and does what Snitterman tells him. Will, as he'd made it abundantly clear, won't be.
"This is some decent stuff here," says Snitterman, poring over the list. "Some of these choreography notes. You could use some of this."
"What?" No. This is just going too damn far. "You didn't say anything about actually ripping off their ideas. And I can choreograph rings around that guy. I don't need to steal anything from him."
"Not 'ripping off,' Goolsby. We're liberating the ideas. And don't flatter yourself." Snitterman tosses the flash drive at him. "Piece something together out of these and let me see it in two days."
There's nothing for it, even if this is just adding insult to injury now, because he is a better choreographer than Will. He tells himself that maybe he can just go along with this and then quietly remove it from the final Regionals set list, when it's too late for Snitterman to do anything about it. He'll just keep going along with it for now and figure out what to do later.
He cobbles together something for one of the songs on the list, with half his own work and half Will's, and hands the music to the kids as they file through the door. It's only then that he notices the guy leaning against the auditorium wall, arms folded, surveying the stage. Dustin thinks he recognizes him. "Jesse St. James?"
"That's me." The kid grins, oozing smugness from every pore. "Don't mind me. I'm just visiting the old stomping grounds. I wanted to see if you'd improved anything since I left."
This is about the last thing Dustin needs right now, but Snitterman would have his head for pissing off a future alumni donor, so he sighs and lets it go. "Whatever. Just don't disturb the rehearsal."
"Oh, I know how this works. I won't make a peep." Dustin hadn't thought it possible for that smirk to be any wider, but evidently, he'd been wrong. He shakes his head and leaves to go direct warmups.
He loathes himself more with every passing hour, and by the time he gets home, he's entertaining fantasies of just quitting his job altogether and joining a cult or something. Anything to get away from fucking Carmel and fucking Snitterman and fucking Ohio. He's making himself a drink when his phone rings.
It's Will, and he just stands there for a while before he can bring himself to answer it. He doesn't want to talk to Will. He doesn't want to pretend everything's fine after he's just spent an entire afternoon tearing apart the set list he should never have taken in the first place. "Hello?"
"Hey." There's a strange timbre to Will's voice, and Dustin can't place whether it's nervous or excited or what, but Will doesn't allow him much time to process it before barreling on. "Look, I just had to talk to you, because I've been thinking. I was thinking about all that stuff I said to you about putting a time limit on this, and I...I don't want to do that. I don't want to limit this. This isn't just something I'm doing until I meet someone else, Dustin; this is real, and I was scared of that, but I'm not anymore. I can do this." He's breathless, words spilling out in a giddy rush. "I couldn't stop thinking about you after we had that talk, just...about all the ways you make me happy, everything I couldn't stand to give up about you. I'm in this for the long haul, Dustin. As long as you want."
Dustin sinks down onto a kitchen chair. He has absolutely, positively no fucking clue what to say to any of that, but it feels a little like someone's hit him in the stomach with a two-by-four.
"Dustin?" Now Will's starting to sound anxious. "You still there?"
This would be a good time for honesty. If Will's being this heart-pouringly honest with him, at the very least, Dustin owes him the truth in return.
"I love you," he says, because it just comes out. It's that or 'I stole your set list,' and both of them are true.
There's a laugh on the other end of the line, but it's happy, not mocking. "I think I love you too," Will says, something like wonderment in his tone. Dustin closes his eyes.
"Look," he says, "there's someone on the other line. I have to go, okay? I'll call you tomorrow."
"Yeah, sure," says Will, still sounding joyfully out of breath. "I'll talk to you tomorrow."
Dustin hangs up, tosses the phone across the room and puts his face in his hands. "Fuck," he says aloud, "fuck, fuck, fuck."
There's nothing that can ruin Will's good mood the next morning, not even Sue. He spends the entire day with a bubble of excitement inside his chest, grinning like an idiot at inopportune moments. Shannon gives him a knowing look and a bruising slap on the shoulder when he passes her in the hallway, and he just smiles wider, because she'd been absolutely right. Everything is going to work out fine.
He's not sure why exactly Dustin couldn't have called him back last night, but he doesn't think much of it. They'll talk later tonight, and Will can just head over to Dustin's apartment, because he's been wanting to get his hands on him all day and it's distracting him when he really shouldn't be letting it.
His spirits sink just a little bit when he finds Jesse waiting for him outside the choir room after rehearsal, but he'll live. It's probably best that Jesse's here when Will's in a charitable mood, anyway. "Jesse, look, I really do appreciate all your offers of help, but I really think it would be best if-"
"Just trust me," says Jesse, cutting him off. "You'll want to hear this." He pulls his phone out of his pocket.
"I took the liberty of using my influence as a former star to spy on Vocal Adrenaline for you," he says, "because I'm still rooting for you guys, I really am. Look at this."
Will sighs. "Jesse, I don't want to see any of what Vocal Adrenaline is working on. As good as your intentions may have been, I'm not interested in any underhanded info-gathering tactics this time around. We're doing things fair and square."
Jesse laughs, almost pitying, and something about it sends a little ripple of foreboding through Will's stomach, finally beginning to dampen his good mood. "Oh, Will. It's really sweet that you're trying to be honorable and everything, but you must have realized by now that that's why you keep losing, right? Vocal Adrenaline doesn't know the meaning of 'fair and square.' You know what Carmel's school motto is? 'Nice guys finish last.'"
"What are you talking about?" That foreboding is beginning to solidify into a cold, hard lump of dread. Will narrows his eyes.
Jesse pulls up a video on his phone and hands it over. "You need to tighten your security. I don't know how Goolsby managed to get his hands on your set list and your choreography notes." He leans over Will's shoulder to watch, clicking his tongue with disapproval. "This guy is no Shelby. She would never have resorted to stealing ideas from you guys. No offense."
Will's not even listening to him. He can't even hear the music on the video; he can't hear anything around him, the only thing going through his mind is he lied to me. He lied about everything.
"Send me that video," he hears himself say. "I'm going to go take care of this."
He's seething throughout the entire drive to Dustin's apartment, gritting his teeth so hard it hurts, gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled fingers. For a second, just a second, he tries to think of a way to give Dustin the benefit of the doubt, but there's no way to. There's no other explanation for this. He lied, and he cheated, and he betrayed every ounce of trust Will has stupidly, stupidly, stupidly put in him for the last eight goddamned months. How could Will ever have let this happen? How could he have been such an idiot?
He arms himself with his phone and hammers on Dustin's door until Dustin opens it. "What the fuck is going-" He stops dead, swallows, wary and guilty. "Will?"
"What the hell is this?" Will turns on the video and thrusts the phone at him, advancing on him, slamming the door behind him. Dustin stares at him like a deer in the headlights, wordless, and he doesn't take the phone until Will shoves it into his chest hard enough to leave a bruise. "Answer me," he hisses.
"I can explain," says Dustin, backing away, holding his hands up in pacifying self-defense. "I swear, Will, I wasn't trying to cheat-"
"You stole my set list," Will snarls. "You would have had to go into my computer and search for it, and you took it and you stole my ideas to use for yourself. How the hell is that not cheating, you son of a bitch?"
At any other time, the wounded look on Dustin's face would have made Will ashamed of himself. Now, it only makes him angrier, contemptuously angrier, because what fucking right does Dustin have to look at him like that? It's nothing but manipulation, because that's the one talent Dustin has in spades.
"I wasn't going to use any of it," Dustin says, as if trying to calm a wild animal. "I scrapped all of it last night. I didn't want to take it in the first place, Will, they gave me an ultimatum, I had to-"
"You didn't have to do anything." Will grinds his teeth, pushing closer, until Dustin's backed up against the kitchen island and can't get any further away. "Don't give me that."
"They gave me an ultimatum," Dustin repeats, and now that he's backed into a corner, he's starting to sound angry too. "It was you or them, Will. When I asked you where this was going, that wasn't a 'let's snuggle and talk about our feelings because sharing is awesome' conversation, that was an 'are you worth losing my job for' conversation. And you told me you were just waiting around for something better to come along. What the fuck was I supposed to do?"
"You were supposed to play fair!" Will slams his fist into the kitchen wall. "You were supposed to do what the rest of us do, and play by the rules! You were supposed to be honest!"
"You know far honesty gets you at Carmel?" Dustin hisses. "I told you, Will, I wasn't going to use any of that stuff at Regionals. I was just following orders; I just took it to get Snitterman off my back..."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Will narrows his eyes. "You weren't just lying to me, you were lying to everyone? That's supposed to help?"
Dustin doesn't say anything, and his silence disgusts Will, because it's plain from the look on his face that that was, in fact, supposed to help. It makes Will sick, because he'd been so stupid, deluding himself into thinking they were making progress, and Dustin's just making it clearer with every word that he still doesn't have anything like a normal human conscience. Dustin claims to love him, and just the thought of that makes Will's heart lurch painfully, because he doesn't know if a person can be equipped to love anyone when they don't even know right from wrong, and it's evident that he can't believe a word Dustin says anymore.
"You said it was them or me?" he says, his voice low and furious. "You made your decision, Dustin. It's obvious whose side you're on. I'm done with this."
"I'm on your side!" Dustin protests, sounding more anxious than Will's ever heard him. "Didn't you hear me? What part of 'I threw out everything I took from you because I didn't want to cheat' don't you understand?"
"I understand exactly what you did. Don't you dare try to turn this back on me like I'm stupid for not getting it." He can't listen to this anymore. He can't stand to hear another minute of Dustin's pathetic, manipulative bullshit. None of it means a damn thing, and it never did. The fact that Dustin was so willing to throw him under the bus that he had his kids rehearsing stolen choreography is all he needs to know.
He heads for the door, footsteps speeding up as Dustin follows him. "Will you just fucking wait?" Dustin demands, and it makes Will want to punch him, because how dare Dustin talk to him like he's the one doing something wrong? He flings the door open, shakes Dustin off and escapes out into the hallway.
"Come on, Will!" There's a 'don't make me beg' note in Dustin's voice as he stands in the doorway, and at any other time, Will would be moved by it. Now, he can see it for the calculating bullshit ploy it is. He's not falling for it anymore.
"Aw, Dustin," he says, because this hurts like hell, and he's angry, and because the devil on his shoulder is telling him to be cruel. "Are you tearing up? People are going to think I just broke up with you."
He shouldn't relish the stricken look on Dustin's face, but he does. As he leaves Dustin's apartment building and gets into his car to start the ignition, his hands are trembling.
He'd told Shannon once that he drank to deal with Terri, when they were married. He'd found solace then in getting blackout drunk, even if he didn't let himself do it often, because he feels good about himself when he's drunk. He feels confident and worthy of love and competent at things; he feels like he's a really awesome catch, the kind of guy Emma would want and Holly would stay with and Terri would admire.
That's what hurts the most about this. Because he's not that kind of guy, but he'd thought he was the kind of guy Dustin would do all of those things for. He'd thought it was mutual. It had been easy to believe Dustin loved him, because Dustin had respected him, listened to him, given a damn about his opinion even when he'd claimed not to care. Once they'd gotten past that first month or so of posturing and pissing contests, once they'd accepted that they had things to offer each other outside of their rivalry, they had respected each other. Dustin's insults had lost their cruel edge, and Will had kept the moral lecturing to a minimum, and they'd been honest about admiring each others' talent and intelligence. All Dustin had wanted was to be reassured that he wasn't a failure as a director, that his voice was no less worthy of Broadway than Will's, and Will had been more than happy to validate him, because it was true. He'd thought that was respect.
He thinks about Terri in the kitchen with her shirt hiked up and the pregnancy pad crumpled in a corner, and he remembers her parting shot. Who are we kidding, Will? This marriage works because you don't feel good about yourself. As if it were some obvious common-sense truth that he was too stupid to see, and she'd said it with the same creepy, ill-fitting innocence Dustin had affected when he'd said what part of this don't you understand?
They have the same eyes, Will thinks, after a few self-pitying drinks. They really do. The same weird, cold blue eyes with the same sneering way of looking at him when they're lying to him. The same tenuous-at-best grasp of right and wrong, the same driving need to shove other people out of the way to get ahead, the same endless ability to justify their behavior. Dustin had just been a hell of a lot better at pretending he didn't think Will was a hopeless idiot, but that had been a lie, too.
Is this what people do? Is this just what love is, and he's the only one who's not in on the joke? Is this just going to keep happening to him again and again, every time he lets himself believe someone when they say they care about him?
It's his fault, he thinks morosely. Because he's always drawn to people who just aren't capable of love or loyalty, who don't fully grasp that they're not the only people on earth with feelings, who think rules are made to be broken and don't make any distinction about what rules to break or why. He wasn't special to Dustin in any way; he wasn't ever anything more than competition who happened to look good naked, because when it came right down to it, Dustin hadn't hesitated to betray him just like he would have betrayed anyone else in the world. He wonders what the hell Dustin thought this relationship was, what he was getting out of it, because sex and set lists and admiration of his talent from someone he was only pretending to respect wouldn't have been enough to waste eight months on.
Will's wasted enough time on this, too. He has one month until Regionals. He needs to pull himself together, make himself forget about Dustin, and focus on the people who do care about him. They need him a hell of a lot more than Dustin ever did.
Dustin hasn't bothered to look at his watch for a while, but it's been dark outside the auditorium for a few hours now, and he's starting to get hungry. He's not about to get up and go get dinner, though, and if he's not leaving, then neither are the kids. He raises his megaphone. "From the top," he orders. "Without sucking this time."
The kids stoically take their places with only a little bit of exhausted whimpering. Dustin folds his arms across his chest. He's rewritten this piece fifteen times, and they have to get it right tonight, have to, because they'd lost precious rehearsal time when he scrapped the stolen material and started over, and Regionals are in just over two weeks.
The choreography for this number involves a lot of lifting and twirling, and he's always worried that he relies too heavily on that, but there's nothing for it right now. It looks like shit, and he'll tear into them for that as soon as they're done, but at least it's shit that can be polished.
Adrian, one of the timid scrawny tenors who has a habit of calling Dustin 'sir,' stumbles over a crack in the stage and drops his partner. He scrambles to catch her, but the kids' reflexes are getting slower as the evening wears on, and she collapses with a startled little shriek. The others, well-trained and fearful of Dustin's wrath, don't stop dancing for a second, just try to move around them, but Dustin waves his hand disgustedly to cut off the music and stalks over to investigate. "What the fuck are you doing?" he snarls at Adrian. "What happened?"
"I-there was a thing-it was sticking up-I tripped, I'm so sorry, sir, I didn't mean to, it won't happen again, I'm sure she's fine. You're fine, Lisa, right?"
"Totally fine." Lisa scrambles to her feet, looking as petrified as Adrian does, though it hadn't been even remotely her fault. "I'm fine, Coach. We can keep going now. Really." They're practically clinging to each other, whether for comfort or to demonstrate that they're back in position for the number, Dustin isn't really sure.
He doesn't care. He doesn't want to hear their pleading and sniveling, because it only makes him think of what a pathetic weakling he must have sounded like, begging Will to come back and listen to him. A lot of fucking good it had done him, too, because that parting shot of Will's still hurts like a punch in the gut when he thinks about it, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as knowing that he was the one who ruined everything. He threw away the best thing that's ever happened to him, and there's no fixing it now.
"Are you blind?" he demands of Adrian, because he's seething now and he's not going to let the kid get away with disrupting rehearsal. "Or are you stupid? Clearly it's one or the other. Which is it?"
"I-I wasn't looking where I was going..."
"Oh," says Dustin, "so you weren't paying attention, is that it? You're not stupid, you're just careless and lazy. Well, at least you're in good company there, because all of you-" He turns to address the rest of the kids, who are all standing stock still and ramrod straight and trying to avoid notice. "All of you are lazy, whiny, coddled little brats. All of you are wasting my time right now. You know what this performance looks like? It looks like an amateurish piece of shit, and I didn't give you amateurish shit to work with. We're going to stay here and make it look professional if I have to keep you here all fucking week and put you on the IV drips again, am I clear?"
He's met with dead silence, and that's not going to fly, because that speech hadn't made him feel any more in control of things, any less guilty or worthless or hurt. "Are you all deaf, too? I said am I clear?"
"Yes, Coach," they murmur, in perfect unison. Lisa looks like she might cry, and Dustin notices that her knee is bleeding a little, but he's never stopped a rehearsal to give anyone medical attention before and he's not going to start now. He doesn't know why they all look so fucking miserable. He's not acting out of the ordinary. He's been angrier with them before; they've handled worse than this in the past.
"What the hell's wrong with all of you?" he demands, and he doesn't know why he's asking, because he doesn't care. He feels precariously balanced right now, like he's on the verge of losing control and he doesn't know how to get it back, and it worries him.
Nobody seems willing to answer him, and half of him wants to berate them and snarl at them and push them until they snap just so he can feel like he's got a hold on things again, and half of him just wants to go back and collapse into a seat in the audience and let it go. They hover for a moment, at an impasse, and he's ready to scream at them just to break the silence.
"You were being nicer to us for a while," Sunshine ventures quietly, and a few other students back her up with hesitant nods. "You let me go home on my birthday."
"You weren't cussing at us whenever our timing was off," says one of the baritones, from the back of the group.
"You only told us we sucked when we really did suck," says Lisa.
Dustin is well and truly blindsided by this, which makes him uneasy in and of itself. He hadn't realized he'd been acting so differently, let alone that the kids had noticed. He hadn't known it was important to them, and now they've apparently come to expect it. Is this what it's like for Will? he finds himself thinking, wondering if this is what it feels like to have students like you and want things from you other than strict professional training, wondering what the fuck he's supposed to do with this. He thinks, for a split second, that he would love to tell Will about it, that maybe Will would be proud of him or something, but that thought disappears as quickly as it had come, because Dustin could probably save a bunch of orphans from a burning building now and Will would still think he was the scum of the earth.
The realization is a painful enough jolt back down to earth that it refreshes all of his bitterness and anger, and he turns his back on the stage, heading back to his seat and grabbing the megaphone again, gripping onto it like a weapon. "What did you do with the leeway I gave you?" he says. "You almost lost Sectionals, that's what. You've shown me what being nice to you gets me. You get complacent, and your performance suffers for it. If this is the shit you're turning out, you can't afford for me to be nice to you. Do I look like Will Schuester?"
Even standing there stoically receiving abuse, heads hung in shame, the kids of Vocal Adrenaline have a sense of pride. Will's been a joke to them for years, and this seems to be the one way in which they're glad to have Dustin back to his old self, because they smile grimly and some of them laugh. Dustin hasn't said anything disparaging about Will at all this year, even for appearance's sake, and even now, it doesn't give him the satisfaction it gives them. But it feels good to get it out, and he keeps going. "You want me to take a page out of his playbook? Because I can do that. You want me to hug you and bake you cookies and listen to all your personal problems like I give a shit, great. We'll do that, and we'll have an awesome twelfth-place trophy to take home from Nationals, and it won't matter because we'll have the power of friendship on our side. That what you guys want?"
"No," they respond, emboldened. Dustin keeps going.
"You want me to cancel this rehearsal so we can have some fun? We can sing about all our feelings. Let's do some interpretive dance about our love lives and other totally irrelevant crap, so we can bond as a big happy group. Does that sound good?"
"No," they shout, still in perfect unison. Dustin smiles thinly.
"That's right," he says. "Are we New Directions, or are we the goddamn champions?"
This raises a cheer, if only a small one, and the kids march back into their places with newfound confidence. It won't last, Dustin knows, because he'll have broken their spirits again by the end of the rehearsal, but it shuts them up for the time being. He feels like an asshole. He can picture Will's disapproving glower all too well, hear his disappointed voice in the back of his mind, and with it comes a fresh, stinging wave of hurt and shame and remorse.
"From the top," he calls again, and leaves it at that.
It's not until the week before Regionals that Will can really bring himself to think levelheadedly about the whole thing with Dustin.
It isn't so much a desire to analyze it that makes him think about it; it's just loneliness, because they'd grown closer than he'd even realized, because Dustin's hair gel and toothbrush are still taking up space in Will's bathroom cabinet, because he'd only just started to get used to having the bed to himself after Terri left and now it feels too damn big for him again.
He'd convinced himself that Dustin was lying about ever having felt anything for him, because in Will's mind, love and cheating are irreconcilable. But even he realizes now how much willful ignorance it takes to think that Dustin didn't care about him.
He doesn't know what makes him think about it, when he's lying awake in bed. He thinks about the first time Dustin had ever called him 'adorable,' and he remembers how pissed he'd been, because Dustin had meant to be condescending about it. Keep thinking that, Schuester. It's adorable. He doesn't even remember what they'd been talking about, but he remembers the smarmy tone.
It had been an insult for a while, Dustin's way of verbally ruffling his hair like a child whenever they bickered about something, but then it had somehow...outgrown that. He remembers a chilly night in mid-November when he'd piled extra blankets onto the bed and huddled under them, and Dustin had laughed at him for it, but there hadn't been any patronizing to it. You look kind of adorable like that, he'd said, and he'd gotten under the blankets too even though he'd said he wasn't cold.
He remembers the warm, pleased affection in Dustin's voice when Will had been so angry about those bruises, when he'd murmured it's really cute when you fuss over things, and he'd barely been willing to pull away from the kiss long enough to say it.
He'd become more demonstrative after summer ended, maybe because Will had, too. He'd let his guard down, and Will knows how much effort that must have taken. Would he really have done it so extensively, for so long, just to gain a slight competitive advantage?
He remembers once, a couple months back, as they'd been lying sated and breathless next to each other, how Dustin had reached over to brush a drop of sweat from Will's collarbone and left his hand resting there, fingertips curling possessively over Will's shoulder. "God," he'd breathed, "you are so fucking gorgeous."
It had been like that kiss in the shower; the overt affection had been unnerving and exciting at the same time, and Will had filed the memory away and found himself pulling it out at lonely moments when he needed cheering. He shouldn't be thinking about it now. It's not going to help anything.
Maybe it makes it hurt a little less to realize that Dustin probably wasn't lying about loving him, but it doesn't change anything, because if this is what Dustin does to the people he loves, there's no hope of being able to trust him. If loving Will wasn't enough to keep him from stealing the set list, nothing's ever going to teach him not to cheat. Will can't set himself and his kids up for failure.
They've busted their asses for Regionals, and when they win by a landslide, it only reinforces Will's certainty that he can't take this away from them. It doesn't matter how much he rationalizes, or whether he misses Dustin or not. He can't leave his kids open to sabotage.
"Bad news," says Jesse cheerfully when he turns up in the choir room the next day. "Vocal Adrenaline killed their competition at Regionals. You'll have to deal with them at Nationals after all. You know, I'm still available as a consultant, if you need me."
There are a lot of appropriate responses to this, Will thinks, but now Dustin won't have to worry so hard about his job security isn't one of them, even if it's tempered by the dismay of having to face him in competition when Vocal Adrenaline is apparently doing better than ever.
I'll see him in New York, then, is even less appropriate. He finds himself dwelling on it anyway, for the rest of the day.