super-duper long chapter for u

i want to thank those of you who commented and gave me this huge motivation boost. this was all you <3

MORNING HAS COME, as shown by the sunlight seeping through the blinds. The warmth wakes Dawson up from his quiet slumber. His eyelids open gently, until he realizes that he is, in fact, not lying in his bed, but on the cold hard floor of Hamilton's dorm room.

He sits up so fast his sight blacks out and he almost sees the stars. Only now he realizes what a bad call staying the night has been.

But what could he do? It was either that or getting his second strike out of three and be one step closer to getting kicked out of Wharton High.

He's not sure whether he had unexpectedly changed his mind the night before— and thus decided to stay— or he simply wasn't fond of the idea of getting expelled without scheming and earning his success.

Thinking lucidly about it now, he might just have preferred that over the embarrassment of waking up in someone else's room, especially when that someone is none other than Adam Hamilton.

His head instinctively turns to where Hamilton is sleeping.

This is the only time Dawson has seen him look completely harmless. Now he has no power to inflict any pain on him; his words can't pierce his skin like bullets, his eyes can't dig into his soul.

There's only him and the soft wheezing sound his breath makes escaping his ajar lips when he's fast asleep. He looks so happy and unaware. His disheveled head is half covered by the white duvet. Dawson's gaze lingers on the boy's messy hair a little bit longer, long enough for him to finally realize that it's dark brown and not black. He thought his hair was black but no, it's dark-chocolate brown and he can tell now that the sunlight is shining on it.

How could he be so mistaken?

Without any warning, Adam's eyelids flutter open. Dawson gulps trying to ignore the sharp stab of anxiety he got from getting caught red-handed.

Dawson immediately tears his eyes away from him, staring at the floor with such intensity he thinks he might be about to burn holes in it.

"We're even now," Adam mumbles in a sleepy voice.

Dawson exhales in relief.

"Good morning to you, too."

"You got a strike because of me, but last night I saved you from getting one," Hamilton continues, cotton mouth from the sleep he's just woken up from. "I think you might actually owe me since both times you got in trouble were of your own free will and stupidity."

"It's too early for this," Dawson stands up from the floor under the scrutinizing eyes of the regretful host, who's now sitting in a tangle of bedsheets, displaying an artfully messy bedhead.

"Were you cold?"

"A bit."

"Why didn't you say anything then?" Adam hauls himself out of bed, trudging towards the closet towering across the room. He opens it, showing a whole set of soft plaid blankets.

"My grandma owned something like that, too."

The cutting remark seems to slide off Adam's back. "You could have asked for a pillow and a blanket."

"I'm sorry, I thought that would be included in the Hamilton Hotel hospitality pack," he sneers.

Adam tears his gaze from him. "Lucky for you, there won't be a next time."

"Right," Dawson chokes on his breath. He clears his throat to speak. "Thank goodness for that."

Adam opens the door for him, politely inviting him to leave, but Dawson seems to miss the cue. "You saved my ass last night..."

"Get out of my face, Evans," his unapologetic smile makes Dawson's heart constrict into his chest.

He steps out of the room and walks away, feeling the boy's heavy stare weighing down on his back.

So much for the day-after walk of shame.

Before knocking at his door, room one hundred thirty-one, Dawson glances around furtively, praying not to see Remington appear out of nowhere holding her weird torture tools in her knotty witch fingers.

"Hey," Dawson greets Milo and a sleepy Calliope, who's wearing part of her costume from the night before and is still curled up in bedsheets. Of Milo's bed, no less. "Feeling hangover?"

"I'm never drinking again," Calliope grunts squeezing a pillow against her face. Milo's pillow.

Dawson lets out a short laugh. "Of course you will."

"What happened last night?" Milo cuts in. "Where did you hide?"

"Hamilton's."

Cal removes the pillow from her face, her bewildered eyes fixed on Dawson while Milo gazes thoughtfully at him. "I thought you hated him," the boy asks the implicit question.

"He helped me this one time," Dawson says nonchalantly. The last thing he wants is for them to see him get flustered over Adam fucking Hamilton. Then it dawns on him. "Where are the others?"

Cal just shrugs while Milo looks afflicted by a dark premonition.

"Maisie is too clever to ever get caught," Cal speaks up, trying to reassure them and herself. "And Abe is a master in the art of getting by. I'm sure they're OK."

The conversation seems to trigger some kind of urgency in her since she shoots up and fixes her high ponytail in the mirror. Dawson has never seen her wear her hair up. After making sure she looks presentable, she walks up to Milo and hunches over him. The boy catches his breath.

"Thank you for taking care of me last night," she whispers in his ear, loud enough for Dawson to hear every word.

Milo just nods, his cheeks tinted red right over his evergreen freckles.

"I'm going back to my room," she gives them a first-lady smile. "Toodles."

And so she leaves, closing the door behind her. Dawson and Milo share five long seconds of awkward silence.

"Did you share the bed?"

"No," Milo sighs, voice tinged with embarrassment. "I slept on the floor."

"You could have slept in my bed."

"I know how much you value your stuff and your personal space. I didn't want to disrespect you by sleeping in your bed without asking for permission."

"I don't mind," Dawson reassures him. "We're friends."

At the word friends, Milo's eyes light up like candles in the darkness and Dawson knows he simply can't take that back now. Now, every unkept promise is a potential deal-breaker, every oversight a fall-out possibility. The stakes are higher now that he cares, now that Milo knows he cares.

The boy starts searching in his satchel for his loose tobacco.

"Why do you think Hamilton decided to help you?" Milo inquires, distracted by his quest. "I mean, what's in it for him?"

"Guess he just wanted to be a decent fucking person for once," Dawson shrugs.

He's not lying, but he only now realizes he doesn't know the answer. It's... complicated, and it's beyond Dawson's ability to understand. It is possible Adam only helped him to settle his debt, but it turns out he didn't see Dawson standing up against Dennis quite as much of an act of chivalry as Dawson intended it to be. And it's not like Dawson gave him any actual reason to help him. They've been rivals ever since school started, in a past life, too, perhaps. That would surely explain the vibrant animosity between them.

Why did Hamilton help him? What incentive did he have to risk his neck for Dawson like that?

"Would you have done the same for him?"

That's the thing about Milo. He has a flair for asking the most uncomfortable questions with the least evil intentions. Dawson both admires and dreads his juvenile lack of awareness, his mindless impudence.

Would Dawson have opened the door for Hamilton? Would he have hidden the boy under his bed? Would he have let him stay the night after getting unapologetically treated like shit?

"I don't know," he utters. "Probably not."

"I don't believe that," Milo beams. "You're always nice to me."

"You're not Hamilton," Dawson argues as if that could somehow make his motive self-explanatory.

Milo looks quite satisfied with the explanation at first, until, all of a sudden, Dawson's answer seems to arouse suspicion and doubt in him.

"Why do you hate him?" he asks, looking a little lost and confused. Dawson's smile drops off his lips.

"Everyone likes him at school," the boy vomits out words and it's like a river that's bound to destroy everything it meets along the way.

"Not Dennis."

Milo sits on his bed with a bounce, crossing his legs on the mattress. "Dennis is a meathead, not to mention a complete halfwit. And you didn't answer my question."

"I just don't," Dawson digs in his heels. Since when you're supposed to have a reason to wholeheartedly dislike someone?

"So, no reason?"

"That's right, Milo," he snarls, with little to no patience left to keep up with Milo's indiscretions. "I don't have a reason to hate him. See? I'm not nice. I'm a dick. Can we stop talking about Hamilton now?"

Milo purposefully ignores his request. "Serenity says he tried to talk teachers out of punishing you for punching Dennis in the face."

Dawson blanches.

"What?"

"Well, Serenity and Adam are best frien–"

"I know that, Milo."

"Oh, sorry," he murmurs, scratching his head uncomfortably. "She said that after you punched Dennis and got your first strike, Adam went to the Principal's office and explained what happened to the whole faculty."

Dawson leans back against the wall, staring vacantly in front of him at the stool by the desk.

"Why are you only telling me this now?"

Milo looks suddenly aware of the fact that he shouldn't have mentioned that. Once again, he learns the hard way that you can't take back certain things back after saying them. Especially not with Dawson Evans. He takes words very seriously.

"I didn't think it mattered," he pleads like he's terrified of Dawson's reaction. "Until now, at least."

"Plus, it was all for nothing," he adds, after a couple of seconds of dreaded silence.

"It did matter, Milo," Dawson pinches his lips, "He basically tried to sabotage my one successful attempt at getting expelled."

"I don't think you want to get expelled all that much anymore."

Dawson's jaw is firm, his voice resolute, "You don't know anything."

"Maybe," Milo says, leaning away from him and lighting up one of Abe's hand-crafted joints. "Do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Do you still want to leave?"

The answer on Dawson's lips is no. No, I don't want to leave. I like you and the others, and I like...

"I don't know."

"For someone who claims I know nothing, there sure are a lot of things you seem to be uncertain about," Milo blurts out, regretting his words half a second later. But now it's done and all he can do is brace for impact.

Dawson's eyebrows waggle in surprise. "Where did that come from?"

"You told me to be bold," the boy mumbles, sounding anything but bold. "I'm trying to follow your advice."

Dawson grins, amused and pleased with his newfound full-time job as a role model for Milo O'Connor. "You're nailing it."

*

Earth & Space Science II at Wharton High is not exactly what you would call a no-brainer.

The class is made up of five people, including the devoted professor Mrs. Lakin, who dedicated her entire life to giving lessons about the universe to a small group of astronomy nerds. Dawson feels sorry for her and she does, too.

That's why, two weeks ago, she decided the class needed a little student stock-up. She said if she couldn't get attendance up to ten students, she would lose her position for the year. Hence, Dawson and the others would end up getting merged with the other class. To make matters worse, Dawson once heard that Earth & Space Science I class has been focusing on learning the names of all planets in the Solar System for the past two months. And, not to brag, but his knowledge extends way further than that.

Needless to say, he really wants to keep attending the advanced course. He dreads the idea of going back to discussing whether Pluto is a planet of not. And, since astronomy has always been his favorite subject, he didn't even hesitate to volunteer to help Mrs. Lakin to find students interested and willing to enroll.

Anyone would think he's doing out of sheer generosity when really he's just trying not to spend the next seven months feeling like he's completely wasting his time.

Mrs. Lakin promised to reward him with an A+ for taking the time and putting in the effort to help her. The plan was for other attending students, such as Dawson, to reach out to their peers, and talk about something interesting but easy about the universe. That's quite the miracle since everything is interesting to Dawson and nothing's easy.

Notwithstanding this, he's managed to find something he knew he'd be able to explain in the simplest way to the least knowledgeable crowd.

Even he, though, had to admit he felt quite discouraged when Mrs. Lakin assigned him to present to Poetry class. What would a bunch of poet wannabes even know about neutrons and gravitational waves?

Doesn't matter now, Dawson thinks while standing outside the door. He peeps inside. An old man is holding a worn-out book. He's got a thick beard and tired eyes, though they still twinkle, welling with emotion, after every syllable he reads out loud to his pupils.

He knocks once. The man invites him inside with a single knowing nod of the head.

"Good heavens, it was just getting good," he exclaims to the class, clasping his hands. "Now... what's your name, son?"

"Dawson."

"And your last name?"

"Evans."

"... Mr. Evans will talk to you about something different."

"Neutron star merger."

"Right," the man smiles uncomfortably. "I guess I will learn something new myself today."

Some girls in the bottom chuckle and shoot Dawson coquettish glances. Unlucky for them, the man seems to notice immediately.

"Pay attention," he thunders. "I didn't interrupt the sacred reading of Blake's masterpiece 'The Tyger' so you could desecrate it with your overt teenage sexual impulses."

The class lapses into a stunned silence.

"Very well," he comments, fixing his glasses on his bulbous nose. "The stage is yours, Mr. Evans."

As he says that, Dawson's eyes run across the classroom– meeting familiar and foreign ones– until they stop. They stop when they meet a pair of bewildered blue eyes. "What are you doing here?" they seem to ask.

Of course Hamilton's attending Poetry class. How Bohémian, how very nonconformist of him!

Dawson gifts him with his signature devilish grin.

"Is any of you familiar with the merger of neutron stars?"

Everyone just stares at him without blinking, astounded by how he could ask such a complicated question so casually.

"A neutron star merger is a type of stellar collision," he explains. "about one hundred thirty million light-years away from Earth, two neutron stars collided—"

One of the girls in the back raises her hand. She curls her hair with the other.

"Yes?"

"How many years is a light-year?" she purses her lips flirtatiously.

"A light-year is a measure of physical distance, not time."

Half the class sniggers. The girl retreats into her chair.

Dawson grabs a white chalk end and starts drawing the Earth and the Sun, connecting them with a long arrow. "The distance of the Earth from the Sun equals about 93 million miles. That distance is a bit more than 8 light-minutes in distance," he turns around and smirks, "You can do the maths."

He glances at the rest of the class, he can tell he's losing them. And, as each pair of eyes looks away, he sees the possibility of attending the advanced Astronomy class drift farther and farther away from reach.

But Dawson Evans is not a quitter.

"Now that we've settled that..." he trails off as his gaze settles on Hamilton, who is urgently writing something on his secret journal. "Neutron stars don't merge very often. You can think of it as an occasional encounter between two people who have always been around each other when they realize they were always meant to collide."

The analogy seems to work, albeit rather cheesy and way too big of a stretch. Dawson thinks that the end might justify the means in this one case. Surprisingly, people start paying attention again, they look awake and ready to learn.

"When two neutron stars orbit each other closely, they start getting closer and closer with time. They spiral inward. And when they meet– ah, when they meet, that must be quite a nice show to attend. When the two have spun fast enough and close enough to each break apart, that's when the magic happens."

Dawson meets Adam's blue eyes. He's not writing on his journal anymore. He's giving him his undivided attention. He holds his gaze, relentless and avid.

"That's when they merge together and it's energy... sheer energy."

Half of the class is now gaping at him in awe.

"This is the kind of things you would learn by attending Earth and Science II class here at Wharton," he adds, distributing a pile of syllabi to the people sitting in the front. Each of them takes a paper for themselves and passes it on.

"We're searching for motivated new students who are also fascinated by the universe and its secrets. If you're interested to enroll, feel free to contact Mrs. Lakin. She'll be happy to answer any question."

The bell rings everyone aware of the end of the class. Most of them stand up and leave right away, including the teacher, who pats on Dawson's shoulder twice before heading to the cafeteria for lunch.

Dawson is patiently cleaning the blackboard from his drawings when a familiar voice draws his attention.

"So... how many years is a light-year?"

He turns around to find Hamilton standing before him. Blue turtleneck sweater, worn-out leather cross-body satchel, playful cerulean eyes and a smile that could make every winter blossom into spring ahead of time.

"Hamilton," is all that Dawson manages to say before his gaze darts to Adam's hands. They're holding the journal he guards ever so jealously. "Did I inspire any ballad?"

"That's not what you inspire me," he blurts out, blushing violently at the realization of what his words sounded like.

Dawson smirks.

Adam hastens to correct himself. "I meant, you inspire me a lot of negative feelings. Such as nausea and contempt."

"Sick burn," Dawson chuckles. "Please, teach me your ways."

"Oh, shut up, Evans," Adam grunts.

"Now, what would be the fun in that?"

The boy rolls his eyes, turning his back on him to leave.

Dawson has to fight the urge to grab him to stop him from leaving. He fights the impulse and holds back. His arm falls back to his side. His fingertips still tingle.

He said 'don't fucking touch me again' and I'm not about to get slapped across the face by Adam Hamilton.

Thankfully, he halts on his own