Tom Hauser

This is Tom Hauser. Leave a message!

Tommy sits at the desk in the office that he’ll grow up to share with Daniel, paper and pen in hand. Daniel’s gone to work, and it feels strange to have the apartment to himself — well, himself and Bopp, who has been following Tommy around all weekend as if making sure he isn’t going to have another conniption.

Daniel had tried to take the day bed in this very office, but Tommy had insisted; he doesn’t think it was the stern looks he’s been secretly perfecting for when he becomes a TA next semester, but rather that Daniel Sousa might, maybe, have a hard time saying no to Tom Hauser. If Tommy used that to his advantage to stop from kicking Daniel out of his own bed, then that’s hardly a crime, is it? And it puts him right in the office where he and Daniel apparently work, sometimes, and while he’s alone, he takes a moment to take advantage of that, too.

He pens a letter. It isn’t to Daniel, per se, though if he knows himself as well as he thinks he does, he’ll be sharing it with Daniel once this ends. If it ends.

Tommy still can’t decide if he hopes it ends or not. Visiting the future like this has been… surprisingly novel and strangely comforting, and Daniel has been nigh princely, but there’s the very real possibility that once things go back to normal, he won’t remember any of this. Oh, Tom Hauser will, most likely. But Tommy, in his own real timeline, in Henri’s bed? If he goes back to that exact moment in time, he probably won’t remember a single moment of Daniel Sousa or Darrow. And that feels like losing something.

Or maybe it’s exactly what needs to happen to get him exactly to the moment in time where he first meets Daniel. They fall in love because of exactly who Tom Hauser is when Tom Hauser arrives comes here, and if ensuring that happens means Tommy forgetting all of this, then he’d do it, he thinks, in a heartbeat. For himself and for Daniel. Maybe for Daniel most of all.

Is that too maudlin?

Is he old enough to be maudlin?

Tommy sighs and looks at the photo that Daniel had introduced him to only a few days ago now. He’s been a little obsessed with it, he knows. It’s probably strange that he is, but he’s been just so completely fascinated by the sight of himself, visibly older, visibly happier. The Tom Hauser in that photo doesn’t have a skrid of the baggage that Tommy feels hanging off his shoulders every single day. He has no idea what path leads him to the man in that picture, other than the little bits that Daniel’s told him, but now it feels like every choice he makes from now on will really, truly matter.

Maybe it’s okay that he’s a little maudlin.

“Oh, just start writing, Tommy,” he says, and huffs a laugh at himself. Bopp lifts her head from where she lays on the daybed, tilting her head at him. “I’m being a fucking idiot,” he tells her, and she lowers her chin back to her paws. “...Don’t rush argue, or anything,” he adds, rolling his eyes at her. But he’s smiling, and he turns to lift the pen at last.

Dear Tom,

That’s what Daniel calls you, right? Not Tommy, not Thomas. Just Tom. Nice and simple. You look like a nice and simple guy, in the photos he’s shown me. That isn’t an insult, although I know you’ll remember that around this age, you thought ‘nice’ and ‘simple’ were both things to shun. Or at least, you pretended to, didn’t you? By which I mean, I pretend to. I have wished, for so long, for a life that is kind, a life that is not difficult to live. And once I had a name for how different I was from my peers, I resigned myself to a life that would see little kindness, and less simplicity.

That’s why I am the way I am, isn’t it? One of many (probably thousands of) reasons, anyway. Mom and Dad, the Church, every small-minded bully and every hate-fueled crime… I thought that I had to safeguard myself against all of that by being harsh and defensive. I’m a snapping turtle, as ready to hide in his shell as he is to bite the first thing to get too close. And sure, I’ve met people like me, people I’ve grown to trust and care about. People I can feel safe with. But despite sharing friendship and more with these kindred spirits, I don’t think I ever believed it could be possible to be where you are now. Not really, truly believed. Seeing what I have this last handful of days, I can see I’ve been wrong. At some point, I get the life I’ve always secretly, privately wanted from inside my snapping turtle shell.

Because of you and Daniel, I’m excited to get there. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited to learn who I am and how I become him. For the first time in a long time, I believe it’s actually possible to be the kind of man that someone like Daniel Sousa can love. And not only that, I want to be. Because, fuck, he’s… amazing, Tom. I hope you realize this, and I hope you take care of him. Do your best to never, ever lose him. I can’t remember meeting someone kinder, more patient, more considerate. You are so lucky. I, somehow, grow up to become so lucky, and that feels impossible.

I don’t know if I’ll remember any of this, once things go back to the way they’re meant to be. But I promise, I’ll do my best to make sure you get where you need to be, Tom, so you can have your chance. Luck doesn’t work on its own, right? Fortune favors the bold, et cetera. So I’ll do my best to help you find your way to exactly where you were when I woke up in your and Daniel’s bed. (And Daniel, if you end up reading this like I think you will, I’m sorry for panicking and accusing you of kidnapping me from Paris. You are nothing short of a gentleman and I’m very grateful to have met you. If it’s not too much to ask, please continue to take care of me, and I promise, with everything that I am, I’ll take care of you back. You deserve nothing less.)

Sincerely,
Tom Hauser (ca age 19)

Once he’s finished, Tommy tri-folds the paper and rummages through the desk to find an envelope, and he doesn’t even feel badly about it. It’s his desk, after all, or it will be in a dozen years. He finds a box of them in the bottom drawer and he rolls his eyes.

“Adults are so fucking predictable,” he says. “I bet there’s a whole book of stamps in here, too.” He pulls the drawer out a little further and, yep, there it is. “Ugh. How domestic.”

But it isn’t as derisive as it sounds. He smiles a little and leaves the stamps where they are, instead writing his own name across the front of the envelope before tucking his letter inside. That done, he slips it under the black, folded up slab of plastic on the desk and then climbs onto the daybed with Bopp.

“I grow up to be very lame and predictable,” he tells her, cooing at her as he strokes his hands along her jowls and behind her ears. “Did you know that? So fucking lame, and I’m excited about it! Can you believe that, girl? Huh? I’m so excited to grow up to be super lame-o!”

The more he talks, the more excited Bopp gets, too, and he laughs as she whines and licks at his chin. He might be projecting, but she seems relieved that he’s not being an asshole.

“Mr. Hauser?”

Gwen Blake steps into Tom’s classroom on Thursday morning before class, and he smiles at her. She’s looking a little tired, but visibly no worse for the wear, and he’s relieved to see that she seems to be okay.

“Miss Blake! Please, come in. How can I help you?”

“I was hoping to ask… I’m sure you heard about all the sh, um, the stuff with the lodge.”

“I did,” he confirms. “That sounds very harrowing. I gather from your absences that you were involved; are you doing alright? Settling back in at home okay?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” she says. “I really missed my bed. It gets hard to sleep with that many people in one spot, and…” She turns her gaze away, and Tom thinks for a moment that she must be remembering something specific, to get that hollow-eyed look on her face. He’d heard about the creatures wandering the city, though he had blessedly not seen any himself. He hopes she hadn’t been terrorized by any of them while she was up there. He hoped nobody had been.

“Gwen?”

She lifts her eyes to him and smiles a little tightly. “I’m just really glad to be back in the city,” she says.

“Of course,” he says, leaning against his desk. “I’m sure it’s a huge relief, being back in a space that’s yours. I understand you recently returned to us here in Darrow? It must have been just as hard, readjusting—”

“No offense, Mr. Hauser, but I’m not here to get my head shrunk,” Gwen interjects. “Yeah, I’m fresh off the boat, whatever, I just. I came to ask about a homework extension? On the assignments from the last three days.”

“Oh!” Tom says, charmed in spite of himself by her candor. And then her actual question registers, and Tom says, “Ah, I see. I imagine you must have a backlog of assignments in all of your classes.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And it sucks. It really sucks, because that’s three days of homework for every class, plus all of the homework I’m going to have tonight and tomorrow night, and I’ve hardly slept in, like, a fucking week, and if you could give me an extension then I could work on all of this shit over the weekend instead of trying to get it all done during the week on top of everything else.”

She doesn’t rant in quite the way that Robin Buckley does — then again, nobody rants in quite the way that Robin Buckley does — but it’s clear to Tom despite that that Gwen Blake is having a rough time. This might even go deeper than the week she spent snowed in at the lodge. She’s only been his student for a few weeks, but she’s always been so quiet, keeping her head down and doing her assignments. This… Tom hesitates to consider it an outburst, since she hadn’t raised her voice, but an outburst is undoubtedly what it still was. This outburst strikes him as uncharacteristic of the girl he’s been coming to know.

“Gwen, have a seat,” he says, gesturing to one of the desks. She looks at it, then sighs softly and sits, her bag thunking to the floor at her feet.

“I’m sorry,” she starts, and he holds up a hand. She stops, looking at her hands.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, this past week,” he says. “I’ve been very worried, about all of the people who were trapped up there, and I’m glad to know that you’ve all made it back down unscathed.” He hesitates for a moment. “That being said, I can’t give you an extension.”

Her eyes snap up to him and she says, “What? Mr. Hauser!”

“I can’t give you an extension because you don’t have any missed assignments,” he says.

“...I don’t?”

“I suppose it would be more accurate to say, I’m waiving the assignments you missed,” Tom clarifies. Gwen looks like she isn’t sure she’s hearing him right, so he explains, “You’ve been a hard worker in my class, Gwen, and I know I could trust you to hand them in if I gave you that extension, but I can’t imagine expecting you to do a week’s worth of homework in only a few days after enduring what must have been the worst week of your life. So I’ve decided to waive the three assignments, for you and any other student of mine who was up there.”

Gwen leans back in her seat, staring up at him. It seems less a matter of whether she thinks she can believe him and more that she’s trying to determine if this is all going to be okay.

“Are you allowed to do that?” she asks.

He shrugs. “That’s not yours to worry about,” he says. Then he adds, “It’s three assignments. It won’t impact your ability to test, and if it removes a little bit of pressure from you, then all the better in my opinion.”

Students are beginning to mill in the hallway, lockers slamming open and closed. The warning bell will ring any moment and they both know it. Gwen stands and shoulders her bag so she can go to homeroom.

“Well… thanks, Mr. Hauser. That’s…” Her eyes widen and she huffs out a surprised laugh. “That’s really helpful.”

“I’m glad, Miss Blake,” he says, walking with her to the classroom door.

“And… to be honest? This wasn’t the worst week of my life. I don’t think this would even rank top five.” She gives him a wan smile, then ducks out of the classroom with a “See you in third.”

Tom stares after her, a worried, pensive frown on his face.

He’s still thinking about that later. I don’t think this would even rank top five. More and more, it seems he’s meeting people whose lives are tumultuous enough that spending a week snowed in with strangers isn’t one of their ‘top five worst experiences.’ Tom doesn’t know what to do with that, other than what he’s always done: offer them an ear, a shoulder if they need it, and try to help them feel not alone.

And there’s someone else he can do that for, too. Daniel hasn’t exactly had an easy week, himself, and while Tom suspects he also wouldn’t rank this within his top five, he knows he could probably use a pick-me-up. On his way home, he stops at a flower vendor, their shop warm and bright against the chilly January afternoon. He steps out with a bouquet of daisies. It had taken some convincing to stop the vendor from dressing the bouquet up with lilies and baby’s breath and green sprigs of filler, but when he looks at the daisies in his hand, he can’t help but smile a little, hoping the surprise will be a pleasant one.

Tom stays home the next day. Well, he and Daniel go to an ER so he can be evaluated properly, and then he stays home, following doctor’s orders and getting rest besides. It had been a long night, but there hadn’t been any other incidents after that first one. Whoever had set off the explosion obviously just wanted to make noise or cause destruction, otherwise they likely would have stuck around and the night would have gone very differently.

His sling is a little uncomfortable, but it does what it needs to do and keeps his shoulder still so it can heal, and he has a spare pair of glasses he can wear while he orders a replacement for the ones that now rest, twisted and cracked, in the trash can. Come Monday, he’s feeling well enough to go back to work. His knee and back are bruised, his face still has some ugly scabs from tiny shards of glass and a thin line of stitches from a longer shard, but he’s not bedridden. Daniel helps him dress, just like he’d helped Daniel not so long ago, and he heads into Darrow High like it’s any other morning.

A few students look shocked to see him in such a state; a few others ask if he’s okay, and offer to help him with things throughout their respective classes. By third period, Tom has fallen into a rhythm with greeting his class with reassurances that yes, he knows he looks like he does, yes, he’ll be just fine thank you, and no, he does not need any extra help.

“What happened?” one of them asks.

“Well the Purge, Mr. McMurty,” he answers, with a tone that suggests he should think it was quite obvious. “I was in a closed down store, helping to keep an eye on things, and as it so happened, someone decided to cause property damage. There was a small explosion and I was caught in it.”

The student that had asked, Cole McMurty, looks a bit contrite for having asked, but two students behind him look altogether guilty. They glance at each other, and one of them swallows hard, and Tom realizes with a cold stone of certainty that these are two of the people involved in the explosion.

“I, ah,” he starts, and clears his throat. “Let’s get on with the lesson, shall we? That’s enough reminiscing about unhappy memories.”

He manages to finish class, but even he isn’t entirely sure how. Relying, perhaps, on the camouflage that Robin had so astutely called him out over in Hawkins. After the final bell of the day, Tom makes his way to the principal’s office. The conversation he has there is even less reassuring than the expressions on those two students’ faces.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” he says, hands shrugging where they rest linked on the surface of his desk. “There’s just nothing we can do.”

Tom sighs, face tightening at the way it pulls his shoulder even despite the sling. “No, of, of course,” he says.