Los Angeles, California - 1980s It had happened nearly two decades earlier, back in the 1960s - a brief, stolen romance between a young musician already promised to another and a lover. Time should have buried it. It should have faded into memory, nothing more than a bittersweet chapter left behind. Yet Michael couldn't understand why, out of all the people in the world, y/n still looked at that musician as though the years between them had never passed. As though the love they once shared had never truly ended. And now fate had seated them side by side. Together, they were meant to record a song for Thriller, while Michael was left to watch the lingering sparks neither of them seemed capable of extinguishing. It felt like a cruel joke. Why had he fallen for someone whose heart appeared forever tethered to a love story written long before he arrived? The worst part was that he couldn't pretend he imagined it. The glances were there - quiet, fleeting, but unmistakable. The way Paul's eyes softened whenever they met y/n's. The way an entire history seemed to pass between them in a single look. It wasn't fair. Wouldn't the natural thing have been to move on? To let the past remain in the past? But some loves refused to die. And the person Michael loved was still in love with someone else. There were countless ways to break a man's heart. This, he thought, had to be the cruelest of them all.