Fic: 31 Magic Moments- Rewriting
Title: 31 Magic Moments- Rewriting
Fandom: Glee
Characters (Pairings) : Kurt, Puck; (Kurt/Puck)
Genre: Supernatural, AU
Rating: PG - R
Warnings: Character Death (Day 7), Inexplicit Descriptions of Torture (31)
Spoilers: Blanket through season 2, to be safe
Word Count: 8,986
Challenge: 31 Days of Puckurt in January 2012
Summary: Puck pulls at the lights; Once every hundred years; A reading from a fortune teller; Two worlds overlap
Disclaimer: I don’t own Glee.
Author’s Note: This compilation is actually a grab bag. All drabbles are one-shots, and are completely separate. Day 1, ‘Lights,’ was inspired by the icon used for this entry, made by sweetiepebbles. Day 7, ‘Try, Try Again,’ was written from a prompt, based on the song A Thousand Years by Christina Perri. Day 30, ‘Fate,’ was written for my little brother, by request. Day 31, ‘Subjective Reality,’ will be expanded into a full story later on.
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Day 1- Lights
It’s one of Kurt’s favorite things to do.
No matter what else has happened on any given day, he never fails to smile when Noah tugs him down onto the bed, tucks his arm around him, and fills the room with lights.
-
When he was younger, Noah used to love watching his father play with the lights. Dad would gather the family in the living room (not often, remember, because secrets are hard to keep), draw the curtains, and smile wider than he ever did as he lifted a hand and called up streaks of color.
Mom sat next to him with a soft hand on his arm while her eyes tracked the patterns. Noah didn’t like to sit and watch; he liked to jump up and chase them around the room. Blue sparks would dart playfully back and forth, letting him get justthisclose before flitting away, and he’d have to jump behind the couch to follow.
November of third grade, he got sick. It wasn’t anything terrible, but it kept him in bed for more than a week, and his mom wouldn’t let him run around even when he started feeling better. Even when Dad took out the lights, he had to just sit on the couch and watch.
That wasn’t as much fun. He liked being close. But, well, the lights seemed to like him when they played. Maybe he could get them to come to him. Noah cupped his hands out in front of him and focused on a patch of green that was curling around one of the legs of the coffee table. After a long moment, the green slowly unraveled and floated over to him, settling quietly in the palm of his hand. Mom and Dad weren’t looking, laughing at the way the new baby was staring at everything with wide, confused eyes.
Noah grinned at the green dot in his hands. It was warm. As he watched, the dot started growing, slowly at first but then quicker, until it was so big that he couldn’t see his parents in front of him. Startled, he yelled for his dad, wondering where he’d gone. Large hands grasped onto his and slammed them closed together, shutting off the green ball and all the other lights in the room at the same time. Dad stared at him, hands shaking slightly against his.
After that, Dad took him aside to explain some things. He was special, Dad said, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody, and he really wasn’t allowed to play with lights unless Dad was watching him.
It took him a minute to figure out what that meant, but when he looked up at his dad and said, slowly, “You mean, I can make them too?” he got a smile in return.
-
Kurt’s eyes have been tracking a red streak back and forth across the room for a while by the time Noah notices where his gaze has stuck. The man grins at him, then he holds out a hand and the red flies over to rest in a small ball against his fingers. Carefully, Noah shifts over and lets the ball drop from his hand to Kurt’s. It’s warm, just for a few seconds, before the little dot jumps up again, moves forward to nudge against his cheek playfully, and then darts away to twist around a line of green in the air.
-
It wasn’t really about making them, his dad told him. They existed on their own, and they came when special people called. People like Noah.
He taught Noah how to do it, too. It took a few tries, and the first time Noah reached out and pulled and a little green light came through, it disappeared just a moment later, but it felt amazing.
When he got a little better at it, and the lights stuck around for more than a few seconds, he started to understand why his dad always stood next to him with a hand on his shoulder or his arm when they did this. Sometimes he’d feel a tug in the base of his stomach. Sometimes he wanted to go with the colors as they left. Dad explained about grounding, about why it was important to have a solid link to this world when you touched another, and he understood.
He pulled at the lights, but the lights pulled back.
-
Kurt feels the hand squeeze tight against him and he snuggles further into the arm around his shoulders, warmer even than the light felt at his fingertips.
-
Mom and Dad argued more than they used to, and Dad didn’t gather them in the living room very often anymore. That was okay, though, because even if he didn’t want to do it himself, he always came and helped Noah pull out his own lights when asked.
One day, his dad walked out after a fight, grabbing a coat on his way out the door. He was going for a walk, he said, to clear his head.
He never came back.
Mom got sad. Her girlfriends came over and made her tea and listen to her cry about how her husband had left her, really left her this time. Even though Noah tried to help by doing his homework (even though fifth grade was hard and he could’ve used help with some of it) and keeping Sarah quiet, he didn’t believe her.
See, Dad wouldn’t have left. He wasn’t as happy as he used to be, yeah, but Noah knew he wouldn’t have walked out. He was too worried about leaving Noah alone with the lights to just run away and never come back. Maybe, though, he forgot that you weren’t supposed to be alone for a few minutes, because sometimes you forgot things when you were angry.
Noah didn’t think Dad left. Noah thought he got pulled.
-
Kurt tries to turn his eyes away from the swooping colors every so often to glance at Noah’s face, just to keep track. Sometimes, when they do this, Noah’s mouth gets tight and his eyes darken, and Kurt has to call his name to tug him away from whatever he’s thinking about that makes him look so uncertain.
Today hasn’t been one of those days so far, but Kurt watches anyway, just in case.
-
A month after his dad vanished, Noah sat alone in his bedroom, reached out a hand and pulled. He knew it was a bad idea, but Mom didn’t want to talk about the lights anymore, so he didn’t have anyone to make him not alone.
Splotches of pink and green had just begun forming in the air over his head before he started getting scared, and he pushed them away harshly before they could try to tug at him. He sat shaking in the dark and missed his dad.
In sixth grade, he went to school as Puck, and tried to forget about the lights. Sports were a good distraction, especially when he was too tired after practice to bother thinking about it anyway.
He grew up slowly, then suddenly much quicker because Quinn was pregnant and the baby was his and he had to worry about people who weren’t himself or his mom or his sister. Before he signed any papers, he got to hold Beth for a few minutes, alone. Eyes darting around to make sure no one was looking, he raised a careful hand and called up a little dot of light that he hadn’t seen in years. He had to be sure.
The orb ventured curiously out from the palm of his hand and poked around Beth for a few moments, until the girl woke up and grasped blindly in the air. The light startled away from her reaching hands, zooming back to the safety of Puck’s fingers. It circled around them a few times before fading away, and Puck sighed in relief. The lights had always liked him, but they didn’t like her, just as they’d never seemed to appreciate it when Sarah had reached out in the same way. Beth would be fine.
With the knowledge that she wouldn’t need to know anything that only he could teach her, Puck said goodbye to his daughter. He shouldn’t have been surprised to find that even after that, his list of people he had to worry about kept on growing.
-
“You okay?”
How can he not be, when he’s surrounded by light? And, more importantly, by Noah.
He knows Noah is asking about what happened earlier today, but it’s hard to think about that or anything else just now. Sitting here, Kurt feels lighter than he has in weeks, and he mumbles an assurance to Noah as he sinks a little deeper into his side.
-
Eventually, Puck decided to say ‘fuck it’ to the fear biting at the back of his mind. That determination carried him all the way across the choir room and close enough to lean in and kiss Kurt Hummel.
At home, he let the memories (of soft lips pressing back against his and bright eyes crinkled by a smile) tie him to the earth when he called up just a single streak of light to swirl around the room, and felt better than he had in a very long time.
-
Purple and orange and green and yellow and red and pink and blue and colors Kurt doesn’t know the names for dance around the room.
-
“I want to show you something,” Noah said, a year and a half after he started calling Kurt his boyfriend. His dad always told him to keep this a secret, but rules are made to have exceptions. When Kurt’s jaw drops at the explosion of light that Noah hasn’t been able to call up in years and his fingers clench tightly around the hand they hold instead of pulling away in fear, Noah’s sure he picked right.
-
Not that he wasn’t totally dumbstruck the first time he saw it, but looking back, Kurt thinks it shouldn’t be too surprising. He’s always known that Noah is amazing.
-
He told Kurt once that he couldn’t do this without him, but he could tell Kurt didn’t believe him.
Still doesn’t, really, but Noah doesn’t want to worry him by explaining, so he keeps insisting and Kurt keeps rolling his eyes and they find their own kind of balance.
-
The lights are beautiful, but at some point Kurt decides he’s more interested in looking at Noah than the rainbow of colors that dart around the room. He tugs at Noah’s hand and drags him over to catch his mouth, smiling at the enthusiastic response.
The lights fade away, but Kurt eyes are closed and he doesn’t even notice, too caught up in the way it feels when Noah’s fingers run through his hair and curl around his hip.
-
Kurt keeps him grounded.
-
Noah sets him free.
---
Day 7- Try, Try Again (R)
1009 A.D.
They should have been more careful.
It’s what everyone says after things crash down around them. That doesn’t make it untrue.
They’d figured it was worth it. So what if their love was against the law? It felt much too right for anything bad to actually happen. Felt immortal.
Two months.
They got two months and then they got caught, and then they got separate jail cells and death sentences, and he hasn’t seen him in what he figures is a week.
Thank God he’s going first. It’s selfish, but he can’t watch that. He can’t.
-
It’s fucked up, is what it is.
Can’t he dream about normal shit? Like forgetting his clothes or learning how to fly or boobs? But, no, instead he has to dream about death.
Not just death, Puck reminds himself, being put to death and waiting around for a week in a cell before that, all because he got caught fucking a dude. Seriously, what the hell?
He’s heard about how dreams are supposed to mean things; unconscious desires or something like that. He’d like to go on record saying there is no way he has any desire to screw a guy. He can’t even remember much about that part, really, so it probably doesn’t mean anything.
It’s not like he actually messed around with a guy in the dream, just kinda knew that he had, at some point. He felt all weird about it, too; sort of warm and happy when he thought about it, but also sad. Well, the sad part might’ve been because he was apparently about to die.
Which, by the way, he has no secret desire to die, either. So the dream was just wrong about everything.
Fuck it, he’s writing this off as a fluke. Too much cold pizza the night before or something like that.
It’s creepy that he can’t stop thinking about it though, even when he’s tossing Hummel in the dumpster, which is usually a pretty good distraction. He just feels how soft Hummel’s skin is when he grazes the guy’s hand by accident and starts wondering whether the person he had not-really-but-sort-of-off-screen-dream-sex with had soft skin too.
It was the soft skin and the sex that got him in such deep shit in his dream, he remembers, and he takes a minute to feel sorry for the kid he just tossed into yesterday’s spaghetti sauce. Yeah, he’s a little bitch who thinks he’s better than everyone else at this school, but it sucks that people are gonna hate on him ‘cause he likes dudes. Not that they’ll execute him for it like Puck’s dream, because that shit’s outdated by like a thousand years, but he knows most of the guys are pushing him into lockers because of his status as ‘fag.’ It kinda sucks.
It’s not really his problem, though.
-
1519
“You’ve done what you can,” he says finally. “Please, leave my friend and me in peace.”
As the door closes after the doctor, there is a chuckle that breaks almost instantly into a harsh cough.
“’Your friend,’” repeats the man on the bed, as soon as he gathers enough air in his lungs to form the words. “I should hope I’m more than that, after everything.”
“Hush,” he replies. He strokes his thumb over the back of the limp hand in a steady rhythm, timed against the shallow breaths that struggle to move through the man’s chest. “You’re meant to be resting.”
“I think… it’s a little late for that.”
He nods, catches himself, shakes his head, tries to hold in the burning at the edges of his eyes. Doing so, he forgets to repress certain other urges, and lets out a short, wet cough before he can think to stop himself. The dark eyes of the man on the bed, previously half-closed from exhaustion, grow wide.
“You- I gave you¬-”
“No,” he soothes quickly. “You haven’t; I promise. The air is dry in here.”
It’s a lie, but there are only a few hours left in which the man has to believe it.
-
He thinks it must have something to do with being the only gay boy in Lima, Ohio. Repression and all that.
That doesn’t explain why the dream is less sex and more tragedy, but he’s always had a flair for the dramatic. Maybe his brain would rather imagine an epic, whirlwind romance that burns out too fast than bodies rolling naked and sweaty on a bed without context. Stupid brain.
It gets a little weird when he finds little ways to connect the dream to real life, but he mostly tries to ignore that. Just because Puck’s brown eyes remind him strangely of the man on the old-fashioned bed, dying of some disease doctors probably cured a couple hundred years later, doesn’t mean he has to do anything about it other than admit the fact that they really are a rather gorgeous shade.
Even if he wanted to go a bit further with that information, he’s aware that it would be an incredibly bad idea. His crush on Finn screwed with the club’s dynamics enough last year, and coming off of that only to move onto the next painfully straight boy in the group would be nothing short of pathetic.
It’s hard not to think about it at least a little, though.
-
1205
His lips are dry and cracked as he presses them against the other man’s forehead, but he forces them to curve into a smile when he sees dark eyelashes flutter open.
“Hello,” the man says with a hoarse voice and a disbelieving stare.
He understands. He didn’t expect to wake up again, either.
“Hello,” he replies. It’s all he can do, really. That, and lock his arm just a little tighter where it lies around the man’s waist.
“Mm,” hums the man, letting his eyes sink closed before opening them again with a jolt. “I love you.” It’s nice that his sentences are simple now. Even if it’s for a terrible reason, he’s glad the man has stopped trying to apologize, like it was all his decision, his fault.
Personally, he blames the people who beat them and tossed them out, and maybe himself for being too weak to look for water.
“Love you too.” Even under the too-hot sun, with dried blood trying to stick his fingers together and desperate thirst biting at his throat.
They’ve barely said anything, but it’s already time to close his eyes again. He shifts his body as much as he can - which isn’t much - to curl a little closer to the man lying beside him.
They were lucky to wake up this time. It probably won’t happen again.
-
Puck is learning to connect the dreams.
They’re all incredibly different, so it took him a while at first, but now he knows the common factors.
Love. Death. Bright blue eyes.
The eyes are weird. He thinks maybe they weren’t really blue every time (well, that’s stupid, they weren’t really anything because none of this is real, but whatever), and maybe his mind is just inserting the color, because there’s no way it’s natural even when the man’s skin is such a deep, dark brown.
Skin color changes. Time, place, everything about the setting always changes. Names would probably change too, only there never are any names. It’s almost like it’s a completely different man every time, except something keeps telling him they’re all the same. And they’re always young.
Officially, Puck’s still pretty freaked out by these dreams, but that’s mostly because of the part where he’s always about to die in them. He’s pretty much come to terms with the part where he’s in love with a guy (which is also the part that makes it harder to be freaked out, but he tries his best, because seriously, a dream about lying bleeding on the ground should not be comforting).
The nice thing is that, because he’s gotten so used to the dreams, making the leap to liking a guy in real life is just that much easier. Of course, that guy happens to have a boyfriend, so that’s unfortunate, but there’s still another few months left before Kurt heads off to New York. If he spends a little too much of his time hanging around and waiting for the boyfriend to screw it up, no one’s really gonna notice.
Those dreams, though. He wonders sometimes whether they might know something he doesn’t.
-
1918
There are all sorts of policies against it, but the soldiers stuffed into the trenches along with them don’t seem to have the energy to care about that at this point. Hell, they don’t even seem to notice.
He thinks for the millionth time that it’s such a shame they met this way, because he’d be willing to bet the boy before him would look amazing in clothes other than this uniform, the only thing he’s ever seen him in. Ah, well. Better to meet in this unfortunate way, he figures, than not at all.
They managed to find each other even in the early days, when they were mutually frightened and overwhelmed by the reality of the war. They’d both skirted the age requirements, and really, they hadn’t been prepared for the results.
“When we’re done with this shit,” the boy tells him, pulling him tight against his side, “we should go somewhere nice. You know, sunny, not dirty, and definitely fresh air.” It’s a very pretty lie.
“Did you have anywhere in mind?” They’ve gotten their orders. Tomorrow morning, the arms holding him are going to be holding a machine gun when they jump over the edge and out onto flat ground. The average survival time for a man with a machine gun is about fifteen seconds.
“The beach, maybe.” The boy will die. He’ll be standing just behind him when it happens.
“That sounds nice.” He’ll pick up the dropped gun.
“Okay, then.” The boy leans down and kisses him firmly, lingering as long as he can before pulling away and bringing up another possible destination.
It’s bizarrely reassuring, the certainty that they’re going to die tomorrow.
-
He hasn’t talked to Puck about the dreams.
It’s weird, because in general, they’re trying to be the sort of boyfriends who don’t hide things from each other (that’s part of what screwed up his last relationship so badly), but the idea of talking about this just makes him feel… nervous.
He knows Puck’s eyes well enough to recognize them in each of the scenes that play through his mind at night. It’s probably just a case of projection: equating the love he feels in the dreams with the way he loves Puck and then unconsciously changing the eyes to match.
The thing is, Kurt’s been having dreams for a while now, and they’re starting to repeat. Not exact scenes, always - though that does happen - but extra little bits that feel like they’re almost the same as some of the other scenes, though not quite. Like shaking hands with that soldier (the same one he dies with in the trenches of what must be World War I) on a train, the boy’s face fresh and clean like he’s never seen before.
It scares him. It makes them feel that much more real.
Kurt doesn’t acknowledge that, though. He’s never believed in the kinds of things that would be necessary for those scenes to have actually happened, so he knows they couldn’t have, really. Telling Puck would just mean admitting he’s been tricked into thinking about things that couldn’t possibly be true. He ignores the little part of his brain that whispers that he’s scared of what would happen if he said something and Puck told him he’d dreamed of the same thing in reverse.
He ignores it, and tightens his grip on Puck’s hand where it rests between the front seats of the car. Their eyes flick sideways to meet just for a second, because yeah, he needs a little reassurance right now, but he’s still got the common sense to know that you don’t take your eyes off the road. Even the quick glimpse of warm, brown eyes makes him feel a little better though, because these are the real eyes, the ones he gets every day, not the ones the haunt him in dreams.
Then the car turns a corner, and the world explodes around them.
-
2012
It’s just the barest brush of consciousness; a hesitant grasp on the world. Very hesitant, if the muted words the doctors are yelling to each other are correct. ‘Hemorrhage’ and ‘pressure dropping’ and ‘tachycardic.’ None of those sound like good things.
But nothing sounds worse than the silence he finds in place of a heartbeat when he goes searching in the body next to him. There’s a little bit of logic biting at him, telling him he shouldn’t be able to hear a heart from this far away, but he snipes back that yes, right now, in this state, he should. He doesn’t.
It’s the scariest thing he’s ever (not) heard in his life, which makes it hard to care about the doctors working around him. They should have worked harder to help them both.
There aren’t even any doctors around the other body, now. They’ve given up, abandoning it completely to lie there cold while they try to save him instead. It’s so wrong. It feels like a dream.
‘I’m sorry,’ a familiar voice whispers in his ear, and he startles at the sound. ‘Couldn’t do it. Sorry.’ The doctors are yelling louder now. ‘Wanna ditch this one and come with me?’ He does. He wants to follow that voice wherever it cares to take him. ‘We’ll try again; get it right this time.’
He grabs the hand that appears before him and holds it tight, and lets go of everything else.
-
2110
As soon as he hears his mother calling, he’s out the door with barely a pause to grab his shoes. It’s a good thing it’s a nice day, or he’d have to waste time looking for a jacket, and then he might get caught and forced into chores. Ugh.
Now he has a whole day in front of him with nothing to do. He could go into one of the cities, maybe; it’s not like they’re more that a quick shuttle ride away. Or he could-
“Oof!”
“Ow! Geez, sorry, didn’t see you.” No one ever does. He’s still waiting for that growth spurt.
He looks up (about a foot and a half up) at the boy who ran into him, and pauses, mouth slightly open.
“Uh, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He snaps his mouth closed. “Fine, just… I think that hit might’ve rattled something, maybe.” He gives the boy a weak smile. What else is he supposed to say? ‘Your eyes look really familiar and I got distracted?’ Yeah, no. “You just moved in down the street, right?” Maybe that’s why he looks familiar.
“Yes. Number 117,” the boy says. “I had to escape the house for a while, though. We’re still unpacking and my parents are going crazy about it.”
“My parents are always crazy,” he says, grinning. “I’m running out for the day. Wanna come with?” He says it before he even thinks about saying it. He doesn’t even know this guy.
The boy’s eyes light up, though, and they’re really pretty eyes, so he decides he’s okay with the decision his mouth made for him. “Really?” the boy says. “That would be awesome.”
“Yeah, sure. I figured maybe I’d head up to the city or something. You know, one of the close ones.”
“New York?” the boy suggests. “I went down there a few times when we lived up in Canada, but it’s so much closer from here.”
“Sure,” he says. That’s usually his favorite place to go, anyway. He’s probably going to like the way this boy thinks. “C’mon, there’s a station just a few streets over this way.”
He takes a chance and grabs at the boy’s hand to pull him around and down the street, and the boy looks startled at the move, but smiles after a moment and tightens his fingers. The grip is firm and warm, and he’s already weirded himself out enough by calling a stranger’s eyes familiar and kind-of-sort-of hitting on him like two seconds after they met, but…
“By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”
---
Day 30- Fate
Living where they do, they don’t get a whole lot of fairs coming through their area very often. At least, not close enough to make it anything less than a big, day-long thing of driving out there and seeing everything, and Puck gets bored with this stuff too quickly for that. So maybe he’ll go for a couple of hours, because there’s finally one close-by and most of the Glee Club is heading over there, and then he’ll take off.
The decision to humor Rachel, therefore, is stupid, because it completely blows his plan.
It’s just that she looked really sad and pathetic after that phone call from Finn (he’s impressed she even understood his voice, actually, considering how bad of a cold Finn’s stuck in bed with, the cold Puck just narrowly avoided), left alone because everyone else had already split off into groups, and… He probably should’ve just walked away, except then he might’ve ended up trailing after Kurt and that would’ve been even lamer than what he’s doing right now, with is pretty damn lame.
Because now she’s leading him enthusiastically by the arm, checking out all the little stalls instead of anything even remotely interesting, and he’s already leaning on his time limit with no sign of her letting up anytime soon.
He’s considering telling her he isn’t feeling well - which is kinda true; he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because Sarah had some of her friends over and they giggled way past midnight and gave him a headache - and breaking off to go home and get some sleep, when she pulls him toward a purple tent with a big, fancy sign out front advertising: ‘Fortune Telling!’
It’s gimmicky as hell, really, and it’s not like he’d be more interested if it weren’t, but this lady plays up every stereotype she can, down to the crystal ball on the table and incense that makes the back of his throat burn with a cough and a black cat purring in the corner. Actually, aren’t cats supposed to be for witches, not gypsies?
Whatever. As long as it’s not looking for any attention.
Rachel’s already all giggly about it - “Come on, Noah, it’ll be fun!” - so he takes what luck he can get when the lady tells them there are larger packages, but they can get just one aspect read off their palm - life, love, fortune, whatever else - for just three dollars. So at least it’s cheap.
Unsurprisingly (or maybe surprisingly, because Puck kind of thought she would have asked about her career), Rachel picks love, and offers her right hand to the woman who tells them to call her Esther.
“Oh, you’ve got a good one, don’t you?” Esther says, throwing out a wink as she inspects Rachel’s palm. “No, no, of course I don’t mean that one,” she continues when Rachel glances uncertainly over in Puck’s direction and opens her mouth to correct the idea. “He couldn’t make it today, yes?”
“He’s sick,” Rachel says, looking relieved. Puck’s pretty damn relieved, too; not that it would’ve mattered if Esther hadn’t corrected herself, because he’s pretty sure they’ve already been there, tried that, and tossed it straight into the friend zone.
“Nothing too serious, I hope.”
“Just a cold,” Rachel assures her.
“Well, you hang onto that one for a while, now,” Esther says. “I like the places your love line is going. So much more hopeful than some of the others I get in here.”
Rachel beams.
There’s a little more after that, some vague assertions of happiness with a man who loves her, though Esther won’t say straight out whether that man is Finn or not (“Best to leave some mysteries for your own discovery,” which Puck figures is her way of not committing to anything specific that might not come true). Right at the end, she gives Rachel’s hand a little squeeze and says, “Broadway romance, dear,” with a smile that Puck takes as absolute proof that she’s just saying what people want to hear.
Which he doesn’t have a problem with, really, since it makes Rachel happy and keeps her busy for a few minutes while the cat somehow makes its way into Puck’s lap and demands to be petted. He kicks it off (gently) when Rachel stands up, though, and turns to leave only to be stopped when Rachel calls out, “Aren’t you going to do it, too?”
It’s hard, and frankly not worth it, to argue with that much enthusiasm, so he figures, what the hell, and fishes three bucks out of his pocket. At Rachel’s insistence, he holds out his hand for the love reading.
Esther has barely even glanced at him before she says, “Oh, but you’re in love, too!”
He’s pretty impressed with himself, really, for keeping a straight face.
“Where is he? Not sick too, I hope?”
That one, he can’t help but choke at. Like, literally choke, and that damn incense is getting at his throat again, because he coughs up the thick air for long enough that one of them has to pass him a bottle of water to drink before he can stop. When he’s finally breathing properly again, he glances over at Rachel, staring wide-eyed back at him, and thinks, ‘oh, hell.’
“Noah?” she starts, and doesn’t seem to know where to go from there.
Esther just keeps apologizing. “I’m so sorry; I should have read further before I said anything. I thought she would have known!”
“It’s fine,” he says, waving her off, even though it sort of isn’t. He’s actually been kind of subtle about all the staring at Kurt’s ass he’s done lately and if there’s one thing that’s definitely going to blow his cover, it’s Rachel Berry and her complete inability to keep a secret. Damnit. Just… damnit. Did he give off a vibe or something? Does ‘Noah Puckerman: recently bi-curious’ show up just as bright and obnoxious as the sign on her tent?
“Let me finish reading your palm, dear,” she urges, and she does seem honestly sorry. “I’ll find you some good news.”
“Don’t think you will,” he says, but hands his palm over anyway, because at this point, why not? “It’s not gonna work out.” Not while he’s still being such a freaking coward about it, anyway.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Esther scolds. She takes his hand in hers and bends over a little to look deeply, tracing the lines with her fingers. Her eyebrows furrow together and she retraces the same lines, humming distractedly to herself.
Seriously, Puck would just like to get this thing over with so he can go back outside away from the incense and try to get Rachel to forget what she heard (yeah, good luck). “Um, so what’s on there?” he says finally, because she didn’t take this long with Rachel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wincing a little like she really is sorry to be telling him this right now. “You were right.”
“About what?”
“It’s not going to work out.” She shakes her head sadly and gives his hand a little pat before pushing it back toward him.
“Wait…” he says slowly, thrown off by the answer, because isn’t the whole point of these things supposed to be telling the person what they want to hear? “Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And, that’s it? Nothing else? You’re not gonna tell me about how I’ll find someone else in a couple years or something?” Rachel got long-term, if vague, predictions, and he gets… this?
“This feels more important to you right now than the future would,” Esther says gently, not meeting his eyes.
“Bullshit.” For three bucks, he got outed to a girl who’s never going to be able to keep it a secret, along with a stunning rejection of any chances he might have with Kurt Hummel. Waste of fucking money.
And yeah, okay, it stings a little that she told him it’s never going to work out, even though he mostly already knew that, but she’s supposed to be all reassuring and mysterious and that was just exactly the opposite.
He storms out of the tent, coughing out the last bits of that incense clinging to his lungs (or maybe he’s getting Finn’s cold, after all) as soon as he hits fresh air.
“Noah,” he hears, soft but sure and somewhere around his elbow.
“What?” he snaps, and instantly feels guilty for it.
“Come on,” Rachel says, pulling gently on his arm. “Let’s go find the others.” Because he can’t really think of anything else to do right now, he follows her.
They find people they know somewhere among the stalls selling food, where Kurt and Mike are looking on in awe as Tina demolishes one of those huge, overflowing plates of curly fries all by herself. Pretty damn impressive, actually. Mike looks so proud.
Puck lets Rachel buy him an ice cream out of some weird guilt thing for dragging him into that tent (must be some pretty impressive guilt for her to offer something non-vegan), and she grabs some fried vegetable thing before they weave their way back through the crowd and squeeze into the table next to their friends.
It gets easier after that, because Puck can sink into the background of the conversation with very little effort, and he just listens to them talk. Once in a while, Rachel will catch his eye and shoot meaningful looks in Kurt’s direction, and he’s not sure whether that means she’s caught on to exactly who was the ‘he’ that Esther mentioned or whether she just wants him to talk to someone gay (if it’s that one, he supposes he should be grateful she’s not offering up her dads).
And, well, it’s not like he needs all that much encouragement to look at Kurt, even if it feels kinda crappy right now, with the words ‘I’m sorry; you were right’ ringing in his head.
What does she know about them, anyway? Nothing. He knows what fortune tellers do, knows how they can take a look at you and figure out enough to construct a vague prediction that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is close enough to make the person happy. So she decided to fuck with his head, so what? He’s not sure what he did to deserve it, ‘cause he was nice enough and paid her three dollars and even pet the damn cat when it jumped onto his lap, but it’s still just words she decided to throw at him.
Except, more and more, he’s getting the overwhelming urge to prove her wrong.
An hour ago, he completely agreed there was pretty much no chance he could ever really do anything about all these weird feelings that sprang up (out of fucking nowhere, too), but that was just him, accepting the obvious. This is her, telling him he can’t do something, and Puck’s never been good at ignoring that.
He’s never been good at impulse control either, he thinks a second later, when his lips are pressed against those of a very surprised Kurt Hummel and water is splashing over his feet from the bottle Kurt just dropped.
After a few seconds, he pulls back, thinking, ‘take that’ and also ‘shit shit shit’ but nothing else because he doesn’t have time for it before Kurt tugs him right back in and basically tries to give the entire homophobic town of Lima a collective heart attack from the way he’s kissing Puck like it’s his only goal in life. And Puck is totally down with that.
At some point, though, he does need air, so he breaks away to grin widely at Kurt, who grins right back, one hand still resting gently at the back of his neck. ‘Oh yeah,’ he thinks. ‘Screw Esther; we’re gonna be fucking awesome.’ Except he kinda has to ruin the moment, just a little, when he feels the scratch in the back of his throat again and has to lean to the side to cough harshly.
Damn, he’s definitely getting that cold from Finn, and he probably just gave it to Kurt, too, if the guy didn’t already have it from living with the source.
“Puck, are you okay?” Kurt says when he finally stops coughing.
“Fine. Think I might’ve gotten you sick, though, but it’s your brother’s fault, really.”
Kurt gives him an odd look and points to the hand he used to cover his mouth. Puck glances down at it to find a small smear of red along one finger. Huh.
He raises the hand back to his mouth and runs a finger along his lip, coming away with a little more blood. He wasn’t bleeding a minute ago.
“Damn, Kurt,” he says, smirking as he realizes what must have happened. “Jumping right into that stuff already?”
Eyes widening, Kurt protests. “I didn’t bite you! Not hard enough to draw blood, anyway,” he corrects, a little closer to mumbling, and Puck just keeps on smirking at him, because it’s seriously fun to see Kurt embarrassed and it’s not like Puck minds if he likes biting. He didn’t even feel it, actually.
He winds up coughing one more time for good measure (yeah, he’s gonna get Kurt sick) and comes back with a little more blood, and damn, how hard did Kurt bite him, anyway? It’s kinda giving him some ideas, actually, and he’s cool with that.
Mike, finally done with his shocked face, gives him a bottle of water to rinse his mouth out, and then Puck loops an arm around Kurt’s shoulders and heads off because probably the least important but still awesome side effect of this is that he’s got someone to walk around with who will actually want to do interesting stuff, now.
When they pass by the bright purple tent, he doesn’t even look at it, because he’s so done with that woman and her stupid predictions. Look how this one turned out for her. Look how it turned out for him. He’s gonna spend the day hanging out and also making out with Kurt fucking Hummel, and then he’s going to figure out how to make that happen more days then not for the next, like, ever.
And then he’s probably going to go home and take an aspirin because those girls seriously did a number on his head last night, but after that, yeah, this is totally gonna be awesome.
---
Day 31- Subjective Reality (R)
The weirdest thing, the part Noah keeps focusing on, is how he figured (not that he’d thought about it that much, but yeah, once or twice it got mentioned and he wondered) he’d get used to some of the bad stuff. He hasn’t, though. It’s weird.
Like, the cold, for example. People are supposed to be able to adapt, right? Leave a guy in the middle of the Artic or whatever and, assuming he survives long enough, his body will get used to the temperature, at least enough so he can live there without feeling like he’s going to freeze in place the next time he stops moving. That’s supposed to be a thing.
Apparently it isn’t, though, at least not for him. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the clothes for it, because even a guy who’s adapted still needs a parka or something so he doesn’t freeze into a block of ice. Noah shivers, his whole body twitching and jerking with the motion. It’s gotta be the clothes, because his back is the worst, where the bare skin is pressed against the rough stone that feels like a hundred little icicles jabbing into him.
He can’t remember not being this cold.
-
Noah is jolted awake when the bus hits a bump, blinking confusedly for a moment before peeling his cheek away from where it has frozen against the window and sitting up. Really, he needs to stop falling asleep on the bus, especially when it gives him such weird dreams.
‘At least I woke up before my stop,’ he thinks, stumbling just a little from the haze of post-sleep as he steps off onto the sidewalk. From there, it’s just a couple more blocks until he reaches the tall apartment building he’s been living in for a couple of years, now.
Noah shakes his head a little when the door closes behind him, trying to dislodge some of the snow that has settled on his hat. He winds up taking the hat off, anyway, because it’s really too warm for it inside the building. Two flights of stairs warm him up even more, and by the time he’s twisting the key in the door handle for 304, his jacket has come off as well.
“Hey, babe,” he calls when he sees lights on and still-dripping boots on the mat. “How was work?”
“Fine,” Kurt calls back. “Bitchy coworkers, but that’s hardly anything new. You?”
“Not bad,” Noah says. Actually, twenty minutes ago he would’ve even called it a good day, but comparing it to the sight of Kurt appearing in the doorway and smiling as he crossed the room made it look pretty dull. He has just enough time to hang up his coat before Kurt reaches him and leans in to greet him with a kiss. “Kitchen smells good.”
Kurt rolls his eyes. “Oh, don’t give me ‘good’ when you know perfectly well you’ve been waiting for this moment ever since I mentioned I picked up the ingredients.” Yep. Guilty.
They have a pretty good system, actually, so whoever gets home first usually starts dinner. More often than not, it’s Noah, but he might have stalled a little today because Kurt said he had the stuff to make that chicken-tomato-potato soup that Noah can never remember the name for. If Kurt asks, though, he just had a few extra papers to look over.
“It smells…” Noah pauses, tilting his head back and adopting an expression of extreme concentration. “Really good. How’s that?”
“Close enough,” Kurt says. “It’s not like you’re going to be able to hold yourself back when you eat it. I swear, we are never allowed to serve this when we have company over, because every time you take the first bite you look like you’re having an orgasm and it’s a little bit obscene.”
“No way I-”
“I watch you during both, Noah. It’s the same face. Trust me.”
-
“Wake up.”
The voice isn’t really necessary, because he’s very suddenly awake from the moment the freezing water splashes over his face, sputtering and coughing and shaking harder than he thinks his body should be capable of at this point. He’s always cold, but it’s so much worse when he’s wet.
Always, though? Wasn’t he, just a minute ago…
No. Dreaming again. And already the details are slipping away from him. He remembers, he thinks, that he was warm, but he can’t recall what it feels like, can’t force his body to remember how to stop shaking.
Hands grip his arms and he’s moving now, but Noah just drops his head and sighs, because it’s not like it matters anymore.
It’s not like anything he does will stop him from ending up in that room again, the one with pain pain pain and oh, there it is again, how did he get here so fast and what’s that biting into his arm? Biting changes to burning changes to something blessedly soft before it stabs into him and there’s wet on his body again. Noah hates being wet.
Actually, this is nicer than usual; is it different? It’s wet, but it doesn’t make the cold worse, and it’s even kind of… Is this what warm felt like? He’s trying to remember, trying to call up a memory of the feeling so he can compare it and figure out if the wet thing is warm.
“You know, you could make this a lot easier on yourself if you’d just give us an answer,” says a voice from somewhere over his head.
“To what?” Noah tries to say, but his mouth doesn’t care about the message enough to actually move. He wants to tell them that he would answer, he would, but he just doesn’t know the question.
The wet thing isn’t as wet anymore, and it’s sticky and unpleasant against his skin, and the maybe-warm feeling (whatever it really was) isn’t really there anymore. He can’t remember if it was there in the first place, or if he made it up.
Pain. Oh, it’s back. He’s still in the room, right? The one he hates, because it always hurts. Ow.
He’s probably screaming. He wishes his head would start working right so he could tell.
-
“Wake up.”
He does, panting and sweating, nearly falling off the bed but pulled back at the last moment by a strong hand on his chest. “Wha-”
“Jesus, Noah, are you okay?” Concerned, blue eyes search through his, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” he says finally. “Yeah, I’m fine. Uh, just a bad dream, I guess.” One hand rubs absently at his chest where can still feel the echo of pain, the only thing he remembers from the dream. Well, that, and a weird sense that maybe he’s had that same dream before.
A short squeeze to his shoulder focuses his attention back from trying to remember the details, and then Kurt is pulling away. “Well, may as well get up, then,” Kurt says, throwing back the covers and letting in a burst off too-cold air. Noah shivers. “It’s a little early, especially after such a late night, but it would be nice to have some extra time in the morning, right?”
“Uh, right.” Late night? He doesn’t remember staying up so-
No, that’s not right. He doesn’t remember… much of anything, actually. He remembers the soup that Kurt made, eating it and glaring when Kurt laughed at his enthusiasm, all of that in very clear detail. It’s weirdly hazy after that, though.
What the hell? Did he… Did he black out or something? Did he get food poisoning from something in the chicken and lose half the night to a fever? Except, then Kurt probably would have been sick too.
“Hey, babe?” he says, when he’s worked himself up with the confusion and can’t manage to do anything more than pick at the eggs on his plate. “Was I sick last night or something?”
Kurt looks at him strangely. “Not that I know of. Were you? Why would you ask me?”
“It’s just…” He fidgets slightly in his chair. It shouldn’t be this big a deal, but there’s just something a little unsettling about this. “Last night’s pretty hazy, you know? Thought I might’ve had food poisoning.”
“Well, you didn’t throw up or anything; I would’ve noticed that. I suppose it’s possible you might’ve been less awake than I thought while we were watching television.”
“Oh. Yeah, maybe that was it.” Maybe he’d just spent most of the night half-conscious and it wasn’t enough to form solid memories. Sitting on the couch and watching a few shows does sound kind of familiar.
It’s enough to let him eat normally again and smile at Kurt when he heads off to work, resolving not to fall asleep on the bus this time.
-
He’s back in the cell again, away from that room and while that’s definitely a good thing, he can’t help but think about how much it doesn’t make sense, because he should remember how it happened. There should be more in his memory to separate the stabbing pain and finding himself lying on his back, finally alone, than a flash of something bright and warm and oddly, achingly blue.
Yes, it was definitely warm. Noah remembers the feeling, now, if just barely (and kind of wishes he didn’t, because it only makes reality feel colder).
The thing is, though, that those sorts of images (an arm wrapped comfortingly around his chest) only come when he’s asleep, which he couldn’t have been. Not that he’s never passed out in that room before, but there’s always been a very clear rule that it’s not up to him to decide when they’re done, so he’s just woken up again. He’s always around to witness a definitive end.
So the fact that he doesn’t, this time, is more than a little odd.
Maybe he’s reading too much into it. Maybe he happened to time it just right, and fell asleep seconds after they finished, and his tired mind just blurred out the end. Maybe they decided not to bother, this time, or got called away before they could finish. Maybe it was too hard to wake him up.
He should take it as a good thing and just leave it alone. It’s just that Noah’s not used to getting ‘good things’ and it makes him more than a little anxious. On the other hand, nothing else seems to be all that different. Just in case, because it’s not like he has anything better to do, he decides to go for a quick check, and heaves his body up as much as he can until he’s propped against the wall, ignoring the unpleasant tingle that shoots through his back.
It’s better to get this done fast, he knows, because he can already feel the draining effects of touching the wall. No one’s ever bothered to explain it to him, but he’s sure that whatever it is, it was done on purpose, in an effort to contain any stray power he might let off.
They shouldn’t have worried. Whatever small stores of magic he has left after this long are focused entirely on keeping him alive.
Noah glances around the tiny room, searching carefully through the dim light for anything that could have changed; there’s just not that much in there to change, and there isn’t anything new. And he can’t exactly see outside, but the sounds are still the same.
He’s being paranoid. Not that he doesn’t have the right to be, but it’s exhausting, and he needs to let it go and get some sleep (didn’t he just wake up?).
His eyelids are drooping already, but he makes sure to shove himself safely away from the wall before he lets them close, because sleeping in contact with that won’t lead to anything good.
Fandom: Glee
Characters (Pairings) : Kurt, Puck; (Kurt/Puck)
Genre: Supernatural, AU
Rating: PG - R
Warnings: Character Death (Day 7), Inexplicit Descriptions of Torture (31)
Spoilers: Blanket through season 2, to be safe
Word Count: 8,986
Challenge: 31 Days of Puckurt in January 2012
Summary: Puck pulls at the lights; Once every hundred years; A reading from a fortune teller; Two worlds overlap
Disclaimer: I don’t own Glee.
Author’s Note: This compilation is actually a grab bag. All drabbles are one-shots, and are completely separate. Day 1, ‘Lights,’ was inspired by the icon used for this entry, made by sweetiepebbles. Day 7, ‘Try, Try Again,’ was written from a prompt, based on the song A Thousand Years by Christina Perri. Day 30, ‘Fate,’ was written for my little brother, by request. Day 31, ‘Subjective Reality,’ will be expanded into a full story later on.
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Day 1- Lights
It’s one of Kurt’s favorite things to do.
No matter what else has happened on any given day, he never fails to smile when Noah tugs him down onto the bed, tucks his arm around him, and fills the room with lights.
-
When he was younger, Noah used to love watching his father play with the lights. Dad would gather the family in the living room (not often, remember, because secrets are hard to keep), draw the curtains, and smile wider than he ever did as he lifted a hand and called up streaks of color.
Mom sat next to him with a soft hand on his arm while her eyes tracked the patterns. Noah didn’t like to sit and watch; he liked to jump up and chase them around the room. Blue sparks would dart playfully back and forth, letting him get justthisclose before flitting away, and he’d have to jump behind the couch to follow.
November of third grade, he got sick. It wasn’t anything terrible, but it kept him in bed for more than a week, and his mom wouldn’t let him run around even when he started feeling better. Even when Dad took out the lights, he had to just sit on the couch and watch.
That wasn’t as much fun. He liked being close. But, well, the lights seemed to like him when they played. Maybe he could get them to come to him. Noah cupped his hands out in front of him and focused on a patch of green that was curling around one of the legs of the coffee table. After a long moment, the green slowly unraveled and floated over to him, settling quietly in the palm of his hand. Mom and Dad weren’t looking, laughing at the way the new baby was staring at everything with wide, confused eyes.
Noah grinned at the green dot in his hands. It was warm. As he watched, the dot started growing, slowly at first but then quicker, until it was so big that he couldn’t see his parents in front of him. Startled, he yelled for his dad, wondering where he’d gone. Large hands grasped onto his and slammed them closed together, shutting off the green ball and all the other lights in the room at the same time. Dad stared at him, hands shaking slightly against his.
After that, Dad took him aside to explain some things. He was special, Dad said, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody, and he really wasn’t allowed to play with lights unless Dad was watching him.
It took him a minute to figure out what that meant, but when he looked up at his dad and said, slowly, “You mean, I can make them too?” he got a smile in return.
-
Kurt’s eyes have been tracking a red streak back and forth across the room for a while by the time Noah notices where his gaze has stuck. The man grins at him, then he holds out a hand and the red flies over to rest in a small ball against his fingers. Carefully, Noah shifts over and lets the ball drop from his hand to Kurt’s. It’s warm, just for a few seconds, before the little dot jumps up again, moves forward to nudge against his cheek playfully, and then darts away to twist around a line of green in the air.
-
It wasn’t really about making them, his dad told him. They existed on their own, and they came when special people called. People like Noah.
He taught Noah how to do it, too. It took a few tries, and the first time Noah reached out and pulled and a little green light came through, it disappeared just a moment later, but it felt amazing.
When he got a little better at it, and the lights stuck around for more than a few seconds, he started to understand why his dad always stood next to him with a hand on his shoulder or his arm when they did this. Sometimes he’d feel a tug in the base of his stomach. Sometimes he wanted to go with the colors as they left. Dad explained about grounding, about why it was important to have a solid link to this world when you touched another, and he understood.
He pulled at the lights, but the lights pulled back.
-
Kurt feels the hand squeeze tight against him and he snuggles further into the arm around his shoulders, warmer even than the light felt at his fingertips.
-
Mom and Dad argued more than they used to, and Dad didn’t gather them in the living room very often anymore. That was okay, though, because even if he didn’t want to do it himself, he always came and helped Noah pull out his own lights when asked.
One day, his dad walked out after a fight, grabbing a coat on his way out the door. He was going for a walk, he said, to clear his head.
He never came back.
Mom got sad. Her girlfriends came over and made her tea and listen to her cry about how her husband had left her, really left her this time. Even though Noah tried to help by doing his homework (even though fifth grade was hard and he could’ve used help with some of it) and keeping Sarah quiet, he didn’t believe her.
See, Dad wouldn’t have left. He wasn’t as happy as he used to be, yeah, but Noah knew he wouldn’t have walked out. He was too worried about leaving Noah alone with the lights to just run away and never come back. Maybe, though, he forgot that you weren’t supposed to be alone for a few minutes, because sometimes you forgot things when you were angry.
Noah didn’t think Dad left. Noah thought he got pulled.
-
Kurt tries to turn his eyes away from the swooping colors every so often to glance at Noah’s face, just to keep track. Sometimes, when they do this, Noah’s mouth gets tight and his eyes darken, and Kurt has to call his name to tug him away from whatever he’s thinking about that makes him look so uncertain.
Today hasn’t been one of those days so far, but Kurt watches anyway, just in case.
-
A month after his dad vanished, Noah sat alone in his bedroom, reached out a hand and pulled. He knew it was a bad idea, but Mom didn’t want to talk about the lights anymore, so he didn’t have anyone to make him not alone.
Splotches of pink and green had just begun forming in the air over his head before he started getting scared, and he pushed them away harshly before they could try to tug at him. He sat shaking in the dark and missed his dad.
In sixth grade, he went to school as Puck, and tried to forget about the lights. Sports were a good distraction, especially when he was too tired after practice to bother thinking about it anyway.
He grew up slowly, then suddenly much quicker because Quinn was pregnant and the baby was his and he had to worry about people who weren’t himself or his mom or his sister. Before he signed any papers, he got to hold Beth for a few minutes, alone. Eyes darting around to make sure no one was looking, he raised a careful hand and called up a little dot of light that he hadn’t seen in years. He had to be sure.
The orb ventured curiously out from the palm of his hand and poked around Beth for a few moments, until the girl woke up and grasped blindly in the air. The light startled away from her reaching hands, zooming back to the safety of Puck’s fingers. It circled around them a few times before fading away, and Puck sighed in relief. The lights had always liked him, but they didn’t like her, just as they’d never seemed to appreciate it when Sarah had reached out in the same way. Beth would be fine.
With the knowledge that she wouldn’t need to know anything that only he could teach her, Puck said goodbye to his daughter. He shouldn’t have been surprised to find that even after that, his list of people he had to worry about kept on growing.
-
“You okay?”
How can he not be, when he’s surrounded by light? And, more importantly, by Noah.
He knows Noah is asking about what happened earlier today, but it’s hard to think about that or anything else just now. Sitting here, Kurt feels lighter than he has in weeks, and he mumbles an assurance to Noah as he sinks a little deeper into his side.
-
Eventually, Puck decided to say ‘fuck it’ to the fear biting at the back of his mind. That determination carried him all the way across the choir room and close enough to lean in and kiss Kurt Hummel.
At home, he let the memories (of soft lips pressing back against his and bright eyes crinkled by a smile) tie him to the earth when he called up just a single streak of light to swirl around the room, and felt better than he had in a very long time.
-
Purple and orange and green and yellow and red and pink and blue and colors Kurt doesn’t know the names for dance around the room.
-
“I want to show you something,” Noah said, a year and a half after he started calling Kurt his boyfriend. His dad always told him to keep this a secret, but rules are made to have exceptions. When Kurt’s jaw drops at the explosion of light that Noah hasn’t been able to call up in years and his fingers clench tightly around the hand they hold instead of pulling away in fear, Noah’s sure he picked right.
-
Not that he wasn’t totally dumbstruck the first time he saw it, but looking back, Kurt thinks it shouldn’t be too surprising. He’s always known that Noah is amazing.
-
He told Kurt once that he couldn’t do this without him, but he could tell Kurt didn’t believe him.
Still doesn’t, really, but Noah doesn’t want to worry him by explaining, so he keeps insisting and Kurt keeps rolling his eyes and they find their own kind of balance.
-
The lights are beautiful, but at some point Kurt decides he’s more interested in looking at Noah than the rainbow of colors that dart around the room. He tugs at Noah’s hand and drags him over to catch his mouth, smiling at the enthusiastic response.
The lights fade away, but Kurt eyes are closed and he doesn’t even notice, too caught up in the way it feels when Noah’s fingers run through his hair and curl around his hip.
-
Kurt keeps him grounded.
-
Noah sets him free.
---
Day 7- Try, Try Again (R)
1009 A.D.
They should have been more careful.
It’s what everyone says after things crash down around them. That doesn’t make it untrue.
They’d figured it was worth it. So what if their love was against the law? It felt much too right for anything bad to actually happen. Felt immortal.
Two months.
They got two months and then they got caught, and then they got separate jail cells and death sentences, and he hasn’t seen him in what he figures is a week.
Thank God he’s going first. It’s selfish, but he can’t watch that. He can’t.
-
It’s fucked up, is what it is.
Can’t he dream about normal shit? Like forgetting his clothes or learning how to fly or boobs? But, no, instead he has to dream about death.
Not just death, Puck reminds himself, being put to death and waiting around for a week in a cell before that, all because he got caught fucking a dude. Seriously, what the hell?
He’s heard about how dreams are supposed to mean things; unconscious desires or something like that. He’d like to go on record saying there is no way he has any desire to screw a guy. He can’t even remember much about that part, really, so it probably doesn’t mean anything.
It’s not like he actually messed around with a guy in the dream, just kinda knew that he had, at some point. He felt all weird about it, too; sort of warm and happy when he thought about it, but also sad. Well, the sad part might’ve been because he was apparently about to die.
Which, by the way, he has no secret desire to die, either. So the dream was just wrong about everything.
Fuck it, he’s writing this off as a fluke. Too much cold pizza the night before or something like that.
It’s creepy that he can’t stop thinking about it though, even when he’s tossing Hummel in the dumpster, which is usually a pretty good distraction. He just feels how soft Hummel’s skin is when he grazes the guy’s hand by accident and starts wondering whether the person he had not-really-but-sort-of-off-screen-dream-sex with had soft skin too.
It was the soft skin and the sex that got him in such deep shit in his dream, he remembers, and he takes a minute to feel sorry for the kid he just tossed into yesterday’s spaghetti sauce. Yeah, he’s a little bitch who thinks he’s better than everyone else at this school, but it sucks that people are gonna hate on him ‘cause he likes dudes. Not that they’ll execute him for it like Puck’s dream, because that shit’s outdated by like a thousand years, but he knows most of the guys are pushing him into lockers because of his status as ‘fag.’ It kinda sucks.
It’s not really his problem, though.
-
1519
“You’ve done what you can,” he says finally. “Please, leave my friend and me in peace.”
As the door closes after the doctor, there is a chuckle that breaks almost instantly into a harsh cough.
“’Your friend,’” repeats the man on the bed, as soon as he gathers enough air in his lungs to form the words. “I should hope I’m more than that, after everything.”
“Hush,” he replies. He strokes his thumb over the back of the limp hand in a steady rhythm, timed against the shallow breaths that struggle to move through the man’s chest. “You’re meant to be resting.”
“I think… it’s a little late for that.”
He nods, catches himself, shakes his head, tries to hold in the burning at the edges of his eyes. Doing so, he forgets to repress certain other urges, and lets out a short, wet cough before he can think to stop himself. The dark eyes of the man on the bed, previously half-closed from exhaustion, grow wide.
“You- I gave you¬-”
“No,” he soothes quickly. “You haven’t; I promise. The air is dry in here.”
It’s a lie, but there are only a few hours left in which the man has to believe it.
-
He thinks it must have something to do with being the only gay boy in Lima, Ohio. Repression and all that.
That doesn’t explain why the dream is less sex and more tragedy, but he’s always had a flair for the dramatic. Maybe his brain would rather imagine an epic, whirlwind romance that burns out too fast than bodies rolling naked and sweaty on a bed without context. Stupid brain.
It gets a little weird when he finds little ways to connect the dream to real life, but he mostly tries to ignore that. Just because Puck’s brown eyes remind him strangely of the man on the old-fashioned bed, dying of some disease doctors probably cured a couple hundred years later, doesn’t mean he has to do anything about it other than admit the fact that they really are a rather gorgeous shade.
Even if he wanted to go a bit further with that information, he’s aware that it would be an incredibly bad idea. His crush on Finn screwed with the club’s dynamics enough last year, and coming off of that only to move onto the next painfully straight boy in the group would be nothing short of pathetic.
It’s hard not to think about it at least a little, though.
-
1205
His lips are dry and cracked as he presses them against the other man’s forehead, but he forces them to curve into a smile when he sees dark eyelashes flutter open.
“Hello,” the man says with a hoarse voice and a disbelieving stare.
He understands. He didn’t expect to wake up again, either.
“Hello,” he replies. It’s all he can do, really. That, and lock his arm just a little tighter where it lies around the man’s waist.
“Mm,” hums the man, letting his eyes sink closed before opening them again with a jolt. “I love you.” It’s nice that his sentences are simple now. Even if it’s for a terrible reason, he’s glad the man has stopped trying to apologize, like it was all his decision, his fault.
Personally, he blames the people who beat them and tossed them out, and maybe himself for being too weak to look for water.
“Love you too.” Even under the too-hot sun, with dried blood trying to stick his fingers together and desperate thirst biting at his throat.
They’ve barely said anything, but it’s already time to close his eyes again. He shifts his body as much as he can - which isn’t much - to curl a little closer to the man lying beside him.
They were lucky to wake up this time. It probably won’t happen again.
-
Puck is learning to connect the dreams.
They’re all incredibly different, so it took him a while at first, but now he knows the common factors.
Love. Death. Bright blue eyes.
The eyes are weird. He thinks maybe they weren’t really blue every time (well, that’s stupid, they weren’t really anything because none of this is real, but whatever), and maybe his mind is just inserting the color, because there’s no way it’s natural even when the man’s skin is such a deep, dark brown.
Skin color changes. Time, place, everything about the setting always changes. Names would probably change too, only there never are any names. It’s almost like it’s a completely different man every time, except something keeps telling him they’re all the same. And they’re always young.
Officially, Puck’s still pretty freaked out by these dreams, but that’s mostly because of the part where he’s always about to die in them. He’s pretty much come to terms with the part where he’s in love with a guy (which is also the part that makes it harder to be freaked out, but he tries his best, because seriously, a dream about lying bleeding on the ground should not be comforting).
The nice thing is that, because he’s gotten so used to the dreams, making the leap to liking a guy in real life is just that much easier. Of course, that guy happens to have a boyfriend, so that’s unfortunate, but there’s still another few months left before Kurt heads off to New York. If he spends a little too much of his time hanging around and waiting for the boyfriend to screw it up, no one’s really gonna notice.
Those dreams, though. He wonders sometimes whether they might know something he doesn’t.
-
1918
There are all sorts of policies against it, but the soldiers stuffed into the trenches along with them don’t seem to have the energy to care about that at this point. Hell, they don’t even seem to notice.
He thinks for the millionth time that it’s such a shame they met this way, because he’d be willing to bet the boy before him would look amazing in clothes other than this uniform, the only thing he’s ever seen him in. Ah, well. Better to meet in this unfortunate way, he figures, than not at all.
They managed to find each other even in the early days, when they were mutually frightened and overwhelmed by the reality of the war. They’d both skirted the age requirements, and really, they hadn’t been prepared for the results.
“When we’re done with this shit,” the boy tells him, pulling him tight against his side, “we should go somewhere nice. You know, sunny, not dirty, and definitely fresh air.” It’s a very pretty lie.
“Did you have anywhere in mind?” They’ve gotten their orders. Tomorrow morning, the arms holding him are going to be holding a machine gun when they jump over the edge and out onto flat ground. The average survival time for a man with a machine gun is about fifteen seconds.
“The beach, maybe.” The boy will die. He’ll be standing just behind him when it happens.
“That sounds nice.” He’ll pick up the dropped gun.
“Okay, then.” The boy leans down and kisses him firmly, lingering as long as he can before pulling away and bringing up another possible destination.
It’s bizarrely reassuring, the certainty that they’re going to die tomorrow.
-
He hasn’t talked to Puck about the dreams.
It’s weird, because in general, they’re trying to be the sort of boyfriends who don’t hide things from each other (that’s part of what screwed up his last relationship so badly), but the idea of talking about this just makes him feel… nervous.
He knows Puck’s eyes well enough to recognize them in each of the scenes that play through his mind at night. It’s probably just a case of projection: equating the love he feels in the dreams with the way he loves Puck and then unconsciously changing the eyes to match.
The thing is, Kurt’s been having dreams for a while now, and they’re starting to repeat. Not exact scenes, always - though that does happen - but extra little bits that feel like they’re almost the same as some of the other scenes, though not quite. Like shaking hands with that soldier (the same one he dies with in the trenches of what must be World War I) on a train, the boy’s face fresh and clean like he’s never seen before.
It scares him. It makes them feel that much more real.
Kurt doesn’t acknowledge that, though. He’s never believed in the kinds of things that would be necessary for those scenes to have actually happened, so he knows they couldn’t have, really. Telling Puck would just mean admitting he’s been tricked into thinking about things that couldn’t possibly be true. He ignores the little part of his brain that whispers that he’s scared of what would happen if he said something and Puck told him he’d dreamed of the same thing in reverse.
He ignores it, and tightens his grip on Puck’s hand where it rests between the front seats of the car. Their eyes flick sideways to meet just for a second, because yeah, he needs a little reassurance right now, but he’s still got the common sense to know that you don’t take your eyes off the road. Even the quick glimpse of warm, brown eyes makes him feel a little better though, because these are the real eyes, the ones he gets every day, not the ones the haunt him in dreams.
Then the car turns a corner, and the world explodes around them.
-
2012
It’s just the barest brush of consciousness; a hesitant grasp on the world. Very hesitant, if the muted words the doctors are yelling to each other are correct. ‘Hemorrhage’ and ‘pressure dropping’ and ‘tachycardic.’ None of those sound like good things.
But nothing sounds worse than the silence he finds in place of a heartbeat when he goes searching in the body next to him. There’s a little bit of logic biting at him, telling him he shouldn’t be able to hear a heart from this far away, but he snipes back that yes, right now, in this state, he should. He doesn’t.
It’s the scariest thing he’s ever (not) heard in his life, which makes it hard to care about the doctors working around him. They should have worked harder to help them both.
There aren’t even any doctors around the other body, now. They’ve given up, abandoning it completely to lie there cold while they try to save him instead. It’s so wrong. It feels like a dream.
‘I’m sorry,’ a familiar voice whispers in his ear, and he startles at the sound. ‘Couldn’t do it. Sorry.’ The doctors are yelling louder now. ‘Wanna ditch this one and come with me?’ He does. He wants to follow that voice wherever it cares to take him. ‘We’ll try again; get it right this time.’
He grabs the hand that appears before him and holds it tight, and lets go of everything else.
-
2110
As soon as he hears his mother calling, he’s out the door with barely a pause to grab his shoes. It’s a good thing it’s a nice day, or he’d have to waste time looking for a jacket, and then he might get caught and forced into chores. Ugh.
Now he has a whole day in front of him with nothing to do. He could go into one of the cities, maybe; it’s not like they’re more that a quick shuttle ride away. Or he could-
“Oof!”
“Ow! Geez, sorry, didn’t see you.” No one ever does. He’s still waiting for that growth spurt.
He looks up (about a foot and a half up) at the boy who ran into him, and pauses, mouth slightly open.
“Uh, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He snaps his mouth closed. “Fine, just… I think that hit might’ve rattled something, maybe.” He gives the boy a weak smile. What else is he supposed to say? ‘Your eyes look really familiar and I got distracted?’ Yeah, no. “You just moved in down the street, right?” Maybe that’s why he looks familiar.
“Yes. Number 117,” the boy says. “I had to escape the house for a while, though. We’re still unpacking and my parents are going crazy about it.”
“My parents are always crazy,” he says, grinning. “I’m running out for the day. Wanna come with?” He says it before he even thinks about saying it. He doesn’t even know this guy.
The boy’s eyes light up, though, and they’re really pretty eyes, so he decides he’s okay with the decision his mouth made for him. “Really?” the boy says. “That would be awesome.”
“Yeah, sure. I figured maybe I’d head up to the city or something. You know, one of the close ones.”
“New York?” the boy suggests. “I went down there a few times when we lived up in Canada, but it’s so much closer from here.”
“Sure,” he says. That’s usually his favorite place to go, anyway. He’s probably going to like the way this boy thinks. “C’mon, there’s a station just a few streets over this way.”
He takes a chance and grabs at the boy’s hand to pull him around and down the street, and the boy looks startled at the move, but smiles after a moment and tightens his fingers. The grip is firm and warm, and he’s already weirded himself out enough by calling a stranger’s eyes familiar and kind-of-sort-of hitting on him like two seconds after they met, but…
“By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”
---
Day 30- Fate
Living where they do, they don’t get a whole lot of fairs coming through their area very often. At least, not close enough to make it anything less than a big, day-long thing of driving out there and seeing everything, and Puck gets bored with this stuff too quickly for that. So maybe he’ll go for a couple of hours, because there’s finally one close-by and most of the Glee Club is heading over there, and then he’ll take off.
The decision to humor Rachel, therefore, is stupid, because it completely blows his plan.
It’s just that she looked really sad and pathetic after that phone call from Finn (he’s impressed she even understood his voice, actually, considering how bad of a cold Finn’s stuck in bed with, the cold Puck just narrowly avoided), left alone because everyone else had already split off into groups, and… He probably should’ve just walked away, except then he might’ve ended up trailing after Kurt and that would’ve been even lamer than what he’s doing right now, with is pretty damn lame.
Because now she’s leading him enthusiastically by the arm, checking out all the little stalls instead of anything even remotely interesting, and he’s already leaning on his time limit with no sign of her letting up anytime soon.
He’s considering telling her he isn’t feeling well - which is kinda true; he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because Sarah had some of her friends over and they giggled way past midnight and gave him a headache - and breaking off to go home and get some sleep, when she pulls him toward a purple tent with a big, fancy sign out front advertising: ‘Fortune Telling!’
It’s gimmicky as hell, really, and it’s not like he’d be more interested if it weren’t, but this lady plays up every stereotype she can, down to the crystal ball on the table and incense that makes the back of his throat burn with a cough and a black cat purring in the corner. Actually, aren’t cats supposed to be for witches, not gypsies?
Whatever. As long as it’s not looking for any attention.
Rachel’s already all giggly about it - “Come on, Noah, it’ll be fun!” - so he takes what luck he can get when the lady tells them there are larger packages, but they can get just one aspect read off their palm - life, love, fortune, whatever else - for just three dollars. So at least it’s cheap.
Unsurprisingly (or maybe surprisingly, because Puck kind of thought she would have asked about her career), Rachel picks love, and offers her right hand to the woman who tells them to call her Esther.
“Oh, you’ve got a good one, don’t you?” Esther says, throwing out a wink as she inspects Rachel’s palm. “No, no, of course I don’t mean that one,” she continues when Rachel glances uncertainly over in Puck’s direction and opens her mouth to correct the idea. “He couldn’t make it today, yes?”
“He’s sick,” Rachel says, looking relieved. Puck’s pretty damn relieved, too; not that it would’ve mattered if Esther hadn’t corrected herself, because he’s pretty sure they’ve already been there, tried that, and tossed it straight into the friend zone.
“Nothing too serious, I hope.”
“Just a cold,” Rachel assures her.
“Well, you hang onto that one for a while, now,” Esther says. “I like the places your love line is going. So much more hopeful than some of the others I get in here.”
Rachel beams.
There’s a little more after that, some vague assertions of happiness with a man who loves her, though Esther won’t say straight out whether that man is Finn or not (“Best to leave some mysteries for your own discovery,” which Puck figures is her way of not committing to anything specific that might not come true). Right at the end, she gives Rachel’s hand a little squeeze and says, “Broadway romance, dear,” with a smile that Puck takes as absolute proof that she’s just saying what people want to hear.
Which he doesn’t have a problem with, really, since it makes Rachel happy and keeps her busy for a few minutes while the cat somehow makes its way into Puck’s lap and demands to be petted. He kicks it off (gently) when Rachel stands up, though, and turns to leave only to be stopped when Rachel calls out, “Aren’t you going to do it, too?”
It’s hard, and frankly not worth it, to argue with that much enthusiasm, so he figures, what the hell, and fishes three bucks out of his pocket. At Rachel’s insistence, he holds out his hand for the love reading.
Esther has barely even glanced at him before she says, “Oh, but you’re in love, too!”
He’s pretty impressed with himself, really, for keeping a straight face.
“Where is he? Not sick too, I hope?”
That one, he can’t help but choke at. Like, literally choke, and that damn incense is getting at his throat again, because he coughs up the thick air for long enough that one of them has to pass him a bottle of water to drink before he can stop. When he’s finally breathing properly again, he glances over at Rachel, staring wide-eyed back at him, and thinks, ‘oh, hell.’
“Noah?” she starts, and doesn’t seem to know where to go from there.
Esther just keeps apologizing. “I’m so sorry; I should have read further before I said anything. I thought she would have known!”
“It’s fine,” he says, waving her off, even though it sort of isn’t. He’s actually been kind of subtle about all the staring at Kurt’s ass he’s done lately and if there’s one thing that’s definitely going to blow his cover, it’s Rachel Berry and her complete inability to keep a secret. Damnit. Just… damnit. Did he give off a vibe or something? Does ‘Noah Puckerman: recently bi-curious’ show up just as bright and obnoxious as the sign on her tent?
“Let me finish reading your palm, dear,” she urges, and she does seem honestly sorry. “I’ll find you some good news.”
“Don’t think you will,” he says, but hands his palm over anyway, because at this point, why not? “It’s not gonna work out.” Not while he’s still being such a freaking coward about it, anyway.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Esther scolds. She takes his hand in hers and bends over a little to look deeply, tracing the lines with her fingers. Her eyebrows furrow together and she retraces the same lines, humming distractedly to herself.
Seriously, Puck would just like to get this thing over with so he can go back outside away from the incense and try to get Rachel to forget what she heard (yeah, good luck). “Um, so what’s on there?” he says finally, because she didn’t take this long with Rachel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wincing a little like she really is sorry to be telling him this right now. “You were right.”
“About what?”
“It’s not going to work out.” She shakes her head sadly and gives his hand a little pat before pushing it back toward him.
“Wait…” he says slowly, thrown off by the answer, because isn’t the whole point of these things supposed to be telling the person what they want to hear? “Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And, that’s it? Nothing else? You’re not gonna tell me about how I’ll find someone else in a couple years or something?” Rachel got long-term, if vague, predictions, and he gets… this?
“This feels more important to you right now than the future would,” Esther says gently, not meeting his eyes.
“Bullshit.” For three bucks, he got outed to a girl who’s never going to be able to keep it a secret, along with a stunning rejection of any chances he might have with Kurt Hummel. Waste of fucking money.
And yeah, okay, it stings a little that she told him it’s never going to work out, even though he mostly already knew that, but she’s supposed to be all reassuring and mysterious and that was just exactly the opposite.
He storms out of the tent, coughing out the last bits of that incense clinging to his lungs (or maybe he’s getting Finn’s cold, after all) as soon as he hits fresh air.
“Noah,” he hears, soft but sure and somewhere around his elbow.
“What?” he snaps, and instantly feels guilty for it.
“Come on,” Rachel says, pulling gently on his arm. “Let’s go find the others.” Because he can’t really think of anything else to do right now, he follows her.
They find people they know somewhere among the stalls selling food, where Kurt and Mike are looking on in awe as Tina demolishes one of those huge, overflowing plates of curly fries all by herself. Pretty damn impressive, actually. Mike looks so proud.
Puck lets Rachel buy him an ice cream out of some weird guilt thing for dragging him into that tent (must be some pretty impressive guilt for her to offer something non-vegan), and she grabs some fried vegetable thing before they weave their way back through the crowd and squeeze into the table next to their friends.
It gets easier after that, because Puck can sink into the background of the conversation with very little effort, and he just listens to them talk. Once in a while, Rachel will catch his eye and shoot meaningful looks in Kurt’s direction, and he’s not sure whether that means she’s caught on to exactly who was the ‘he’ that Esther mentioned or whether she just wants him to talk to someone gay (if it’s that one, he supposes he should be grateful she’s not offering up her dads).
And, well, it’s not like he needs all that much encouragement to look at Kurt, even if it feels kinda crappy right now, with the words ‘I’m sorry; you were right’ ringing in his head.
What does she know about them, anyway? Nothing. He knows what fortune tellers do, knows how they can take a look at you and figure out enough to construct a vague prediction that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is close enough to make the person happy. So she decided to fuck with his head, so what? He’s not sure what he did to deserve it, ‘cause he was nice enough and paid her three dollars and even pet the damn cat when it jumped onto his lap, but it’s still just words she decided to throw at him.
Except, more and more, he’s getting the overwhelming urge to prove her wrong.
An hour ago, he completely agreed there was pretty much no chance he could ever really do anything about all these weird feelings that sprang up (out of fucking nowhere, too), but that was just him, accepting the obvious. This is her, telling him he can’t do something, and Puck’s never been good at ignoring that.
He’s never been good at impulse control either, he thinks a second later, when his lips are pressed against those of a very surprised Kurt Hummel and water is splashing over his feet from the bottle Kurt just dropped.
After a few seconds, he pulls back, thinking, ‘take that’ and also ‘shit shit shit’ but nothing else because he doesn’t have time for it before Kurt tugs him right back in and basically tries to give the entire homophobic town of Lima a collective heart attack from the way he’s kissing Puck like it’s his only goal in life. And Puck is totally down with that.
At some point, though, he does need air, so he breaks away to grin widely at Kurt, who grins right back, one hand still resting gently at the back of his neck. ‘Oh yeah,’ he thinks. ‘Screw Esther; we’re gonna be fucking awesome.’ Except he kinda has to ruin the moment, just a little, when he feels the scratch in the back of his throat again and has to lean to the side to cough harshly.
Damn, he’s definitely getting that cold from Finn, and he probably just gave it to Kurt, too, if the guy didn’t already have it from living with the source.
“Puck, are you okay?” Kurt says when he finally stops coughing.
“Fine. Think I might’ve gotten you sick, though, but it’s your brother’s fault, really.”
Kurt gives him an odd look and points to the hand he used to cover his mouth. Puck glances down at it to find a small smear of red along one finger. Huh.
He raises the hand back to his mouth and runs a finger along his lip, coming away with a little more blood. He wasn’t bleeding a minute ago.
“Damn, Kurt,” he says, smirking as he realizes what must have happened. “Jumping right into that stuff already?”
Eyes widening, Kurt protests. “I didn’t bite you! Not hard enough to draw blood, anyway,” he corrects, a little closer to mumbling, and Puck just keeps on smirking at him, because it’s seriously fun to see Kurt embarrassed and it’s not like Puck minds if he likes biting. He didn’t even feel it, actually.
He winds up coughing one more time for good measure (yeah, he’s gonna get Kurt sick) and comes back with a little more blood, and damn, how hard did Kurt bite him, anyway? It’s kinda giving him some ideas, actually, and he’s cool with that.
Mike, finally done with his shocked face, gives him a bottle of water to rinse his mouth out, and then Puck loops an arm around Kurt’s shoulders and heads off because probably the least important but still awesome side effect of this is that he’s got someone to walk around with who will actually want to do interesting stuff, now.
When they pass by the bright purple tent, he doesn’t even look at it, because he’s so done with that woman and her stupid predictions. Look how this one turned out for her. Look how it turned out for him. He’s gonna spend the day hanging out and also making out with Kurt fucking Hummel, and then he’s going to figure out how to make that happen more days then not for the next, like, ever.
And then he’s probably going to go home and take an aspirin because those girls seriously did a number on his head last night, but after that, yeah, this is totally gonna be awesome.
---
Day 31- Subjective Reality (R)
The weirdest thing, the part Noah keeps focusing on, is how he figured (not that he’d thought about it that much, but yeah, once or twice it got mentioned and he wondered) he’d get used to some of the bad stuff. He hasn’t, though. It’s weird.
Like, the cold, for example. People are supposed to be able to adapt, right? Leave a guy in the middle of the Artic or whatever and, assuming he survives long enough, his body will get used to the temperature, at least enough so he can live there without feeling like he’s going to freeze in place the next time he stops moving. That’s supposed to be a thing.
Apparently it isn’t, though, at least not for him. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the clothes for it, because even a guy who’s adapted still needs a parka or something so he doesn’t freeze into a block of ice. Noah shivers, his whole body twitching and jerking with the motion. It’s gotta be the clothes, because his back is the worst, where the bare skin is pressed against the rough stone that feels like a hundred little icicles jabbing into him.
He can’t remember not being this cold.
-
Noah is jolted awake when the bus hits a bump, blinking confusedly for a moment before peeling his cheek away from where it has frozen against the window and sitting up. Really, he needs to stop falling asleep on the bus, especially when it gives him such weird dreams.
‘At least I woke up before my stop,’ he thinks, stumbling just a little from the haze of post-sleep as he steps off onto the sidewalk. From there, it’s just a couple more blocks until he reaches the tall apartment building he’s been living in for a couple of years, now.
Noah shakes his head a little when the door closes behind him, trying to dislodge some of the snow that has settled on his hat. He winds up taking the hat off, anyway, because it’s really too warm for it inside the building. Two flights of stairs warm him up even more, and by the time he’s twisting the key in the door handle for 304, his jacket has come off as well.
“Hey, babe,” he calls when he sees lights on and still-dripping boots on the mat. “How was work?”
“Fine,” Kurt calls back. “Bitchy coworkers, but that’s hardly anything new. You?”
“Not bad,” Noah says. Actually, twenty minutes ago he would’ve even called it a good day, but comparing it to the sight of Kurt appearing in the doorway and smiling as he crossed the room made it look pretty dull. He has just enough time to hang up his coat before Kurt reaches him and leans in to greet him with a kiss. “Kitchen smells good.”
Kurt rolls his eyes. “Oh, don’t give me ‘good’ when you know perfectly well you’ve been waiting for this moment ever since I mentioned I picked up the ingredients.” Yep. Guilty.
They have a pretty good system, actually, so whoever gets home first usually starts dinner. More often than not, it’s Noah, but he might have stalled a little today because Kurt said he had the stuff to make that chicken-tomato-potato soup that Noah can never remember the name for. If Kurt asks, though, he just had a few extra papers to look over.
“It smells…” Noah pauses, tilting his head back and adopting an expression of extreme concentration. “Really good. How’s that?”
“Close enough,” Kurt says. “It’s not like you’re going to be able to hold yourself back when you eat it. I swear, we are never allowed to serve this when we have company over, because every time you take the first bite you look like you’re having an orgasm and it’s a little bit obscene.”
“No way I-”
“I watch you during both, Noah. It’s the same face. Trust me.”
-
“Wake up.”
The voice isn’t really necessary, because he’s very suddenly awake from the moment the freezing water splashes over his face, sputtering and coughing and shaking harder than he thinks his body should be capable of at this point. He’s always cold, but it’s so much worse when he’s wet.
Always, though? Wasn’t he, just a minute ago…
No. Dreaming again. And already the details are slipping away from him. He remembers, he thinks, that he was warm, but he can’t recall what it feels like, can’t force his body to remember how to stop shaking.
Hands grip his arms and he’s moving now, but Noah just drops his head and sighs, because it’s not like it matters anymore.
It’s not like anything he does will stop him from ending up in that room again, the one with pain pain pain and oh, there it is again, how did he get here so fast and what’s that biting into his arm? Biting changes to burning changes to something blessedly soft before it stabs into him and there’s wet on his body again. Noah hates being wet.
Actually, this is nicer than usual; is it different? It’s wet, but it doesn’t make the cold worse, and it’s even kind of… Is this what warm felt like? He’s trying to remember, trying to call up a memory of the feeling so he can compare it and figure out if the wet thing is warm.
“You know, you could make this a lot easier on yourself if you’d just give us an answer,” says a voice from somewhere over his head.
“To what?” Noah tries to say, but his mouth doesn’t care about the message enough to actually move. He wants to tell them that he would answer, he would, but he just doesn’t know the question.
The wet thing isn’t as wet anymore, and it’s sticky and unpleasant against his skin, and the maybe-warm feeling (whatever it really was) isn’t really there anymore. He can’t remember if it was there in the first place, or if he made it up.
Pain. Oh, it’s back. He’s still in the room, right? The one he hates, because it always hurts. Ow.
He’s probably screaming. He wishes his head would start working right so he could tell.
-
“Wake up.”
He does, panting and sweating, nearly falling off the bed but pulled back at the last moment by a strong hand on his chest. “Wha-”
“Jesus, Noah, are you okay?” Concerned, blue eyes search through his, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” he says finally. “Yeah, I’m fine. Uh, just a bad dream, I guess.” One hand rubs absently at his chest where can still feel the echo of pain, the only thing he remembers from the dream. Well, that, and a weird sense that maybe he’s had that same dream before.
A short squeeze to his shoulder focuses his attention back from trying to remember the details, and then Kurt is pulling away. “Well, may as well get up, then,” Kurt says, throwing back the covers and letting in a burst off too-cold air. Noah shivers. “It’s a little early, especially after such a late night, but it would be nice to have some extra time in the morning, right?”
“Uh, right.” Late night? He doesn’t remember staying up so-
No, that’s not right. He doesn’t remember… much of anything, actually. He remembers the soup that Kurt made, eating it and glaring when Kurt laughed at his enthusiasm, all of that in very clear detail. It’s weirdly hazy after that, though.
What the hell? Did he… Did he black out or something? Did he get food poisoning from something in the chicken and lose half the night to a fever? Except, then Kurt probably would have been sick too.
“Hey, babe?” he says, when he’s worked himself up with the confusion and can’t manage to do anything more than pick at the eggs on his plate. “Was I sick last night or something?”
Kurt looks at him strangely. “Not that I know of. Were you? Why would you ask me?”
“It’s just…” He fidgets slightly in his chair. It shouldn’t be this big a deal, but there’s just something a little unsettling about this. “Last night’s pretty hazy, you know? Thought I might’ve had food poisoning.”
“Well, you didn’t throw up or anything; I would’ve noticed that. I suppose it’s possible you might’ve been less awake than I thought while we were watching television.”
“Oh. Yeah, maybe that was it.” Maybe he’d just spent most of the night half-conscious and it wasn’t enough to form solid memories. Sitting on the couch and watching a few shows does sound kind of familiar.
It’s enough to let him eat normally again and smile at Kurt when he heads off to work, resolving not to fall asleep on the bus this time.
-
He’s back in the cell again, away from that room and while that’s definitely a good thing, he can’t help but think about how much it doesn’t make sense, because he should remember how it happened. There should be more in his memory to separate the stabbing pain and finding himself lying on his back, finally alone, than a flash of something bright and warm and oddly, achingly blue.
Yes, it was definitely warm. Noah remembers the feeling, now, if just barely (and kind of wishes he didn’t, because it only makes reality feel colder).
The thing is, though, that those sorts of images (an arm wrapped comfortingly around his chest) only come when he’s asleep, which he couldn’t have been. Not that he’s never passed out in that room before, but there’s always been a very clear rule that it’s not up to him to decide when they’re done, so he’s just woken up again. He’s always around to witness a definitive end.
So the fact that he doesn’t, this time, is more than a little odd.
Maybe he’s reading too much into it. Maybe he happened to time it just right, and fell asleep seconds after they finished, and his tired mind just blurred out the end. Maybe they decided not to bother, this time, or got called away before they could finish. Maybe it was too hard to wake him up.
He should take it as a good thing and just leave it alone. It’s just that Noah’s not used to getting ‘good things’ and it makes him more than a little anxious. On the other hand, nothing else seems to be all that different. Just in case, because it’s not like he has anything better to do, he decides to go for a quick check, and heaves his body up as much as he can until he’s propped against the wall, ignoring the unpleasant tingle that shoots through his back.
It’s better to get this done fast, he knows, because he can already feel the draining effects of touching the wall. No one’s ever bothered to explain it to him, but he’s sure that whatever it is, it was done on purpose, in an effort to contain any stray power he might let off.
They shouldn’t have worried. Whatever small stores of magic he has left after this long are focused entirely on keeping him alive.
Noah glances around the tiny room, searching carefully through the dim light for anything that could have changed; there’s just not that much in there to change, and there isn’t anything new. And he can’t exactly see outside, but the sounds are still the same.
He’s being paranoid. Not that he doesn’t have the right to be, but it’s exhausting, and he needs to let it go and get some sleep (didn’t he just wake up?).
His eyelids are drooping already, but he makes sure to shove himself safely away from the wall before he lets them close, because sleeping in contact with that won’t lead to anything good.