Fic: Love Belongs to All in Deed and Name Interlude: Parental Units
Title: Love Belongs to All in Deed and Name Interlude: Parental Units
Author: knittycat99
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Rating: R
Spoilers: Through 3.05
Summary: How the parents got where they are
Author's Note: I've seriously messed with canon here regarding Finn's dad. Because if my math is correct, Finn being a baby when his dad died in the Gulf War means that Finn had to have been born before January of 1991. Which would clearly make him 21 this year, and that just isn't right. So, for my purposes here, his father doesn't go to war in 1991. Also, my two years of college Russian left me less than fluent, so my phonetical spellings might be off. If you're more fluent than I am, don't hate me.
Word Count: 3,835
Catherine sat, staring and unseeing, at her computer. She had turned her phone off at noon, the way she did every day before retreating to the HR break room with her book and her yogurt and rice cakes. But she hadn’t been able to even leave her desk, she was so tired. She’d been up well into the early hours of the morning after talking with Blaine, and she’d pretended to be asleep when Kent had rumbled into bed after 3 am. Pretended that she hadn’t heard every last word and accusation of his fight with Blaine.
Pretended that she was invisible, expendable.
Wondered, as she’d listened to Kent snoring lightly next to her, how she had ended up there.
She’d been raised on secrets and silence, had been the thing. They fit her well, settled into her with every breath, as well they should have since she’d been living them since she was a baby.
Yekaterina, she remembered. Katya. Grandparents who spoke to her in fragments of Yiddish and Russian until the day she’d raised sleepy, little girl arms to her father and said dobre utra, papa as the morning sent sun into her room.
When she went to dinner at a friend’s house one Friday night late in elementary school, there were Shabbat candles and prayers, vague things that sounded familiar to her ear but she couldn’t quite trace, couldn’t match up with the cross her mother wore like it was burning her and the Sunday church services that felt like a prison.
When she’d asked her mother, she’d gotten a smack on her cheek and a scolding. “You’ll understand when you’re older, Catherine.”
So she’d waited, piecing her history together from fragments and assumptions until finally, she’d asked outright on the eve of her 14th birthday.
“Why are we pretending to be Catholic?” It wasn’t the right question. She’d spent dinner with we’re Jewish, aren’t we on her tongue, but she hadn’t been able to force the words out.
“It wasn’t safe,” her father said. “Your grandparents survived because they hid. And your mother and I, well. We didn’t have a real choice. So you have to understand, Catherine. This is the way things are now.”
“What’s our real last name?” Because there was no way that Simmons was it.
Her father twirled some spaghetti onto his fork, and heaved a deep sigh before giving her mother a pointed look.
“Schwartzman,” her mother said, and Catherine let her real name echo in her brain. Katya Schwartzman. She liked it.
“It’s time you knew,” her father said, “but that means it’s your secret to keep now, too.”
And she had, through high school and into college. It was like breathing to her, easy in a somewhat uncomfortable way that she didn’t think about too much.
One September day when she was 19, she stopped thinking about it at all, because she settled into her seat in Biology lecture and accidentally elbowed the boy who sat next to her. She fell over herself in apology, but the way he crinkled his eyes and asuaged her fears that she’d hurt him made her catch her breath.
Kent Anderson was smart and funny, and Catherine never really knew why he’d decided to pursue her, because he dressed well and drove a nice car, and she had a work-study job filing in the Registrar’s office and had to take the bus home for breaks because she couldn’t even afford the train.
She knew, though, that she pretended well, and in the long run all that seemed to matter to Kent was that Catherine was also smart and funny, and even though she didn’t like to party with his friends she sure acted like she did. She didn’t let her fear show the first night he took her back to his room, or the first time she visited him at his parent’s summer house. She acted like she hadn’t overheard his parents’ whispers in the kitchen her last night there, their musings over whether she was good enough for Kent, whether she’d hold him back.
She loved him, so she promised herself that she would never hold him back.
When the time came to take their MCATs, Catherine feigned a lack of funds even though she’d been squirreling money away since freshman year, because the idea of spending four years or more at different medical schools left her unable to breathe. Instead, she sent Kent off to the exam and planned her next move, because she was never going to be a doctor.
Kent’s parents paid for their apartment in Cambridge, and his uncle set Catherine up with a job in the English department, doing scheduling and filing and copying endless numbers of course packets.
She hated every minute of it.
On some level, it had been a blessing when Kent was matched for his internship so far away from both of their families. She looked forward to the new start, even though Kent railed around the apartment for days, waving his match letter and cursing about fucking Ohio. Catherine had soothed him the best way she knew how, laying herself open and letting Kent have his fill.
The morning of his graduation, she was sick three times before she made it out the door to the ceremony. The next morning, the test came back positive. She was six weeks pregnant on their long-planned wedding day, the day before they drove the U-Haul to Columbus for Kent’s internship, but she wasn’t showing and she added the baby to the list of secrets she kept.
Kent hadn’t seemed surprised when she finally told him on the dark stretch of highway leading into Columbus, but he also hadn’t seemed happy, so she vowed to prove to him that he could be a medical student and a father.
She taught Blaine early how to be silent, how to be invisible.
It was, after all, the thing she knew best.
**
Burt Hummel had lived in Lima his whole life. Every pocket of town was a part of him, steeped into his memories. Lima had shaped him, for good and for bad, and there was no way he could hate Lima for any of it.
He’d thought, once, about getting out. About joining the army or driving a long-haul truck, or finding someplace else to share the skills he’d learned at his father’s elbow, because every place needs a good mechanic, Burt. But he never looked too hard, because life in Lima kind of suited him, and he got to play football at the junior college, until his second year when he busted out his knee in October, and then his dad died in the cold stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he was the only Hummel who knew his way around the garage.
He’d still been on crutches and that goddamned knee brace, fucking sitting down to work on engines, when Liz had pulled into the parking lot, muffler belching smoke and rattling like a drum line.
He’d given her a fair estimate after seeing the OSU-Lima sticker in the back window and the battered child development texbooks with orange USED stickers on the spines littering the backseat, and when she’d balked at the price he’d sighed and offered to do it for cost.
“What’s the catch,” she’d asked, leaning against the driver’s door and eyeing him suspiciously.
“No catch,” he replied, shaking his head and trying not to blush. Because she was pretty, and seemed sweet, and even if she was attending OSU-Lima, she wasn’t from Lima because Burt didn’t know her and she clearly didn’t know him. “Just- maybe when I’m out of this stupid brace and can walk again, you’ll let me buy you a coffee.”
She’d fiddled with her necklace and looked away. “Seems you should let me buy you a coffee, since you’re going to fix my car for cheap.”
“I guess that means we’ll have to go out twice.” He didn’t expect her to agree, but she had.
Liz was smart, and she seemed more aware of the world than Burt was. But he liked that she was maybe even more of a baseball fan than he was, and that she liked beer on football Sundays, and that she would sing in the shower on the nights she stayed over. She had a wicked sense of humor, and there was nothing reserved about her. Burt liked the way she made him feel, like he didn’t need to be quiet and focused all the time. Like it was okay to have fun.
Valentine’s Day of her senior year, she called him crying from the bathroom of the elementary school where she was student teaching. “I’m pregnant,” she whispered, and Burt had felt something click into place inside him, like all the scattered pieces of himself had coalesced into husband and father.
He called in sick to work, and drove down to Dayton to buy a ring. They were married in March, the two of them at City Hall, and they set to work getting ready for the baby. A boy, the doctor told them, due in October.
A son, Burt thought every day. He’d take him to ball games, and to the garage, and teach him from the time he was old enough to hold tools, the way Burt’s father had taught him.
But almost from the start, Kurt had been different. It’s not unusual, Liz said when Kurt was three and got into her clothes and makeup. He’ll grow out of it, the pediatrician said at Kurt’s four year old checkup when they had to pull Kurt away from the baby dolls in the waiting area.
“I want a pair of thenthible heelth,” Kurt lisped, handing Burt his birthday wishlist over breakfast one morning.
“I don’t think he’s growing out of it,” he told Liz that evening, after Kurt was in bed.
“I think you’re right,” she said, resting her hand on his. “And I think we need to be on the same page. We need to be okay with whoever he grows up to be.”
“He’s my son, Lizzie. I love him. Nothing could change that.” Burt never hesitated, because it was the God’s honest truth. He might not understand it, but he loved that little boy so much he thought his heart would burst.
“I didn’t expect anything less from you, Burt Hummel,” she’d said, smiling, as he kissed her.
Burt had fought for a lot in his life. He’d fought for Liz after what they thought was a pregnancy was actually cancer. He fought for himself, in the bleak months after her death, and he fought for Kurt, every day. He didn’t think, now that he’d battled through, that he’d ever stop fighting for Kurt and kids like him.
Which was why this crap with Blaine’s father was pissing him off so badly. Blaine was a good kid, polite and smart and damn if he didn’t make Kurt so blissfully happy. Burt thought that any parent would be proud to have a kid like Blaine.
But there were still a lot of things Burt didn’t understand, which was why he was sitting on hold, giving up his lunch break to muzak in the hopes that he’d catch the elusive Dr. Kent Anderson in his office.
**
Carole liked the afternoons after a night shift, the way the house was still and silent when she woke up, and the idea of having a handful of hours to herself before the boys and Burt came home, filling the space with bodies and noise and the kind of chaos that came from too much testosterone.
She puttered around when she got up just shy of noon, fixing tea and then taking it with her on her rounds of shower-laundry-lunch before settling on the couch with the book Kurt had picked up for her at the library last week. “Blaine’s mom likes these,” he’d said, handing her a thick paperback that promised time travel and romance, and really, Carole wasn’t going to turn down the promise of hot Scottish men in kilts. She may be married, but she wasn’t dead.
She’d always loved romance novels; she suspected now that it was a habit born of needing the escape from being the only girl in a house full of four older brothers. But no matter the reason, every Saturday she’d take the bus to the library and check out a stack, take them home, and lose herself in tales of endless love and happily ever after, the most adult of fairy tales. And the stories were just that to Carole, fairy tales. Because she was a pretty smart girl, and she knew that not everyone got their prince.
Girls like her, they never got their prince or the magic life that came with it. Girls like her, daughters and sisters of cops and firefighters, grew up to marry cops or firefighters and stayed home and had babies and hosted clans for post-church Sunday dinners. But Carole wanted more than that, so the day after her high school graduation, she took her carefully saved years of allowance and money she’d been sent for birthdays and Christmases, First Communion and Confirmation, and hopped the bus to New York City. She had a scholarship to the nursing program at CUNY, and a friend from high school had a cousin who lived in the city, who needed a sixth girl to split the rent on a two-bedroom on the edge of Harlem.
She loved the city. Loved her classes. Loved her jobs, afternoons as a nanny for a 6 year old girl on the East Side and weekends scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. She called home once a week, made small talk with her mother, but she never went back to New Jersey.
She met Christopher in the park on a Thursday in April, while Maddie was busy chasing her school friends around and up and down the slide. He had a map, and if that hadn’t marked him as an outsider, his courteous excuse me, miss certainly would have.
“Better be careful,” she said, taking his map and turning it right-side up before marking their location with the pen she always kept tucked into her bun. “You scream innocent newbie, and not everyone is as nice as I am.”
He smiled at her, a wide grin that lit up his face. “You might be all the nice I can handle,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Christopher Hudson.”
“Carole Flaherty.”
“Well, Carole Flaherty. I’m here in the city till Monday. Can I take you to dinner?”
Over cheap Chinese in Midtown, he told her he was in the city on leave, after completing his Basic and Advanced Infantry Training in Georgia. “I’m headed to Fort Drum,” he said, scooping fried rice onto his plate. “I’d like to see you again, but it seems some girls are afraid of Army men.”
“You’re not a cop, firefighter, EMT, or a medical student or intern,” Carole said, waving her egg roll in the air. “Army is a step up as far as I’m concerned.”
He was embarrassed after almost snorting soda out of his nose. That almost sold her right then. But when he picked up the check and walked her home and asked before pressing a chaste kiss to her cheek, she was pretty well gone.
Things built slowly, letters and phone calls and the too-rare weekend visits, but it wasn’t a surprise to her that they tumbled into bed together in a smoke-hazy hotel room outside of Albany over Fourth of July weekend.
They were nervous with each other, careful, because Carole had been a genuinely good Catholic girl despite her otherwise rebellious nature, and Christopher had lived in small-town Ohio until Christmas, and to hear him tell it there hadn’t been a whole lot of girls chasing after the second-string quarterback and honor student.
They’d been lost in each other, and Carole hadn’t thought too much about anything until she’d noticed the untouched strip of condoms on the bedside table.
Even then, she didn’t think about it again until the heat of August, when she was caring for Maddie all day long and couldn’t stomach the smell of the chicken nuggets she cooked up for Maddie’s lunch.
She was a nursing student. Of course she was pregnant, she only needed her calendar and her rebellious stomach to tell her. She was also still a good Catholic girl at heart, but one who had a rebellious streak. There was no question. Her mother would be saying novenas if she knew.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered into the phone when Christopher called her on Friday night, like he always did. “And I’m keeping it. If you don’t want anything to do with me, that’s fine. I’ll do it on my own.”
“Carole,” he said, and she could hear him crying. “Marry me.”
Christopher was so handsome in his uniform, and Carole wore a sundress she’d bought at Goodwill. One of his Army buddies and one of her roommates stood as witnesses, and they’d had a picnic in the park afterwards. Carole had nibbled a turkey sandwich and sipped at some sparkling cider before sending Christopher back to Fort Drum on the late bus.
She finished out her fall semester of school before moving up to the base with Christopher, where they shared a postage stamp apartment in a building with other young enlisted families. The other wives offered Carole maternity and baby clothes, and help finding an OB and a pediatrician. She grew into her love for Christopher in those months, just as she grew into her love for the baby, even when he kicked all night long. Sometimes, it felt like he was drumming on her ribcage, and she wondered if his tiny fists against her bones sounded like anything from inside her body.
Finnegan Seamus Hudson was just like his father, smiles and eyes and gentle-natured, even from his first day. Christopher loved the baby, to the point where Carole never had to worry about caring for him at night. Christpher carried Finn everywhere in the evenings, bathing him and singing to him, and walking him when he fussed, bundled against the cold in a snowsuit and a pile of blankets in the stroller. Those nights, Carole would watch her two men, as she called them, and think of the romances she’d read as a girl. Maybe, girls like her did get their happy ever after.
The crash happened in wind-blown snow, some kind of a night training exercise gone terribly wrong, and Christopher and the pilot and two other men had been killed. Carole cried for three days, and then went downstairs and retrieved Finn from the neighbor who’d been keeping him. She packed up the apartment and went to the only place she could: Christopher’s childhood home in Lima, Ohio.
She’d finished nursing school there, worked days and put Finn in the hospital’s childcare until he went to school full-time. She put everything she had into raising Finn, into making a life for herself and her son, and if she had to do it in Ohio, so be it.
And then this slightly awkward elfin boy grabbed her elbow in a crowded classroom, shoved her in front of his father. Carole Hudson, meet Burt Hummel. Dead spouses, small talk over generic cookies and watery punch. Eyes that knew sadness and work, and getting by as best you could.
It didn’t take Carole long, but she was a hopeless romantic, after all.
It turned out that girls like her sometimes got two princes.
And if her second round at happy ever after came with a stepson and his boyfriend, well. Carole knew how to handle boys. She had grown up with all those brothers, after all.
**
Kent hated feeling out of control, feeling less than perfect. It had been his whole life, after all. The right camps, the right schools, perfect grades and attendance and behavior. Manners that left adults telling him what a polite young man and his parents beaming with pride.
He didn’t know how to be any way else.
Which was why it was so hard to watch Blaine unraveling in front of him. He thought, maybe, that he was jealous of the way his son bucked every constraint Kent tried to place on him, but most of the time it just left him feeling uncomfortable because he didn’t understand it. None of it, the restlessness at school and Blaine’s relentless need for music, and the way he spoke up, with a true confidence that Kent only recognized because of his own carefully constructed false confidence.
Kent had known for years that Blaine hated him. That Blaine only wanted his approval. But Kent simply didn’t know how to give it because all the things he’d learned were good and right and perfect were things Blaine struggled with.
And Blaine being gay? Well. That was the most unacceptable thing of all. Oh, Kent knew logically that it was nothing Blaine could change, but that didn’t stop him from wanting Blaine to do this one thing right. Because a wife and children? That was something Kent could be proud of.
Instead, Kent got Kurt, a flamboyant boy with a mechanic father. A boy who left Dalton for public school, who urged Blaine to do the same. Who was pulling the promise of a perfect son away from Kent with every day.
Kent didn’t know what to do with that, what to do with the fight he was never going to win but that kept creeping out at him when he was least prepared for it.
I’ve been screaming at you for years, Blaine had yelled at him at the end of things. This is the first time you’ve ever heard me. But Kent knew that he hadn’t heard Blaine.
He had learned one thing, though. When Blaine climbed into bed, when his son had dismissed him, Kent knew he’d succeeded on one area. He’d taught his son to be aloof and distant.
And that was something else he could be proud of. It told him that Blaine was like him after all.
That pride had settled him, allowed him to be calm and patient and caring with the post-op patients he saw in his office twice a week. He breezed through his morning appointments, grabbed a coffee and a muffin from the lobby cart, and breezed back into the office for his afternoon appointments when Gina, his secretary, called out to him.
“Doctor, I have a Burt Hummel holding for you on three. He refuses to leave a message.”
Kent paused and took a sip of his too-hot coffee. “I’ll take it inside,” he nodded to her and slipped through his door.
“Mr. Hummel? Kent Anderson.” He unwrapped the paper on his muffin and broke it into pieces.
“Mr. Anderson. I wanna talk to you about our boys.”
Author: knittycat99
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Rating: R
Spoilers: Through 3.05
Summary: How the parents got where they are
Author's Note: I've seriously messed with canon here regarding Finn's dad. Because if my math is correct, Finn being a baby when his dad died in the Gulf War means that Finn had to have been born before January of 1991. Which would clearly make him 21 this year, and that just isn't right. So, for my purposes here, his father doesn't go to war in 1991. Also, my two years of college Russian left me less than fluent, so my phonetical spellings might be off. If you're more fluent than I am, don't hate me.
Word Count: 3,835
Catherine sat, staring and unseeing, at her computer. She had turned her phone off at noon, the way she did every day before retreating to the HR break room with her book and her yogurt and rice cakes. But she hadn’t been able to even leave her desk, she was so tired. She’d been up well into the early hours of the morning after talking with Blaine, and she’d pretended to be asleep when Kent had rumbled into bed after 3 am. Pretended that she hadn’t heard every last word and accusation of his fight with Blaine.
Pretended that she was invisible, expendable.
Wondered, as she’d listened to Kent snoring lightly next to her, how she had ended up there.
She’d been raised on secrets and silence, had been the thing. They fit her well, settled into her with every breath, as well they should have since she’d been living them since she was a baby.
Yekaterina, she remembered. Katya. Grandparents who spoke to her in fragments of Yiddish and Russian until the day she’d raised sleepy, little girl arms to her father and said dobre utra, papa as the morning sent sun into her room.
When she went to dinner at a friend’s house one Friday night late in elementary school, there were Shabbat candles and prayers, vague things that sounded familiar to her ear but she couldn’t quite trace, couldn’t match up with the cross her mother wore like it was burning her and the Sunday church services that felt like a prison.
When she’d asked her mother, she’d gotten a smack on her cheek and a scolding. “You’ll understand when you’re older, Catherine.”
So she’d waited, piecing her history together from fragments and assumptions until finally, she’d asked outright on the eve of her 14th birthday.
“Why are we pretending to be Catholic?” It wasn’t the right question. She’d spent dinner with we’re Jewish, aren’t we on her tongue, but she hadn’t been able to force the words out.
“It wasn’t safe,” her father said. “Your grandparents survived because they hid. And your mother and I, well. We didn’t have a real choice. So you have to understand, Catherine. This is the way things are now.”
“What’s our real last name?” Because there was no way that Simmons was it.
Her father twirled some spaghetti onto his fork, and heaved a deep sigh before giving her mother a pointed look.
“Schwartzman,” her mother said, and Catherine let her real name echo in her brain. Katya Schwartzman. She liked it.
“It’s time you knew,” her father said, “but that means it’s your secret to keep now, too.”
And she had, through high school and into college. It was like breathing to her, easy in a somewhat uncomfortable way that she didn’t think about too much.
One September day when she was 19, she stopped thinking about it at all, because she settled into her seat in Biology lecture and accidentally elbowed the boy who sat next to her. She fell over herself in apology, but the way he crinkled his eyes and asuaged her fears that she’d hurt him made her catch her breath.
Kent Anderson was smart and funny, and Catherine never really knew why he’d decided to pursue her, because he dressed well and drove a nice car, and she had a work-study job filing in the Registrar’s office and had to take the bus home for breaks because she couldn’t even afford the train.
She knew, though, that she pretended well, and in the long run all that seemed to matter to Kent was that Catherine was also smart and funny, and even though she didn’t like to party with his friends she sure acted like she did. She didn’t let her fear show the first night he took her back to his room, or the first time she visited him at his parent’s summer house. She acted like she hadn’t overheard his parents’ whispers in the kitchen her last night there, their musings over whether she was good enough for Kent, whether she’d hold him back.
She loved him, so she promised herself that she would never hold him back.
When the time came to take their MCATs, Catherine feigned a lack of funds even though she’d been squirreling money away since freshman year, because the idea of spending four years or more at different medical schools left her unable to breathe. Instead, she sent Kent off to the exam and planned her next move, because she was never going to be a doctor.
Kent’s parents paid for their apartment in Cambridge, and his uncle set Catherine up with a job in the English department, doing scheduling and filing and copying endless numbers of course packets.
She hated every minute of it.
On some level, it had been a blessing when Kent was matched for his internship so far away from both of their families. She looked forward to the new start, even though Kent railed around the apartment for days, waving his match letter and cursing about fucking Ohio. Catherine had soothed him the best way she knew how, laying herself open and letting Kent have his fill.
The morning of his graduation, she was sick three times before she made it out the door to the ceremony. The next morning, the test came back positive. She was six weeks pregnant on their long-planned wedding day, the day before they drove the U-Haul to Columbus for Kent’s internship, but she wasn’t showing and she added the baby to the list of secrets she kept.
Kent hadn’t seemed surprised when she finally told him on the dark stretch of highway leading into Columbus, but he also hadn’t seemed happy, so she vowed to prove to him that he could be a medical student and a father.
She taught Blaine early how to be silent, how to be invisible.
It was, after all, the thing she knew best.
**
Burt Hummel had lived in Lima his whole life. Every pocket of town was a part of him, steeped into his memories. Lima had shaped him, for good and for bad, and there was no way he could hate Lima for any of it.
He’d thought, once, about getting out. About joining the army or driving a long-haul truck, or finding someplace else to share the skills he’d learned at his father’s elbow, because every place needs a good mechanic, Burt. But he never looked too hard, because life in Lima kind of suited him, and he got to play football at the junior college, until his second year when he busted out his knee in October, and then his dad died in the cold stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he was the only Hummel who knew his way around the garage.
He’d still been on crutches and that goddamned knee brace, fucking sitting down to work on engines, when Liz had pulled into the parking lot, muffler belching smoke and rattling like a drum line.
He’d given her a fair estimate after seeing the OSU-Lima sticker in the back window and the battered child development texbooks with orange USED stickers on the spines littering the backseat, and when she’d balked at the price he’d sighed and offered to do it for cost.
“What’s the catch,” she’d asked, leaning against the driver’s door and eyeing him suspiciously.
“No catch,” he replied, shaking his head and trying not to blush. Because she was pretty, and seemed sweet, and even if she was attending OSU-Lima, she wasn’t from Lima because Burt didn’t know her and she clearly didn’t know him. “Just- maybe when I’m out of this stupid brace and can walk again, you’ll let me buy you a coffee.”
She’d fiddled with her necklace and looked away. “Seems you should let me buy you a coffee, since you’re going to fix my car for cheap.”
“I guess that means we’ll have to go out twice.” He didn’t expect her to agree, but she had.
Liz was smart, and she seemed more aware of the world than Burt was. But he liked that she was maybe even more of a baseball fan than he was, and that she liked beer on football Sundays, and that she would sing in the shower on the nights she stayed over. She had a wicked sense of humor, and there was nothing reserved about her. Burt liked the way she made him feel, like he didn’t need to be quiet and focused all the time. Like it was okay to have fun.
Valentine’s Day of her senior year, she called him crying from the bathroom of the elementary school where she was student teaching. “I’m pregnant,” she whispered, and Burt had felt something click into place inside him, like all the scattered pieces of himself had coalesced into husband and father.
He called in sick to work, and drove down to Dayton to buy a ring. They were married in March, the two of them at City Hall, and they set to work getting ready for the baby. A boy, the doctor told them, due in October.
A son, Burt thought every day. He’d take him to ball games, and to the garage, and teach him from the time he was old enough to hold tools, the way Burt’s father had taught him.
But almost from the start, Kurt had been different. It’s not unusual, Liz said when Kurt was three and got into her clothes and makeup. He’ll grow out of it, the pediatrician said at Kurt’s four year old checkup when they had to pull Kurt away from the baby dolls in the waiting area.
“I want a pair of thenthible heelth,” Kurt lisped, handing Burt his birthday wishlist over breakfast one morning.
“I don’t think he’s growing out of it,” he told Liz that evening, after Kurt was in bed.
“I think you’re right,” she said, resting her hand on his. “And I think we need to be on the same page. We need to be okay with whoever he grows up to be.”
“He’s my son, Lizzie. I love him. Nothing could change that.” Burt never hesitated, because it was the God’s honest truth. He might not understand it, but he loved that little boy so much he thought his heart would burst.
“I didn’t expect anything less from you, Burt Hummel,” she’d said, smiling, as he kissed her.
Burt had fought for a lot in his life. He’d fought for Liz after what they thought was a pregnancy was actually cancer. He fought for himself, in the bleak months after her death, and he fought for Kurt, every day. He didn’t think, now that he’d battled through, that he’d ever stop fighting for Kurt and kids like him.
Which was why this crap with Blaine’s father was pissing him off so badly. Blaine was a good kid, polite and smart and damn if he didn’t make Kurt so blissfully happy. Burt thought that any parent would be proud to have a kid like Blaine.
But there were still a lot of things Burt didn’t understand, which was why he was sitting on hold, giving up his lunch break to muzak in the hopes that he’d catch the elusive Dr. Kent Anderson in his office.
**
Carole liked the afternoons after a night shift, the way the house was still and silent when she woke up, and the idea of having a handful of hours to herself before the boys and Burt came home, filling the space with bodies and noise and the kind of chaos that came from too much testosterone.
She puttered around when she got up just shy of noon, fixing tea and then taking it with her on her rounds of shower-laundry-lunch before settling on the couch with the book Kurt had picked up for her at the library last week. “Blaine’s mom likes these,” he’d said, handing her a thick paperback that promised time travel and romance, and really, Carole wasn’t going to turn down the promise of hot Scottish men in kilts. She may be married, but she wasn’t dead.
She’d always loved romance novels; she suspected now that it was a habit born of needing the escape from being the only girl in a house full of four older brothers. But no matter the reason, every Saturday she’d take the bus to the library and check out a stack, take them home, and lose herself in tales of endless love and happily ever after, the most adult of fairy tales. And the stories were just that to Carole, fairy tales. Because she was a pretty smart girl, and she knew that not everyone got their prince.
Girls like her, they never got their prince or the magic life that came with it. Girls like her, daughters and sisters of cops and firefighters, grew up to marry cops or firefighters and stayed home and had babies and hosted clans for post-church Sunday dinners. But Carole wanted more than that, so the day after her high school graduation, she took her carefully saved years of allowance and money she’d been sent for birthdays and Christmases, First Communion and Confirmation, and hopped the bus to New York City. She had a scholarship to the nursing program at CUNY, and a friend from high school had a cousin who lived in the city, who needed a sixth girl to split the rent on a two-bedroom on the edge of Harlem.
She loved the city. Loved her classes. Loved her jobs, afternoons as a nanny for a 6 year old girl on the East Side and weekends scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. She called home once a week, made small talk with her mother, but she never went back to New Jersey.
She met Christopher in the park on a Thursday in April, while Maddie was busy chasing her school friends around and up and down the slide. He had a map, and if that hadn’t marked him as an outsider, his courteous excuse me, miss certainly would have.
“Better be careful,” she said, taking his map and turning it right-side up before marking their location with the pen she always kept tucked into her bun. “You scream innocent newbie, and not everyone is as nice as I am.”
He smiled at her, a wide grin that lit up his face. “You might be all the nice I can handle,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Christopher Hudson.”
“Carole Flaherty.”
“Well, Carole Flaherty. I’m here in the city till Monday. Can I take you to dinner?”
Over cheap Chinese in Midtown, he told her he was in the city on leave, after completing his Basic and Advanced Infantry Training in Georgia. “I’m headed to Fort Drum,” he said, scooping fried rice onto his plate. “I’d like to see you again, but it seems some girls are afraid of Army men.”
“You’re not a cop, firefighter, EMT, or a medical student or intern,” Carole said, waving her egg roll in the air. “Army is a step up as far as I’m concerned.”
He was embarrassed after almost snorting soda out of his nose. That almost sold her right then. But when he picked up the check and walked her home and asked before pressing a chaste kiss to her cheek, she was pretty well gone.
Things built slowly, letters and phone calls and the too-rare weekend visits, but it wasn’t a surprise to her that they tumbled into bed together in a smoke-hazy hotel room outside of Albany over Fourth of July weekend.
They were nervous with each other, careful, because Carole had been a genuinely good Catholic girl despite her otherwise rebellious nature, and Christopher had lived in small-town Ohio until Christmas, and to hear him tell it there hadn’t been a whole lot of girls chasing after the second-string quarterback and honor student.
They’d been lost in each other, and Carole hadn’t thought too much about anything until she’d noticed the untouched strip of condoms on the bedside table.
Even then, she didn’t think about it again until the heat of August, when she was caring for Maddie all day long and couldn’t stomach the smell of the chicken nuggets she cooked up for Maddie’s lunch.
She was a nursing student. Of course she was pregnant, she only needed her calendar and her rebellious stomach to tell her. She was also still a good Catholic girl at heart, but one who had a rebellious streak. There was no question. Her mother would be saying novenas if she knew.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered into the phone when Christopher called her on Friday night, like he always did. “And I’m keeping it. If you don’t want anything to do with me, that’s fine. I’ll do it on my own.”
“Carole,” he said, and she could hear him crying. “Marry me.”
Christopher was so handsome in his uniform, and Carole wore a sundress she’d bought at Goodwill. One of his Army buddies and one of her roommates stood as witnesses, and they’d had a picnic in the park afterwards. Carole had nibbled a turkey sandwich and sipped at some sparkling cider before sending Christopher back to Fort Drum on the late bus.
She finished out her fall semester of school before moving up to the base with Christopher, where they shared a postage stamp apartment in a building with other young enlisted families. The other wives offered Carole maternity and baby clothes, and help finding an OB and a pediatrician. She grew into her love for Christopher in those months, just as she grew into her love for the baby, even when he kicked all night long. Sometimes, it felt like he was drumming on her ribcage, and she wondered if his tiny fists against her bones sounded like anything from inside her body.
Finnegan Seamus Hudson was just like his father, smiles and eyes and gentle-natured, even from his first day. Christopher loved the baby, to the point where Carole never had to worry about caring for him at night. Christpher carried Finn everywhere in the evenings, bathing him and singing to him, and walking him when he fussed, bundled against the cold in a snowsuit and a pile of blankets in the stroller. Those nights, Carole would watch her two men, as she called them, and think of the romances she’d read as a girl. Maybe, girls like her did get their happy ever after.
The crash happened in wind-blown snow, some kind of a night training exercise gone terribly wrong, and Christopher and the pilot and two other men had been killed. Carole cried for three days, and then went downstairs and retrieved Finn from the neighbor who’d been keeping him. She packed up the apartment and went to the only place she could: Christopher’s childhood home in Lima, Ohio.
She’d finished nursing school there, worked days and put Finn in the hospital’s childcare until he went to school full-time. She put everything she had into raising Finn, into making a life for herself and her son, and if she had to do it in Ohio, so be it.
And then this slightly awkward elfin boy grabbed her elbow in a crowded classroom, shoved her in front of his father. Carole Hudson, meet Burt Hummel. Dead spouses, small talk over generic cookies and watery punch. Eyes that knew sadness and work, and getting by as best you could.
It didn’t take Carole long, but she was a hopeless romantic, after all.
It turned out that girls like her sometimes got two princes.
And if her second round at happy ever after came with a stepson and his boyfriend, well. Carole knew how to handle boys. She had grown up with all those brothers, after all.
**
Kent hated feeling out of control, feeling less than perfect. It had been his whole life, after all. The right camps, the right schools, perfect grades and attendance and behavior. Manners that left adults telling him what a polite young man and his parents beaming with pride.
He didn’t know how to be any way else.
Which was why it was so hard to watch Blaine unraveling in front of him. He thought, maybe, that he was jealous of the way his son bucked every constraint Kent tried to place on him, but most of the time it just left him feeling uncomfortable because he didn’t understand it. None of it, the restlessness at school and Blaine’s relentless need for music, and the way he spoke up, with a true confidence that Kent only recognized because of his own carefully constructed false confidence.
Kent had known for years that Blaine hated him. That Blaine only wanted his approval. But Kent simply didn’t know how to give it because all the things he’d learned were good and right and perfect were things Blaine struggled with.
And Blaine being gay? Well. That was the most unacceptable thing of all. Oh, Kent knew logically that it was nothing Blaine could change, but that didn’t stop him from wanting Blaine to do this one thing right. Because a wife and children? That was something Kent could be proud of.
Instead, Kent got Kurt, a flamboyant boy with a mechanic father. A boy who left Dalton for public school, who urged Blaine to do the same. Who was pulling the promise of a perfect son away from Kent with every day.
Kent didn’t know what to do with that, what to do with the fight he was never going to win but that kept creeping out at him when he was least prepared for it.
I’ve been screaming at you for years, Blaine had yelled at him at the end of things. This is the first time you’ve ever heard me. But Kent knew that he hadn’t heard Blaine.
He had learned one thing, though. When Blaine climbed into bed, when his son had dismissed him, Kent knew he’d succeeded on one area. He’d taught his son to be aloof and distant.
And that was something else he could be proud of. It told him that Blaine was like him after all.
That pride had settled him, allowed him to be calm and patient and caring with the post-op patients he saw in his office twice a week. He breezed through his morning appointments, grabbed a coffee and a muffin from the lobby cart, and breezed back into the office for his afternoon appointments when Gina, his secretary, called out to him.
“Doctor, I have a Burt Hummel holding for you on three. He refuses to leave a message.”
Kent paused and took a sip of his too-hot coffee. “I’ll take it inside,” he nodded to her and slipped through his door.
“Mr. Hummel? Kent Anderson.” He unwrapped the paper on his muffin and broke it into pieces.
“Mr. Anderson. I wanna talk to you about our boys.”