Bright Things
Title: Bright Things
Rating: PG
Characters: Kurt, Sam, Blaine (Kurt/Blaine, Sam+Kurt friendship)
Words: 4,400
Spoilers: 2.19, Rumours
Summary: A conversation in the cold with Sam, a conversation in the warmth with Blaine, and literary references.
Author's Note: I know that I did this decidedly backwards, writing a prom fic before a Rumours fic, but this one needed more staring at and humming. If this fic were to have warnings, they would be speaking from personal experience and literature of the Roaring Twenties.
The rough finish of the motel’s exterior wall bit through Kurt’s jacket and shirt to his skin, prickling uncomfortably, but he wasn’t going to move. Sam was next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them sitting on the unconscionably dirty asphalt that rolled in the dark from the rear of the building to the line of trees at the edge of the lot; it was a small, tangled forest, littered with bright bits of trash. Sam was looking down at the dregs of a 7-11 slurpee held limp in his hand, his shoulders hunched. Kurt could smell the artificial banana flavoring, doing what it could do drown out the bitter aroma of the largely untouched, poor-quality coffee sitting by Kurt’s right knee.
The silence had stretched between them since they’d left the motel earlier, when the sky was still evening-blue and the cold was just starting to creep in as the lingering traces of the sun were leeched away. It had been punctuated only by the offer for something and the nod of Kurt’s head at the overbright convenience store sign, and Sam’s immediate hesitance to accept the offer, and Kurt’s insistence that he needed something warm because the Earth had apparently forgotten what month it was and he didn’t have any gloves and this jacket was mostly decorative.
And Sam got a slurpee, because Sam was Sam, and if anyone was going to be completely unscarred by the feeling of sugared ice dripping into his eyes, it would be him.
Sam swirled the clear plastic straw through the water and ice at the bottom of his cup, and Kurt watched through the corner of his eye while he took a breath that lifted his letterman jacket a little higher. “Thanks for--” he gestured with the cup, but it wasn’t necessarily what he was referring to.
“It’s no problem,” Kurt said, reaching down to wrap his hands around both sides of the undrinkable coffee and lifting it up into his lap. “Who am I to come between you and artificial banana?”
Sam’s mouth twitched, but it did absolutely nothing to his eyes. It was more a grimace than a smile, and Kurt wondered when Sam had needed to learn to respond like that to poor attempts at humor. Was it - this, recently? Was it always? (Did Kurt have those responses? Did anyone see through them?)
“I just needed to get out of there for a while, you know?” Sam was gently pressing the straw into the ice now, breaking it apart with small creaking noises.
Kurt knew. The idea of sharing one room with Finn had, at one point, been attractive (and he couldn’t remember it without cutting his eyes away and closing his hand in a fist, because it was still embarrassing), but now the idea filled him with horror, because Finn was a human wrecking ball with questionable hygiene practices. Add to that Carole and his dad and all of their unsellable worldly possessions, and Kurt couldn’t imagine the pressure to get away, for any amount of time.
Except that he could. Enough to need to set the coffee back down and pull his knees to his chest so he could clasp his hands beneath them, hide them to keep Sam from seeing-
He let out one long breath and set his head against his knees. He was tired of this.
“My mom died when I was eight,” Kurt said. Sam stilled next to him. Kurt let his legs straighten out, looking into the middle distance, the thin trees way off in the dark. “She was sick for a while. At first it wasn’t that bad, and then - it was, and then--” He gestured openly. “She was just gone. It was just me and my dad.”
Sam was looking at him, and Kurt couldn’t really read the expression on his face, except that his eyes were sad. He let out a breath through pursed lips. “I’m really sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know that.” He glanced toward the corner of the building, where the light spilled over from the lamps between each door in the outdoor hallway. “I guess that kind of makes this look like nothing.”
Kurt shook his head firmly. “That isn’t what I meant. I’ll admit that there are times when Rachel is whining about whatever agony is currently besetting her that I just want to pick her up and shake her and explain what it actually feels like to have something legitimately terrible happen to you--” (it was only on the worst days, and he always felt guilty about it later, but it was true) “-- but what you’re going through is real and horrible.” Kurt stopped. “And it reminds me of when she died.”
Sam frowned, and opened his mouth to apologize again, but Kurt held up a hand to stop him. “It isn’t throwing me into a spiraling depression or anything,” he said. He hoped. “It happened a long time ago.”
Sam closed his mouth, but his eyebrows were still furrowed, looking at Kurt in an actively engaged way that Kurt hadn’t really seen in him since the night he’d let all of this out, standing in the rain on the front steps of Dalton at two in the morning. “How does it - remind you?” he asked. And then, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I get it, but--”
Kurt shook his head. “It’s just--” he said, and had to stop to collect the pieces, shuffle them into some semblance of order. “The week she died, it felt like everyone we knew was at our house, all the time. Touching me and talking to me. I hated it. It felt like they were squeezing her out - like the more people who came in, the less she fit.” He closed his eyes and tried to smooth his clenching hands against his pants. “So I left a lot. I would take my bike and ride around the neighborhood and not come back until I was sure everyone was gone. My dad hated it, but I think he understood. He probably felt the same way, but he couldn’t run away the way I could.”
He sat in the ensuing silence, not looking at Sam, picking lightly at the seam of his pant leg. “Sorry,” he said, after a minute. “I’m not trying to make this about me.”
He saw Sam shake his head out of the corner of his eye, blonde hair flicking back and forth. When he dared to look over, Sam was staring hard at the ground between them, thoughts almost visible behind his eyes. “I feel guilty about it,” he mumbled, the words nearly too quiet in the short distance to Kurt. “Like, I shouldn’t want to leave so bad. I should be - you know. Stronger.”
Kurt watched the flicker of expressions over Sam’s face and frowned. “I think you’re doing fine.”
Sam smiled without any humor or brightness in it at all. “You’re really wrong.” He rubbed a hand over his face, dragging his hair back away from his eyes. “I’m so bad at everything. They told me what was happening, and I was just like -- ‘this can’t be real, this isn’t actually happening.’” He closed his eyes. “And then it actually did, and I still couldn’t believe it until I was standing in the middle of the motel room and Stacey was crying about the toys we had to leave because there was no space, and my parents were trying to make her stop, but my dad started crying--” His exhale shuddered and frosted in the dark. “And it all kind of hit me at once. This is where I live now, this is what my life’s gonna be like.” He opened his eyes and looked over at Kurt. “I still kind of hope it’s a bad dream. It feels like one.”
Kurt watched Sam, his mouth tugged into a prominent, untempered frown. His hand twitched on his knee. Hesitantly, telegraphing every movement, he reached out and put his hand on Sam’s arm. “It isn’t really the best thing to hear,” he said slowly, “but I understand the way you feel.” Being sat down on the couch by his dad kneeling in front of him, telling him carefully what was happening, what was going to happen. The very loose and distracted days after that, thinking that if he could just pinch hard enough, he would wake up and nothing would be wrong. “And it stops after a while.”
Sam just sighed. He held his head up in both of his hands, looking down at his lap.
“The thing that you don’t really think about beforehand,” Kurt heard himself saying, hardly processing the words, “is that once it happens, you actually have to keep waking up every morning afterwards.”
Sam looked at him, then, through his shaggy bangs, and Kurt saw the incredulous recognition in his eyes. Under Kurt’s hand, Sam’s body stilled, as if his cells themselves had stopped dividing. Then he sat back against the wall behind him, letting his head fall so he could look up at the sky from under the overhanging roof. “How did you do it?” he asked, his voice soft. “Keep waking up. Because I don’t know how I’m doing it.”
Kurt squeezed Sam’s arm. “The day after we buried my mom, and everybody was gone and there was nothing to do anymore - I was surprised. Because I woke up and there was actually a whole day in front of me and I had no idea what I was going to do with it, because it never occurred to me that days were going to exist after the worst possible thing happened. But eventually it just - becomes life again.”
Kurt leaned forward so that he could see Sam’s face in the light from the corner, and his hand slipped down to wrap over the one Sam had on his knee. “This is going to be completely useless to you right now, because I think it’s something you have to learn for yourself,” he said, and Sam met his eyes, “but world-ending things? Aren’t actually world-ending. You think that everything is going to be over, but then there’s the next day, and the next day, and you lose track of what you thought was ending in the first place.” Kurt took a breath. “Things are different, and they’re terrible in a lot of ways, but you’re going to get through it, because you kind of won’t be able to help it. And then things are going to keep getting different, and you’re going to find ways to settle in to all of those differences, and you’re going to feel the same way you felt before any of this happened.” He smiled a little wryly. “Almost.”
“Almost?” Sam asked, still looking at him.
Kurt shrugged. “You’re always going to feel the bad stuff that happened to you. You’re just going to feel the good stuff more.”
Sam smiled at him, a little. It was real, and it made something faint and sweet bloom in Kurt’s chest.
“I’m glad that it was you who found out, instead of anybody else,” Sam said, his eyes flickering back to the ground. “You - you kind of get it.”
Kurt squeezed his fingers over Sam’s hand, his smile fragile. “I’m glad there’s something I could give you. Even if it’s just talking.”
Sam’s back slid down the wall, and Kurt didn’t know what Sam was doing until Sam’s head was against his shoulder, his breath leaving him in one great exhale. Kurt could only sit there for a second, frozen, feeling the weight of the body against him, not really daring to believe that he hadn’t just imagined it. But as much as Kurt blinked, Sam still stayed in the same place. And it wasn’t really that much of a surprise, if he let himself think about it. Sam had always been the one boy at McKinley who had never been afraid of him, of who he was. Sam had never cared at all that Kurt was gay.
Kurt let out his own breath, then lifted his arm and crossed it over Sam’s shoulder, letting him fall closer. Kurt could do physical comfort.
Sam glanced up at him. “Will your boyfriend have a problem with this?” he asked, gesturing at the compromising position.
“No,” Kurt said with confidence, lips tugging a little with humor at the thought of Blaine stumbling upon them. “I think if he was here, you’d be cuddled in his lap at this point.”
Sam laughed, and the sound startled both of them into silence.
“I have to go back inside soon,” Sam said after a moment.
Kurt sighed. “I have to drive back to Dalton before the campus closes down.”
Sam leaned away, but he caught Kurt’s eyes and smiled again. Kurt couldn’t help but feel pleased at the way it actually reached. “Thanks,” he said, all over again.
Kurt shrugged, watching him. “My pleasure. You can call me whenever you want, you know.”
Sam nodded. “O-okay.”
Kurt braced his hand against the wall and pushed himself to him feet. The back of his jacket and the seat of his pants were hopeless, but he brushed at them anyway, as fruitless as he knew the endeavor was. Then he turned around and held his hand out to Sam. “Up and at ‘em.”
Sam looked at the proffered hand for a moment. Then he reached out and grabbed it, and pulled himself up. They stood looking at each other with their hands between them.
“I’ll see you, Kurt,” Sam said, letting go.
Kurt nodded. “Any time. I mean it.”
Sam tilted his head. “Got it.”
Kurt turned slowly and started away, his steps clicking with the slight heel of his shoes. He headed for the corner with the light, beyond which he knew waited his car, and the drive back - one that would probably be silent, he thought, no music to distract from his thoughts, the feelings stirring between his chest and his head, disconnected old memories still humming a little with ache.
When he looked back over his shoulder before rounding the building, he saw Sam still there, with his hands at his sides, head cast back to look unflinchingly up at the stars. Like there was something written there for him, some kind of promise of space in the small sense. The future and the past at the same time, and Sam standing under it, waiting.
Kurt kept going.
Blaine was asleep on one of the long leather couches in the second floor common room. He was stretched out, but his feet still didn’t manage to touch the opposite arm; there was a book with its pages fanned face-up on the floor, and Blaine’s hand hung above it, fingers slack. He was lying on his side, and from where he’d stopped in the doorway, Kurt could see his face, his mouth open slightly, his long eyelashes against his cheeks. His chest rose and fell slow and even. Kurt lingered for a moment, leaning against the doorframe, his head against the wood, just watching. Then he set his bag down and wandered over, carefully quiet.
He knelt next to the couch and picked up the book to set it on the side table. (The Great Gatsby, he noticed, with the touch of a smile, his fingers tracing the blue-yellow image on the cover.) He hovered next to Blaine for a moment, his fingers resting carefully against the smooth skin of his brow, before leaning in and pressing a kiss to Blaine’s mouth.
When he pulled away, Blaine was smiling sleepily up at him. “Best wake-up ever,” he murmured, his voice a little rough with disuse, and his hand slid around to the back of Kurt’s neck, fingers fanned against his hair.
Kurt watched him, expression wry and unimpressed. “You were sleeping on the wrong floor, in the wrong building, on the wrong piece of furniture.”
“I was maybe waiting for you.” He looked at the floor, then at the side table, and smiled when he saw the book sitting neatly there. “And I maybe fell asleep in the middle of dinner at Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s.”
“What will they think of you?” Kurt asked. His fingers were tracing the curves and dips of Blaine’s face, his voice far away as he watched their progress over Blaine’s nose, under his eyes, against his hairline.
“They were kind of distracted,” Blaine said. He reached up and took Kurt’s hand. “They probably didn’t notice.”
“That book is so much better in the summer.”
“Sadly, they don’t teach English III in the summer.” He tilted his head a little, watching Kurt’s face, still as far away as his voice. “How was Sam?”
Kurt sat sideways against the couch with his legs tucked halfway under him, his shoulder brushing Blaine’s arm where it was still curled to cup against the back of Kurt’s neck. “He’s - Sam,” he murmured.
Blaine moved so that Kurt’s hand was tucked in his against his chest. “That’s incredibly specific,” he said, his mouth curling up at the edges. “Thanks for clearing it up.”
Kurt rolled his eyes, but he gave up the pretense and set his head against Blaine’s chest. “We went on a walk,” he said. “He wanted to get out of the motel room.”
“I don’t blame him.”
Kurt shook his head. He felt the fabric of Blaine’s blazer scratch against his skin as he did so. “It’s - more than that.” He took in and let out a breath. “We went back and talked for a while. About what’s happening to him.”
The fingers against the back of Kurt’s head rubbed softly, back and forth. “Good,” Blaine murmured.
Kurt lifted his head a little to look at him, surprised. “Good?”
Blaine smiled. It was lazy and still tired, but there was a kind of peace in it that Kurt loved, suddenly, the way he loved the other things that Blaine had or did or was, the things that Kurt had never really seen before but now wanted all the time. “Do you feel better?” Blaine asked.
“What--” Kurt asked, but he stopped when Blaine dipped forward and nosed in between Kurt’s shoulder and neck, his breath warm, his lips almost touching Kurt’s skin, and Kurt had to relax completely against him.
“You’ve been distracted all week,” Blaine murmured. “You’ve been wandering around like you don’t know where you are, ever since Sam came and told you what happened. There’s been something bothering you. And you haven’t talked to me about it.” He nuzzled closer against Kurt’s skin. “A guy could get a complex.”
Kurt breathed a shaky laugh against the lapel of Blaine’s blazer. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
Blaine pulled away. “I’m really flattered right now,” he said, one eyebrow raised, and Kurt laughed again and pulled him back to where he’d been.
“You’ll get over it,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and let himself drift with the sensations of Blaine against him; Blaine’s face tucked against his neck, one hand in his, the other arm curved around Kurt’s back to clutch at the material of his shirt and hold them together. He sighed. “I’ve been thinking about my mom.”
Blaine nodded against his neck. An invitation to continue.
“Sam’s - he’s kind of--” Kurt searched for the words, where he knew they existed somewhere inside of his head. “He’s feeling a lot of the same things I felt. Which is strange, because our situations are completely different, but - it’s still this life-altering change.” He paused. “And I’ve been--” having flashbacks “-reliving it, a little, since he told us.”
He felt Blaine’s hand tighten against his shirt. Blaine moved to press his forehead closer against Kurt’s pulse point. “I’m so sorry, Kurt,” he murmured.
Kurt shook his head. The air moved out of him, leaving his voice weak. “It’s okay,” he said. “I talked to him about it.” Another pause. “I do feel better.”
Blaine’s hand squeezed his, briefly. He pulled back to look Kurt in the eyes. “I know that you want to help him,” he said, “but if it’s too much for you, or if you’re worried you’ll--” He shook his head. “This isn’t your responsibility.”
“No, I know,” Kurt said. He smiled at the sincerity on Blaine’s face, the weird protectiveness that forced its way to the surface whenever something was bothering him. “It isn’t perfect,” he managed, “but - I want this to be something I can do.” He shrugged. “And maybe it’ll make us both feel better.”
Blaine smiled at him. It was small, and a little uncertain, but it was better. “Do what you want to do,” he said. “Whatever makes you feel right. I’ll support you either way.”
Kurt nodded. He leaned in to press a chaste kiss against Blaine’s lips. “Curfew is in about three minutes, by the way,” he mumbled.
Blaine sat up, sudden, cursing quietly, while Kurt laughed at him, still on the floor. When Blaine stood up, he pulled Kurt with him, pressing them together and kissing him (a little less chaste) before leaning away to grin. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “I’m glad you talked to Sam tonight.” He let go, then turned and hurried for the door.
“You were waiting for me to talk to him, weren’t you?” Kurt called after him.
Blaine looked back over his shoulder halfway out of the door and smiled. “That might have been why I was hanging around here.” He ducked into the hall and Kurt heard him hurrying away.
“I kind of hate you!” Kurt shouted.
“No you don’t!”
No, he didn’t.
Kurt fell to sit on the brown leather couch with a dramatic sprawl, his head rolling back to look up at the ceiling. He wondered what Sam was doing, then. Two minutes to ten on a Monday night. He could imagine the room -- the small, disorienting motel room; Sam’s sister and brother sprawled and asleep, tangled in the blankets, while Sam sat with his back against the wall beside them, on top of the sheets, a textbook propped against his knees, reading with a booklight and listening to his parents breathing from the foldaway at the end of the bed. It was a claustrophobic closeness that Kurt had never really visualized for himself.
But, suddenly, he could imagine the comfort of it. Forced together in a time of crisis. Every second, sitting with the weight of something uncertain and unsteady, trying to go on with things as normal, with the whisper of pages in the dark - every second reminded, by the sound of four draws of sleeping breath, that you aren’t alone.
Kurt could almost feel his father’s hand in his, walking out of the cemetery in the cold, away from everything familiar and into everything so desperately not. He wasn’t alone, either. They’d been together.
Kurt’s fingers brushed something smooth on the table beside the couch, and he glanced over to see his hand hovering above The Great Gatsby. Blaine had left it accidentally. Kurt lifted it and sat up a little in the seat, leaning against the arm to flip slowly through the pages, half reading, half watching the paper fall beneath his hand. The language was the way that he remembered; warm and lazy and bright and brittle, two women in white dresses lounging boneless in the sun. At the final page, he stopped, and his fingers smoothed over the last few lines, with their disjointed phrases.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us, then, but that’s no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
He closed the book and looked down at his hands over the cover.
If Sam could look up at the stars and see light from the past screaming down out of the dark as if it was the present and feel a sense of hope from that - if Gatsby could believe in the green light at the end of a dock in the mist - then Kurt could feel at peace with past overtaking the present. With the smell of perfume mixing with the musk of motel linen.
Gatsby and Sam had their own bright things to reach for. And Kurt thought that maybe, if he looked over his shoulder, he’d see his own, shining in the dark of his history. Closer than it had been in a while, with the current pushing stronger against him. But nothing to be afraid of, maybe.
He stood up, with the book still in his hand, and crossed the room to slip it into his bag. His phone chimed in his pocket, and he fished it out to look at the screen.
To: Kurt
Made it.
Kurt smiled. He shouldered the bag, then turned and started down the hallway to his room, looking at the screen as he typed a reply.
To: Blaine
Good. Also, you forgot Gatsby. Now he’ll never invite you to his parties.
To: Kurt
Crap. Well, no one was ever really invited anyway.
To: Blaine
I’ll give it to you tomorrow morning. Breakfast.
To: Kurt
I’m already looking forward to it. Good night, Kurt.
Kurt typed back his good night, then slipped the phone into his pocket.
Just because a friend going through something like this could still make Kurt’s hands shake and his stomach twist - that didn’t mean that what he’d told Sam wasn’t true. His mother had died, and the world hadn’t actually ended, and he’d kept waking up to new days. The world had settled back around him again, elastic and forgiving. There had been laughter at the dinner table and fighting and birthdays, and now there was a woman making him herbal tea and bringing it to him in his room on the weekends, and she wasn’t his mother, but it was still in her title, and he loved her.
The world hadn’t ended.
His key turned in the lock, and he pushed the door out and open into the shapeless dark of his room. Then he turned on the light.
Rating: PG
Characters: Kurt, Sam, Blaine (Kurt/Blaine, Sam+Kurt friendship)
Words: 4,400
Spoilers: 2.19, Rumours
Summary: A conversation in the cold with Sam, a conversation in the warmth with Blaine, and literary references.
Author's Note: I know that I did this decidedly backwards, writing a prom fic before a Rumours fic, but this one needed more staring at and humming. If this fic were to have warnings, they would be speaking from personal experience and literature of the Roaring Twenties.
The rough finish of the motel’s exterior wall bit through Kurt’s jacket and shirt to his skin, prickling uncomfortably, but he wasn’t going to move. Sam was next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them sitting on the unconscionably dirty asphalt that rolled in the dark from the rear of the building to the line of trees at the edge of the lot; it was a small, tangled forest, littered with bright bits of trash. Sam was looking down at the dregs of a 7-11 slurpee held limp in his hand, his shoulders hunched. Kurt could smell the artificial banana flavoring, doing what it could do drown out the bitter aroma of the largely untouched, poor-quality coffee sitting by Kurt’s right knee.
The silence had stretched between them since they’d left the motel earlier, when the sky was still evening-blue and the cold was just starting to creep in as the lingering traces of the sun were leeched away. It had been punctuated only by the offer for something and the nod of Kurt’s head at the overbright convenience store sign, and Sam’s immediate hesitance to accept the offer, and Kurt’s insistence that he needed something warm because the Earth had apparently forgotten what month it was and he didn’t have any gloves and this jacket was mostly decorative.
And Sam got a slurpee, because Sam was Sam, and if anyone was going to be completely unscarred by the feeling of sugared ice dripping into his eyes, it would be him.
Sam swirled the clear plastic straw through the water and ice at the bottom of his cup, and Kurt watched through the corner of his eye while he took a breath that lifted his letterman jacket a little higher. “Thanks for--” he gestured with the cup, but it wasn’t necessarily what he was referring to.
“It’s no problem,” Kurt said, reaching down to wrap his hands around both sides of the undrinkable coffee and lifting it up into his lap. “Who am I to come between you and artificial banana?”
Sam’s mouth twitched, but it did absolutely nothing to his eyes. It was more a grimace than a smile, and Kurt wondered when Sam had needed to learn to respond like that to poor attempts at humor. Was it - this, recently? Was it always? (Did Kurt have those responses? Did anyone see through them?)
“I just needed to get out of there for a while, you know?” Sam was gently pressing the straw into the ice now, breaking it apart with small creaking noises.
Kurt knew. The idea of sharing one room with Finn had, at one point, been attractive (and he couldn’t remember it without cutting his eyes away and closing his hand in a fist, because it was still embarrassing), but now the idea filled him with horror, because Finn was a human wrecking ball with questionable hygiene practices. Add to that Carole and his dad and all of their unsellable worldly possessions, and Kurt couldn’t imagine the pressure to get away, for any amount of time.
Except that he could. Enough to need to set the coffee back down and pull his knees to his chest so he could clasp his hands beneath them, hide them to keep Sam from seeing-
He let out one long breath and set his head against his knees. He was tired of this.
“My mom died when I was eight,” Kurt said. Sam stilled next to him. Kurt let his legs straighten out, looking into the middle distance, the thin trees way off in the dark. “She was sick for a while. At first it wasn’t that bad, and then - it was, and then--” He gestured openly. “She was just gone. It was just me and my dad.”
Sam was looking at him, and Kurt couldn’t really read the expression on his face, except that his eyes were sad. He let out a breath through pursed lips. “I’m really sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know that.” He glanced toward the corner of the building, where the light spilled over from the lamps between each door in the outdoor hallway. “I guess that kind of makes this look like nothing.”
Kurt shook his head firmly. “That isn’t what I meant. I’ll admit that there are times when Rachel is whining about whatever agony is currently besetting her that I just want to pick her up and shake her and explain what it actually feels like to have something legitimately terrible happen to you--” (it was only on the worst days, and he always felt guilty about it later, but it was true) “-- but what you’re going through is real and horrible.” Kurt stopped. “And it reminds me of when she died.”
Sam frowned, and opened his mouth to apologize again, but Kurt held up a hand to stop him. “It isn’t throwing me into a spiraling depression or anything,” he said. He hoped. “It happened a long time ago.”
Sam closed his mouth, but his eyebrows were still furrowed, looking at Kurt in an actively engaged way that Kurt hadn’t really seen in him since the night he’d let all of this out, standing in the rain on the front steps of Dalton at two in the morning. “How does it - remind you?” he asked. And then, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I get it, but--”
Kurt shook his head. “It’s just--” he said, and had to stop to collect the pieces, shuffle them into some semblance of order. “The week she died, it felt like everyone we knew was at our house, all the time. Touching me and talking to me. I hated it. It felt like they were squeezing her out - like the more people who came in, the less she fit.” He closed his eyes and tried to smooth his clenching hands against his pants. “So I left a lot. I would take my bike and ride around the neighborhood and not come back until I was sure everyone was gone. My dad hated it, but I think he understood. He probably felt the same way, but he couldn’t run away the way I could.”
He sat in the ensuing silence, not looking at Sam, picking lightly at the seam of his pant leg. “Sorry,” he said, after a minute. “I’m not trying to make this about me.”
He saw Sam shake his head out of the corner of his eye, blonde hair flicking back and forth. When he dared to look over, Sam was staring hard at the ground between them, thoughts almost visible behind his eyes. “I feel guilty about it,” he mumbled, the words nearly too quiet in the short distance to Kurt. “Like, I shouldn’t want to leave so bad. I should be - you know. Stronger.”
Kurt watched the flicker of expressions over Sam’s face and frowned. “I think you’re doing fine.”
Sam smiled without any humor or brightness in it at all. “You’re really wrong.” He rubbed a hand over his face, dragging his hair back away from his eyes. “I’m so bad at everything. They told me what was happening, and I was just like -- ‘this can’t be real, this isn’t actually happening.’” He closed his eyes. “And then it actually did, and I still couldn’t believe it until I was standing in the middle of the motel room and Stacey was crying about the toys we had to leave because there was no space, and my parents were trying to make her stop, but my dad started crying--” His exhale shuddered and frosted in the dark. “And it all kind of hit me at once. This is where I live now, this is what my life’s gonna be like.” He opened his eyes and looked over at Kurt. “I still kind of hope it’s a bad dream. It feels like one.”
Kurt watched Sam, his mouth tugged into a prominent, untempered frown. His hand twitched on his knee. Hesitantly, telegraphing every movement, he reached out and put his hand on Sam’s arm. “It isn’t really the best thing to hear,” he said slowly, “but I understand the way you feel.” Being sat down on the couch by his dad kneeling in front of him, telling him carefully what was happening, what was going to happen. The very loose and distracted days after that, thinking that if he could just pinch hard enough, he would wake up and nothing would be wrong. “And it stops after a while.”
Sam just sighed. He held his head up in both of his hands, looking down at his lap.
“The thing that you don’t really think about beforehand,” Kurt heard himself saying, hardly processing the words, “is that once it happens, you actually have to keep waking up every morning afterwards.”
Sam looked at him, then, through his shaggy bangs, and Kurt saw the incredulous recognition in his eyes. Under Kurt’s hand, Sam’s body stilled, as if his cells themselves had stopped dividing. Then he sat back against the wall behind him, letting his head fall so he could look up at the sky from under the overhanging roof. “How did you do it?” he asked, his voice soft. “Keep waking up. Because I don’t know how I’m doing it.”
Kurt squeezed Sam’s arm. “The day after we buried my mom, and everybody was gone and there was nothing to do anymore - I was surprised. Because I woke up and there was actually a whole day in front of me and I had no idea what I was going to do with it, because it never occurred to me that days were going to exist after the worst possible thing happened. But eventually it just - becomes life again.”
Kurt leaned forward so that he could see Sam’s face in the light from the corner, and his hand slipped down to wrap over the one Sam had on his knee. “This is going to be completely useless to you right now, because I think it’s something you have to learn for yourself,” he said, and Sam met his eyes, “but world-ending things? Aren’t actually world-ending. You think that everything is going to be over, but then there’s the next day, and the next day, and you lose track of what you thought was ending in the first place.” Kurt took a breath. “Things are different, and they’re terrible in a lot of ways, but you’re going to get through it, because you kind of won’t be able to help it. And then things are going to keep getting different, and you’re going to find ways to settle in to all of those differences, and you’re going to feel the same way you felt before any of this happened.” He smiled a little wryly. “Almost.”
“Almost?” Sam asked, still looking at him.
Kurt shrugged. “You’re always going to feel the bad stuff that happened to you. You’re just going to feel the good stuff more.”
Sam smiled at him, a little. It was real, and it made something faint and sweet bloom in Kurt’s chest.
“I’m glad that it was you who found out, instead of anybody else,” Sam said, his eyes flickering back to the ground. “You - you kind of get it.”
Kurt squeezed his fingers over Sam’s hand, his smile fragile. “I’m glad there’s something I could give you. Even if it’s just talking.”
Sam’s back slid down the wall, and Kurt didn’t know what Sam was doing until Sam’s head was against his shoulder, his breath leaving him in one great exhale. Kurt could only sit there for a second, frozen, feeling the weight of the body against him, not really daring to believe that he hadn’t just imagined it. But as much as Kurt blinked, Sam still stayed in the same place. And it wasn’t really that much of a surprise, if he let himself think about it. Sam had always been the one boy at McKinley who had never been afraid of him, of who he was. Sam had never cared at all that Kurt was gay.
Kurt let out his own breath, then lifted his arm and crossed it over Sam’s shoulder, letting him fall closer. Kurt could do physical comfort.
Sam glanced up at him. “Will your boyfriend have a problem with this?” he asked, gesturing at the compromising position.
“No,” Kurt said with confidence, lips tugging a little with humor at the thought of Blaine stumbling upon them. “I think if he was here, you’d be cuddled in his lap at this point.”
Sam laughed, and the sound startled both of them into silence.
“I have to go back inside soon,” Sam said after a moment.
Kurt sighed. “I have to drive back to Dalton before the campus closes down.”
Sam leaned away, but he caught Kurt’s eyes and smiled again. Kurt couldn’t help but feel pleased at the way it actually reached. “Thanks,” he said, all over again.
Kurt shrugged, watching him. “My pleasure. You can call me whenever you want, you know.”
Sam nodded. “O-okay.”
Kurt braced his hand against the wall and pushed himself to him feet. The back of his jacket and the seat of his pants were hopeless, but he brushed at them anyway, as fruitless as he knew the endeavor was. Then he turned around and held his hand out to Sam. “Up and at ‘em.”
Sam looked at the proffered hand for a moment. Then he reached out and grabbed it, and pulled himself up. They stood looking at each other with their hands between them.
“I’ll see you, Kurt,” Sam said, letting go.
Kurt nodded. “Any time. I mean it.”
Sam tilted his head. “Got it.”
Kurt turned slowly and started away, his steps clicking with the slight heel of his shoes. He headed for the corner with the light, beyond which he knew waited his car, and the drive back - one that would probably be silent, he thought, no music to distract from his thoughts, the feelings stirring between his chest and his head, disconnected old memories still humming a little with ache.
When he looked back over his shoulder before rounding the building, he saw Sam still there, with his hands at his sides, head cast back to look unflinchingly up at the stars. Like there was something written there for him, some kind of promise of space in the small sense. The future and the past at the same time, and Sam standing under it, waiting.
Kurt kept going.
Blaine was asleep on one of the long leather couches in the second floor common room. He was stretched out, but his feet still didn’t manage to touch the opposite arm; there was a book with its pages fanned face-up on the floor, and Blaine’s hand hung above it, fingers slack. He was lying on his side, and from where he’d stopped in the doorway, Kurt could see his face, his mouth open slightly, his long eyelashes against his cheeks. His chest rose and fell slow and even. Kurt lingered for a moment, leaning against the doorframe, his head against the wood, just watching. Then he set his bag down and wandered over, carefully quiet.
He knelt next to the couch and picked up the book to set it on the side table. (The Great Gatsby, he noticed, with the touch of a smile, his fingers tracing the blue-yellow image on the cover.) He hovered next to Blaine for a moment, his fingers resting carefully against the smooth skin of his brow, before leaning in and pressing a kiss to Blaine’s mouth.
When he pulled away, Blaine was smiling sleepily up at him. “Best wake-up ever,” he murmured, his voice a little rough with disuse, and his hand slid around to the back of Kurt’s neck, fingers fanned against his hair.
Kurt watched him, expression wry and unimpressed. “You were sleeping on the wrong floor, in the wrong building, on the wrong piece of furniture.”
“I was maybe waiting for you.” He looked at the floor, then at the side table, and smiled when he saw the book sitting neatly there. “And I maybe fell asleep in the middle of dinner at Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s.”
“What will they think of you?” Kurt asked. His fingers were tracing the curves and dips of Blaine’s face, his voice far away as he watched their progress over Blaine’s nose, under his eyes, against his hairline.
“They were kind of distracted,” Blaine said. He reached up and took Kurt’s hand. “They probably didn’t notice.”
“That book is so much better in the summer.”
“Sadly, they don’t teach English III in the summer.” He tilted his head a little, watching Kurt’s face, still as far away as his voice. “How was Sam?”
Kurt sat sideways against the couch with his legs tucked halfway under him, his shoulder brushing Blaine’s arm where it was still curled to cup against the back of Kurt’s neck. “He’s - Sam,” he murmured.
Blaine moved so that Kurt’s hand was tucked in his against his chest. “That’s incredibly specific,” he said, his mouth curling up at the edges. “Thanks for clearing it up.”
Kurt rolled his eyes, but he gave up the pretense and set his head against Blaine’s chest. “We went on a walk,” he said. “He wanted to get out of the motel room.”
“I don’t blame him.”
Kurt shook his head. He felt the fabric of Blaine’s blazer scratch against his skin as he did so. “It’s - more than that.” He took in and let out a breath. “We went back and talked for a while. About what’s happening to him.”
The fingers against the back of Kurt’s head rubbed softly, back and forth. “Good,” Blaine murmured.
Kurt lifted his head a little to look at him, surprised. “Good?”
Blaine smiled. It was lazy and still tired, but there was a kind of peace in it that Kurt loved, suddenly, the way he loved the other things that Blaine had or did or was, the things that Kurt had never really seen before but now wanted all the time. “Do you feel better?” Blaine asked.
“What--” Kurt asked, but he stopped when Blaine dipped forward and nosed in between Kurt’s shoulder and neck, his breath warm, his lips almost touching Kurt’s skin, and Kurt had to relax completely against him.
“You’ve been distracted all week,” Blaine murmured. “You’ve been wandering around like you don’t know where you are, ever since Sam came and told you what happened. There’s been something bothering you. And you haven’t talked to me about it.” He nuzzled closer against Kurt’s skin. “A guy could get a complex.”
Kurt breathed a shaky laugh against the lapel of Blaine’s blazer. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
Blaine pulled away. “I’m really flattered right now,” he said, one eyebrow raised, and Kurt laughed again and pulled him back to where he’d been.
“You’ll get over it,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and let himself drift with the sensations of Blaine against him; Blaine’s face tucked against his neck, one hand in his, the other arm curved around Kurt’s back to clutch at the material of his shirt and hold them together. He sighed. “I’ve been thinking about my mom.”
Blaine nodded against his neck. An invitation to continue.
“Sam’s - he’s kind of--” Kurt searched for the words, where he knew they existed somewhere inside of his head. “He’s feeling a lot of the same things I felt. Which is strange, because our situations are completely different, but - it’s still this life-altering change.” He paused. “And I’ve been--” having flashbacks “-reliving it, a little, since he told us.”
He felt Blaine’s hand tighten against his shirt. Blaine moved to press his forehead closer against Kurt’s pulse point. “I’m so sorry, Kurt,” he murmured.
Kurt shook his head. The air moved out of him, leaving his voice weak. “It’s okay,” he said. “I talked to him about it.” Another pause. “I do feel better.”
Blaine’s hand squeezed his, briefly. He pulled back to look Kurt in the eyes. “I know that you want to help him,” he said, “but if it’s too much for you, or if you’re worried you’ll--” He shook his head. “This isn’t your responsibility.”
“No, I know,” Kurt said. He smiled at the sincerity on Blaine’s face, the weird protectiveness that forced its way to the surface whenever something was bothering him. “It isn’t perfect,” he managed, “but - I want this to be something I can do.” He shrugged. “And maybe it’ll make us both feel better.”
Blaine smiled at him. It was small, and a little uncertain, but it was better. “Do what you want to do,” he said. “Whatever makes you feel right. I’ll support you either way.”
Kurt nodded. He leaned in to press a chaste kiss against Blaine’s lips. “Curfew is in about three minutes, by the way,” he mumbled.
Blaine sat up, sudden, cursing quietly, while Kurt laughed at him, still on the floor. When Blaine stood up, he pulled Kurt with him, pressing them together and kissing him (a little less chaste) before leaning away to grin. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “I’m glad you talked to Sam tonight.” He let go, then turned and hurried for the door.
“You were waiting for me to talk to him, weren’t you?” Kurt called after him.
Blaine looked back over his shoulder halfway out of the door and smiled. “That might have been why I was hanging around here.” He ducked into the hall and Kurt heard him hurrying away.
“I kind of hate you!” Kurt shouted.
“No you don’t!”
No, he didn’t.
Kurt fell to sit on the brown leather couch with a dramatic sprawl, his head rolling back to look up at the ceiling. He wondered what Sam was doing, then. Two minutes to ten on a Monday night. He could imagine the room -- the small, disorienting motel room; Sam’s sister and brother sprawled and asleep, tangled in the blankets, while Sam sat with his back against the wall beside them, on top of the sheets, a textbook propped against his knees, reading with a booklight and listening to his parents breathing from the foldaway at the end of the bed. It was a claustrophobic closeness that Kurt had never really visualized for himself.
But, suddenly, he could imagine the comfort of it. Forced together in a time of crisis. Every second, sitting with the weight of something uncertain and unsteady, trying to go on with things as normal, with the whisper of pages in the dark - every second reminded, by the sound of four draws of sleeping breath, that you aren’t alone.
Kurt could almost feel his father’s hand in his, walking out of the cemetery in the cold, away from everything familiar and into everything so desperately not. He wasn’t alone, either. They’d been together.
Kurt’s fingers brushed something smooth on the table beside the couch, and he glanced over to see his hand hovering above The Great Gatsby. Blaine had left it accidentally. Kurt lifted it and sat up a little in the seat, leaning against the arm to flip slowly through the pages, half reading, half watching the paper fall beneath his hand. The language was the way that he remembered; warm and lazy and bright and brittle, two women in white dresses lounging boneless in the sun. At the final page, he stopped, and his fingers smoothed over the last few lines, with their disjointed phrases.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us, then, but that’s no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
He closed the book and looked down at his hands over the cover.
If Sam could look up at the stars and see light from the past screaming down out of the dark as if it was the present and feel a sense of hope from that - if Gatsby could believe in the green light at the end of a dock in the mist - then Kurt could feel at peace with past overtaking the present. With the smell of perfume mixing with the musk of motel linen.
Gatsby and Sam had their own bright things to reach for. And Kurt thought that maybe, if he looked over his shoulder, he’d see his own, shining in the dark of his history. Closer than it had been in a while, with the current pushing stronger against him. But nothing to be afraid of, maybe.
He stood up, with the book still in his hand, and crossed the room to slip it into his bag. His phone chimed in his pocket, and he fished it out to look at the screen.
To: Kurt
Made it.
Kurt smiled. He shouldered the bag, then turned and started down the hallway to his room, looking at the screen as he typed a reply.
To: Blaine
Good. Also, you forgot Gatsby. Now he’ll never invite you to his parties.
To: Kurt
Crap. Well, no one was ever really invited anyway.
To: Blaine
I’ll give it to you tomorrow morning. Breakfast.
To: Kurt
I’m already looking forward to it. Good night, Kurt.
Kurt typed back his good night, then slipped the phone into his pocket.
Just because a friend going through something like this could still make Kurt’s hands shake and his stomach twist - that didn’t mean that what he’d told Sam wasn’t true. His mother had died, and the world hadn’t actually ended, and he’d kept waking up to new days. The world had settled back around him again, elastic and forgiving. There had been laughter at the dinner table and fighting and birthdays, and now there was a woman making him herbal tea and bringing it to him in his room on the weekends, and she wasn’t his mother, but it was still in her title, and he loved her.
The world hadn’t ended.
His key turned in the lock, and he pushed the door out and open into the shapeless dark of his room. Then he turned on the light.