Comfort Zone 2/2
Spoilers: Up to 2.10.
Warnings: Homophobia.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 12, 272 total
Disclaimer: RIB and FOX own everything ever.
This prompt. Finn discovers that Kurt’s bed is almost definitely magical; at least, sleeping there always makes him feel better. (Obviously, given the stuff I write, I got permission to keep it brotherly.)
Part One
4.
If there were a list of things Kurt did not expect to be true of Finn Hudson, his being deathly terrified of horror movies would probably be somewhere on it. He plays those video games and watches war movies all the time, and Kurt doesn’t see how they’re all that different. Lots of people dying gruesomely for a few hours and then it’s over; the only real variable is whether it’s foreigners or zombies who start the gruesome death ball rolling. And at least horror movies don’t have as much posturing about honor and glory. Kurt isn’t a huge fan, but he can tolerate horror; he thinks it’s likely to be one of the few genres they can agree on. And to be totally fair, he does ask.
Finn is devastated at losing Rachel, his own choice or not. Kurt is trying to be supportive without picking a side, not as much because he can’t make a moral judgment as because he just doesn’t want to alienate either of them. He has a feeling he is getting away with this only because Finn hasn’t noticed, but he likes having a frally in Rachel; it’s comforting, and worth a little obfuscation.
In the interests of keeping Finn from noticing, and to distract Finn from his pain, he calls from the grocery store and offers to make a movie run while he’s out.
“Yeah, sure, dude.”
“Is horror okay with you? I thought it might be sort of the middle ground between musicals and war movies. Just as much melodrama, just as much gore.”
“Horror’s fine.”
“Start finding your snacks now, then, because I am not digging around in the cupboards for ten minutes looking for the cheesy puffs again when it turns out they’re in your room.”
Then he gets to Blockbuster and realizes that he just has no idea. All of the movies look unforgivably stupid. Resigning himself to a night of mind-numbing boredom, he texts Puck, asking for the title of a cool horror movie.
para normal activity man that shit was freaking terrifying, Puck texts back.
Kurt squints at the title for a while, thinking it’s half in Spanish, and then gives up. He finds the movie, and the title makes a lot more sense without the extra space. He trusts Puck to have about the same taste in movies as Finn, so he takes it without reading the description and goes home.
This is a mistake.
His first clue comes when the movie starts and Finn frowns. “We’re watching a documentary?”
Kurt plops his feet in Finn’s lap and drags over his personal bowl of plain popcorn. “No, it’s just shot this way,” he says, already bored. “It must be that pseudo-Blair Witch Trials one everyone was raging about.” He prefers a stylish horror movie, not one that’s trying to be realistic. There is nothing realistic about ghosts, and bad camera work doesn’t change that. A horror movie ought to embrace its fictional nature and be pretty. Oh well. For Finn’s sake, he can give up two hours.
“So it is a documentary. Like the Blair Witch one.”
“Really, Finn?”
Finn looks at him.
“No. The Blair Witch Project was not real. Neither is this. There are no witches, no ghosts, no demons, and do we need to have a talk about the Tooth Fairy?”
“Oh,” says Finn, and his expression should tip Kurt off, but it doesn’t.
It’s not a bad movie, per se. It’s just not Kurt’s favorite kind. There are exactly two things he’s willing to suspend disbelief for: overdramatic relationships and people singing apropos of nothing (and given his life, that’s not even that big a leap of faith). Night-attacking demons with a crush, not so much. Halfway through, Dad and Carole get home from their night out and he is granted a brief interlude of interesting conversation, but then they go to bed. Kurt falls asleep a little before the climax.
When he wakes up, it’s very late. The TV is off. His upper body is cold, his legs are warm, and he won’t be able to appreciate that for long because they’re going numb due to the large amount of Finn Hudson on them.
“Nng,” he protests, and shoves Finn until he wakes up and moves. “We fell asleep downstairs,” he informs his stepbrother muzzily.
“Um, yeah,” Finn says. He’s still holding onto Kurt’s ankle.
“So. Let’s go upstairs.”
“Sure.”
Kurt leaves the tidying for tomorrow, switches off the DVD player, and goes upstairs to bed. Finn holds his arm all the way up, but Kurt figure’s that’s because he walks into things so much and wants to get to bed in one piece.
Kurt continues to think that everything is fine and he has made a noble and self-sacrificing gesture until four in the morning, when something huge hits his bed and almost bounces him off. He jolts awake with a small shriek and is assaulted by the smell of cheesy puffs.
“Kurt,” Finn says, “are you awake?”
“I am,” Kurt says, “now.”
“There’s a demon in the house. It’s after you. I saw it in a dream.”
“The random misfirings of your brain are not my problem,” Kurt hisses.
“But what if you get yanked out of bed like in the movie and dragged into the hall closet and there’s no one there to save you? Or what if I wake up in the night and you’re standing over me swaying and then you kill me?”
“Finn. There are no, repeat after me, no demons. They do not exist. And we do not have a hall closet.”
“Then what dragged that girl out of bed?”
“Special effects. CGI. It was a movie, Finn, a work of fiction, with actors pretending to be going through imaginary situations.”
“There’s something moving in my room, though.”
“Finnnnn,” Kurt moans, and pulls the covers over his head. “Just... get in and go to sleep.”
Under the covers, he vindictively texts Puck. I don’t think Finn liked your movie. Finn gets in and has, Kurt is pleased to find, worn socks.
A few seconds later, Puck texts back, you watched it w Finn? lol dude bad move. azimio told him blair witch was real when we were kids been doin damage control ever since
Kurt throws his phone back onto the bedside table and contemplates ways to murder Noah Puckerman, and of the two of them which has cheated on Finn twice anyway, or whatever you call it when you make out with your best friend’s girlfriend, so he’s in no position to make Kurt feel guilty.
“Finn,” he says, “docu-style horror kind of freaks you out, doesn’t it.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“It doesn’t!” Finn snakes an arm under Kurt and drags him back against his chest. “If the demon tried to get me, though, you’d hold on, right?”
“There. Are. No. Demons.”
“But if…”
“It couldn’t drag you away anyway, you’re too heavy.”
“…Really?”
“No, Finn. They can’t have a weight limit, they don’t exist.”
“But so if they did, one definitely couldn’t get both of us at once.” He puts his other arm over Kurt and folds their hands together.
“I’m going to pretend you’re sleepwalking, because you’re embarrassing yourself right now.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t let go if you don’t.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, Finn. Go to sleep.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The fourth time Finn wakes up in Kurt’s bed, there is no way, in the light of the sun, to categorize it as an emergency. But it was, Finn decides, thinking of something Rachel had said once, an urgent situation, which is almost as good.
He’s spooning Kurt this time, but he’d had the foresight to move over so that a bunch of blankets are wadded between their lower bodies; it totally doesn’t count.
There are possibly no such things as demons, and anyway the one in the movie didn’t attack in the daytime, so he could move back to his own room. He pulls the sheet over their heads instead, just in case, and locks his hand tighter around Kurt’s. Neither of them are going anywhere.
5.
Finn has never been over-invested in his studies. He wants good grades, but not on their own merit, and he means well but doesn’t get too terribly broken up about a B or a C. Kurt, on the other hand, while he does value other things more - song, interior decoration, a good sale - does care about his grades and finds Finn’s study habits (or lack thereof) irritating. Especially now, with the workload at Dalton. He spends most weekends at home, too, which means he has to bear witness to the madness that is Finn remembering Sunday night that he has a test on Monday and then shrug it off with a few hours of studying, while Kurt’s just spent all weekend trying to memorize the entire history of France.
He’s not prepared for the horror with which Finn greets Carole’s casual, “Oh, Finn, don’t you have a test tomorrow? In… history, I think?”
Finn, who is sitting on the floor because he says it’s easier to play video games that way, drops his controller, allowing his character to be mowed down by things that are either robots or men in very odd metal clothing. “Oh, crap.”
“Don’t worry, he’s just pixels,” Kurt says irritably from behind his French textbook. “You can bring him right back again, remember? Over, and over, and over…” He really thinks video game characters should stay dead when they die.
“No, dude, the test. I’m so screwed. I was going to spend all this weekend studying with Rach - Rachel…”
“Really?” Kurt raised an eyebrow. “You, Finn, you had planned pre-‘you know’ to study for this test? Why on earth -”
Finn scoots closer to Kurt, lowering his voice. Carole is reading a murder-mystery and possibly not listening, although if she is there’s no way to miss Finn’s stage whisper. “I’m gonna fail Mrs. Simmons’ class if I don’t pass with at least an eighty, and then I won’t be eligible for sports.”
“Oh, ouch. You’d better get studying.” He does, now, remember that an awful lot of their grade was riding on this test. He is perversely pleased to not be taking it, though he’s traded it for worse.
“I don’t know what to do,” Finn hisses, frantic.
“You know Mrs. Simmons. Memorize every date in the chapters you’ve covered well enough to do a short-answer essay on it.”
Finn grabs his knee and stares up at him with laser-intense puppy dog eyes. “Help me.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
They end up making an obscene amount of flashcards covering the Mayflower up until the end of the Civil War and going over them for the better part of two hours before Burt pats Kurt’s back and tells him, with a look at Finn that defines passive stepparenting, that it’s bedtime.
“Oh, yeah, totally, me too,” Finn says, grabbing a handful of flashcards.
“M’kay, I was getting bored with Washington anyway, fabulous as his wig may have been.” Kurt kisses Burt and Carole goodnight. Finn does that awkward thing where he looks like he thinks he should do the same, or wants to do the same, but can’t quite bring himself to so he just waves and pats their shoulders instead.
And at the top of the stairs Finn grabs Kurt bodily and says, “Dude, you gotta keep helping me.”
“It’s eleven o’clock, I’ve been helping you for three hours. I’m going to bed.”
“Please, dude, I can’t do this to my mom, fail a class. I swear I was gonna study, but I had everything planned with, you know, and then everything got thrown off when, you know, and you’re really helpful, I can’t memorize stuff on my own.”
Kurt sighs. “Put me down.”
“Oh.” Finn looks down at the gap between Kurt’s heels and the floor and sets him back on his feet. “Oops.”
“On the bright side for one of us, either I’ve lost weight or the gym’s paid off for you.”
Finn brightens. “I think it’s the gym. You’ve actually gained some weight lately.”
Kurt glares.
“In a good way! You were looking all scrawny at McKinley the last few weeks, like in a bad way, even Rachel said so. Now you look healthy again.”
“Stop, Finn, while you’re… less behind. Fine, come in my room after they go to sleep and we’ll keep working on it.”
“Cool! Love ya, dude.”
Kurt reels emotionally, and also a little bit physically, as he isn’t all that skilled at keeping his emotions off his face or inner ear. He is pretty sure Finn will fall asleep and fail to go anywhere until seven in the morning, when the alarm Carole habitually set for him would go off. He is also regretting that this was his reason for saying yes.
It probably hadn’t meant all that much to Finn, Kurt reminds himself. Finn doesn’t think before speaking. Or during, or generally after. That sort of makes it better, for a second; it means Finn’s over the crush issue and can toss off familial expressions of love without thinking about it. Then Kurt thinks about it some more and realizes that it makes it worse.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Finn shows up three hours later. He’s yawning and mussed and Kurt realizes he’s there when he wakes up to someone huge with ice-cold feet dragging him into a hug.
“Teddy,” Finn says.
“No. Not Teddy.” Kurt shoves Finn off. “How did you wake up for this?”
“Gah. Uh. Cell phone. Did you know they have alarms? Rach showed me. Took me a while to find it again.”
“I thought we discussed a sock rule for when you sleep with me.”
“I didn’t realize I’d have to get under the covers. Anyway, I’m not sleeping with you, that sounds weird.”
“Yeah, well, tough. Technically you are and have been.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Okay, good. Don’t be. I can’t handle it right now, dude, not on top of… you know.”
“I know.”
“So do you still want to help me study, or can we just go to sleep?”
“Sit up,” Kurt sighs, and manages not to snap or snipe for a full two hours more. The key to flashcards, he’s always found, is to go very slowly and not add more until you know the one you have. With Finn, this is a process which slows time to a surreal crawl, especially when he tries to get out of answering the questions by saying that he’d just done that one despite having no real response for “yes, so what is it?”
The end result is not perfect, but it is four in the morning, so Kurt calls it quits. Finn doesn’t even put the cards on the table before falling asleep.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The fifth time Finn wakes up in Kurt’s bed, there’s pretty much no excuse except that he was tired. He does think the whole magic thing could help him on his test tomorrow, to be fair. But it’s five-thirty in the morning and he has to pee, which is depressing since in a half an hour Kurt’ll have to leave for the week at Dalton so he should probably stay awake but he really wants to sneak out, pee, and then sneak back in for more sleep.
This doesn’t happen, because the bed is empty when he gets back into the bedroom. It takes him a while to remember why this is bad, and then he wakes up all the way because he’s afraid Kurt’s been snatched by a demon.
Kurt is, as it turns out, asleep on the couch downstairs. Finn feels pretty heroic for having checked rather than running to hide under his own bed.
“Hey,” he says, poking Kurt’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”
Kurt bats his hand away. “Sleeping.”
“On the couch, though. How come?”
“No reason. Go back to my bed, Finn.”
“You’re gonna freeze, dude. I think you’re out of it and making bad decisions. Come on.” He tugs Kurt’s arm over his shoulders.
“Finn.” Kurt jerks away. “I mean it. Leave me alone. I don’t want to sleep with you, okay?”
“…Seriously, what did I do?”
“Nothing.”
Finn steps back. “I’m sorry, I… I thought you were cool with…”
“Well, I’m not. I changed my mind.”
“Uh, did I… did you… like… get…”
“Do not, Finn Hudson, finish that sentence; the horror in your tone speaks volumes,” Kurt says bitterly. “In fact, don’t finish any sentences. Go. Back. To bed.”
Finn nods, and turns around, and does. He goes to his own bed, which cold and there is definitely something moving in the corner of his room and damnit he really thought they were cool. But he’s been sleeping in with Kurt kind of a lot, for a guy with a brand new gay stepbrother who used to have a crush on him, and they’d talked about whether or not Finn was attractive and oh shit. Just… shit.
+1
Kurt is really high maintenance, but he’s also really, really self-sufficient. He does a lot of the cleaning and cooking, and it’s pretty obvious even to Finn that he used to do like all of it before he and his mom moved in - because Burt totally helps out whenever anyone asks him, it’s just that he has to be asked, whereas Kurt and his mom both have this weird thing where they just do stuff, like before it even needs to be done. He still does the grocery shopping sometimes. He buys all his own clothes, and he has a credit card so he knows how to handle bills and sometimes he does that. He helps out at the garage and keeps his own car in working order. He’s pretty much like a miniature grown-up, Finn figures.
So it probably sounds lame to say that he’s fine with his parents having a weekend getaway awhile after Christmas not so much because he’s seventeen and almost an adult as because he knows his little brother will, even if he is still pissed off for things which are not Finn’s fault, take care of him - but there it is. Plus it’s totally the only reason they’re going; Carole reminds Kurt twice before they leave not to let Finn use anything hot or metallic in the kitchen, or anywhere really. She also makes sure three times that he knows where all the emergency numbers are.
Finn is fine with this, because the night Burt brought the idea up (and Kurt, predictably, was kind of creepily overjoyed at the idea of their parents having a romantic pseudo-honeymoon thing, while Finn was decently uncomfortable with the whole thing) he took Finn aside later. “Look,” he said, “this has gotta stay between us, but… you know how to use a rifle?”
Then he showed Finn where he stashes this manliest of man-things, and how to use it. Let Kurt keep the frying pans; Finn gets the rifle.
“Kurt knows where this is, and how to use it,” Burt said, “but he doesn’t like it and he ain’t afraid to say so. I just…” he rubbed his head. “Some of those phone calls… Thing is, Finn, anyone breaks in here, you got a legal right to shoot them. This town, I don’t trust them to be after the TV, okay? So you know how this is gonna work, Kurt’s gonna walk all over you on this power high, but if anyone tries something funny while we’re gone - you’re in charge, and don’t you let anyone hurt either of you boys. No matter what. Alright?”
Finn nodded solemnly and accepted his mission.
Burt looked at him warily. “Just… don’t take it out unless you have to. And maybe let Kurt load it.”
So now they’re gone, and Kurt is, indeed, on a power high. He’s trying to decide what bedtime to instate.
“Kurt, come on. I already cleared this weekend because you said you didn’t feel comfortable with me driving at night in the snow. Now you’re just being a tyrannist.”
“Tyrannical. Tyrannist isn’t a word. And I was right! Look at it out there, it’s a whiteout.”
He’s not wrong, but it’s Ohio in January. Finn thinks this is an overreaction. Plus he needs to stop using words that aren’t around Kurt, because he has the exact same tone (and phrasing) Rachel does about this stuff and it hurts too much. “Dude, chill. It’s not like… a storm.”
“Actually, Finn, when the snow makes it impossible to see across the street and the nice man on TV is warning against unnecessary travel? That is the very definition of a storm.”
“…I don’t see why that means I need a bedtime.”
“You need a bedtime because I say so.” Kurt beams. “Oh my god, I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Finn breaks down. “If it makes you that happy.” He slumps down into the couch. “Not like anything else I can do will…”
“What?”
“I was kind of hoping someone would break in and I could shoot them to save you and then you’d like me again, but since we’re snowed in and all the violent homophobes probably are too, I guess that’s a bust. So seriously, dude, what is your problem?”
Kurt closes his eyes for a while, and mutters something that sounds like numbers. Then he says, “Do you really want to do this?”
“Yes,” says Finn, who doesn’t. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have been bunking in with you, but you could have said if it was making you - I mean, you specifically said it was fine, like I asked and everything!”
Kurt is the special kind of white he gets when he’s really upset or mad or, generally, both. “You were not,” he says, “making me uncomfortable. At least not the way you’re obviously about to have an apoplectic fit over. You said that, not me. You’re the one who assumed that the only possible reason I could be mad at you would be because you’d awoken my perverse, incestuous gay lust.”
“That’s not fair,” Finn says, “you didn’t say you weren’t, either. Wait. You weren’t?” The intense skeeze factor he’s been dealing with for the past week and change, thinking he’d been snuggled up to a dude who kind of wanted to bang him still despite the lack of crush, goes away. This is nice, but it’s replaced by total bafflement. “Well then what was the problem?”
“At this point, the problem is that you really think I’d sleep with you if I wanted to have sex with you. Aside from everything else, I can’t believe you think I’d be that stupid. The original problem was that you said you loved me.”
Finn feels very out of his depth. “Which time was it a problem?”
“There was only. One. Time.”
“Dude, not even. I say it all the time.”
“No, you don’t. You said it when I told you I’d help with your stupid flashcards. I promised to help you study after lights-out, you tossed off an ‘I love you.’”
“Okay, fine. I still don’t get why it’s bad to say that I love you.”
Kurt’s eyes are getting shiny and wet-looking. “Because you don’t. You like me. There’s a difference, and maybe it’s not a big deal to you, but it is to me. And when you do love someone, you don’t just… drop it into casual conversation when you’re saying it for the first time. Especially you. You don’t think when you speak, and ‘I love you’ requires some forethought. You didn’t mean ‘I love you,’ you meant, ‘thanks for being a convenient study partner,’ and you should have said so.”
Finn stands up. “Jesus, Kurt, give me a break! I didn’t say it the right way, so there’s no possible way I could mean it? I do love you. I don’t know how to say it so you believe me, like what weird new-brothers code I’m supposed to be following here, but I do. And don’t give me that about it not being a big deal to me, either, I know what it’s like to grow up with only one person and then get two brand new ones. And - and you know what? I’d buy in a second that you love me, but you don’t like me very much, and that sucks.”
Kurt looks stricken. “I do like you. I - what more could I possibly do to convince you that I like you?”
“It’s not about doing stuff, dude, that’s my point! You’re always there for the big stuff, when I need you, like over Rachel and being drunk and stuff, and I’m grateful. But you don’t like me anymore. Unless I’m like on the verge of a nervous breakdown you snap at me and act like I’m stupid and say weird stuff about some guy who plays a pipe -”
“The Pied Piper.”
“ - yeah, him. You used to want to talk to me about normal things and… and now you just help when I need it and then go away again.”
Kurt takes several deep breaths. “I may have misread the situation.”
“You think?”
“But you did too. I do like you, Finn. I think you’re a really great guy. If I’ve been… short with you in your hours of less emotional need, it’s because of the stress. Karofsky’s been worse all year, and then moving to Dalton - it’s great, but it’s not exactly stress-free to change schools mid-semester and not be able to see my dad every day. And if I’ve been condescending, well, welcome to the club, I’m condescending to everyone.”
“You didn’t use to be with me.”
Kurt flushes. “Finn. When we met, I…”
“Had a crush on me,” Finn realizes.
“Wasn’t making wise decisions,” Kurt says.
“You were only super-nice because of that?”
“Yes. Because of the lack of wise decisions.”
Finn reflects upon this at length. “So it’s a good thing that you’re treating me like everyone else now?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Cool.” He sits back down. “I really do love you.”
“Well, I really do like you.”
“So… you’re still pissed at me.”
“You thought I was perving on you. You seriously thought I was letting you sleep with me, which was always your idea, just so, what, I could -”
“I’m sorry, okay?” Finn, with monumental effort, manages not to point out the room-sharing incident, which kind of proves Kurt’s not entirely above this sort of thing.
“Good.” Kurt sits down too. At the opposite end of the couch, with his arms crossed. “I hope that in the future you’re more certain about eliciting contact with which you’ll feel comfortable without a metaphorical ‘no homo’ right after.”
“Okay.” Finn waits a while. “So what’s bedtime?”
“I don’t care.”
Finn wonders if it would be insensitive to turn on the TV. Probably.
“Finn?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever spent the night without Carole? I mean, with her in another town?”
“Actually, no.”
“Me neither. I mean, at Dalton. But Dad’s never been the one who’s… gone.”
Finn nods. “Let’s stay up all night in case they call randomly at three in the morning.”
“Deal.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Kurt’s the first one to pass out, at some time around two in the morning, with his cell phone still in his hand. Finn thinks he probably follows suit around three. He wakes up at seven in the morning, and Kurt is curled into a lump under the blanket over at the end of the couch. It’s still pretty dark outside because of the snow, which looks gray and threatening in the thin light.
Finn being the one in charge of dangerous situations, he goes up to his room and changes the sheets, then piles all the blankets in the linen cupboard on his bed. He also gets snacks. Kurt proves to be about as easy to carry as the lump of blankets - awkward, but not all that heavy.
“Wazzat?” Kurt asks when Finn dumps him on the bed.
“We’re battening down the hatches,” Finn informs him. “Move over.”
“Mmphm.”
Finn gets in next to him and curls around him. It really isn’t fair that he always has to be the bigger man, and Kurt is the one who thought it was cool to share a room with a guy he had a crush on and then never even own up to said crush so he thinks a few misgivings are justified here. But on the other hand, Finn seriously is the bigger man - by like at least a head or so - so maybe that’s why. He makes sure he’s holding Kurt’s hand before he goes to sleep.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The first time Kurt wakes up in Finn’s bed, his initial reaction is horror because he remembers going to sleep in the living room and apparently someone broke in during the night and plastered the walls with hideous, tacky posters. His secondary reaction is also horror because oh god he’s in Finn Hudson’s bed, and those sheets are probably breeding diseases unknown by science. By the time he gets around to Finn being sort of on top of him, with the hand-holding and arm around him and their legs all tangled together, he’s pretty much out of horror.
“Finn.”
No answer.
“Finn.”
“Hn.”
“I thought we had a new rule.”
Finn slits his eyes open. “New rule. Bedtime?”
“No, the other one.”
“Only things I’m comfortable with, even without no homo?”
“Yes, that.”
“Following it.” Finn tries to pat Kurt’s shoulder with the hand he’s holding Kurt’s with and ends up sort of clipping Kurt’s chin with his own hand. “Oops.” He rests his chin on Kurt’s hair. “I know I backslide sometimes, but it’s cool now, right?”
Kurt sighs into Finn’s neck, which smells faintly of sweat and the kind of soap that dries rather than moisturizes. “You’re very good at messing up spectacularly and then making up for it even more spectacularly.” It really isn’t fair that he always has to be the bigger man and forgive Finn’s constant gay freakouts, but he’s had his whole life to get used to it. Finn didn’t have to deal with any of it until he was sixteen.
“Thanks? I think?”
“I have to get up, though.”
“…We’re not cool?”
“We’re cool, Finn. This bed is not cool.”
“I changed the sheets.”
“For clean ones?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I take that back. You’re astoundingly good at making it up with spectacular gestures.”
“Which makes me very likable.”
“It does.”
“Did I tell you I got an A on that test?”
“No, but I heard you tell Carole. Several times. In a tone of voice I haven’t heard since I used it on my father when I was maybe ten.”
“Oh, screw you.”
“You’re welcome for my invaluable help with studying.”
“I would say it makes you lovable, but I’m afraid you’ll think I only love you for your brain or something, so just in general - I love you, Kurt.”
“Good.”
“Next time we’re going back in your room, though. Pretty sure this one’s haunted.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Master List
Warnings: Homophobia.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 12, 272 total
Disclaimer: RIB and FOX own everything ever.
This prompt. Finn discovers that Kurt’s bed is almost definitely magical; at least, sleeping there always makes him feel better. (Obviously, given the stuff I write, I got permission to keep it brotherly.)
Part One
4.
If there were a list of things Kurt did not expect to be true of Finn Hudson, his being deathly terrified of horror movies would probably be somewhere on it. He plays those video games and watches war movies all the time, and Kurt doesn’t see how they’re all that different. Lots of people dying gruesomely for a few hours and then it’s over; the only real variable is whether it’s foreigners or zombies who start the gruesome death ball rolling. And at least horror movies don’t have as much posturing about honor and glory. Kurt isn’t a huge fan, but he can tolerate horror; he thinks it’s likely to be one of the few genres they can agree on. And to be totally fair, he does ask.
Finn is devastated at losing Rachel, his own choice or not. Kurt is trying to be supportive without picking a side, not as much because he can’t make a moral judgment as because he just doesn’t want to alienate either of them. He has a feeling he is getting away with this only because Finn hasn’t noticed, but he likes having a frally in Rachel; it’s comforting, and worth a little obfuscation.
In the interests of keeping Finn from noticing, and to distract Finn from his pain, he calls from the grocery store and offers to make a movie run while he’s out.
“Yeah, sure, dude.”
“Is horror okay with you? I thought it might be sort of the middle ground between musicals and war movies. Just as much melodrama, just as much gore.”
“Horror’s fine.”
“Start finding your snacks now, then, because I am not digging around in the cupboards for ten minutes looking for the cheesy puffs again when it turns out they’re in your room.”
Then he gets to Blockbuster and realizes that he just has no idea. All of the movies look unforgivably stupid. Resigning himself to a night of mind-numbing boredom, he texts Puck, asking for the title of a cool horror movie.
para normal activity man that shit was freaking terrifying, Puck texts back.
Kurt squints at the title for a while, thinking it’s half in Spanish, and then gives up. He finds the movie, and the title makes a lot more sense without the extra space. He trusts Puck to have about the same taste in movies as Finn, so he takes it without reading the description and goes home.
This is a mistake.
His first clue comes when the movie starts and Finn frowns. “We’re watching a documentary?”
Kurt plops his feet in Finn’s lap and drags over his personal bowl of plain popcorn. “No, it’s just shot this way,” he says, already bored. “It must be that pseudo-Blair Witch Trials one everyone was raging about.” He prefers a stylish horror movie, not one that’s trying to be realistic. There is nothing realistic about ghosts, and bad camera work doesn’t change that. A horror movie ought to embrace its fictional nature and be pretty. Oh well. For Finn’s sake, he can give up two hours.
“So it is a documentary. Like the Blair Witch one.”
“Really, Finn?”
Finn looks at him.
“No. The Blair Witch Project was not real. Neither is this. There are no witches, no ghosts, no demons, and do we need to have a talk about the Tooth Fairy?”
“Oh,” says Finn, and his expression should tip Kurt off, but it doesn’t.
It’s not a bad movie, per se. It’s just not Kurt’s favorite kind. There are exactly two things he’s willing to suspend disbelief for: overdramatic relationships and people singing apropos of nothing (and given his life, that’s not even that big a leap of faith). Night-attacking demons with a crush, not so much. Halfway through, Dad and Carole get home from their night out and he is granted a brief interlude of interesting conversation, but then they go to bed. Kurt falls asleep a little before the climax.
When he wakes up, it’s very late. The TV is off. His upper body is cold, his legs are warm, and he won’t be able to appreciate that for long because they’re going numb due to the large amount of Finn Hudson on them.
“Nng,” he protests, and shoves Finn until he wakes up and moves. “We fell asleep downstairs,” he informs his stepbrother muzzily.
“Um, yeah,” Finn says. He’s still holding onto Kurt’s ankle.
“So. Let’s go upstairs.”
“Sure.”
Kurt leaves the tidying for tomorrow, switches off the DVD player, and goes upstairs to bed. Finn holds his arm all the way up, but Kurt figure’s that’s because he walks into things so much and wants to get to bed in one piece.
Kurt continues to think that everything is fine and he has made a noble and self-sacrificing gesture until four in the morning, when something huge hits his bed and almost bounces him off. He jolts awake with a small shriek and is assaulted by the smell of cheesy puffs.
“Kurt,” Finn says, “are you awake?”
“I am,” Kurt says, “now.”
“There’s a demon in the house. It’s after you. I saw it in a dream.”
“The random misfirings of your brain are not my problem,” Kurt hisses.
“But what if you get yanked out of bed like in the movie and dragged into the hall closet and there’s no one there to save you? Or what if I wake up in the night and you’re standing over me swaying and then you kill me?”
“Finn. There are no, repeat after me, no demons. They do not exist. And we do not have a hall closet.”
“Then what dragged that girl out of bed?”
“Special effects. CGI. It was a movie, Finn, a work of fiction, with actors pretending to be going through imaginary situations.”
“There’s something moving in my room, though.”
“Finnnnn,” Kurt moans, and pulls the covers over his head. “Just... get in and go to sleep.”
Under the covers, he vindictively texts Puck. I don’t think Finn liked your movie. Finn gets in and has, Kurt is pleased to find, worn socks.
A few seconds later, Puck texts back, you watched it w Finn? lol dude bad move. azimio told him blair witch was real when we were kids been doin damage control ever since
Kurt throws his phone back onto the bedside table and contemplates ways to murder Noah Puckerman, and of the two of them which has cheated on Finn twice anyway, or whatever you call it when you make out with your best friend’s girlfriend, so he’s in no position to make Kurt feel guilty.
“Finn,” he says, “docu-style horror kind of freaks you out, doesn’t it.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“It doesn’t!” Finn snakes an arm under Kurt and drags him back against his chest. “If the demon tried to get me, though, you’d hold on, right?”
“There. Are. No. Demons.”
“But if…”
“It couldn’t drag you away anyway, you’re too heavy.”
“…Really?”
“No, Finn. They can’t have a weight limit, they don’t exist.”
“But so if they did, one definitely couldn’t get both of us at once.” He puts his other arm over Kurt and folds their hands together.
“I’m going to pretend you’re sleepwalking, because you’re embarrassing yourself right now.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t let go if you don’t.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, Finn. Go to sleep.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The fourth time Finn wakes up in Kurt’s bed, there is no way, in the light of the sun, to categorize it as an emergency. But it was, Finn decides, thinking of something Rachel had said once, an urgent situation, which is almost as good.
He’s spooning Kurt this time, but he’d had the foresight to move over so that a bunch of blankets are wadded between their lower bodies; it totally doesn’t count.
There are possibly no such things as demons, and anyway the one in the movie didn’t attack in the daytime, so he could move back to his own room. He pulls the sheet over their heads instead, just in case, and locks his hand tighter around Kurt’s. Neither of them are going anywhere.
5.
Finn has never been over-invested in his studies. He wants good grades, but not on their own merit, and he means well but doesn’t get too terribly broken up about a B or a C. Kurt, on the other hand, while he does value other things more - song, interior decoration, a good sale - does care about his grades and finds Finn’s study habits (or lack thereof) irritating. Especially now, with the workload at Dalton. He spends most weekends at home, too, which means he has to bear witness to the madness that is Finn remembering Sunday night that he has a test on Monday and then shrug it off with a few hours of studying, while Kurt’s just spent all weekend trying to memorize the entire history of France.
He’s not prepared for the horror with which Finn greets Carole’s casual, “Oh, Finn, don’t you have a test tomorrow? In… history, I think?”
Finn, who is sitting on the floor because he says it’s easier to play video games that way, drops his controller, allowing his character to be mowed down by things that are either robots or men in very odd metal clothing. “Oh, crap.”
“Don’t worry, he’s just pixels,” Kurt says irritably from behind his French textbook. “You can bring him right back again, remember? Over, and over, and over…” He really thinks video game characters should stay dead when they die.
“No, dude, the test. I’m so screwed. I was going to spend all this weekend studying with Rach - Rachel…”
“Really?” Kurt raised an eyebrow. “You, Finn, you had planned pre-‘you know’ to study for this test? Why on earth -”
Finn scoots closer to Kurt, lowering his voice. Carole is reading a murder-mystery and possibly not listening, although if she is there’s no way to miss Finn’s stage whisper. “I’m gonna fail Mrs. Simmons’ class if I don’t pass with at least an eighty, and then I won’t be eligible for sports.”
“Oh, ouch. You’d better get studying.” He does, now, remember that an awful lot of their grade was riding on this test. He is perversely pleased to not be taking it, though he’s traded it for worse.
“I don’t know what to do,” Finn hisses, frantic.
“You know Mrs. Simmons. Memorize every date in the chapters you’ve covered well enough to do a short-answer essay on it.”
Finn grabs his knee and stares up at him with laser-intense puppy dog eyes. “Help me.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
They end up making an obscene amount of flashcards covering the Mayflower up until the end of the Civil War and going over them for the better part of two hours before Burt pats Kurt’s back and tells him, with a look at Finn that defines passive stepparenting, that it’s bedtime.
“Oh, yeah, totally, me too,” Finn says, grabbing a handful of flashcards.
“M’kay, I was getting bored with Washington anyway, fabulous as his wig may have been.” Kurt kisses Burt and Carole goodnight. Finn does that awkward thing where he looks like he thinks he should do the same, or wants to do the same, but can’t quite bring himself to so he just waves and pats their shoulders instead.
And at the top of the stairs Finn grabs Kurt bodily and says, “Dude, you gotta keep helping me.”
“It’s eleven o’clock, I’ve been helping you for three hours. I’m going to bed.”
“Please, dude, I can’t do this to my mom, fail a class. I swear I was gonna study, but I had everything planned with, you know, and then everything got thrown off when, you know, and you’re really helpful, I can’t memorize stuff on my own.”
Kurt sighs. “Put me down.”
“Oh.” Finn looks down at the gap between Kurt’s heels and the floor and sets him back on his feet. “Oops.”
“On the bright side for one of us, either I’ve lost weight or the gym’s paid off for you.”
Finn brightens. “I think it’s the gym. You’ve actually gained some weight lately.”
Kurt glares.
“In a good way! You were looking all scrawny at McKinley the last few weeks, like in a bad way, even Rachel said so. Now you look healthy again.”
“Stop, Finn, while you’re… less behind. Fine, come in my room after they go to sleep and we’ll keep working on it.”
“Cool! Love ya, dude.”
Kurt reels emotionally, and also a little bit physically, as he isn’t all that skilled at keeping his emotions off his face or inner ear. He is pretty sure Finn will fall asleep and fail to go anywhere until seven in the morning, when the alarm Carole habitually set for him would go off. He is also regretting that this was his reason for saying yes.
It probably hadn’t meant all that much to Finn, Kurt reminds himself. Finn doesn’t think before speaking. Or during, or generally after. That sort of makes it better, for a second; it means Finn’s over the crush issue and can toss off familial expressions of love without thinking about it. Then Kurt thinks about it some more and realizes that it makes it worse.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Finn shows up three hours later. He’s yawning and mussed and Kurt realizes he’s there when he wakes up to someone huge with ice-cold feet dragging him into a hug.
“Teddy,” Finn says.
“No. Not Teddy.” Kurt shoves Finn off. “How did you wake up for this?”
“Gah. Uh. Cell phone. Did you know they have alarms? Rach showed me. Took me a while to find it again.”
“I thought we discussed a sock rule for when you sleep with me.”
“I didn’t realize I’d have to get under the covers. Anyway, I’m not sleeping with you, that sounds weird.”
“Yeah, well, tough. Technically you are and have been.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Okay, good. Don’t be. I can’t handle it right now, dude, not on top of… you know.”
“I know.”
“So do you still want to help me study, or can we just go to sleep?”
“Sit up,” Kurt sighs, and manages not to snap or snipe for a full two hours more. The key to flashcards, he’s always found, is to go very slowly and not add more until you know the one you have. With Finn, this is a process which slows time to a surreal crawl, especially when he tries to get out of answering the questions by saying that he’d just done that one despite having no real response for “yes, so what is it?”
The end result is not perfect, but it is four in the morning, so Kurt calls it quits. Finn doesn’t even put the cards on the table before falling asleep.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The fifth time Finn wakes up in Kurt’s bed, there’s pretty much no excuse except that he was tired. He does think the whole magic thing could help him on his test tomorrow, to be fair. But it’s five-thirty in the morning and he has to pee, which is depressing since in a half an hour Kurt’ll have to leave for the week at Dalton so he should probably stay awake but he really wants to sneak out, pee, and then sneak back in for more sleep.
This doesn’t happen, because the bed is empty when he gets back into the bedroom. It takes him a while to remember why this is bad, and then he wakes up all the way because he’s afraid Kurt’s been snatched by a demon.
Kurt is, as it turns out, asleep on the couch downstairs. Finn feels pretty heroic for having checked rather than running to hide under his own bed.
“Hey,” he says, poking Kurt’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”
Kurt bats his hand away. “Sleeping.”
“On the couch, though. How come?”
“No reason. Go back to my bed, Finn.”
“You’re gonna freeze, dude. I think you’re out of it and making bad decisions. Come on.” He tugs Kurt’s arm over his shoulders.
“Finn.” Kurt jerks away. “I mean it. Leave me alone. I don’t want to sleep with you, okay?”
“…Seriously, what did I do?”
“Nothing.”
Finn steps back. “I’m sorry, I… I thought you were cool with…”
“Well, I’m not. I changed my mind.”
“Uh, did I… did you… like… get…”
“Do not, Finn Hudson, finish that sentence; the horror in your tone speaks volumes,” Kurt says bitterly. “In fact, don’t finish any sentences. Go. Back. To bed.”
Finn nods, and turns around, and does. He goes to his own bed, which cold and there is definitely something moving in the corner of his room and damnit he really thought they were cool. But he’s been sleeping in with Kurt kind of a lot, for a guy with a brand new gay stepbrother who used to have a crush on him, and they’d talked about whether or not Finn was attractive and oh shit. Just… shit.
+1
Kurt is really high maintenance, but he’s also really, really self-sufficient. He does a lot of the cleaning and cooking, and it’s pretty obvious even to Finn that he used to do like all of it before he and his mom moved in - because Burt totally helps out whenever anyone asks him, it’s just that he has to be asked, whereas Kurt and his mom both have this weird thing where they just do stuff, like before it even needs to be done. He still does the grocery shopping sometimes. He buys all his own clothes, and he has a credit card so he knows how to handle bills and sometimes he does that. He helps out at the garage and keeps his own car in working order. He’s pretty much like a miniature grown-up, Finn figures.
So it probably sounds lame to say that he’s fine with his parents having a weekend getaway awhile after Christmas not so much because he’s seventeen and almost an adult as because he knows his little brother will, even if he is still pissed off for things which are not Finn’s fault, take care of him - but there it is. Plus it’s totally the only reason they’re going; Carole reminds Kurt twice before they leave not to let Finn use anything hot or metallic in the kitchen, or anywhere really. She also makes sure three times that he knows where all the emergency numbers are.
Finn is fine with this, because the night Burt brought the idea up (and Kurt, predictably, was kind of creepily overjoyed at the idea of their parents having a romantic pseudo-honeymoon thing, while Finn was decently uncomfortable with the whole thing) he took Finn aside later. “Look,” he said, “this has gotta stay between us, but… you know how to use a rifle?”
Then he showed Finn where he stashes this manliest of man-things, and how to use it. Let Kurt keep the frying pans; Finn gets the rifle.
“Kurt knows where this is, and how to use it,” Burt said, “but he doesn’t like it and he ain’t afraid to say so. I just…” he rubbed his head. “Some of those phone calls… Thing is, Finn, anyone breaks in here, you got a legal right to shoot them. This town, I don’t trust them to be after the TV, okay? So you know how this is gonna work, Kurt’s gonna walk all over you on this power high, but if anyone tries something funny while we’re gone - you’re in charge, and don’t you let anyone hurt either of you boys. No matter what. Alright?”
Finn nodded solemnly and accepted his mission.
Burt looked at him warily. “Just… don’t take it out unless you have to. And maybe let Kurt load it.”
So now they’re gone, and Kurt is, indeed, on a power high. He’s trying to decide what bedtime to instate.
“Kurt, come on. I already cleared this weekend because you said you didn’t feel comfortable with me driving at night in the snow. Now you’re just being a tyrannist.”
“Tyrannical. Tyrannist isn’t a word. And I was right! Look at it out there, it’s a whiteout.”
He’s not wrong, but it’s Ohio in January. Finn thinks this is an overreaction. Plus he needs to stop using words that aren’t around Kurt, because he has the exact same tone (and phrasing) Rachel does about this stuff and it hurts too much. “Dude, chill. It’s not like… a storm.”
“Actually, Finn, when the snow makes it impossible to see across the street and the nice man on TV is warning against unnecessary travel? That is the very definition of a storm.”
“…I don’t see why that means I need a bedtime.”
“You need a bedtime because I say so.” Kurt beams. “Oh my god, I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Finn breaks down. “If it makes you that happy.” He slumps down into the couch. “Not like anything else I can do will…”
“What?”
“I was kind of hoping someone would break in and I could shoot them to save you and then you’d like me again, but since we’re snowed in and all the violent homophobes probably are too, I guess that’s a bust. So seriously, dude, what is your problem?”
Kurt closes his eyes for a while, and mutters something that sounds like numbers. Then he says, “Do you really want to do this?”
“Yes,” says Finn, who doesn’t. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have been bunking in with you, but you could have said if it was making you - I mean, you specifically said it was fine, like I asked and everything!”
Kurt is the special kind of white he gets when he’s really upset or mad or, generally, both. “You were not,” he says, “making me uncomfortable. At least not the way you’re obviously about to have an apoplectic fit over. You said that, not me. You’re the one who assumed that the only possible reason I could be mad at you would be because you’d awoken my perverse, incestuous gay lust.”
“That’s not fair,” Finn says, “you didn’t say you weren’t, either. Wait. You weren’t?” The intense skeeze factor he’s been dealing with for the past week and change, thinking he’d been snuggled up to a dude who kind of wanted to bang him still despite the lack of crush, goes away. This is nice, but it’s replaced by total bafflement. “Well then what was the problem?”
“At this point, the problem is that you really think I’d sleep with you if I wanted to have sex with you. Aside from everything else, I can’t believe you think I’d be that stupid. The original problem was that you said you loved me.”
Finn feels very out of his depth. “Which time was it a problem?”
“There was only. One. Time.”
“Dude, not even. I say it all the time.”
“No, you don’t. You said it when I told you I’d help with your stupid flashcards. I promised to help you study after lights-out, you tossed off an ‘I love you.’”
“Okay, fine. I still don’t get why it’s bad to say that I love you.”
Kurt’s eyes are getting shiny and wet-looking. “Because you don’t. You like me. There’s a difference, and maybe it’s not a big deal to you, but it is to me. And when you do love someone, you don’t just… drop it into casual conversation when you’re saying it for the first time. Especially you. You don’t think when you speak, and ‘I love you’ requires some forethought. You didn’t mean ‘I love you,’ you meant, ‘thanks for being a convenient study partner,’ and you should have said so.”
Finn stands up. “Jesus, Kurt, give me a break! I didn’t say it the right way, so there’s no possible way I could mean it? I do love you. I don’t know how to say it so you believe me, like what weird new-brothers code I’m supposed to be following here, but I do. And don’t give me that about it not being a big deal to me, either, I know what it’s like to grow up with only one person and then get two brand new ones. And - and you know what? I’d buy in a second that you love me, but you don’t like me very much, and that sucks.”
Kurt looks stricken. “I do like you. I - what more could I possibly do to convince you that I like you?”
“It’s not about doing stuff, dude, that’s my point! You’re always there for the big stuff, when I need you, like over Rachel and being drunk and stuff, and I’m grateful. But you don’t like me anymore. Unless I’m like on the verge of a nervous breakdown you snap at me and act like I’m stupid and say weird stuff about some guy who plays a pipe -”
“The Pied Piper.”
“ - yeah, him. You used to want to talk to me about normal things and… and now you just help when I need it and then go away again.”
Kurt takes several deep breaths. “I may have misread the situation.”
“You think?”
“But you did too. I do like you, Finn. I think you’re a really great guy. If I’ve been… short with you in your hours of less emotional need, it’s because of the stress. Karofsky’s been worse all year, and then moving to Dalton - it’s great, but it’s not exactly stress-free to change schools mid-semester and not be able to see my dad every day. And if I’ve been condescending, well, welcome to the club, I’m condescending to everyone.”
“You didn’t use to be with me.”
Kurt flushes. “Finn. When we met, I…”
“Had a crush on me,” Finn realizes.
“Wasn’t making wise decisions,” Kurt says.
“You were only super-nice because of that?”
“Yes. Because of the lack of wise decisions.”
Finn reflects upon this at length. “So it’s a good thing that you’re treating me like everyone else now?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Cool.” He sits back down. “I really do love you.”
“Well, I really do like you.”
“So… you’re still pissed at me.”
“You thought I was perving on you. You seriously thought I was letting you sleep with me, which was always your idea, just so, what, I could -”
“I’m sorry, okay?” Finn, with monumental effort, manages not to point out the room-sharing incident, which kind of proves Kurt’s not entirely above this sort of thing.
“Good.” Kurt sits down too. At the opposite end of the couch, with his arms crossed. “I hope that in the future you’re more certain about eliciting contact with which you’ll feel comfortable without a metaphorical ‘no homo’ right after.”
“Okay.” Finn waits a while. “So what’s bedtime?”
“I don’t care.”
Finn wonders if it would be insensitive to turn on the TV. Probably.
“Finn?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever spent the night without Carole? I mean, with her in another town?”
“Actually, no.”
“Me neither. I mean, at Dalton. But Dad’s never been the one who’s… gone.”
Finn nods. “Let’s stay up all night in case they call randomly at three in the morning.”
“Deal.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Kurt’s the first one to pass out, at some time around two in the morning, with his cell phone still in his hand. Finn thinks he probably follows suit around three. He wakes up at seven in the morning, and Kurt is curled into a lump under the blanket over at the end of the couch. It’s still pretty dark outside because of the snow, which looks gray and threatening in the thin light.
Finn being the one in charge of dangerous situations, he goes up to his room and changes the sheets, then piles all the blankets in the linen cupboard on his bed. He also gets snacks. Kurt proves to be about as easy to carry as the lump of blankets - awkward, but not all that heavy.
“Wazzat?” Kurt asks when Finn dumps him on the bed.
“We’re battening down the hatches,” Finn informs him. “Move over.”
“Mmphm.”
Finn gets in next to him and curls around him. It really isn’t fair that he always has to be the bigger man, and Kurt is the one who thought it was cool to share a room with a guy he had a crush on and then never even own up to said crush so he thinks a few misgivings are justified here. But on the other hand, Finn seriously is the bigger man - by like at least a head or so - so maybe that’s why. He makes sure he’s holding Kurt’s hand before he goes to sleep.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
The first time Kurt wakes up in Finn’s bed, his initial reaction is horror because he remembers going to sleep in the living room and apparently someone broke in during the night and plastered the walls with hideous, tacky posters. His secondary reaction is also horror because oh god he’s in Finn Hudson’s bed, and those sheets are probably breeding diseases unknown by science. By the time he gets around to Finn being sort of on top of him, with the hand-holding and arm around him and their legs all tangled together, he’s pretty much out of horror.
“Finn.”
No answer.
“Finn.”
“Hn.”
“I thought we had a new rule.”
Finn slits his eyes open. “New rule. Bedtime?”
“No, the other one.”
“Only things I’m comfortable with, even without no homo?”
“Yes, that.”
“Following it.” Finn tries to pat Kurt’s shoulder with the hand he’s holding Kurt’s with and ends up sort of clipping Kurt’s chin with his own hand. “Oops.” He rests his chin on Kurt’s hair. “I know I backslide sometimes, but it’s cool now, right?”
Kurt sighs into Finn’s neck, which smells faintly of sweat and the kind of soap that dries rather than moisturizes. “You’re very good at messing up spectacularly and then making up for it even more spectacularly.” It really isn’t fair that he always has to be the bigger man and forgive Finn’s constant gay freakouts, but he’s had his whole life to get used to it. Finn didn’t have to deal with any of it until he was sixteen.
“Thanks? I think?”
“I have to get up, though.”
“…We’re not cool?”
“We’re cool, Finn. This bed is not cool.”
“I changed the sheets.”
“For clean ones?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I take that back. You’re astoundingly good at making it up with spectacular gestures.”
“Which makes me very likable.”
“It does.”
“Did I tell you I got an A on that test?”
“No, but I heard you tell Carole. Several times. In a tone of voice I haven’t heard since I used it on my father when I was maybe ten.”
“Oh, screw you.”
“You’re welcome for my invaluable help with studying.”
“I would say it makes you lovable, but I’m afraid you’ll think I only love you for your brain or something, so just in general - I love you, Kurt.”
“Good.”
“Next time we’re going back in your room, though. Pretty sure this one’s haunted.”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Master List