[FIC] Yesterday's Parade, Chapter One
Title: Yesterday's Parade, Chapter One
Author: thisfishflies
Pairing: Puck/Kurt
Rating: PG for now
Wordcount: ~800
Spoilers: To be safe, all aired episodes.
Summary: A Cheerio organizes the ten year reunion- five years early. Everyone is changed, and it's all a surprise.
Notes: This is partially for bhsbaby and a few other friends. Because they'll bug me if I don't write this.
He looks at the small envelope in his hand. It's heavy, and not the usual shape he was used to: not long and thin with the window that meant “bill”. It was almost square, with the school logo printed on the front. That was enough to give him pause. Opening it would answer all his questions, but he didn't know if he wanted to.
High school was still a sore subject for him. He had purposefully not thought of it in years, and he had put all of it behind him. Heck, he hadn't sung outside the shower since he graduated. Sure, his time had been easier after Glee, but that wasn't the whole of it. If he was smart, he'd just throw the letter in the trash and forget about whatever it was. Maybe go out to a club with some friends and drink away the memories.
Instead, Kurt opened it. A sound-he wouldn't call it a laugh- burst from his mouth. Inside the envelope was an invitation. An invitation to a five year reunion. It was laughable, as he just illustrated.
Five years is not a reunion. After five years, half of them were still in college, and the others were probably working crap jobs. Getting done with college as quickly as Kurt did took hard work. The friends he made in college where still there- he only finished early because he took summer semesters every year and some how managed to charm the administrator into allowing him to take an extra class most times. The point of reunions was to shove your success into the faces of those who mocked and ridiculed you. Being a wardrobe intern was not all that important sounding, and his work pretty much just consisted in “sewing buttons on dresses” and “fixing the rips from the badly placed barrel in act 2”.
He was doing what he loved, but job satisfaction was not on his list of appropriate gloat-worthy accomplishments. Nor did he have a hot boyfriend to rub in faces: at the moment he didn't even have a cute boyfriend with a great personality. This was something he complained about loudly when he was drunk. Dating someone hot or powerful was number two on his list.
So the invite got dropped on the counter and was forgotten for a week, until his roommate Carla got into a cleaning binge and found it wedged between the toaster and the horrid wood sculpture one of Kurt's past boyfriends had given him. Carla attacked him with it when Kurt got home. When they met another friend, Penny, they both stared him down until he told them the whole story of Glee and high school.
Carla and Penny had been Kurt's best girlfriends for a few years. They had a unspoken agreement that as long as he never called them 'fag hags' they'd never mention Kurt's uncharacteristic habit of watching football and squealing and covering his eyes half the time. His extreme love for glittery gel pens was always open for teasing, though. Kurt could put each of them off his tail separately, but together they were an unstoppable force of hairspray and wicked nails. Hitting a girl had never been a problem for Kurt, but they were scrappy pulled hair much better.
The next hour was a blur due to too many of those orange drinks they ordered, but somewhere along the way Kurt was browbeaten into saying he would go to his reunion. Try as he might to get out of it the next morning, Penny had managed to catch the moment on her phone and emails the video to him. The smudge of black lipstick across his lower lip distracts him for a minute (he never found out whose it was) but he admits defeat after the third watching. Plus, there is the matter of the second video that was much more embarrassing and very good blackmail fodder. His email back to Penny only says “fine, you won.”
When Carla got off work she grinned.
“Buddy boy, you know she won't delete that clip until she sees your name on a list.” Carla pauses for a beat. “Or until she sees pictures from it, if she was feeling evil. We don't want you to belying to us.”
“Look,” Kurt replies, turning his laptop towards her, “here is me informing the organizer that I'll be attending. And right here- I'm emailing my boss and asking for time off. Can you please stop her from posting that on youtube?”
Carla just laughs and ruffles his hair, causing Kurt to huff in annoyance and paw it back into place.
And that's how, three and a half months later, he is back in Ohio with a pocketful of lies and all the sarcasm he could pack into one smile.
Author: thisfishflies
Pairing: Puck/Kurt
Rating: PG for now
Wordcount: ~800
Spoilers: To be safe, all aired episodes.
Summary: A Cheerio organizes the ten year reunion- five years early. Everyone is changed, and it's all a surprise.
Notes: This is partially for bhsbaby and a few other friends. Because they'll bug me if I don't write this.
He looks at the small envelope in his hand. It's heavy, and not the usual shape he was used to: not long and thin with the window that meant “bill”. It was almost square, with the school logo printed on the front. That was enough to give him pause. Opening it would answer all his questions, but he didn't know if he wanted to.
High school was still a sore subject for him. He had purposefully not thought of it in years, and he had put all of it behind him. Heck, he hadn't sung outside the shower since he graduated. Sure, his time had been easier after Glee, but that wasn't the whole of it. If he was smart, he'd just throw the letter in the trash and forget about whatever it was. Maybe go out to a club with some friends and drink away the memories.
Instead, Kurt opened it. A sound-he wouldn't call it a laugh- burst from his mouth. Inside the envelope was an invitation. An invitation to a five year reunion. It was laughable, as he just illustrated.
Five years is not a reunion. After five years, half of them were still in college, and the others were probably working crap jobs. Getting done with college as quickly as Kurt did took hard work. The friends he made in college where still there- he only finished early because he took summer semesters every year and some how managed to charm the administrator into allowing him to take an extra class most times. The point of reunions was to shove your success into the faces of those who mocked and ridiculed you. Being a wardrobe intern was not all that important sounding, and his work pretty much just consisted in “sewing buttons on dresses” and “fixing the rips from the badly placed barrel in act 2”.
He was doing what he loved, but job satisfaction was not on his list of appropriate gloat-worthy accomplishments. Nor did he have a hot boyfriend to rub in faces: at the moment he didn't even have a cute boyfriend with a great personality. This was something he complained about loudly when he was drunk. Dating someone hot or powerful was number two on his list.
So the invite got dropped on the counter and was forgotten for a week, until his roommate Carla got into a cleaning binge and found it wedged between the toaster and the horrid wood sculpture one of Kurt's past boyfriends had given him. Carla attacked him with it when Kurt got home. When they met another friend, Penny, they both stared him down until he told them the whole story of Glee and high school.
Carla and Penny had been Kurt's best girlfriends for a few years. They had a unspoken agreement that as long as he never called them 'fag hags' they'd never mention Kurt's uncharacteristic habit of watching football and squealing and covering his eyes half the time. His extreme love for glittery gel pens was always open for teasing, though. Kurt could put each of them off his tail separately, but together they were an unstoppable force of hairspray and wicked nails. Hitting a girl had never been a problem for Kurt, but they were scrappy pulled hair much better.
The next hour was a blur due to too many of those orange drinks they ordered, but somewhere along the way Kurt was browbeaten into saying he would go to his reunion. Try as he might to get out of it the next morning, Penny had managed to catch the moment on her phone and emails the video to him. The smudge of black lipstick across his lower lip distracts him for a minute (he never found out whose it was) but he admits defeat after the third watching. Plus, there is the matter of the second video that was much more embarrassing and very good blackmail fodder. His email back to Penny only says “fine, you won.”
When Carla got off work she grinned.
“Buddy boy, you know she won't delete that clip until she sees your name on a list.” Carla pauses for a beat. “Or until she sees pictures from it, if she was feeling evil. We don't want you to belying to us.”
“Look,” Kurt replies, turning his laptop towards her, “here is me informing the organizer that I'll be attending. And right here- I'm emailing my boss and asking for time off. Can you please stop her from posting that on youtube?”
Carla just laughs and ruffles his hair, causing Kurt to huff in annoyance and paw it back into place.
And that's how, three and a half months later, he is back in Ohio with a pocketful of lies and all the sarcasm he could pack into one smile.