Fic: Milk, No Sugar, 1/2
Title: Milk, No Sugar
Part: 1/2
Rating: PG (language, some mild dude-on-dude action)
Characters: Finn and Will, an assortment of Gleeks, and the odd OC to flesh things out.
Total word count: ~13,000
Summary: Finn gets out of Lima, he gets a job, fame and fortune. But can he get the one thing he’s always wanted?
Notes: Holiday season fic, written for the December Challenge. To give you an idea of what you’re in for, here’s what I like in a seasonal fic...
- Short and sweet, so I can read between holiday obligations
- No OCs, I don’t have time to care about new characters
- No mention of iconic locations, because I’ve never been to most of them
- Nothing epic. I like my holiday fics simple, and the characters kept familiar
- A scene by a fire. Because I like fires.
- The fic should actually be set in the holiday season. Not some journey of growth or development spanning years. I have a short attention span around Christmas.
And now, for the complete opposite...
Milk, No Sugar
As it turned out, Finn wasn’t very good at college. He did get that scholarship, to Chicago Booth of all places, and he did like the performing side of things. But in all honesty, he wasn’t the best - not even near the best - and even though they practiced like crazy, and had one-on-one training, and it was pretty much like Glee only eight times more intense, he just didn’t get any better. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
And the rest of college, well. Every now and then he thought back to the moment when he told Mr Schue that he was going to do business and economics, and that odd look on Mr Schue’s face. Amused and worried. And, of course, he often thought that maybe he should have taken the fact that essentially the coolest person Finn knew used to be an accountant as a bit of a sign that it just wasn’t going to be for him. Sometimes he wondered what look he would have gotten if he’d told Mr Schue that he was going to be a teacher or something instead.
In all honesty, he thought about Mr Schue a lot.
He’d been thinking about Mr Schue, in fact, on the day that he accidentally started what some would call a business empire. He’d been sitting on his scooter, stuck in traffic, holding a cheap cup of coffee in his hands, daydreaming about how high school could have been, when the guy next to him leaned on his horn hard, making him jump.
“Seriously,” Finn said. “Calm down.”
The guy had snorted. “Easy for you to say,” he said. “You’ve got your morning coffee right there. I’d give my right arm for a cup of joe.”
Finn had stared at him for a moment, before offering the cup out. “Latte, no sugar. I’ll give it to you for three dollars.”
The guy stared at him. “For real?” Finn nodded, and made his first dollar of profit.
The next day he went out with two thermos of coffee and a carton of milk, winding his was through traffic on his red scooter, topping up people’s travel mugs for a few bucks. Over the weekend, he bought a box of sugar sachets from the deli near his apartment.
The key was simplicity. As Finn discovered, no matter how elaborate your favourite order at Starbucks may be, when you’re stuck in traffic you’ll take anything. Halfway through the following week he’d lined up a friend to have three new thermos of black coffee halfway down the route, and started carrying a carton of soy as well.
So the business degree did come in handy, in a way. He even did his semester project on what was slowly becoming his business model, looking into the food preparation laws and the food sales laws and permits. He got a credit, and the comment “Ambitious, but hardly realistic.”
By the end of the year he’d recruited another eight people to spend their mornings in the key gridlock areas, serving coffee. He got the money together to get his scooter detailed, getting a big white fox tail painted on the back. His coffee service was registered as ‘Fox on the Run’.
“You made it into my local paper,” Kurt said one day, down the phone from New York. “You’re in the Times!”
Finn had paused, his hand hovering over the magical forms that would make him an official university dropout. “Really?”
“You’re making Chicago look too cool,” Kurt told him. “You need to come to the Big Apple.”
So he did. He handed the reigns over, and went to open another franchise of FotR. “Do you think I can write the move off as a tax deductable business expense?” he asked.
“Finn, honey, I know what you earn. Besides, you’ll practically be saving money by moving in with me.”
Finn didn’t understand that logic, since Kurt’s slice of New York was certainly not as easy on the pocket as Finn’s old studio that had been almost completely outside Chicago. It took a while for the business to take off. They made some local rags, gaining some notoriety after a picture ran of Finn zipping past a motorbike cop on his scooter, and the cop shaking his fist at him. The caption was, of course, “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog”. Kurt had it framed, and hung in the place of pride above their faux-fireplace.
So Finn was doing good. He was able to send some money home, to thank his mom and Burt for helping him get set up in Chicago. He was busy, but still had plenty of time to goof off. He was making new friends, and Kurt kept him from feeling homesick. For once, money was hardly an issue.
He still thought about Mr Schue a lot.
“Stop staring into space and help me,” Kurt said one evening, sitting on the polished wood floor with his sketchbook open across the coffee table.
“Sorry,” Finn said, trying to pull himself out of memories of green eyes and warm smiles. “What’s the problem?”
“I need to design a fashion product, and get it made, and create an ad campaign.” Kurt pretended to swoon against the couch. “It’s just too much! I’m only in my third year of university.”
“Isn’t this also your last year?”
“That’s beside the point! I’m not fully trained yet. How can I make judgements about core fashion items?”
“It’s never stopped you before.” Finn slumped back on the couch, putting his feet on the coffee table. “What about shoes?”
“Ugh,” Kurt said. “Have you ever tried to get completely original shoes made? Have you?”
“Okay, so it has to be something that’s easy to make? So, you’d want something that was made of fabric or plastic.”
“Something that makes you look cool,” Kurt added. “Something that everyone will want to buy.”
Finn gnawed on his lip, thinking back to high school, to things that you needed to look cool...
“Sunglasses,” he blurted out. “I, ah. Everyone has a pair, right? And cool people have multiple pairs. Like, you’ve got eight. And they’re plastic, and bits of metal, so that’s easy, right?”
Kurt leaned his head back on the couch, looking up at Finn. “Okay, that’s the item down. Now how the hell do I advertise sunglasses in an original and incredibly effective way?”
“Well, okay. Why do people wear sunglasses?”
Kurt rolled his eyes. “To keep the sun out of their eyes.”
“No!” Finn said, getting into the idea. “It’s to stop anyone from seeing their eyes. Like, if you have sunglasses on, no one can see where you’re looking. You could be looking at anything, or anyone. You know, like those French peeping-toms.”
“Voyeurs?”
“Yes! Exactly!” Finn thumped the couch cushion, narrowly missing Kurt’s ear. “There’s your brand.”
Kurt mulled it over. “Voyeur,” he said, before dropping his voice to a low, sultry sound, “Voyeur.”
“Yeah,” Finn said, “like that. And it’d have a slogan in French. Something like, like... like ‘watching without being seen’. Except better.”
“No,” Kurt said. “No, I like that one. Let me just see what that is in French.” He dragged his laptop open, and went to Babelfish. “Observation sans être vu,” he read out.
“No,” Finn said, “you’ve got to say it in a whisper, you know? So it sounds a little sexy and a little creepy.” Kurt tried again, making his voice low and husky. “Bam! You’ve got it.”
Kurt grinned, scribbling the ideas down. “You know, you may not have been the brightest crayon in the box back in high school, but you’re sure making up for lost time. Now, what do they look like?”
Finn held his hands up in defeat. “Hey, I thought this was a partnership?” he joked. “The design is all up to you. But they should be those big kind of glasses, the ones that cover all of your face.”
And that’s exactly what Kurt produced. He got Mike, whose dad was the shop teacher at old McKinley High, to teach him all he needed to know about plastics and moulds. He went to Tina, who was studying 3D art to get them made. She insisted that he let CJC (Cohen-Jones-Chang, her online clothing store, co-run with Mercedes) be the exclusive carrier. Finn, as co-creator and the only one who knew much about contracts, drew up a deal that probably wouldn’t hold up in a court, but would look good in Kurt’s project folder.
Kurt worked magic, and somehow managed to get himself, Quinn (who was living in Cleveland), and Tina (who was living with her grandparents in Coral Springs, attending Art school in Miami) together for a photo shoot. Artie was splitting a room with Mercedes in Mission Bay, and was wrangled along as a photographer. Finn found himself as financier, flying Artie and Tina up from Florida, while Kurt kindly split Quinn’s bus fare. The two big surprises were that Puck came over with her, and that he looked surprisingly good in the sunglasses. Four black and white portraits were shot against the barest wall in the Hudson-Hummel New York abode, with a run of colour photos that Artie swore he’d be able to manipulate into any combination of pair shots.
There was even an ad they put on youtube, with a wind machine (achieved by two large fans and Kurt’s hair dryer), soft, sensual music (recorded on Tina’s phone, on the day), and a seductive French voice (Kurt) whispering “Observation sans être vu” as the image faded to white.
“Do you think you should have gotten someone to proof-read the French part?” Artie asked.
Kurt’s eyes widened. “Do you think we should?”
Finn gave them a disbelieving look. “We’re clearly an American company,” he said. “We’re just co-opting the French image as a marketing ploy. If anything, the bad French is an addition to our corporate identity.”
Everyone stared at him.
“So... you mean it’s ironic?” Quinn said.
Puck shook his head, and smirked a little at Finn. “College boy.”
Kurt did fantastically at the fake-expo that served as his final assessment. Better than okay, since a few design companies left their cards with him, and praised him on a job well done.
But the real success was entirely unintentional.
Mercedes was winding up her own fashion degree, while Tina was pumping out designs and Artie was getting the last bugs out of the CJC website. And at Mercedes’ graduation fashion show, she just happened to drop that she had a website out, and Tina just happened to mail pics of the night to everyone on her mailing list, and Jacob Israel - who everyone had forgotten about - just happened to being doing a placement for his journalism degree, and snapped up the opportunity to get his name on a filler piece.
And the first Finn heard about any of this happening was Rachel calling him at 5.45 in the morning, for the Juilliard Centre, and demanding to know why she hadn’t been involved in his fashion empire.
“Rach? Mngh, it’s too early.”
“I wanted to make up for the time delay,” she explained, calming down gradually after the assurance that there was no empire, it was all a misunderstanding.
“There is no time delay,” Finn said. “I’m in New York too, living with Kurt.” Which, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to say in order to calm your ex-girlfriend down.
Half an hour later, he was off the phone, nursing a sore ear, and trying to coordinate the coffee run for the morning. It was only when things calmed down - around 9.30am - that he noticed he had a million missed calls from Kurt, and a packed inbox.
CJC had sold out of Voyeur stock. What was even more amazing was that there was no stock. There were ten pairs, and two hundred had been sold. And everyone was looking at Finn for answers.
“Put up an out of stock notice online,” he croaked over a Skype conference call. He didn’t want to coordinate sales, he wanted to be back in bed. “Get more pairs made, asap. Let people know that there will be a delay in shipping. That this is an exclusive brand, and that quality must be assured.”
“Is this really happening?” Tina asked.
“Yeah,” Finn replied. “Unless you don’t want it to.”
“We do,” Mercedes said firmly. “We really, really do.”
“Okay then.” Finn blinked, and finished his fourth cup of coffee for the morning. He paused, letting the flavour roll around his mouth. “And when we’re go for sales again, mark up the price by three-hundred percent.”
And suddenly Finn was running two business empires. When before he and Kurt had bantered in the evenings about what to have for dinner, now they were discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing. Instead of arguing about steak versus chicken, it was whether to attend a gala or stay in.
“That’s it,” Kurt said one day, putting his expensively shod foot down. “If we get any more like a married couple, I’m never going to meet someone. We’re going to the gala!”
So they dressed. Kurt went in GQMF-glamour, Finn went in smart-casual. Kurt spent the evening mingling and being delightful, Finn shook some hands and then settled in by the food table. Kurt did indeed meet someone, and spent the night flirting, laughing, and getting close. Finn spent the night alone, thinking.
“Don’t you think Dani is such a great name?” Kurt asked during the taxi ride home, at two in the morning. “And I love the way he spells it, feminine yet strong.”
“Do you have any real regrets?” Finn asked suddenly. “Like, something that you wish that you had done but never did?”
Kurt gave him a surprised look. “I prefer to have regrets about things that I’ve done but probably shouldn’t.” He made a show of looking out the window, looking at Finn’s reflection in the glass instead. “Of course, if it’s something that you didn’t do, then there’s no reason why you can’t still do it, right?”
Finn pursed his lips, and stared out of his own window.
As it turned out, Dani was a few (nine) years older than Kurt, European, and in America to work in developing new fragrances for a very expensive perfume company.
“He’s so interesting,” Kurt would gush. “And romantic. He says he wants to bottle the way I smell after we, well. Anyway, go dress up. We’re going out with his friends tonight.”
Finn would admit that Dani was interesting, and that his friends Jon, Alex, and Kermit (yes, for real) were also very interesting people. He felt weird every time Kurt turned the conversation to Finn’s achievements. These were people with finely honed senses, and very select skills, and impressive careers. Finn was the guy who sold a second-hand coffee and got lucky by accident.
“So,” Kermit said, tucking her long hair behind her ear, “I suppose if you were to make a cologne, it’d smell like coffee.”
“An expensive hazelnut grind?” Jon asked. “Maybe a latte with sweet milk?”
“Or a cappuccino, so you can have that slight smell of chocolate?” Alex suggested.
Finn laughed. “Nothing that complicated. At the end of the day, people just want something simple, something familiar. That’s why Foxy sells coffee. Not frappes or lattes or macchiatos. Just simple coffee, something that people understand.”
“So you think the simple smells are best?” Kermit said. “I suppose that’s true. People do like the same core scents.”
“Ah,” Alex interjected. “But people also like those complicated scents, the ones that remind them of a particular moment in time, a certain person. Like the cigarette smoke and sour apples that my mom smelled like.”
“The sugar of donuts and the sharp oil of petrol,” Kurt added.
They looked at Finn expectantly. “Wool,” he said at last. “And tea. Green tea, with a squeeze of lemon.” His eyes closed as he fell into the memory of the smell. “Something almost dusty, like an old leather jacket. Clean linen. Sweat.” He felt his mouth curving into a smile as he came to the last item on the list. “And chocolate chip cookies.”
When he opened his eyes, the table of people were staring at him. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “That’s what my school smelled like,” he said at last. “To me, at least.”
“Better than my school,” Dani said. “Smelled like cabbage and chalk. And school boys, or course. Horrid things.”
“You should sell more perfume and cologne to the youngsters, then,” Alex said with a grin.
“Why sell it myself,” Dani asked, wrapping an arm around Kurt and squeezing him, “when I have this treasure to speak to the youth so much more efficiently than I could myself?”
“There you go,” Kermit said, smiling over at Finn. “You might get your perfect perfume made after all.”
And while it was clearly meant as a joke, Kurt took it and ran with it. Which meant that Finn was dragged into it too. Kurt developed a fragrance that was light, almost floral, with ginger and cherry blossom and white roses. Finn drove Dani mad with his very nice, but entirely unhelpful descriptions of scent. His own end-product wasn’t quite where he had hoped it would be - Dani insisted on putting Citron in, and Kurt suggested a dash of cinnamon. So they ended up with two perfume recipes, and a manufacturer, and after a week of Sunday’s they finally brought it up at a CJC staff meeting.
“Look, no offence guys,” Mercedes said, getting right to the point. “But are we really ready to sell perfume, of all things? I mean, do we need to? We’re barely keeping up with the sunglasses. Speaking of, Kurt, honey, where the hell are your designs for the Winter range? We’re nearly in Autumn!”
“Come on,” Kurt insisted. “If we diversify now we could have an actual empire, instead of just a sunglasses brand. Just think, we could carve out a whole subculture, and ensure that it smells better than any other subculture!”
“Finn?” Tina asked down the Skype connection. “What do you think?”
Finn thought about it. On the one hand, Mercedes was right. On the other hand... on the other hand, he’d put so much time and thought, and it was almost right. It almost smelled like...
“I think you guys should smell them,” he said at last. “We’ll let you cast the deciding vote.”
It took a month for them to all get together, and in that time Dani had whipped up what he called the ‘crowd pleaser’, a scent that was a compromise between Kurt’s flower arrangement and Finn’s pantry, as he called their respective colognes. In that time, Kurt himself thought of all kinds of compromises.
“We’ll only launch one,” he said. “Whichever the girls’ chose. We’ll have a single fragrance, and a simple ad campaign, like for Voyeur. Would it be Voyeur, or CJC? Or should we have a new label altogether?”
“Keep it Voyeur,” Finn voted. “That’s us, after all.” And then he put it out of his mind. He had a business to run - and why did people keep suggesting getting scooter-mounted coffee machines? It was a dumb idea. It would never work, the Occ-health-safety would be a nightmare, not to mention meeting the food preparation standards. And then he had to deal with all of the paperwork for two businesses. He had assistants, and office heads for both Chicago and New York, and Tina was meant to be handling the office side of CJC, but there was more than enough mounting up. Add to that Tina, Artie, and Mercedes suddenly moving into their apartment for a week to celebrate Kurt’s birthday, and Finn was feeling more than a little stretched.
“Okay,” Kurt said, handing out black ties. “We’ll do this blindfolded. You’ll each smell the three fragrances, in no particular order, and rank them according to your favourite. Then we’ll talk about marketability. Then see how feasible this all is, and whether we’ll do it at all.”
Finn looked at the little bottle that held what was essentially his high school crush. For the first time, he was starting to feel nervous with this plan.
That feeling lasted all the way through twenty minutes of judging, right up until the final vote, and Kurt dropping a glass onto the hard floor.
“Number three?” Kurt asked. “You picked Finn’s perfume?”
Finn responded with the first thing that came into his head. “It’s really more of a cologne.”
“It’s well balanced,” Artie explained.
“It’s unisex,” Tina added.
“It’s tasty,” Mercedes concluded. “Nobody could not like that smell.”
Seeing the look on Kurt’s face, Artie rushed in. “We just felt that, as a first foray into this industry that we know nothing about, a crowd pleaser would be the safe bet.”
“Number one was the crowd pleaser,” Kurt ground out.
“And that one was great, really,” Tina said. “It was just...”
“Crowded,” Mercedes finished. “Look, if you didn’t want our opinion-”
“Let’s just not bother,” Finn said. “We’re all busy enough as it is. We need to hire more staff, not make ourselves busier. We’ve shown that we can make good smells. Let’s just sit on that and we’ll deal with it later. Like, a few years later.”
“No,” Kurt said firmly. “We have a scent, we have a store, this is a route we have to go down.” He paused to smooth his fringe down. “I was just... surprised. Your smell is lovely, Finn. Really.”
“Does it have a name?” Tina asked.
Oh yeah, it most certainly had a name. “No,” Finn said innocently. “I really didn’t think that far.”
So they brainstormed. Kurt came up with ‘Drama Queen’, but everyone agreed that suited his fragrance more. Since their consumership was young, Tina suggested ‘Teacher’s Pet’. “It’s cute, you know? It’s a high school-type name. It’s preppy, but a little naughty.”
Finn voted that down, without explaining why.
Mercedes suggested ‘Ex-girlfriend’, with a sly look at Finn that he totally missed. Artie came up with ‘Whyt boi’, and was unanimously voted down.
“What do you think of when you smell it?” Tina finally asked, as they were eating the last of the biscuits and finishing their nth cups of coffee and tea.
Finn thought back to high school, to the man. To the movement and the dancing, to the singing and the advice, to the smiles and the t-shirts that he wore in summer. To winter and the button up shirts, and ties, and-
“Sweater vests,” he finally said.
Everyone exchanged looks. “I can see that,” Tina said at last.
“And it’s definitely unisex,” Kurt added.
“And you’d be tapping into the ever-growing marker of sweater vest wearers,” Artie added.
So that was decided. Finn checked his e-mail as the conversation about potential advertising flowed around him. Scratch and sniff, Artie insisted. Mercedes was more into charging a dollar with any CJC store purchase for a tiny tester. Tina felt that celebrity endorsement was the way to go, as celebrities appealed to a wider demographic than the age-specific marketing they currently used. And all the time they danced around the issue, would they do this? Would they go there?
“Hey guys,” Finn called out at last. “I got an e-mail from Kermit. She says that Hot Topic wants to know more about our perfume.”
“Are you serious?” Kurt finally asked.
“Hot Topic?” Tina asked, her eyes going wide.
Mercedes gave Finn a long look. “You seriously know someone named Kermit?”
Finn e-mailed back, and got a phone number in response. And then there were two hours of phone tag, before a hasty meeting was set up before the Florida team had to fly out again. Then there was a blur of photographing - Rachel, Mike, and Artie, all striking poses, all dancing, all in sweater vests. Of teaser ads, of talks for real life celebrity endorsements - talks with the guys from Weezer, which had Quinn flailing down the phone line when she found out.
‘Sweater Vest’ was on shelves in plenty of time for Christmas. Finn had no idea how it happened. Nothing happened that fast.
“You got the Midas touch,” Mercedes told him.
“I always wondered how King Midas, you know, went to the bathroom,” Finn replied.
Kurt propelled himself across the room, in a computer chair, singing “Gooold Finnngerrrr.”
The cologne was sold in twin packs, the idea that parents could get it for two siblings, couples and bffs could buy it and have a bottle each. And, Finn was sure, someone would buy it and give a bottle to their crush, and keep one for themselves.
All in all, Finn was glad when Christmas break rolled around. For him and Kurt, at least. Since their parents were going away for Christmas, they headed over to Lima at the end of November, leaving Team Florida to deal with CJC, and the increasingly concerning Chi-town branch to handle FotR. Dani refused to set foot in any town that didn’t have a Versace store, which Kurt both understood and sulked about.
Finn had been thrilled at the idea of having his family all to himself for a week, but the reality was that Burt and Carole still worked, and Kurt felt the need to catch up with anyone and everyone still in Lima, and Finn ended up spending a lot of time with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, roaming through Lima central.
He did run into an old teacher, but not the one he expected.
“Hey, Finn,” Coach Tanaka said with a clap to the shoulder. “How’ve you been? Got time for a drink?”
More than enough time.
They talked about football - the Titans had gotten better for a few seasons, and then dropped back to their usual place at the bottom of the ladder - about the town - a few new houses, and few less stores - about the teachers.
“Sue got out of here a few years back. Moved her and her sister somewhere warmer.”
“What about Mr Schuester?” Finn asked, toying with the label on his beer bottle. “Is he still around?”
“Oh yeah. You might like this story - a few weeks back, one of my smart-ass linebackers got me a bottle of that stuff you kids have put out, the smelly stuff.”
“Sweater Vest,” Finn supplied.
“Right. And it smells nice enough, you know, but it’s not me. Anyway, one of Will’s students had got him the same thing a few weeks later. With a card about how sweet he smelled and this wrapping paper with hand-drawn hearts on it. I swear, I’ve never seen anyone so freaked out by a gift.”
Finn’s heart sank. He’d been right about the demographic with crushes, then.
“I mean,” Ken continued, “he should be used to it by now. I swear this stuff happens to him twice a year. Anyway, he’s real proud of you kids and what you’ve achieved, and he was kind of bummed that this gift was ruined by the fact that it was given to him by a student that was just a little too into Spanish, if you get my drift. So we swapped. He gets the smart-ass present, and I have the token of a stalker’s affection.”
Finn recognised the end of the story, and forced out a chuckle. “Wow, uh. Thanks, I guess? For keeping it.”
“You should thank Will more’n me,” Ken said, draining his glass. “He’s the one that wears it.”
Something in Finn’s brain shortened out. Will Schuester. Wearing the cologne that was made for him, of him, whatever. Wearing the scent that Finn himself had engineered. Okay, engineered with help, but still. Wow.
“So Mr Schue is still teaching, still at McKinley?”
“Oh yeah,” Ken replied. “He’s teaching media studies now. Don’t ask me why - I go on leave, and when I come back the school doesn’t do Spanish any more, he’s teaching media, and we have a brand spanking new Japanese teacher.”
“Wow,” Finn said. “Is, uh, is he around, do you think? I’d like to catch up. You know, say hi.”
“Sure,” Ken said, pulling his phone out. “Give me a minute.”
A minute was nowhere near long enough for Finn to compose himself, so in a way he was glad that Will took twenty minutes to get there. It gave him plenty of time to check his hair, and to turn his phone off, and to make sure his face wasn’t massively weird in some way that he’d never noticed before. It was only when Will stepped through the door and spotted them that Finn remembered, shit, he hadn’t checked to make sure he was wearing clean clothes. Oh god, what if he wasn’t? What if he had the remains of lunch down his front and he didn’t know?
But then Mr Schue was right in front of him, and when Finn stood up to shake his hand, he got a warm hug instead. Of course, he’d always been a hugger, but Finn couldn’t help feeling special for getting such a friendly welcome. And then Finn stopped worrying about how lame he looked, because Will was sitting between Finn and Ken, and smiling widely as he ordered a beer, and Finn was doing his best not to stare but he really was. Mr Schue hadn’t changed at all. The same curly hair, the same expressive green eyes, the same red scarf that he was unwinding from around his neck.
Finn decided to go with the happiness bubbling up inside, and leant an elbow on the bar when he said, “Long time no see, Mr Schue.”
Mr Schue pulled a face at him. “You’re not allowed to call me that anymore,” he said, sipping at his beer and making a face at how cold it was.
“And why is that?” Finn asked, letting his voice be playful.
“Because,” Mr Schue responded patiently, “you are an adult with stable employment, and that makes you old. So if I have all of these old people roaming around, calling me ‘Mr Schue’, that makes me doubly old.” He gave Finn what would be a stern look, if he weren’t so obviously trying to repress a smile. “And I’m just not ready to be doubly old yet.”
Finn grinned. “Alright then. Will.” He paused to examine the way the name felt on his tongue. “So, media teacher now?”
“Yeah, I realised that the media department had better funding than the language department. And if I’m going to appropriate funds for glee, it’s best to do it from a department with money.”
“Huh,” Finn said. “So you still do glee, as well?”
And here Will shrugged. “We haven’t competed this year. I think your success has scared a lot of them. But we have a club, and the students enjoy it.”
Finn turned that over in his mind. “But you enjoy teaching media then?”
“Oh yeah.” Will looked over and gave him a sly smile. “We just finished analysing your advertising campaigns, looking at the unsaid messages conveyed in your ads compared to other brands.”
“Oh?” Finn asked, swivelling on his stool to face Will, “and what did you find?”
Will opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped, biting back a laugh. “You do realise that we’re talking about what I’m doing at school, when we could be talking about you?”
Finn shifted uncomfortably. “I haven’t done much that’s special.”
And Will barked out a laugh. “I can guarantee that you’re one of the most interesting people to get out of Lima.”
“Well,” Finn was aware that he was blushing, and figured to just go with it since he looked embarrassed enough already. “You’re the most interesting person still here.”
Will gave him a bemused, unbelieving look. The conversation turned outwards after that. They talked about movies, and music, and how the town had changed. Finn told Will about New York, and Chicago, and plans to spend Christmas in Miami helping pack last-minute orders for CJC. Will did manage to drag a few stories out of Finn, about selling coffee from a scooter, and how helping Kurt with his homework had been more work than they bargained for.
“It all sounds completely crazy,” Will said, eating up Finn’s words.
“It really is. And on top of that, we’re in New York, which is a kind of crazy all of its own. You ever been to New York? Aside from Nationals, I mean.”
Will shook his head. “Nope. I’ve just seen the little snatches of it between herding the kids around.”
“You should come and visit sometime,” Finn said without thinking.
“Right,” Will said, turning back to his beer, and Finn knew that - for whatever reason - Will had no intention of ever doing so. “So, please tell me that you’ve been taking advantage of being practically on top of Broadway?”
And they were back to talking about easy things, like musicals and concerts and plays and movies. It was different, Finn noted, the way they talked. They talked about how things were staged, and the themes that showed through and the ones that were muted. It was deeper than the ‘I like this band’ conversations they’d had back when Finn was a student and Will was his teacher. A few hours were eaten up with conversation.
“Ugh,” Will said, pushing his empty glass away. “I need to get going. It is a school night, after all.”
“Yeah,” Finn agreed. “I’m usually up early for the coffee thing, and I’m trying not to get into bad habits this week. I’m usually up at five.”
Will winced. “What do you do with your mornings?”
Finn shrugged. “This week I’ve been going running, dealing with little office details before the day starts, that kind of thing.”
Will smiled admiringly as he pulled his coat on again. “Wow. I keep meaning to go running before school, but it’s hard to be motivated when it’s this cold.”
“Come running with me tomorrow,” Finn offered. “I’ll swing by your place and kick you out of bed.”
Will laughed. “Sure, bright and early.” And while he seemed to be joking, Finn was willing to take a yes when one got handed to him.
So, in the dim light of six am, he leaned his finger on the buzzer to what he hoped was Will’s apartment. It occurred to him just a moment too late that if Will had moved he was probably waking some poor old lady up. But no, Will eventually stumbled out the door, looking half asleep and gloriously dishevelled. He gave Finn a long, unimpressed look, unfaltering in the face of Finn’s own happy grin.
“Hey,” Finn said, “this is me being nice. I could have been here an hour ago.”
Will grunted, and turned away, heading down the street at a slow jog. Finn caught up with him, and quickly fell in time with his stride. They jogged through the suburbs surrounding what little industrial area Lima had, across the stretch of no man’s land that was dotted with trees and the occasional military building, and then through the thin suburbs of Lima Central, jogging down main street, stopping to catch their breaths and drink icy cold water from the drinking fountain in a sparse little park.
“See?” Finn said, gesturing to the quiet landscape, the clear sky and the thin sunlight. “This is totally worth getting out of bed for.”
Will had one heel up on the back of a bench, stretching his legs out. Finn stared for a moment, before hurriedly turning back to the scenery. “It’s great,” Will finally said. He looked up at Finn with a lopsided smile. “I just feel like I’m being punished for all of those times I made you stay back after school to practice.”
“I liked those practices,” Finn replied, before looking away again. “It’s just after seven.”
“I need to head back then,” Will replied.
“Sure.”
They jogged in silence, except for the occasional catch of breath, but it was peaceful. That was something Finn had never mastered when living with Kurt, the art of being silent together. Finn found jogging with his teacher/friend/crush peaceful, settling. After so many months of being busybusybusy, taking the time to work the kinks out of his body and to just to hold someone’s company for no reason other than that he enjoyed it, it put him into a placid state of dumb happiness.
So much so that he almost ran into the car the pulled in suddenly in front of them.
Kurt popped out of the driver’s seat, stumbling as his feet hit the ground. “Finn!” he called, then he was racing over - getting his designer shoes dusty on the side of the road - and grabbing Finn by the arms, jumping up and down, shouting “Oh my god!” and “Finn!” over and over again.
Finn stood there dumbly, letting Kurt shake him. “What? Did something happen?”
“I got a call,” Kurt said breathlessly. “Or, rather, you did, but you didn’t answer your phone and you weren’t around, and it just kept ringing, so I picked it up and it was your accountant.” Kurt stopped to take in a lungful of breath, his face slipt open with a giddy smile. “Finn, with all of your assets, your business, your stocks, your raw savings, you are worth about eighty cents more than a million dollars.”
Finn stood there, blinking dumbly.
“Finn, you’re a millionaire!”
Part Two
Part: 1/2
Rating: PG (language, some mild dude-on-dude action)
Characters: Finn and Will, an assortment of Gleeks, and the odd OC to flesh things out.
Total word count: ~13,000
Summary: Finn gets out of Lima, he gets a job, fame and fortune. But can he get the one thing he’s always wanted?
Notes: Holiday season fic, written for the December Challenge. To give you an idea of what you’re in for, here’s what I like in a seasonal fic...
- Short and sweet, so I can read between holiday obligations
- No OCs, I don’t have time to care about new characters
- No mention of iconic locations, because I’ve never been to most of them
- Nothing epic. I like my holiday fics simple, and the characters kept familiar
- A scene by a fire. Because I like fires.
- The fic should actually be set in the holiday season. Not some journey of growth or development spanning years. I have a short attention span around Christmas.
And now, for the complete opposite...
Milk, No Sugar
As it turned out, Finn wasn’t very good at college. He did get that scholarship, to Chicago Booth of all places, and he did like the performing side of things. But in all honesty, he wasn’t the best - not even near the best - and even though they practiced like crazy, and had one-on-one training, and it was pretty much like Glee only eight times more intense, he just didn’t get any better. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
And the rest of college, well. Every now and then he thought back to the moment when he told Mr Schue that he was going to do business and economics, and that odd look on Mr Schue’s face. Amused and worried. And, of course, he often thought that maybe he should have taken the fact that essentially the coolest person Finn knew used to be an accountant as a bit of a sign that it just wasn’t going to be for him. Sometimes he wondered what look he would have gotten if he’d told Mr Schue that he was going to be a teacher or something instead.
In all honesty, he thought about Mr Schue a lot.
He’d been thinking about Mr Schue, in fact, on the day that he accidentally started what some would call a business empire. He’d been sitting on his scooter, stuck in traffic, holding a cheap cup of coffee in his hands, daydreaming about how high school could have been, when the guy next to him leaned on his horn hard, making him jump.
“Seriously,” Finn said. “Calm down.”
The guy had snorted. “Easy for you to say,” he said. “You’ve got your morning coffee right there. I’d give my right arm for a cup of joe.”
Finn had stared at him for a moment, before offering the cup out. “Latte, no sugar. I’ll give it to you for three dollars.”
The guy stared at him. “For real?” Finn nodded, and made his first dollar of profit.
The next day he went out with two thermos of coffee and a carton of milk, winding his was through traffic on his red scooter, topping up people’s travel mugs for a few bucks. Over the weekend, he bought a box of sugar sachets from the deli near his apartment.
The key was simplicity. As Finn discovered, no matter how elaborate your favourite order at Starbucks may be, when you’re stuck in traffic you’ll take anything. Halfway through the following week he’d lined up a friend to have three new thermos of black coffee halfway down the route, and started carrying a carton of soy as well.
So the business degree did come in handy, in a way. He even did his semester project on what was slowly becoming his business model, looking into the food preparation laws and the food sales laws and permits. He got a credit, and the comment “Ambitious, but hardly realistic.”
By the end of the year he’d recruited another eight people to spend their mornings in the key gridlock areas, serving coffee. He got the money together to get his scooter detailed, getting a big white fox tail painted on the back. His coffee service was registered as ‘Fox on the Run’.
“You made it into my local paper,” Kurt said one day, down the phone from New York. “You’re in the Times!”
Finn had paused, his hand hovering over the magical forms that would make him an official university dropout. “Really?”
“You’re making Chicago look too cool,” Kurt told him. “You need to come to the Big Apple.”
So he did. He handed the reigns over, and went to open another franchise of FotR. “Do you think I can write the move off as a tax deductable business expense?” he asked.
“Finn, honey, I know what you earn. Besides, you’ll practically be saving money by moving in with me.”
Finn didn’t understand that logic, since Kurt’s slice of New York was certainly not as easy on the pocket as Finn’s old studio that had been almost completely outside Chicago. It took a while for the business to take off. They made some local rags, gaining some notoriety after a picture ran of Finn zipping past a motorbike cop on his scooter, and the cop shaking his fist at him. The caption was, of course, “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog”. Kurt had it framed, and hung in the place of pride above their faux-fireplace.
So Finn was doing good. He was able to send some money home, to thank his mom and Burt for helping him get set up in Chicago. He was busy, but still had plenty of time to goof off. He was making new friends, and Kurt kept him from feeling homesick. For once, money was hardly an issue.
He still thought about Mr Schue a lot.
“Stop staring into space and help me,” Kurt said one evening, sitting on the polished wood floor with his sketchbook open across the coffee table.
“Sorry,” Finn said, trying to pull himself out of memories of green eyes and warm smiles. “What’s the problem?”
“I need to design a fashion product, and get it made, and create an ad campaign.” Kurt pretended to swoon against the couch. “It’s just too much! I’m only in my third year of university.”
“Isn’t this also your last year?”
“That’s beside the point! I’m not fully trained yet. How can I make judgements about core fashion items?”
“It’s never stopped you before.” Finn slumped back on the couch, putting his feet on the coffee table. “What about shoes?”
“Ugh,” Kurt said. “Have you ever tried to get completely original shoes made? Have you?”
“Okay, so it has to be something that’s easy to make? So, you’d want something that was made of fabric or plastic.”
“Something that makes you look cool,” Kurt added. “Something that everyone will want to buy.”
Finn gnawed on his lip, thinking back to high school, to things that you needed to look cool...
“Sunglasses,” he blurted out. “I, ah. Everyone has a pair, right? And cool people have multiple pairs. Like, you’ve got eight. And they’re plastic, and bits of metal, so that’s easy, right?”
Kurt leaned his head back on the couch, looking up at Finn. “Okay, that’s the item down. Now how the hell do I advertise sunglasses in an original and incredibly effective way?”
“Well, okay. Why do people wear sunglasses?”
Kurt rolled his eyes. “To keep the sun out of their eyes.”
“No!” Finn said, getting into the idea. “It’s to stop anyone from seeing their eyes. Like, if you have sunglasses on, no one can see where you’re looking. You could be looking at anything, or anyone. You know, like those French peeping-toms.”
“Voyeurs?”
“Yes! Exactly!” Finn thumped the couch cushion, narrowly missing Kurt’s ear. “There’s your brand.”
Kurt mulled it over. “Voyeur,” he said, before dropping his voice to a low, sultry sound, “Voyeur.”
“Yeah,” Finn said, “like that. And it’d have a slogan in French. Something like, like... like ‘watching without being seen’. Except better.”
“No,” Kurt said. “No, I like that one. Let me just see what that is in French.” He dragged his laptop open, and went to Babelfish. “Observation sans être vu,” he read out.
“No,” Finn said, “you’ve got to say it in a whisper, you know? So it sounds a little sexy and a little creepy.” Kurt tried again, making his voice low and husky. “Bam! You’ve got it.”
Kurt grinned, scribbling the ideas down. “You know, you may not have been the brightest crayon in the box back in high school, but you’re sure making up for lost time. Now, what do they look like?”
Finn held his hands up in defeat. “Hey, I thought this was a partnership?” he joked. “The design is all up to you. But they should be those big kind of glasses, the ones that cover all of your face.”
And that’s exactly what Kurt produced. He got Mike, whose dad was the shop teacher at old McKinley High, to teach him all he needed to know about plastics and moulds. He went to Tina, who was studying 3D art to get them made. She insisted that he let CJC (Cohen-Jones-Chang, her online clothing store, co-run with Mercedes) be the exclusive carrier. Finn, as co-creator and the only one who knew much about contracts, drew up a deal that probably wouldn’t hold up in a court, but would look good in Kurt’s project folder.
Kurt worked magic, and somehow managed to get himself, Quinn (who was living in Cleveland), and Tina (who was living with her grandparents in Coral Springs, attending Art school in Miami) together for a photo shoot. Artie was splitting a room with Mercedes in Mission Bay, and was wrangled along as a photographer. Finn found himself as financier, flying Artie and Tina up from Florida, while Kurt kindly split Quinn’s bus fare. The two big surprises were that Puck came over with her, and that he looked surprisingly good in the sunglasses. Four black and white portraits were shot against the barest wall in the Hudson-Hummel New York abode, with a run of colour photos that Artie swore he’d be able to manipulate into any combination of pair shots.
There was even an ad they put on youtube, with a wind machine (achieved by two large fans and Kurt’s hair dryer), soft, sensual music (recorded on Tina’s phone, on the day), and a seductive French voice (Kurt) whispering “Observation sans être vu” as the image faded to white.
“Do you think you should have gotten someone to proof-read the French part?” Artie asked.
Kurt’s eyes widened. “Do you think we should?”
Finn gave them a disbelieving look. “We’re clearly an American company,” he said. “We’re just co-opting the French image as a marketing ploy. If anything, the bad French is an addition to our corporate identity.”
Everyone stared at him.
“So... you mean it’s ironic?” Quinn said.
Puck shook his head, and smirked a little at Finn. “College boy.”
Kurt did fantastically at the fake-expo that served as his final assessment. Better than okay, since a few design companies left their cards with him, and praised him on a job well done.
But the real success was entirely unintentional.
Mercedes was winding up her own fashion degree, while Tina was pumping out designs and Artie was getting the last bugs out of the CJC website. And at Mercedes’ graduation fashion show, she just happened to drop that she had a website out, and Tina just happened to mail pics of the night to everyone on her mailing list, and Jacob Israel - who everyone had forgotten about - just happened to being doing a placement for his journalism degree, and snapped up the opportunity to get his name on a filler piece.
And the first Finn heard about any of this happening was Rachel calling him at 5.45 in the morning, for the Juilliard Centre, and demanding to know why she hadn’t been involved in his fashion empire.
“Rach? Mngh, it’s too early.”
“I wanted to make up for the time delay,” she explained, calming down gradually after the assurance that there was no empire, it was all a misunderstanding.
“There is no time delay,” Finn said. “I’m in New York too, living with Kurt.” Which, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to say in order to calm your ex-girlfriend down.
Half an hour later, he was off the phone, nursing a sore ear, and trying to coordinate the coffee run for the morning. It was only when things calmed down - around 9.30am - that he noticed he had a million missed calls from Kurt, and a packed inbox.
CJC had sold out of Voyeur stock. What was even more amazing was that there was no stock. There were ten pairs, and two hundred had been sold. And everyone was looking at Finn for answers.
“Put up an out of stock notice online,” he croaked over a Skype conference call. He didn’t want to coordinate sales, he wanted to be back in bed. “Get more pairs made, asap. Let people know that there will be a delay in shipping. That this is an exclusive brand, and that quality must be assured.”
“Is this really happening?” Tina asked.
“Yeah,” Finn replied. “Unless you don’t want it to.”
“We do,” Mercedes said firmly. “We really, really do.”
“Okay then.” Finn blinked, and finished his fourth cup of coffee for the morning. He paused, letting the flavour roll around his mouth. “And when we’re go for sales again, mark up the price by three-hundred percent.”
And suddenly Finn was running two business empires. When before he and Kurt had bantered in the evenings about what to have for dinner, now they were discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing. Instead of arguing about steak versus chicken, it was whether to attend a gala or stay in.
“That’s it,” Kurt said one day, putting his expensively shod foot down. “If we get any more like a married couple, I’m never going to meet someone. We’re going to the gala!”
So they dressed. Kurt went in GQMF-glamour, Finn went in smart-casual. Kurt spent the evening mingling and being delightful, Finn shook some hands and then settled in by the food table. Kurt did indeed meet someone, and spent the night flirting, laughing, and getting close. Finn spent the night alone, thinking.
“Don’t you think Dani is such a great name?” Kurt asked during the taxi ride home, at two in the morning. “And I love the way he spells it, feminine yet strong.”
“Do you have any real regrets?” Finn asked suddenly. “Like, something that you wish that you had done but never did?”
Kurt gave him a surprised look. “I prefer to have regrets about things that I’ve done but probably shouldn’t.” He made a show of looking out the window, looking at Finn’s reflection in the glass instead. “Of course, if it’s something that you didn’t do, then there’s no reason why you can’t still do it, right?”
Finn pursed his lips, and stared out of his own window.
As it turned out, Dani was a few (nine) years older than Kurt, European, and in America to work in developing new fragrances for a very expensive perfume company.
“He’s so interesting,” Kurt would gush. “And romantic. He says he wants to bottle the way I smell after we, well. Anyway, go dress up. We’re going out with his friends tonight.”
Finn would admit that Dani was interesting, and that his friends Jon, Alex, and Kermit (yes, for real) were also very interesting people. He felt weird every time Kurt turned the conversation to Finn’s achievements. These were people with finely honed senses, and very select skills, and impressive careers. Finn was the guy who sold a second-hand coffee and got lucky by accident.
“So,” Kermit said, tucking her long hair behind her ear, “I suppose if you were to make a cologne, it’d smell like coffee.”
“An expensive hazelnut grind?” Jon asked. “Maybe a latte with sweet milk?”
“Or a cappuccino, so you can have that slight smell of chocolate?” Alex suggested.
Finn laughed. “Nothing that complicated. At the end of the day, people just want something simple, something familiar. That’s why Foxy sells coffee. Not frappes or lattes or macchiatos. Just simple coffee, something that people understand.”
“So you think the simple smells are best?” Kermit said. “I suppose that’s true. People do like the same core scents.”
“Ah,” Alex interjected. “But people also like those complicated scents, the ones that remind them of a particular moment in time, a certain person. Like the cigarette smoke and sour apples that my mom smelled like.”
“The sugar of donuts and the sharp oil of petrol,” Kurt added.
They looked at Finn expectantly. “Wool,” he said at last. “And tea. Green tea, with a squeeze of lemon.” His eyes closed as he fell into the memory of the smell. “Something almost dusty, like an old leather jacket. Clean linen. Sweat.” He felt his mouth curving into a smile as he came to the last item on the list. “And chocolate chip cookies.”
When he opened his eyes, the table of people were staring at him. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “That’s what my school smelled like,” he said at last. “To me, at least.”
“Better than my school,” Dani said. “Smelled like cabbage and chalk. And school boys, or course. Horrid things.”
“You should sell more perfume and cologne to the youngsters, then,” Alex said with a grin.
“Why sell it myself,” Dani asked, wrapping an arm around Kurt and squeezing him, “when I have this treasure to speak to the youth so much more efficiently than I could myself?”
“There you go,” Kermit said, smiling over at Finn. “You might get your perfect perfume made after all.”
And while it was clearly meant as a joke, Kurt took it and ran with it. Which meant that Finn was dragged into it too. Kurt developed a fragrance that was light, almost floral, with ginger and cherry blossom and white roses. Finn drove Dani mad with his very nice, but entirely unhelpful descriptions of scent. His own end-product wasn’t quite where he had hoped it would be - Dani insisted on putting Citron in, and Kurt suggested a dash of cinnamon. So they ended up with two perfume recipes, and a manufacturer, and after a week of Sunday’s they finally brought it up at a CJC staff meeting.
“Look, no offence guys,” Mercedes said, getting right to the point. “But are we really ready to sell perfume, of all things? I mean, do we need to? We’re barely keeping up with the sunglasses. Speaking of, Kurt, honey, where the hell are your designs for the Winter range? We’re nearly in Autumn!”
“Come on,” Kurt insisted. “If we diversify now we could have an actual empire, instead of just a sunglasses brand. Just think, we could carve out a whole subculture, and ensure that it smells better than any other subculture!”
“Finn?” Tina asked down the Skype connection. “What do you think?”
Finn thought about it. On the one hand, Mercedes was right. On the other hand... on the other hand, he’d put so much time and thought, and it was almost right. It almost smelled like...
“I think you guys should smell them,” he said at last. “We’ll let you cast the deciding vote.”
It took a month for them to all get together, and in that time Dani had whipped up what he called the ‘crowd pleaser’, a scent that was a compromise between Kurt’s flower arrangement and Finn’s pantry, as he called their respective colognes. In that time, Kurt himself thought of all kinds of compromises.
“We’ll only launch one,” he said. “Whichever the girls’ chose. We’ll have a single fragrance, and a simple ad campaign, like for Voyeur. Would it be Voyeur, or CJC? Or should we have a new label altogether?”
“Keep it Voyeur,” Finn voted. “That’s us, after all.” And then he put it out of his mind. He had a business to run - and why did people keep suggesting getting scooter-mounted coffee machines? It was a dumb idea. It would never work, the Occ-health-safety would be a nightmare, not to mention meeting the food preparation standards. And then he had to deal with all of the paperwork for two businesses. He had assistants, and office heads for both Chicago and New York, and Tina was meant to be handling the office side of CJC, but there was more than enough mounting up. Add to that Tina, Artie, and Mercedes suddenly moving into their apartment for a week to celebrate Kurt’s birthday, and Finn was feeling more than a little stretched.
“Okay,” Kurt said, handing out black ties. “We’ll do this blindfolded. You’ll each smell the three fragrances, in no particular order, and rank them according to your favourite. Then we’ll talk about marketability. Then see how feasible this all is, and whether we’ll do it at all.”
Finn looked at the little bottle that held what was essentially his high school crush. For the first time, he was starting to feel nervous with this plan.
That feeling lasted all the way through twenty minutes of judging, right up until the final vote, and Kurt dropping a glass onto the hard floor.
“Number three?” Kurt asked. “You picked Finn’s perfume?”
Finn responded with the first thing that came into his head. “It’s really more of a cologne.”
“It’s well balanced,” Artie explained.
“It’s unisex,” Tina added.
“It’s tasty,” Mercedes concluded. “Nobody could not like that smell.”
Seeing the look on Kurt’s face, Artie rushed in. “We just felt that, as a first foray into this industry that we know nothing about, a crowd pleaser would be the safe bet.”
“Number one was the crowd pleaser,” Kurt ground out.
“And that one was great, really,” Tina said. “It was just...”
“Crowded,” Mercedes finished. “Look, if you didn’t want our opinion-”
“Let’s just not bother,” Finn said. “We’re all busy enough as it is. We need to hire more staff, not make ourselves busier. We’ve shown that we can make good smells. Let’s just sit on that and we’ll deal with it later. Like, a few years later.”
“No,” Kurt said firmly. “We have a scent, we have a store, this is a route we have to go down.” He paused to smooth his fringe down. “I was just... surprised. Your smell is lovely, Finn. Really.”
“Does it have a name?” Tina asked.
Oh yeah, it most certainly had a name. “No,” Finn said innocently. “I really didn’t think that far.”
So they brainstormed. Kurt came up with ‘Drama Queen’, but everyone agreed that suited his fragrance more. Since their consumership was young, Tina suggested ‘Teacher’s Pet’. “It’s cute, you know? It’s a high school-type name. It’s preppy, but a little naughty.”
Finn voted that down, without explaining why.
Mercedes suggested ‘Ex-girlfriend’, with a sly look at Finn that he totally missed. Artie came up with ‘Whyt boi’, and was unanimously voted down.
“What do you think of when you smell it?” Tina finally asked, as they were eating the last of the biscuits and finishing their nth cups of coffee and tea.
Finn thought back to high school, to the man. To the movement and the dancing, to the singing and the advice, to the smiles and the t-shirts that he wore in summer. To winter and the button up shirts, and ties, and-
“Sweater vests,” he finally said.
Everyone exchanged looks. “I can see that,” Tina said at last.
“And it’s definitely unisex,” Kurt added.
“And you’d be tapping into the ever-growing marker of sweater vest wearers,” Artie added.
So that was decided. Finn checked his e-mail as the conversation about potential advertising flowed around him. Scratch and sniff, Artie insisted. Mercedes was more into charging a dollar with any CJC store purchase for a tiny tester. Tina felt that celebrity endorsement was the way to go, as celebrities appealed to a wider demographic than the age-specific marketing they currently used. And all the time they danced around the issue, would they do this? Would they go there?
“Hey guys,” Finn called out at last. “I got an e-mail from Kermit. She says that Hot Topic wants to know more about our perfume.”
“Are you serious?” Kurt finally asked.
“Hot Topic?” Tina asked, her eyes going wide.
Mercedes gave Finn a long look. “You seriously know someone named Kermit?”
Finn e-mailed back, and got a phone number in response. And then there were two hours of phone tag, before a hasty meeting was set up before the Florida team had to fly out again. Then there was a blur of photographing - Rachel, Mike, and Artie, all striking poses, all dancing, all in sweater vests. Of teaser ads, of talks for real life celebrity endorsements - talks with the guys from Weezer, which had Quinn flailing down the phone line when she found out.
‘Sweater Vest’ was on shelves in plenty of time for Christmas. Finn had no idea how it happened. Nothing happened that fast.
“You got the Midas touch,” Mercedes told him.
“I always wondered how King Midas, you know, went to the bathroom,” Finn replied.
Kurt propelled himself across the room, in a computer chair, singing “Gooold Finnngerrrr.”
The cologne was sold in twin packs, the idea that parents could get it for two siblings, couples and bffs could buy it and have a bottle each. And, Finn was sure, someone would buy it and give a bottle to their crush, and keep one for themselves.
All in all, Finn was glad when Christmas break rolled around. For him and Kurt, at least. Since their parents were going away for Christmas, they headed over to Lima at the end of November, leaving Team Florida to deal with CJC, and the increasingly concerning Chi-town branch to handle FotR. Dani refused to set foot in any town that didn’t have a Versace store, which Kurt both understood and sulked about.
Finn had been thrilled at the idea of having his family all to himself for a week, but the reality was that Burt and Carole still worked, and Kurt felt the need to catch up with anyone and everyone still in Lima, and Finn ended up spending a lot of time with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, roaming through Lima central.
He did run into an old teacher, but not the one he expected.
“Hey, Finn,” Coach Tanaka said with a clap to the shoulder. “How’ve you been? Got time for a drink?”
More than enough time.
They talked about football - the Titans had gotten better for a few seasons, and then dropped back to their usual place at the bottom of the ladder - about the town - a few new houses, and few less stores - about the teachers.
“Sue got out of here a few years back. Moved her and her sister somewhere warmer.”
“What about Mr Schuester?” Finn asked, toying with the label on his beer bottle. “Is he still around?”
“Oh yeah. You might like this story - a few weeks back, one of my smart-ass linebackers got me a bottle of that stuff you kids have put out, the smelly stuff.”
“Sweater Vest,” Finn supplied.
“Right. And it smells nice enough, you know, but it’s not me. Anyway, one of Will’s students had got him the same thing a few weeks later. With a card about how sweet he smelled and this wrapping paper with hand-drawn hearts on it. I swear, I’ve never seen anyone so freaked out by a gift.”
Finn’s heart sank. He’d been right about the demographic with crushes, then.
“I mean,” Ken continued, “he should be used to it by now. I swear this stuff happens to him twice a year. Anyway, he’s real proud of you kids and what you’ve achieved, and he was kind of bummed that this gift was ruined by the fact that it was given to him by a student that was just a little too into Spanish, if you get my drift. So we swapped. He gets the smart-ass present, and I have the token of a stalker’s affection.”
Finn recognised the end of the story, and forced out a chuckle. “Wow, uh. Thanks, I guess? For keeping it.”
“You should thank Will more’n me,” Ken said, draining his glass. “He’s the one that wears it.”
Something in Finn’s brain shortened out. Will Schuester. Wearing the cologne that was made for him, of him, whatever. Wearing the scent that Finn himself had engineered. Okay, engineered with help, but still. Wow.
“So Mr Schue is still teaching, still at McKinley?”
“Oh yeah,” Ken replied. “He’s teaching media studies now. Don’t ask me why - I go on leave, and when I come back the school doesn’t do Spanish any more, he’s teaching media, and we have a brand spanking new Japanese teacher.”
“Wow,” Finn said. “Is, uh, is he around, do you think? I’d like to catch up. You know, say hi.”
“Sure,” Ken said, pulling his phone out. “Give me a minute.”
A minute was nowhere near long enough for Finn to compose himself, so in a way he was glad that Will took twenty minutes to get there. It gave him plenty of time to check his hair, and to turn his phone off, and to make sure his face wasn’t massively weird in some way that he’d never noticed before. It was only when Will stepped through the door and spotted them that Finn remembered, shit, he hadn’t checked to make sure he was wearing clean clothes. Oh god, what if he wasn’t? What if he had the remains of lunch down his front and he didn’t know?
But then Mr Schue was right in front of him, and when Finn stood up to shake his hand, he got a warm hug instead. Of course, he’d always been a hugger, but Finn couldn’t help feeling special for getting such a friendly welcome. And then Finn stopped worrying about how lame he looked, because Will was sitting between Finn and Ken, and smiling widely as he ordered a beer, and Finn was doing his best not to stare but he really was. Mr Schue hadn’t changed at all. The same curly hair, the same expressive green eyes, the same red scarf that he was unwinding from around his neck.
Finn decided to go with the happiness bubbling up inside, and leant an elbow on the bar when he said, “Long time no see, Mr Schue.”
Mr Schue pulled a face at him. “You’re not allowed to call me that anymore,” he said, sipping at his beer and making a face at how cold it was.
“And why is that?” Finn asked, letting his voice be playful.
“Because,” Mr Schue responded patiently, “you are an adult with stable employment, and that makes you old. So if I have all of these old people roaming around, calling me ‘Mr Schue’, that makes me doubly old.” He gave Finn what would be a stern look, if he weren’t so obviously trying to repress a smile. “And I’m just not ready to be doubly old yet.”
Finn grinned. “Alright then. Will.” He paused to examine the way the name felt on his tongue. “So, media teacher now?”
“Yeah, I realised that the media department had better funding than the language department. And if I’m going to appropriate funds for glee, it’s best to do it from a department with money.”
“Huh,” Finn said. “So you still do glee, as well?”
And here Will shrugged. “We haven’t competed this year. I think your success has scared a lot of them. But we have a club, and the students enjoy it.”
Finn turned that over in his mind. “But you enjoy teaching media then?”
“Oh yeah.” Will looked over and gave him a sly smile. “We just finished analysing your advertising campaigns, looking at the unsaid messages conveyed in your ads compared to other brands.”
“Oh?” Finn asked, swivelling on his stool to face Will, “and what did you find?”
Will opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped, biting back a laugh. “You do realise that we’re talking about what I’m doing at school, when we could be talking about you?”
Finn shifted uncomfortably. “I haven’t done much that’s special.”
And Will barked out a laugh. “I can guarantee that you’re one of the most interesting people to get out of Lima.”
“Well,” Finn was aware that he was blushing, and figured to just go with it since he looked embarrassed enough already. “You’re the most interesting person still here.”
Will gave him a bemused, unbelieving look. The conversation turned outwards after that. They talked about movies, and music, and how the town had changed. Finn told Will about New York, and Chicago, and plans to spend Christmas in Miami helping pack last-minute orders for CJC. Will did manage to drag a few stories out of Finn, about selling coffee from a scooter, and how helping Kurt with his homework had been more work than they bargained for.
“It all sounds completely crazy,” Will said, eating up Finn’s words.
“It really is. And on top of that, we’re in New York, which is a kind of crazy all of its own. You ever been to New York? Aside from Nationals, I mean.”
Will shook his head. “Nope. I’ve just seen the little snatches of it between herding the kids around.”
“You should come and visit sometime,” Finn said without thinking.
“Right,” Will said, turning back to his beer, and Finn knew that - for whatever reason - Will had no intention of ever doing so. “So, please tell me that you’ve been taking advantage of being practically on top of Broadway?”
And they were back to talking about easy things, like musicals and concerts and plays and movies. It was different, Finn noted, the way they talked. They talked about how things were staged, and the themes that showed through and the ones that were muted. It was deeper than the ‘I like this band’ conversations they’d had back when Finn was a student and Will was his teacher. A few hours were eaten up with conversation.
“Ugh,” Will said, pushing his empty glass away. “I need to get going. It is a school night, after all.”
“Yeah,” Finn agreed. “I’m usually up early for the coffee thing, and I’m trying not to get into bad habits this week. I’m usually up at five.”
Will winced. “What do you do with your mornings?”
Finn shrugged. “This week I’ve been going running, dealing with little office details before the day starts, that kind of thing.”
Will smiled admiringly as he pulled his coat on again. “Wow. I keep meaning to go running before school, but it’s hard to be motivated when it’s this cold.”
“Come running with me tomorrow,” Finn offered. “I’ll swing by your place and kick you out of bed.”
Will laughed. “Sure, bright and early.” And while he seemed to be joking, Finn was willing to take a yes when one got handed to him.
So, in the dim light of six am, he leaned his finger on the buzzer to what he hoped was Will’s apartment. It occurred to him just a moment too late that if Will had moved he was probably waking some poor old lady up. But no, Will eventually stumbled out the door, looking half asleep and gloriously dishevelled. He gave Finn a long, unimpressed look, unfaltering in the face of Finn’s own happy grin.
“Hey,” Finn said, “this is me being nice. I could have been here an hour ago.”
Will grunted, and turned away, heading down the street at a slow jog. Finn caught up with him, and quickly fell in time with his stride. They jogged through the suburbs surrounding what little industrial area Lima had, across the stretch of no man’s land that was dotted with trees and the occasional military building, and then through the thin suburbs of Lima Central, jogging down main street, stopping to catch their breaths and drink icy cold water from the drinking fountain in a sparse little park.
“See?” Finn said, gesturing to the quiet landscape, the clear sky and the thin sunlight. “This is totally worth getting out of bed for.”
Will had one heel up on the back of a bench, stretching his legs out. Finn stared for a moment, before hurriedly turning back to the scenery. “It’s great,” Will finally said. He looked up at Finn with a lopsided smile. “I just feel like I’m being punished for all of those times I made you stay back after school to practice.”
“I liked those practices,” Finn replied, before looking away again. “It’s just after seven.”
“I need to head back then,” Will replied.
“Sure.”
They jogged in silence, except for the occasional catch of breath, but it was peaceful. That was something Finn had never mastered when living with Kurt, the art of being silent together. Finn found jogging with his teacher/friend/crush peaceful, settling. After so many months of being busybusybusy, taking the time to work the kinks out of his body and to just to hold someone’s company for no reason other than that he enjoyed it, it put him into a placid state of dumb happiness.
So much so that he almost ran into the car the pulled in suddenly in front of them.
Kurt popped out of the driver’s seat, stumbling as his feet hit the ground. “Finn!” he called, then he was racing over - getting his designer shoes dusty on the side of the road - and grabbing Finn by the arms, jumping up and down, shouting “Oh my god!” and “Finn!” over and over again.
Finn stood there dumbly, letting Kurt shake him. “What? Did something happen?”
“I got a call,” Kurt said breathlessly. “Or, rather, you did, but you didn’t answer your phone and you weren’t around, and it just kept ringing, so I picked it up and it was your accountant.” Kurt stopped to take in a lungful of breath, his face slipt open with a giddy smile. “Finn, with all of your assets, your business, your stocks, your raw savings, you are worth about eighty cents more than a million dollars.”
Finn stood there, blinking dumbly.
“Finn, you’re a millionaire!”
Part Two