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rmTitle: The Voice of Avalon
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Rating: PG-13
Summary: An AU set in the world of Max Brooks's World War Z, where it turns out the voice of the Victory at Avalon was Kurt Hummel.
Warnings: Recollection of character deaths, zombies, homophobia, and implied dubiously consensual reproduction.
Notes: 2,000 words of “I need to type this out so it will go away.” Also available on Tumblr.
[I meet Kurt Hummel at his home, a simple suburban that looks, remarkably, pre-war, until he shows me the alterations: metal shutters and bullet proof glass. “I only have them so I don’t look stupid, and because it would make my dad happy. They don’t mean anything. Blaine and I know that.”
Like many of the people I’ve interviewed both for my first volume and for this one, Kurt Hummel can be said to be one of the unknown heroes of World War Z. He laughs at that, although his eyes, which, like all the rest of him, are strangely and perhaps appropriately fae, spark at the praise. After all, Kurt Hummel is the voice of the Victory at Avalon.]
Blaine and I met in high school, and he saved my life. This was before the War, before anybody had ever heard of African Rabies. I was bullied a lot, kids used to throw me into dumpsters. Things were… out of control, I guess, and I met Blaine; it was this whole complicated thing where I was spying on his school’s glee club for my school’s glee club – people still know what those are, right?
At any rate, things happened, and we fell in love. Dated for a year and a half, and then, after failing to get into the college I wanted to go to —
NYADA.
Yes. In New York. I suppose I don’t need to say anything more about that.
No.
I was lucky. I was so angry, of course, then. I still am, in some ways. It’s better, I guess, than being angry about everything else.
Anyway, I went out to California, I thought maybe I’d go to LA eventually, see if I could have a career out there, even though my heart had always been set on Broadway. Blaine’s brother was in LA, and… well in hindsight he was a terrible actor and not a great brother to Blaine, but he was so handsome, so handsome. It was inhuman, and he was getting work.
But you didn’t go right to LA.
No. Not quite. Although Claremont was close. I felt like I needed an education. It’s not like I had gotten much of one back in Lima. And among my many curses was that I was smart.
What are your other curses?
My capacity for love. Survival. And my voice.
So how did you come to be the voice of Avalon? Everyone assumed, for a long time, it was a girl.
You say that like I’ve never heard it before. That I wasn’t mistaken for my dead mother when I answered the phone before the War. Like I don’t know how startled people are when someone who sounds like me, turns out to be someone who was at the Five.
There —
No. Let’s clear a few things up. I am gay. A queer, queer boy of the type that can’t hide it. And you know, things were getting better, when the War came. I thought Blaine and I would be legally married by thirty; when New York fell through, that’s the other reason I headed out to LA. Legally married by thirty.
And in the War, the only thing anyone cared about was if you weren’t one of them. And if you could fight. Who you loved, who you fucked — nobody cared about that.
But they do now.
They do and they don’t. No one has a problem with us. I never feel like Blaine and I are in danger, but the marriage thing isn’t happening any time soon. Not with the need to encourage procreation. It makes sense… for values of sense … that people who can have babies by accident get extra privileges now. So….
It is what it is.
What did you do during the siege? And why was Blaine there? Isn’t he a year younger than you?
Yeah. He was still in high school, but we’d been having problems… the distance really, and he used the excuse of his brother to come out to visit me, so we could sort our shit out, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what happened. Complete, total, screaming meltdown breakup, tears, et cetera, interspersed with watching the news. I mean, shit was way beyond African Rabies at that point. The dead were real, and coming, and there was this definite first wave escape going on.
But look, my dad was a mechanic, owned a garage. I knew all about what was going to go wrong with all those escape plans. Breakdowns, gas shortages, flats, clogged roads and a whole bunch of people who think they’re more manly than me that didn’t know jumpers from a clothesline. I wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was my ex-boyfriend. When people started talking about hunkering down, I was all in, and despite everything that was going on with us, I spoke for Blaine. I always had, and somehow that didn’t change.
Was that difficult? Being cooped up in there with him for all those months?
It’s probably what kept me alive. Whenever I couldn’t think about the Z’s anymore, I could just be really, really pissed off at Blaine.
You still loved him.
Still do. But yeah. And Blaine… Blaine reacts to stress with a need for physical affection. I was… unamused. And jealous, and yeah.
His favorite band, when we were in high school was Roxy Music. It didn’t make any sense. They hadn’t even been popular in our lifetimes, and they weren’t even cool retro. Honestly, I think Blaine just had a thing for Bryan Ferry circa 1979 or whatever. I don’t know. I remember this one conversation we had that somehow went from Bryan Ferry to masturbation…
I’m sorry, that’s too much information, but it’s nice, to have attention again. I wanted to be a star once, and I know the War was supposed to have taught us the … the wrongness… of such desires, but the war didn’t kill me. And it didn’t kill who I was before it happened, even if I’ve put it aside.
Bryan Ferry.
Right. You’re here to know why I was singing “Avalon,” not what my love life was like when I was sixteen. Like I said, Blaine loved Bryan Ferry, and the end was coming. Win or lose — and I thought we might lose, gloriously and remembered forever – the end was coming. We were either going to win and Blaine and I were going to be able to get the hell away from each other or we were going to die.
And I didn’t want either of those things. I still loved him. And, in a way, I loved our siege. I was good, as good as anyone else, and sometimes better. The things that had made me strange, made be valued, kept me alive at the Five.
I helped us cook well, with crappy supplies; I helped us stay entertained; I was handy because of my dad, and god, I once survived a fucking Z because I always had this thing, where I wore layers because I didn’t like people to touch me — even in high school, before the war. It was all the abuse and god, the closest I ever came, one of those things got a mouthful of my fucking blazer.
Anyway, the end was coming, and I wanted Blaine to know. I wanted him to know without us screaming at each other, that it was him, that it had always been him, that no matter what happened, I was glad that the little life I had had, had been about him.
So I wasn’t on a shift, should’ve been sleeping, and I was friends with the girl on that shift at the station, and I’d been hanging out with her, singing along in the studio with the songs she was playing, just to have something to do, and I asked if she had any Roxy Music. Because I wanted to sing along I guess. For me. But as she was about to put it on, I stopped her. Actually grabbed her hand; I didn’t do things like that… I didn’t like touching people. I still don’t, and, well, I stopped her. And into this silence, this hissing silence and she’s just staring at me for fucking up her broadcast, I start singing “Avalon” because it’s, for whatever reason, the only one I can remember right then.
Did Blaine hear it?
Everybody heard it.
Did it win him back?
You’d have to ask him, but he’s here, isn’t he?
***
[In many ways Blaine Anderson still looks like the boy he must have been at the Five. High energy, with a mop of curly hair that, to be fair, is thinning at the crown, and a bright smile. He seems eager to please, which while easy to reconcile with his partner’s recollection of their experience of the siege, seems nearly impossible to reconcile with the rest of the war.
He insists on being interviewed separately from Kurt, saying too much of what happened is still too hard for them to speak about side by side.]
I don’t really know why you’re interviewing me. Kurt’s a pretty important footnote, but… I’m… well, I’m Kurt’s footnote.
He seems pretty smitten.
I’m pretty lucky. It’s nice. Being able to say that about something other than still breathing.
Do you want me to talk about the siege?
Is that what you want to talk about?
No. I don’t want to talk about Kurt either. I don’t want the world to have him. I know how much he’s always hated his voice being misunderstood, but every time someone says “she” about Avalon, I’m so glad. He deserved – deserves – to be famous for his talent, not for a weird right place right time salvo in an on-again off-again feud-love affair with his ex-boyfriend that’s become some weird, militaristic anthem of human survival. I mean, have you actually listened to that song? It has the word bossanova in it, for Chrissakes.
I want to talk about my daughter.
What was that decision like for you?
Pretty much the opposite of what I used to think about. I thought we were going to grow up and get married. Adopt a baby, or get one of our friends to be a surrogate for us.
They’re all dead. The ones I fantasized about for that. Rachel was in New York, where Kurt wanted to be. And. Well, you know. All your friends from twenty years ago are probably dead too.
Your daughter.
Right. So, things are different now. There’s all this concern about population growth and genetic variance and everyone has to pitch in right? And people like Kurt and I, I guess, I guess I just wanted to be sure there couldn’t be any reason to complain. I just. I just want us to be safe.
Why wouldn’t you be? Other than the obvious?
You mean the Z’s?
Yes.
A year and a half before I met Kurt three guys beat the shit out of me and a friend for going to a high school dance together. I didn’t really feel like having some real live humans beat the shit out of us for not contributing to the renewal of our species.
Tell us about your daughter.
That’s her picture. Over there. She died. When she was four. Pneumonia. Drug production and distribution was still really fucked up then. She didn’t seem that sick. And then she was.
I found out a week later. Because she wasn’t mine, not really, not like we’d always dreamed.
Do you ever think about having another?
You say that like it’s an option. My lack of choices are just a little more obvious than other people’s.
You also say it like I’d get to raise them and buy them toys and take them fishing and teach them to ride their bikes to school.
I have three other children. Alive. Doing well. In this crazy broken world that doesn’t know from pop starts or glee clubs or dreams of New York.
Who has good dreams about New York anymore?
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Rating: PG-13
Summary: An AU set in the world of Max Brooks's World War Z, where it turns out the voice of the Victory at Avalon was Kurt Hummel.
Warnings: Recollection of character deaths, zombies, homophobia, and implied dubiously consensual reproduction.
Notes: 2,000 words of “I need to type this out so it will go away.” Also available on Tumblr.
[I meet Kurt Hummel at his home, a simple suburban that looks, remarkably, pre-war, until he shows me the alterations: metal shutters and bullet proof glass. “I only have them so I don’t look stupid, and because it would make my dad happy. They don’t mean anything. Blaine and I know that.”
Like many of the people I’ve interviewed both for my first volume and for this one, Kurt Hummel can be said to be one of the unknown heroes of World War Z. He laughs at that, although his eyes, which, like all the rest of him, are strangely and perhaps appropriately fae, spark at the praise. After all, Kurt Hummel is the voice of the Victory at Avalon.]
Blaine and I met in high school, and he saved my life. This was before the War, before anybody had ever heard of African Rabies. I was bullied a lot, kids used to throw me into dumpsters. Things were… out of control, I guess, and I met Blaine; it was this whole complicated thing where I was spying on his school’s glee club for my school’s glee club – people still know what those are, right?
At any rate, things happened, and we fell in love. Dated for a year and a half, and then, after failing to get into the college I wanted to go to —
NYADA.
Yes. In New York. I suppose I don’t need to say anything more about that.
No.
I was lucky. I was so angry, of course, then. I still am, in some ways. It’s better, I guess, than being angry about everything else.
Anyway, I went out to California, I thought maybe I’d go to LA eventually, see if I could have a career out there, even though my heart had always been set on Broadway. Blaine’s brother was in LA, and… well in hindsight he was a terrible actor and not a great brother to Blaine, but he was so handsome, so handsome. It was inhuman, and he was getting work.
But you didn’t go right to LA.
No. Not quite. Although Claremont was close. I felt like I needed an education. It’s not like I had gotten much of one back in Lima. And among my many curses was that I was smart.
What are your other curses?
My capacity for love. Survival. And my voice.
So how did you come to be the voice of Avalon? Everyone assumed, for a long time, it was a girl.
You say that like I’ve never heard it before. That I wasn’t mistaken for my dead mother when I answered the phone before the War. Like I don’t know how startled people are when someone who sounds like me, turns out to be someone who was at the Five.
There —
No. Let’s clear a few things up. I am gay. A queer, queer boy of the type that can’t hide it. And you know, things were getting better, when the War came. I thought Blaine and I would be legally married by thirty; when New York fell through, that’s the other reason I headed out to LA. Legally married by thirty.
And in the War, the only thing anyone cared about was if you weren’t one of them. And if you could fight. Who you loved, who you fucked — nobody cared about that.
But they do now.
They do and they don’t. No one has a problem with us. I never feel like Blaine and I are in danger, but the marriage thing isn’t happening any time soon. Not with the need to encourage procreation. It makes sense… for values of sense … that people who can have babies by accident get extra privileges now. So….
It is what it is.
What did you do during the siege? And why was Blaine there? Isn’t he a year younger than you?
Yeah. He was still in high school, but we’d been having problems… the distance really, and he used the excuse of his brother to come out to visit me, so we could sort our shit out, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what happened. Complete, total, screaming meltdown breakup, tears, et cetera, interspersed with watching the news. I mean, shit was way beyond African Rabies at that point. The dead were real, and coming, and there was this definite first wave escape going on.
But look, my dad was a mechanic, owned a garage. I knew all about what was going to go wrong with all those escape plans. Breakdowns, gas shortages, flats, clogged roads and a whole bunch of people who think they’re more manly than me that didn’t know jumpers from a clothesline. I wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was my ex-boyfriend. When people started talking about hunkering down, I was all in, and despite everything that was going on with us, I spoke for Blaine. I always had, and somehow that didn’t change.
Was that difficult? Being cooped up in there with him for all those months?
It’s probably what kept me alive. Whenever I couldn’t think about the Z’s anymore, I could just be really, really pissed off at Blaine.
You still loved him.
Still do. But yeah. And Blaine… Blaine reacts to stress with a need for physical affection. I was… unamused. And jealous, and yeah.
His favorite band, when we were in high school was Roxy Music. It didn’t make any sense. They hadn’t even been popular in our lifetimes, and they weren’t even cool retro. Honestly, I think Blaine just had a thing for Bryan Ferry circa 1979 or whatever. I don’t know. I remember this one conversation we had that somehow went from Bryan Ferry to masturbation…
I’m sorry, that’s too much information, but it’s nice, to have attention again. I wanted to be a star once, and I know the War was supposed to have taught us the … the wrongness… of such desires, but the war didn’t kill me. And it didn’t kill who I was before it happened, even if I’ve put it aside.
Bryan Ferry.
Right. You’re here to know why I was singing “Avalon,” not what my love life was like when I was sixteen. Like I said, Blaine loved Bryan Ferry, and the end was coming. Win or lose — and I thought we might lose, gloriously and remembered forever – the end was coming. We were either going to win and Blaine and I were going to be able to get the hell away from each other or we were going to die.
And I didn’t want either of those things. I still loved him. And, in a way, I loved our siege. I was good, as good as anyone else, and sometimes better. The things that had made me strange, made be valued, kept me alive at the Five.
I helped us cook well, with crappy supplies; I helped us stay entertained; I was handy because of my dad, and god, I once survived a fucking Z because I always had this thing, where I wore layers because I didn’t like people to touch me — even in high school, before the war. It was all the abuse and god, the closest I ever came, one of those things got a mouthful of my fucking blazer.
Anyway, the end was coming, and I wanted Blaine to know. I wanted him to know without us screaming at each other, that it was him, that it had always been him, that no matter what happened, I was glad that the little life I had had, had been about him.
So I wasn’t on a shift, should’ve been sleeping, and I was friends with the girl on that shift at the station, and I’d been hanging out with her, singing along in the studio with the songs she was playing, just to have something to do, and I asked if she had any Roxy Music. Because I wanted to sing along I guess. For me. But as she was about to put it on, I stopped her. Actually grabbed her hand; I didn’t do things like that… I didn’t like touching people. I still don’t, and, well, I stopped her. And into this silence, this hissing silence and she’s just staring at me for fucking up her broadcast, I start singing “Avalon” because it’s, for whatever reason, the only one I can remember right then.
Did Blaine hear it?
Everybody heard it.
Did it win him back?
You’d have to ask him, but he’s here, isn’t he?
***
[In many ways Blaine Anderson still looks like the boy he must have been at the Five. High energy, with a mop of curly hair that, to be fair, is thinning at the crown, and a bright smile. He seems eager to please, which while easy to reconcile with his partner’s recollection of their experience of the siege, seems nearly impossible to reconcile with the rest of the war.
He insists on being interviewed separately from Kurt, saying too much of what happened is still too hard for them to speak about side by side.]
I don’t really know why you’re interviewing me. Kurt’s a pretty important footnote, but… I’m… well, I’m Kurt’s footnote.
He seems pretty smitten.
I’m pretty lucky. It’s nice. Being able to say that about something other than still breathing.
Do you want me to talk about the siege?
Is that what you want to talk about?
No. I don’t want to talk about Kurt either. I don’t want the world to have him. I know how much he’s always hated his voice being misunderstood, but every time someone says “she” about Avalon, I’m so glad. He deserved – deserves – to be famous for his talent, not for a weird right place right time salvo in an on-again off-again feud-love affair with his ex-boyfriend that’s become some weird, militaristic anthem of human survival. I mean, have you actually listened to that song? It has the word bossanova in it, for Chrissakes.
I want to talk about my daughter.
What was that decision like for you?
Pretty much the opposite of what I used to think about. I thought we were going to grow up and get married. Adopt a baby, or get one of our friends to be a surrogate for us.
They’re all dead. The ones I fantasized about for that. Rachel was in New York, where Kurt wanted to be. And. Well, you know. All your friends from twenty years ago are probably dead too.
Your daughter.
Right. So, things are different now. There’s all this concern about population growth and genetic variance and everyone has to pitch in right? And people like Kurt and I, I guess, I guess I just wanted to be sure there couldn’t be any reason to complain. I just. I just want us to be safe.
Why wouldn’t you be? Other than the obvious?
You mean the Z’s?
Yes.
A year and a half before I met Kurt three guys beat the shit out of me and a friend for going to a high school dance together. I didn’t really feel like having some real live humans beat the shit out of us for not contributing to the renewal of our species.
Tell us about your daughter.
That’s her picture. Over there. She died. When she was four. Pneumonia. Drug production and distribution was still really fucked up then. She didn’t seem that sick. And then she was.
I found out a week later. Because she wasn’t mine, not really, not like we’d always dreamed.
Do you ever think about having another?
You say that like it’s an option. My lack of choices are just a little more obvious than other people’s.
You also say it like I’d get to raise them and buy them toys and take them fishing and teach them to ride their bikes to school.
I have three other children. Alive. Doing well. In this crazy broken world that doesn’t know from pop starts or glee clubs or dreams of New York.
Who has good dreams about New York anymore?
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Date: 2012-08-27 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-08-27 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-08-27 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-08-28 04:25 am (UTC)Also, you really don't like Roxy Music!! I alway sorta have, but now I think I need to re-listen...it may have just been the bubblegummy-ness of it.
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Date: 2012-08-28 06:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-08-28 11:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
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