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rmTitle: What the Spiders Wove
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~3,000
Summary: Sometimes what people want only becomes clear when it seems like it's not going to happen. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Phoenix.
The series so far:
Boston: Following Home | These Thousand Names for Gratitude | All the Honesty of Politics | Circles as the Dark Winds Down | The Distance Between Ohio and Boston | All the Pretty Little Horses | Languages You Don't Even Know | Fauna and Flora | Where Water Doesn't Speak | Under Glass We Are Expected to Blossom | You Were Someone Else Before We Came Here
D.C.: Strategies and Tactics | The Many Shades of Sugar | When Sea Levels Rise | The History of Sand | Tales of Minor Gods | A Little Bit Ruined | The Numbers Held by Ghosts | Weights and Measures | Anamnesis | Hello, I Must Be Going | And I Have Heard You Speaking | More Honored Than the Other Animals | Melissa, Mellonia, or Deborah | On the Throwing of Stones
Whatever happens in Los Angeles, Jay doesn’t tell Kurt about it. He makes it back on time for Tuesday’s show and he seems neither disappointed nor elated. Other than the data vacuum -- which he finds innately sinister, like silence in the woods of a horror movie or the halls of a high school – Kurt is relieved.
They stay out of each other’s way for the rest of the San Francisco run, Kurt dodging him with a minimum of awkwardness, until Brittany takes him to a fundraiser for a Burning Man encampment on the show’s last full week in town.
He doesn’t understand the appeal, not of the people making out under the large metal spiders shooting flames in the absolute middle of nowhere – this is, he’s sure, somehow exactly what his father was afraid of when he left Ohio – and not of the event in the desert itself. It actually makes him nervous, to think of his skin that dry in a world that bright.
Jay makes him nervous now too. Because Kurt realizes that, aside from some legitimately useful advice on tour living and some deeply unavoidable camaraderie, the only thing the man has consistently provided him with has been instructions on how not to offend him. And Kurt has, most certainly, offended him now.
He doesn’t know the price of that; he also doesn’t know how to stop. Because instead of ignoring him when he sees him through the metal spider flames of the party as Brittany prattles on beside him about how they should totally build fire-breathing lobsters and a memorial Lord Tubbington toaster next year, Kurt raises his glass to him. And smirks.
*
“I just don’t think you should do anything, Blaine. You can’t fix this, because it’s not a problem. It’s just Kurt,” Tina says, well beyond frustration.
“I don’t –“
“You don’t like that, because in your world Kurt is perfect and you’re broken, but Blaine? Kurt is weird. Kurt has always been weird. And needs you more for having you. I just… the problem isn’t Jay, the solution isn’t you. Kurt, on tour, was always going to be a disaster, and I’m not really sure how either of you missed that.”
“I think we were worrying about me flipping out,” he mumbles.
“And?”
“Me cheating on him,” he adds, still mumbling.
“And?”
“Me freaking out some more.”
“Right,” Tina says. “So. You two are idiots, although I’ve very glad that you haven’t cheated…. You haven’t, right?”
“No! Jesus.”
“Well there was that thing….”
“Who the hell told you about that?”
“Everyone.”
“Fucking Santana.”
“Mercedes, actually.”
“Does anyone from New Directions ever call anyone for reasons other than gossip or despair?”
“No. Duh.”
“Fuck.”
“Look, maybe you should call one of Kurt’s friends? I mean, not that I’m not, but … it’s been a long time since we were close like you want for this conversation, and I’ve got nothing. But frankly, unless he wants to me to call him Rachel for the rest of eternity, what he needs to do is get over his shit and stick this out.”
“Right,” Blaine sighs. “Fuck.”
*
“How’s LA?” Blaine asks, around a spoonful of banana pudding ice cream.
“What are you eating?” Kurt asks.
“Ice cream.”
“Tell me that’s not dinner.”
“It’s almost midnight here. Not dinner. How’s LA?”
“Absolutely no idea. I think I’ve hit my social quota for a long while.”
“Brittany,” Blaine supplies helpfully.
“Not just Brittany,” he says, but neither of them name names.
“Any word on that?”
“No.”
“Do you still want it not to happen?”
“Yes? No? I don’t know. I mean, if it were gonna happen, I assume it would have by now, not that I really know how these things work. I just… I just want to do what I came here to do and get home to you as soon as I can.”
“You went there to make your career. And in twelve weeks, you’re home, working and home for a little while, so let’s just focus on that.”
“Can you come to Omaha? For Thanksgiving?”
“I bet that was a question you never thought you’d ask, and yes, I will have Thanksgiving with you in Omaha even if it’s turkey sandwiches from an all-night gas station.”
“Thank you. I’m never doing this again, you know.”
“I know,” Blaine says solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. It just seems polite.”
*
“You did the right thing, you know,” the girl says as Kurt gets in the elevator.
“Huh?” he asks without looking up. He’s deep in a text war with Henry about the latest HBO series they’re both obsessed with.
“Breaking up with Jay.”
That makes Kurt look up. It’s Misty, the second female lead that he doesn’t have a single interaction with on stage either as Simon or as his generic ensemble vampire. They’ve never talked much. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“We weren’t dating.”
“You were doing something.”
“Um. No. I’m engaged. Blaine? Short? Curls? Awkward JFK Jr. thing?”
She shrugs. “Look, I know he’s been giving you the we all have to be social every night speech, but seriously, didn’t you ever wonder where everyone who doesn’t hang out in Jay’s room spends their evenings?”
Kurt’s jaw drops a little more.
Misty pats his cheek. “See, sweetie? He gave you good advice, but you’ve clearly been failing on the execution.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes in his hand again as the elevator stops and dings, the doors opening to let Misty out.
He looks down at his phone and starts frantically thumbing out a new message. I think I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd.
*
Of all the topics Blaine expects to focus on with his therapist, Kurt can’t quit the tour isn’t one of them, but it’s there, and it’s inescapable, and it’s not even about Kurt’s well-being. It’s about Blaine’s.
“Look. Don’t get me wrong. I miss him, and I am bad at this. Like he’ll catch me eating ice cream when I’m on the phone with him and I’ll totally assure him that it’s later here and that it’s totally not dinner, but it’s totally dinner. Like, even if I’m living like a sixteen-year-old with a lack of proper supervision and too many Papa John’s coupons, I actually don’t feel like we’re playing house for a change and that feels kinda good.”
“What do you mean by playing house?”
“That I like sloppy clothes and not shaving for a week sometimes?” Blaine says, his hand scrubbing across his jaw, and it’s clearly been more than a week. He takes a deep breath. “We moved in together, with absolutely no clue and a remarkable lack of advance planning at eighteen because everything was crazy and it was the only thing my father could give me and the only thing I could give Kurt. And we’ve been going through all the right motions ever since – study abroad, graduation, Christmas. I mean, the kitchen got painted buttercup yellow, and I proposed. I can’t remember when I wasn’t an adult. Sometimes I just wish we’d lived in the dorms and had friends and –“
“Don’t you have friends now?”
“Yes. Adult, couple-ly friends that don’t really make up for the too tiny chunk of time we spent in Boston getting high and having people crash on our floor every weekend and making terrible choices and feeling like we had family like a nest of… what’s an animal that lives in groups?”
“You said nests. Birds?”
“No. Something fuzzy. Like bears? Rats? I don’t know. Something. Collective animals. Anyway, I’m failing analogies today. My point is, we don’t even know any of those people anymore.”
“Most people don’t. You’re mourning a fantasy, more than a real thing. Typical college experiences aren’t necessarily easy – and often have a much weaker support system than what you and Kurt had and have.”
Blaine sighs. “Right. I still need him not to come home early. I need to know we can do this. And I need to know that the only person I have to blame for not having whatever it is I think being on my own for the first time experiences should be is myself. Also, ice cream is awesome dinner. Just, you know, as an aside.”
*
Kurt copes by making lists for himself of small talk to offer all the people he’s spent the last several months effectively ignoring thanks to Jay’s exhortations to be social. While he is certain he must seem fake and insincere, a compliment here, an inquiry there, an exchange of complaints about the coffee in the lobby, all seem to land well and without offense.
People are, he knows, however, in their own world. Jay hadn’t been lying about auditions and agents and a little bit of madness setting in, in LA.
*
“Would I like it?” Blaine asks a week in.
Kurt smiles. “I wish I could say no. In another world, you’re a runaway here, flirting your way on and off the pier.”
Blaine bites his lip.
“Say it,” Kurt says, “Because I can hear you thinking it.”
“That just sounds like an awesome sex fantasy set up.”
“Well,” Kurt notes, trying to be sanguine, “it’s a lot less depressing than the alternative.”
Blaine chuckles. “Hey, can we do serious business for a moment?”
“What? Did I get another collections notice on the library book you lost?”
“Yeah, actually, but…. No. I just… are you going to be able to stick this thing out?”
Kurt takes a deep breath. “I’m working on it. It’s getting a little better. Although Jay still hasn’t said two words to me since it happened, and I’m frankly terrified of what it’s going to look like when that changes. Why?”
“Because I need you not to come home early.”
Kurt is silent.
“And now I think I need you to say something,” Blaine adds.
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you don’t hate me for that.”
“I don’t… I don’t hate you for that. I could never hate you for anything.”
“And if you need to come home, I’d welcome you with open arms and I miss you so much, but I think I’m doing everything I didn’t do in Shanghai and –“
“Not Thomas, I hope,” Kurt says dryly.
Blaine starts laughing and can’t stop. “No, not Thomas. Not anyone. I’m just, eating badly and staying up all night and drinking too much with Kate and Henry and maybe finally getting it through my head that the fact that I’ve been an adult since I was like fourteen isn’t actually the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“The house is a mess, isn’t it,” Kurt says.
“Kind of?”
“And you’re scruffy.”
“Totally scruffy.”
“If you’ve worn sweatpants in public, don’t tell me.”
“I love you,” Blaine says.
“I love you too,” Kurt replies, serious, and hoping it translates beyond the call and response nature of the exchange. “I think we should start planning the wedding.”
*
Three people get off the tour before they leave Los Angeles. None of them are Jay, who he secretly, and probably unfairly, expects to opine nastily on their chances at failing in their new endeavors and winding up in porn before the end of the year.
They arrive in Phoenix Halloween week, and Kurt wishes they could somehow be somewhere cooler for it, but at least, he hopes, it will guarantee a sell-out crowd, even at matinees.
He needs something to make up for drawing the short straw on the backstage tours. Kurt is sure he’s the last person who should be telling anyone – much less fourteen-year-olds with perfect noses, second place trophies in regional dance team competitions, and the doe eyes of prey – that their perfectly ordinary dreams absolutely can come true.
I was always strange, he finds he wants to say to them. I was always dead. And my boyfriend has eyes like you; he’s decided to go into politics instead.
*
Jay is ferocious in Phoenix from the very first rehearsal, and Kurt has no idea why, but the performance is angry, powerful, and the space between his Simon and Kurt’s own is the smallest he’s seen.
It makes Kurt proud.
It makes Kurt jealous.
*
“And I thought LA did nothing for me,” Kurt intones to Blaine on the phone.
“How are the new people?” Blaine asks.
“Professionals.”
“Aren’t you all?”
“No,” Kurt says, then softens. “Not all in the same way, I guess. It’s weird here.”
“How?”
Kurt shrugs. “I think it’s me. I miss you.”
“Is that new and weird?” Blaine teases.
“Maybe. This girl hugged me today. After the tour, after we posed for photos with them.”
“She was grateful.”
“Yeah.”
“What was she like?” Blaine asks, clear that whatever story Kurt has to tell, he needs help forming it into words.
“Sad,” Kurt says. “Just sad. She thought I was beautiful.”
“You are.”
“It wasn’t desire,” Kurt says, and it takes Blaine a moment to work it out.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t call her she?” he asks, not certain of his guess.
“Maybe,” Kurt says, non-committal. “She asked if I’d always been a boy.”
“What did you say?”
“That sometimes I wasn’t sure.”
“You’re so good,” Blaine says.
“What would you have said?”
“Only by accident.”
*
The first words Kurt says to Jay in the wake of their sex party blow up is to hiss at him to get off his damn cell phone during the Entr’acte on the Tuesday after Halloween. Jay just holds up a hand and then turns away, pressing a finger tight into his free ear.
Kurt throws up his hands, which is, he knows, what he should have done regarding this whole mess from the very beginning. Even so, he breathes a sigh of relief as Jay disconnects the call and then crouches down to skid the phone out of the way and in to a corner.
“Thank you,” Kurt mouths at him.
Jay snorts. “You don’t even know,” he says, low and tight under his breath.
An ache wells up in Kurt then, because he’s missed this man, or, at least, the idea of his friendship. Before he can say anything – not that he knows what it would be – they each plunge onto the stage, as they do every day, every night, into the dark.
*
After their bows, Jay grabs Kurt’s arm and pulls him into the same dark corner he’d banished his phone to earlier.
Kurt rolls his eyes, even as his heart speeds up and the drama is, unfortunately, expected.
“Do we have to do this in costume?” he asks, defensive, tired, and well detached now from his earlier moment of longing. He’s sweaty, and the touch of anyone who isn’t Blaine is particularly unbearable for it; it feels too intimate.
“I have to be on a plane tomorrow, so yes.”
“What?!”
“Los Angeles,” Jay says, enunciating each syllable like Kurt is stupid.
“Oh my god, congratulations,” Kurt says, and surprising them both, launches himself at him, hugging him hard.
Jay kisses his hair, and whispers, “Don’t be scared.”
It’s absolutely, and powerfully, erotic. Kurt feels guilt. It tingles, novel, on the barest edge of his fingertips.
*
“There are moments,” Kurt says on the phone that night with Alex – it is 10am in Rome – “when I know I’ll only feel alone if I try to explain it to another person.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“Because you may as well be on Mars.”
“Blaine’s alone too. You should call him.”
“Not yet,” he says, curling onto his side, his face barely in the frame of the Skype call. “Not today.”
“Are you pretending to hold me?” she asks, looking at the curve of his body and the stripe of skin between his battered black jeans wrinkled t-shirt.
Kurt makes a non-committal noise. “You were always so warm,” he says.
“So were you.”
*
“How have you been?” his therapist asks. It’s a working question, disguised as a social nicety. For an activity about learning how to be more clear on your own needs with yourself and others, Blaine remains fascinated by how much of the process is tacit and unnamed, a symptom at least of his own disease.
“Well, we’re back to the first problem,” Blaine says brightly.
“Which is?”
“Kurt’s on tour, and I feel desiccated without human contact.”
“So no risk of him coming home early?”
“I suppose there’s always a risk. But, no. Not now. The guy he was understudying for quit the tour. He got a sitcom in LA.”
“So the role is Kurt’s?”
“Full time,” Blaine says, cheerfully.
“You must be proud of him.”
“No. Not really. I never expected anything else.”
“When will you see him?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Soon.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it will really be us though. I don’t know if it really gets to be us until this thing is over.”
“Do parts linger with him, when he’s performing?”
Blaine pauses to think about it. Oddly, it’s not something he and Kurt have ever really discussed. “No. Not particularly. Although this one has. It’s pretty haunting, no pun intended. Ugh. But I guess, we’re both performing this absence, right? So that’s hard. I guess I just have to let this be a thing that we’re doing.”
“Are you worried about whether he comes back to you?” his therapist asks.
Blaine shakes his head. “No. Not at all. It’s way more like a horror movie. I worry about what he’ll bring back with him. You know,” he pauses to laugh, “other than another suitcase filled with new clothes.”
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~3,000
Summary: Sometimes what people want only becomes clear when it seems like it's not going to happen. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Phoenix.
The series so far:
Boston: Following Home | These Thousand Names for Gratitude | All the Honesty of Politics | Circles as the Dark Winds Down | The Distance Between Ohio and Boston | All the Pretty Little Horses | Languages You Don't Even Know | Fauna and Flora | Where Water Doesn't Speak | Under Glass We Are Expected to Blossom | You Were Someone Else Before We Came Here
D.C.: Strategies and Tactics | The Many Shades of Sugar | When Sea Levels Rise | The History of Sand | Tales of Minor Gods | A Little Bit Ruined | The Numbers Held by Ghosts | Weights and Measures | Anamnesis | Hello, I Must Be Going | And I Have Heard You Speaking | More Honored Than the Other Animals | Melissa, Mellonia, or Deborah | On the Throwing of Stones
Whatever happens in Los Angeles, Jay doesn’t tell Kurt about it. He makes it back on time for Tuesday’s show and he seems neither disappointed nor elated. Other than the data vacuum -- which he finds innately sinister, like silence in the woods of a horror movie or the halls of a high school – Kurt is relieved.
They stay out of each other’s way for the rest of the San Francisco run, Kurt dodging him with a minimum of awkwardness, until Brittany takes him to a fundraiser for a Burning Man encampment on the show’s last full week in town.
He doesn’t understand the appeal, not of the people making out under the large metal spiders shooting flames in the absolute middle of nowhere – this is, he’s sure, somehow exactly what his father was afraid of when he left Ohio – and not of the event in the desert itself. It actually makes him nervous, to think of his skin that dry in a world that bright.
Jay makes him nervous now too. Because Kurt realizes that, aside from some legitimately useful advice on tour living and some deeply unavoidable camaraderie, the only thing the man has consistently provided him with has been instructions on how not to offend him. And Kurt has, most certainly, offended him now.
He doesn’t know the price of that; he also doesn’t know how to stop. Because instead of ignoring him when he sees him through the metal spider flames of the party as Brittany prattles on beside him about how they should totally build fire-breathing lobsters and a memorial Lord Tubbington toaster next year, Kurt raises his glass to him. And smirks.
*
“I just don’t think you should do anything, Blaine. You can’t fix this, because it’s not a problem. It’s just Kurt,” Tina says, well beyond frustration.
“I don’t –“
“You don’t like that, because in your world Kurt is perfect and you’re broken, but Blaine? Kurt is weird. Kurt has always been weird. And needs you more for having you. I just… the problem isn’t Jay, the solution isn’t you. Kurt, on tour, was always going to be a disaster, and I’m not really sure how either of you missed that.”
“I think we were worrying about me flipping out,” he mumbles.
“And?”
“Me cheating on him,” he adds, still mumbling.
“And?”
“Me freaking out some more.”
“Right,” Tina says. “So. You two are idiots, although I’ve very glad that you haven’t cheated…. You haven’t, right?”
“No! Jesus.”
“Well there was that thing….”
“Who the hell told you about that?”
“Everyone.”
“Fucking Santana.”
“Mercedes, actually.”
“Does anyone from New Directions ever call anyone for reasons other than gossip or despair?”
“No. Duh.”
“Fuck.”
“Look, maybe you should call one of Kurt’s friends? I mean, not that I’m not, but … it’s been a long time since we were close like you want for this conversation, and I’ve got nothing. But frankly, unless he wants to me to call him Rachel for the rest of eternity, what he needs to do is get over his shit and stick this out.”
“Right,” Blaine sighs. “Fuck.”
*
“How’s LA?” Blaine asks, around a spoonful of banana pudding ice cream.
“What are you eating?” Kurt asks.
“Ice cream.”
“Tell me that’s not dinner.”
“It’s almost midnight here. Not dinner. How’s LA?”
“Absolutely no idea. I think I’ve hit my social quota for a long while.”
“Brittany,” Blaine supplies helpfully.
“Not just Brittany,” he says, but neither of them name names.
“Any word on that?”
“No.”
“Do you still want it not to happen?”
“Yes? No? I don’t know. I mean, if it were gonna happen, I assume it would have by now, not that I really know how these things work. I just… I just want to do what I came here to do and get home to you as soon as I can.”
“You went there to make your career. And in twelve weeks, you’re home, working and home for a little while, so let’s just focus on that.”
“Can you come to Omaha? For Thanksgiving?”
“I bet that was a question you never thought you’d ask, and yes, I will have Thanksgiving with you in Omaha even if it’s turkey sandwiches from an all-night gas station.”
“Thank you. I’m never doing this again, you know.”
“I know,” Blaine says solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. It just seems polite.”
*
“You did the right thing, you know,” the girl says as Kurt gets in the elevator.
“Huh?” he asks without looking up. He’s deep in a text war with Henry about the latest HBO series they’re both obsessed with.
“Breaking up with Jay.”
That makes Kurt look up. It’s Misty, the second female lead that he doesn’t have a single interaction with on stage either as Simon or as his generic ensemble vampire. They’ve never talked much. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“We weren’t dating.”
“You were doing something.”
“Um. No. I’m engaged. Blaine? Short? Curls? Awkward JFK Jr. thing?”
She shrugs. “Look, I know he’s been giving you the we all have to be social every night speech, but seriously, didn’t you ever wonder where everyone who doesn’t hang out in Jay’s room spends their evenings?”
Kurt’s jaw drops a little more.
Misty pats his cheek. “See, sweetie? He gave you good advice, but you’ve clearly been failing on the execution.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes in his hand again as the elevator stops and dings, the doors opening to let Misty out.
He looks down at his phone and starts frantically thumbing out a new message. I think I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd.
*
Of all the topics Blaine expects to focus on with his therapist, Kurt can’t quit the tour isn’t one of them, but it’s there, and it’s inescapable, and it’s not even about Kurt’s well-being. It’s about Blaine’s.
“Look. Don’t get me wrong. I miss him, and I am bad at this. Like he’ll catch me eating ice cream when I’m on the phone with him and I’ll totally assure him that it’s later here and that it’s totally not dinner, but it’s totally dinner. Like, even if I’m living like a sixteen-year-old with a lack of proper supervision and too many Papa John’s coupons, I actually don’t feel like we’re playing house for a change and that feels kinda good.”
“What do you mean by playing house?”
“That I like sloppy clothes and not shaving for a week sometimes?” Blaine says, his hand scrubbing across his jaw, and it’s clearly been more than a week. He takes a deep breath. “We moved in together, with absolutely no clue and a remarkable lack of advance planning at eighteen because everything was crazy and it was the only thing my father could give me and the only thing I could give Kurt. And we’ve been going through all the right motions ever since – study abroad, graduation, Christmas. I mean, the kitchen got painted buttercup yellow, and I proposed. I can’t remember when I wasn’t an adult. Sometimes I just wish we’d lived in the dorms and had friends and –“
“Don’t you have friends now?”
“Yes. Adult, couple-ly friends that don’t really make up for the too tiny chunk of time we spent in Boston getting high and having people crash on our floor every weekend and making terrible choices and feeling like we had family like a nest of… what’s an animal that lives in groups?”
“You said nests. Birds?”
“No. Something fuzzy. Like bears? Rats? I don’t know. Something. Collective animals. Anyway, I’m failing analogies today. My point is, we don’t even know any of those people anymore.”
“Most people don’t. You’re mourning a fantasy, more than a real thing. Typical college experiences aren’t necessarily easy – and often have a much weaker support system than what you and Kurt had and have.”
Blaine sighs. “Right. I still need him not to come home early. I need to know we can do this. And I need to know that the only person I have to blame for not having whatever it is I think being on my own for the first time experiences should be is myself. Also, ice cream is awesome dinner. Just, you know, as an aside.”
*
Kurt copes by making lists for himself of small talk to offer all the people he’s spent the last several months effectively ignoring thanks to Jay’s exhortations to be social. While he is certain he must seem fake and insincere, a compliment here, an inquiry there, an exchange of complaints about the coffee in the lobby, all seem to land well and without offense.
People are, he knows, however, in their own world. Jay hadn’t been lying about auditions and agents and a little bit of madness setting in, in LA.
*
“Would I like it?” Blaine asks a week in.
Kurt smiles. “I wish I could say no. In another world, you’re a runaway here, flirting your way on and off the pier.”
Blaine bites his lip.
“Say it,” Kurt says, “Because I can hear you thinking it.”
“That just sounds like an awesome sex fantasy set up.”
“Well,” Kurt notes, trying to be sanguine, “it’s a lot less depressing than the alternative.”
Blaine chuckles. “Hey, can we do serious business for a moment?”
“What? Did I get another collections notice on the library book you lost?”
“Yeah, actually, but…. No. I just… are you going to be able to stick this thing out?”
Kurt takes a deep breath. “I’m working on it. It’s getting a little better. Although Jay still hasn’t said two words to me since it happened, and I’m frankly terrified of what it’s going to look like when that changes. Why?”
“Because I need you not to come home early.”
Kurt is silent.
“And now I think I need you to say something,” Blaine adds.
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you don’t hate me for that.”
“I don’t… I don’t hate you for that. I could never hate you for anything.”
“And if you need to come home, I’d welcome you with open arms and I miss you so much, but I think I’m doing everything I didn’t do in Shanghai and –“
“Not Thomas, I hope,” Kurt says dryly.
Blaine starts laughing and can’t stop. “No, not Thomas. Not anyone. I’m just, eating badly and staying up all night and drinking too much with Kate and Henry and maybe finally getting it through my head that the fact that I’ve been an adult since I was like fourteen isn’t actually the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“The house is a mess, isn’t it,” Kurt says.
“Kind of?”
“And you’re scruffy.”
“Totally scruffy.”
“If you’ve worn sweatpants in public, don’t tell me.”
“I love you,” Blaine says.
“I love you too,” Kurt replies, serious, and hoping it translates beyond the call and response nature of the exchange. “I think we should start planning the wedding.”
*
Three people get off the tour before they leave Los Angeles. None of them are Jay, who he secretly, and probably unfairly, expects to opine nastily on their chances at failing in their new endeavors and winding up in porn before the end of the year.
They arrive in Phoenix Halloween week, and Kurt wishes they could somehow be somewhere cooler for it, but at least, he hopes, it will guarantee a sell-out crowd, even at matinees.
He needs something to make up for drawing the short straw on the backstage tours. Kurt is sure he’s the last person who should be telling anyone – much less fourteen-year-olds with perfect noses, second place trophies in regional dance team competitions, and the doe eyes of prey – that their perfectly ordinary dreams absolutely can come true.
I was always strange, he finds he wants to say to them. I was always dead. And my boyfriend has eyes like you; he’s decided to go into politics instead.
*
Jay is ferocious in Phoenix from the very first rehearsal, and Kurt has no idea why, but the performance is angry, powerful, and the space between his Simon and Kurt’s own is the smallest he’s seen.
It makes Kurt proud.
It makes Kurt jealous.
*
“And I thought LA did nothing for me,” Kurt intones to Blaine on the phone.
“How are the new people?” Blaine asks.
“Professionals.”
“Aren’t you all?”
“No,” Kurt says, then softens. “Not all in the same way, I guess. It’s weird here.”
“How?”
Kurt shrugs. “I think it’s me. I miss you.”
“Is that new and weird?” Blaine teases.
“Maybe. This girl hugged me today. After the tour, after we posed for photos with them.”
“She was grateful.”
“Yeah.”
“What was she like?” Blaine asks, clear that whatever story Kurt has to tell, he needs help forming it into words.
“Sad,” Kurt says. “Just sad. She thought I was beautiful.”
“You are.”
“It wasn’t desire,” Kurt says, and it takes Blaine a moment to work it out.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t call her she?” he asks, not certain of his guess.
“Maybe,” Kurt says, non-committal. “She asked if I’d always been a boy.”
“What did you say?”
“That sometimes I wasn’t sure.”
“You’re so good,” Blaine says.
“What would you have said?”
“Only by accident.”
*
The first words Kurt says to Jay in the wake of their sex party blow up is to hiss at him to get off his damn cell phone during the Entr’acte on the Tuesday after Halloween. Jay just holds up a hand and then turns away, pressing a finger tight into his free ear.
Kurt throws up his hands, which is, he knows, what he should have done regarding this whole mess from the very beginning. Even so, he breathes a sigh of relief as Jay disconnects the call and then crouches down to skid the phone out of the way and in to a corner.
“Thank you,” Kurt mouths at him.
Jay snorts. “You don’t even know,” he says, low and tight under his breath.
An ache wells up in Kurt then, because he’s missed this man, or, at least, the idea of his friendship. Before he can say anything – not that he knows what it would be – they each plunge onto the stage, as they do every day, every night, into the dark.
*
After their bows, Jay grabs Kurt’s arm and pulls him into the same dark corner he’d banished his phone to earlier.
Kurt rolls his eyes, even as his heart speeds up and the drama is, unfortunately, expected.
“Do we have to do this in costume?” he asks, defensive, tired, and well detached now from his earlier moment of longing. He’s sweaty, and the touch of anyone who isn’t Blaine is particularly unbearable for it; it feels too intimate.
“I have to be on a plane tomorrow, so yes.”
“What?!”
“Los Angeles,” Jay says, enunciating each syllable like Kurt is stupid.
“Oh my god, congratulations,” Kurt says, and surprising them both, launches himself at him, hugging him hard.
Jay kisses his hair, and whispers, “Don’t be scared.”
It’s absolutely, and powerfully, erotic. Kurt feels guilt. It tingles, novel, on the barest edge of his fingertips.
*
“There are moments,” Kurt says on the phone that night with Alex – it is 10am in Rome – “when I know I’ll only feel alone if I try to explain it to another person.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“Because you may as well be on Mars.”
“Blaine’s alone too. You should call him.”
“Not yet,” he says, curling onto his side, his face barely in the frame of the Skype call. “Not today.”
“Are you pretending to hold me?” she asks, looking at the curve of his body and the stripe of skin between his battered black jeans wrinkled t-shirt.
Kurt makes a non-committal noise. “You were always so warm,” he says.
“So were you.”
*
“How have you been?” his therapist asks. It’s a working question, disguised as a social nicety. For an activity about learning how to be more clear on your own needs with yourself and others, Blaine remains fascinated by how much of the process is tacit and unnamed, a symptom at least of his own disease.
“Well, we’re back to the first problem,” Blaine says brightly.
“Which is?”
“Kurt’s on tour, and I feel desiccated without human contact.”
“So no risk of him coming home early?”
“I suppose there’s always a risk. But, no. Not now. The guy he was understudying for quit the tour. He got a sitcom in LA.”
“So the role is Kurt’s?”
“Full time,” Blaine says, cheerfully.
“You must be proud of him.”
“No. Not really. I never expected anything else.”
“When will you see him?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Soon.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it will really be us though. I don’t know if it really gets to be us until this thing is over.”
“Do parts linger with him, when he’s performing?”
Blaine pauses to think about it. Oddly, it’s not something he and Kurt have ever really discussed. “No. Not particularly. Although this one has. It’s pretty haunting, no pun intended. Ugh. But I guess, we’re both performing this absence, right? So that’s hard. I guess I just have to let this be a thing that we’re doing.”
“Are you worried about whether he comes back to you?” his therapist asks.
Blaine shakes his head. “No. Not at all. It’s way more like a horror movie. I worry about what he’ll bring back with him. You know,” he pauses to laugh, “other than another suitcase filled with new clothes.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:09 am (UTC)I'm feeling haunted after reading that tonight. Beautiful, and achingly sad. I'm looking forward to the light after the transformation.
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Date: 2012-09-04 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 11:57 am (UTC)I definitely suffer from over-romanticizing the college experiences of younger associates, mainly because mine was such a bucket of damn awful.
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Date: 2012-09-05 02:25 am (UTC)I hear other people's mantras of how college was SO_MUCH_FUN I Had the Best Experiences I will Ever Have and have a mental stutter that we went to the same university, at the same time, and what does that say about me.
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:16 am (UTC)Knowing me, you probably could have predicted this, but that segment's going to linger with me for a while. Excellent update, as always.
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Date: 2012-09-04 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:54 am (UTC)innately sinister, like silence in the woods of a horror movie or the halls of a high school
That last being something Kurt would know about. It is a rather high-school situation that Kurt and Jay have got themselves into, isn't it? Only with larger (professional) repercussions because of the tour context. This wasn't a situation where Kurt could afford to live in his own headspace quite so much, I think.
It actually makes him nervous, to think of his skin that dry in a world that bright.
This to me says so much about Kurt's sensory relationship to the world and to touch. Wow.
You don’t like that, because in your world Kurt is perfect and you’re broken, but Blaine? Kurt is weird. Kurt has always been weird.
Aaaaaand Tina would be the one to both see it, and say it. As bluntly as necessary to make Blaine understand that he can't fix this for Kurt, and possibly Kurt can't fix this for Kurt either, and it just has to be lived with. Also: unless he wants to me to call him Rachel for the rest of eternity, what he needs to do is get over his shit and stick this out...
I do love your Tina. :)
Blaine is right. Ice cream makes an awesome dinner, and giving yourself permission to have it or to be a slob, to not perform adulthood in your own home but just to be, is a good thing. I'm glad Blaine is claiming his own space to grow in for his own reasons here, and I think I like his new therapist.
And it's perfectly possible to break up from a friendship/not-really-friendship, Kurt. Trust me on this.
I think I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd.
Oh, Kurt. Possibly only you could do that and not notice...
Kurt scripting conversations is...yes. He does that. Because he doesn't know how this happens organically but he knows it needs to be done. Watching him figure out how to do the work on the other side of the situation - the social side not the stage side - is fascinating.
“I think we should start planning the wedding.”
I wasn't expecting Kurt to be the one to get to that point. Not so soon. Interesting.
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:54 am (UTC)Prey animals are dead too (eventually). And that says something about what he thinks/fears will happen to Blaine on the career path he's chosen.
It's interesting that Kurt is becoming so much more able to articulate this self-concept to himself, though. Since the night at the piano bar and since Lord Tubbington, and since he recognised the connection that he keeps getting cast as undead or unearthly creatures. The question then, of course, becomes where he'll go from this point...
“She asked if I’d always been a boy.”
“What did you say?”
“That sometimes I wasn’t sure.”
For some reason I have the feeling that for Kurt that isn't just about gender, but about the aliveness/realness thing too. For Blaine it is absolutely about gender, though.
The Jay thing and the new job...um. Yes, a huge opportunity for Kurt, but will it be a problem with the rest of the cast assuming Jay left because of the fight? Ouch, if so.
Kurt pretending to hold Alex. Because actual human contact, especially after the Jay moment, is too much to bear, but he needs something. That ached.
we’re both performing this absence, right?
Yes, and the audience isn't just themselves and each other, which must make it harder. Because the New Directions crowd calls each other for gossip and despair, and then there are their other friends. Is Alex far enough away not to be considered an observer (also, she's never met Blaine in person) and that's part of why Kurt can talk to her?
I worry about what he’ll bring back with him
I think Kurt may be worried about that too.
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Date: 2012-09-04 12:01 pm (UTC)Kurt can definitely talk to Alex because of the distance, and because she's never met Blaine. They've chatted a few times, but Blaine has worked hard to let her be and let her be Kurt's secret friend.
Kurt's definitely worried about what he brings back with him. If anything, Blaine's anxiety around that is just reflecting Kurt's.
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Date: 2012-09-04 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 12:03 pm (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: 2012-09-04 10:59 am (UTC)I forget that baggage isn't only capable of being tiresome.
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Date: 2012-09-04 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 11:37 am (UTC)I love that you've written such a HUMAN story. I think that's why everyone loves it so much, because in all of Kurt and Blaine's neuroses and fumbling their way through, I think people read it and say "Oh. That's me. I feel like that, I did that, I lived that."
Bravo :)
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Date: 2012-09-04 12:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 12:51 pm (UTC)Best.
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Date: 2012-09-04 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 01:09 pm (UTC)I just want to wrap both the boys up in blanket forts and feed them soup but i know that's not what they need right now.
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Date: 2012-09-04 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 01:28 pm (UTC)Maybe, I have spent too much time in therapy, but I love Blaine's therapy scenes. They just feel very real.
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Date: 2012-09-04 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 10:45 pm (UTC)Heh, I feel like I have to do that too, otherwise I turn into Ralph Wiggum and devolve into "so...you like...stuff?"
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Date: 2012-09-05 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 12:48 am (UTC)Like someone up-thread mentioned, I love that their struggles are human ones, that they feel so real.
The scene with Kurt and Misty in the elevator reminded me of being gone on my three month internship, stuck someplace with forced relationships and lots of inappropriate after hours activity. It was so easy to get sucked into that, and so hard to make the effort to not be a part of it. Kurt handles it well, here, I think, once he realizes that Jay's social life doesn't have to be his. I also really felt for him when he told Blaine he'd hit his people limit for a long time. Been there, done that.
As always, your prose is so beautiful. I aspire to write these boys... er, men... as eloquently as you do.
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Date: 2012-09-05 01:29 pm (UTC)Forced intimacy with colleagues is the worst, because it's either awkward or CAR CRASH.
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Date: 2012-09-05 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 04:42 am (UTC)This is cleaner than any of the other parts have been. By which I mean, Blaine isn't wobbling around quite as much. He seems to be more confident in his uncertainty. Kurt... he seems to be softening a bit, becoming more confident that Blaine can take care of himself, or maybe that Blaine doesn't need Kurt to take care of him so much, or something. I'm not being very clear. But there seems to be a separateness developing — a good one. Cleaner, less enmeshed with one another or something. Gah. sorry. I like that Blaine is able to laugh.
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Date: 2012-10-10 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 03:03 am (UTC)