Fic: Not Too Gay To Function
Finn thought it was totally cool that Kurt had come back to McKinley. Well, everyone thought it was cool, but he thought he was cooler, because now that they shared half of their classes again, whenever Finn didn’t understand his homework - which was fairly often - he could just jog up the stairs and ask Kurt.
When Kurt was going to Dalton, he was all caught up with those uber-difficult assignments they gave him, plus rehearsing audition material to impress the Warblers, plus working like crazy to impress Blaine; nowadays, Kurt usually finished his homework pretty quick, so he was willing to help Finn out, and the two teens spent the rest of the afternoon discussing music and Glee club. It was pretty rad, actually.
Except that this evening when Finn - holding a pack of cookies in one hand and his chemistry assignment in his mouth - knocked briefly on Kurt’s door before entering, Kurt wasn’t sprawled on the bed with his laptop as usual; instead, he was sitting on the bed and his hands were doing something with a tissue that looked remarkably like they were mauling it. He had clearly been crying.
“Uh.” Finn said, intelligently. He should probably apologise for the intrusion and back out like nothing had happened, but Kurt had looked up and seen him, and besides something seemed wrong about just bolting. So he went with his instincts and stepped closer. “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.” Kurt said, his voice sounding weak and croaky, and looked away.
Finn nodded to himself. He had learned at his own expense that treating Kurt like a girl led to dire consequences, but he also knew that in some ways Kurt was pretty much like a girl; and when Quinn or Rachel said they didn’t want to talk about it, it usually meant they really wanted to talk about it and he was supposed to be a good boyfriend and ask. So Finn sat on the bed - a little ways away from Kurt, as unobtrusively as someone his size could - and prodded: “You sure you’re okay?”
And sure enough, after a small pause, Kurt’s hands clenched around the tissue and he stopped facing away from Finn and started staring at his feet instead. “Blaine and I had a fight.” he sniffled.
Finn frowned; Blaine was about the least threatening person he knew, apart from Brittany perhaps, and he couldn’t imagine anyone having a fight with him. After a moment, Kurt amended: “Not a real fight. But… we argued and it really upset me.”
Finn almost smiled, because this was going strictly by the book, so he had a chance to make it right. Dutifully, he asked Kurt what had happened.
Kurt was silent for a little while, probably gauging how good an idea it would be to share his boyfriend troubles with Finn. Eventually, he seemed to decide on taking the chance; he looked up and started recounting, his voice still thick: “Well, we were at the mall, right after school, and I was telling him about that Barbra number we put together for Rachel when she wanted to get a nose job…” Finn nodded, listening.
“And then I wanted to show him the dance moves, you know? Because it was so fun when we did it all together. I guess it just looked stupid without the rest of the choreography.” Kurt mused, a little self-deprecatingly.
Finn thought it made sense; one guy busting a move in the center of a mall was not the same as an organised flashmob. Kurt’s diva-esque outbursts could be pretty… unusual, but it was also true that Kurt was a way better dancer than him, so it couldn’t have looked that bad. “So what happened then?” he prodded.
“Just…” Kurt was back to torturing the tissue, and then he got the rest out in a strangled voice: “Blaine basically asked me to stop shaking my ass around in public.”
“What?!” Finn was blown, mostly because he couldn’t picture Blaine saying ‘ass’ without getting a serious case of the snickering.
“Well, not in quite those words, but the meaning was pretty clear. He was embarrassed by me.” Kurt concluded, his eyes starting to brim with tears all over again. “By my dance moves.”
“What?” Finn repeated, this time acknowledging the actual impact of the statement. “But… why?”
Kurt shrugged, dabbing at his eyes. “Too gay, I guess.”
That made no sense. Finn frowned. “But Blaine is gay. He’s dating you. You’re a guy.” It was fairly straightforward to him.
Kurt sighed, with a small bitter smile. “Blaine is the solid-looking, butch-with-style kind of gay. I’m the flamingo-pink, diva-fabulous kind of gay. It would appear it’s a more despicable kind of gay than the former.” He concluded, his voice cracking on the last word.
“Man, that’s really shitty.” Finn let out a long breath, unsure how to comfort his stepbrother. Eventually he leaned over and pulled him into a hug, pleasantly surprised when Kurt hugged back tightly. When they separated, he asked: “Did he apologise yet?”
“Oh, I guess…” Kurt glanced at his iPhone. “There are about three missed calls and two texts. I just… I don’t really feel like getting back to him yet. I mean, he’s my boyfriend. He’s supposed to find me attractive, isn’t he?” The question was underlaid with a faint pleading.
“He does.” the taller boy replied, with certainty, because it was capital that Kurt knew that. “He’s totally into you.”
The slighter teen smiled feebly, looking lost in thought for a few moments. Finn pursed his lips, trying to figure out what he should do, because this was not by the book anymore. Should he try for another hug? He settled for patting Kurt’s back amicably.
After a while, the other boy’s blue eyes dragged back up to meet his. “You know how you have that picture of Quinn in your wallet? The one where she looks, well. Unpretty?” Finn nodded. “Blaine keeps a picture of me in his wallet too,” Kurt announced casually.
Finn grinned. “Oh. That’s cool.”
Kurt smiled back, unconvinced. After another moment, he added, “I’m in my Dalton blazer. In the picture.”
Finn said nothing. Even he could realise what the other boy was getting at.
“I was so unhappy in that horrible blazer.” Kurt said, tearily, finally succeeding in his attempts to destroy the tissue.
“Hey, now.” Finn slung a long arm around Kurt’s shoulders. “We’re all glad to have you back, you know that, and we all think you rock. You should feel free to be whoever you want to be. You’re amazing.” He was getting in the habit of using that adjective when around Kurt. Sure, he was almost always tempted to add ‘just the way you are’, but come on, that had been one of his finest moments, right up there with winning the championship and the red Gaga dress. A guy’s gotta be allowed to bask in his own awesomeness sometimes.
“Thank you, Finn.” Kurt smiled at him, a sincere smile this time, and okay, that was better, even with the tears still tracking his face.
“You know what you need?” Finn suddenly beamed.
Kurt beamed, too. “A day spa?”
The beaming rapidly stopped on both sides.
“Uh, no. Here.” Finn grabbed the pack of cookies and offered it to Kurt.
The boy gave a little smile, diving his hand in and coming up with rounded chocolatey treasure. “You know these are really bad for my complexion?” he scolded, gesturing to his face with the cookie. Finn shoved him playfully into the pillow.
*
Half an hour later, they were more than halfway through the pack of cookies (mostly by Finn’s hard work) and were idly discussing show tunes, the mood thankfully less gloomy now.
“Cookies are good,” Kurt stated emphatically, breaking out in a genuine smile.
“Totally. They’re delicious.” The quarterback agreed happily. “Oh, hey, you have chocolate on your shirt”.
Kurt looked down and yelped loudly. “Oh, God, my newest Cavalli!” He sprung up from the bed like a jack-in-the-box, catapulting himself into the bathroom and wrestling out of the shirt to start scrubbing it under the cold water. His stepbrother watched him with moderate interest, munching incessantly.
“Oh, perfect. Just perfect. This won’t come out. This is just my day! Say-Finn, can you get me a clean shirt? Something less fancy?”
“Sure thing.” But Finn wasn’t actually so sure, because as far as he knew, there was not one single un-fancy item in Kurt’s wardrobe. He was fairly certain of that, because it was all stuff he would never wear, which usually meant it was designer, and more expensive than Finn wanted to consider.
He got up, carefully cleaning his hands on his pants to get rid of potential cookie crumbs which might stain Kurt’s clothes and get Finn painfully murdered. Then he started rooting through Kurt’s colour-sorted drawers, until an unusually plain t-shirt caught his attention. In fact…
“Hey, this one’s mine.”
Kurt dashed out of the bathroom, eyes wide. “I don’t know how it ended up there! Your mom probably got them mixed up when she was doing the laundry. You know, she’s so busy, it happens. It’s not like I stole it from you or something.” He was talking fast and slightly panicked, eyes never leaving Finn’s, anxious to project sincerity. Ever since their fight in the basement, Kurt was terrified of Finn calling him out on his old crush, and went out of his way to avoid any misunderstanding that might get him accused of being a creepy stalker.
“Dude. Okay.” Finn blinked, then handed him the shirt. “Do you want it? It’s a little small for me anyway, and I guess you need something to kick back in.”
That made Kurt realise that he was still naked from the waist up, and his arms quickly went up around his chest. “Oh, um, yeah, sure. Thanks. That’s nice of you. As long as nobody sees me in it, I could use that.”
Finn snorted sarcastically and gave him the t-shirt, then looked him over curiously. “Hey, what’s with the nervousness? I’ve seen you before.”
“What?” Kurt choked, his eyes even wider.
The other teen raised his eyebrows. “Last year? After football practice?”
“Oh. Oh, right, yeah… you’re right. How silly, I forgot. I guess I tried to remove that particular experience with sport from my mind...” Kurt’s arms dropped lower, but didn’t leave his chest completely. Finn marveled at his shyness. Kurt’s torso was pale and slim, but not in a scrawny kind of way; he was not particularly toned, but the lines of his chest were lean and smooth, all flat planes and no spare fat. Not bad, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. But Kurt was definitely looking more uncomfortable by the second, so Finn went back to the bed and busied himself with the remaining cookies, mercifully allowing him escape.
Eventually the soprano came back from the bathroom and curled up on the bed, his back against the headrest; Finn’s green t-shirt was a couple sizes too big on him, and it made him look even younger.
A moment of silence passed, then Kurt started to speak, hesitantly.
“Finn, we’re friends, right?”
The tall boy looked up, brown eyes surprised. “Do you even have to ask?”
There was no artificial smoothness to the words. Yes, there had been times when Finn had gone out of his way and laid it heavy with the affection because he was desperate to obtain Kurt’s forgiveness. But they were past that now, and Finn honestly valued the other boy’s presence in his life more than he could hope to explain. But Kurt was speaking again.
“So… we can be honest with each other. And… and you would tell me if I was, right?”
“Was what?” The quarterback’s guessing abilities were undergoing some serious strain tonight.
Kurt bit his lip. “Too gay to function?” he suggested quietly.
For a split second, Finn gaped like a fish. Then he remembered Kurt’s shirt, the one he had worn for that week’s Glee assignment: “Likes Boys”. And wasn’t the week’s assignment to deal with the thing they each hated about themselves?
It had simply never occurred to him that Kurt might have troubles with his ‘lady-fabulous’ side. Sure, for a while he had denied being gay, but that hadn’t lasted long, and since then, Kurt had been as out and proud as they come, easily the most flamboyant boy in school. But now Finn had to wonder just how much went on under the surface, when Kurt was out of the spotlight. How many times had he felt ashamed of his extravagance? And how many of those times had he felt ashamed because of dumb boys - Finn included - teasing him about it?
Swallowing down the lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat, Finn reached forward to squeeze Kurt’s shoulder. “I think you function just fine. Actually, I think you function perfectly.”
He ruffled Kurt’s hair lightly and was rewarded with a small uncertain smile. Not good enough. He decided to go one step further. “No, seriously, if I was a gay dude I would totally date you over Blaine.”
He nodded to himself for a moment, with conviction, but when he looked back up he found Kurt staring at him wide-eyed, apparently paralysed in the act of pushing a cookie halfway into his mouth.
“Kurt? You okay?”
Kurt quickly stuffed the rest of the cookie inside his mouth, choking a little on it. “Sorry. You mean, hypothetically.”
“Yeah, sure.” Finn replied, shrugging, because he was still not quite positive about what that word meant. Sometimes he mixed it up with hypocritically, and he knew that was a bad word, so he hoped Kurt wasn’t actually referring to that one.
“Oh, good. Good.” His fashionista friend seemed relieved, in a subdued kind of way.
“Seriously though. I mean, at least you’re fun.”
“Hey!” Kurt lightly swatted his arm. “Blaine is fun!” He protested, feeling he had to defend his boyfriend. Then, with a sly smile, he conceded: “But you’re right, I am decidedly more fun.”
Finn matched his smile, and for the rest of that night until dinnertime they kept bantering back and forth, and all was right with the world.