Fic: Fault Lines: A Higher Education Interlude
Title: Fault Lines: A Higher Education Interlude
Author: knittycat99
Rating: R for mild sexual content
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Puck/Kurt
Genre: Romance, Angst
Warning: AU, Futurefic.
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author Notes: Here be lots and lots of angst. This is kind of a bridge to get me through some plot points so I don't have to explain where my head went in the next installment. In my timeline, the boys finished college in 2017.
Summary: The boys have a hard time, and Kurt finds an unexpected confidante.
Word Count: 1,903
here I am inside a hotel choking on a
million words I've said
cigarettes have burned a hole and dreams are
drunk and penniless
here I am inside my fathers arms
all jagged-bone and whiskey-dry
whisper to me sweetly now and tell me I will
never die unloved....unloved....unloved....unloved
-Jann Arden
Fall, 2018
Noah can feel Kurt pulling away. He sees it in the stressed pseudo-smile on his face and the stand-offish tilt of his head. But it is most apparent at night when Kurt curls into himself in sleep, hugging the edge of the mattress. Their all too infrequent meals together are mostly silent; city budget cuts mean that Noah’s been working 12 hour shifts instead of 8’s, and Kurt’s been spending late nights at the library working on his thesis. And when they are together, they fight about everything. Noah isn’t sure when it all started, or even how. He suspects it just came on slowly, and now it’s like they’re stuck in this tornado of everything being bad and neither of them can figure out how to get out of it. And it hurts.
The apartment is dark and quiet when he gets home, and he thinks that maybe Kurt is still at the library, or out with some of his friends from class. But as he gets closer to the bedroom, he can hear water running in the bathroom. The door is open, and he pokes his head in. “I’m home, babe.”
“Hey.” Kurt’s strangled reply is slightly muted by the water, and Noah struggles with whether to go in and check on him. It might make things worse. Instead, he stays, lingering in the doorway and asking “are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Just . . . just give me a minute, okay?”
“Sure.”
His heart sinks a little and he can’t help wondering if he just gave up his last best chance at fixing whatever it was that had gone so drastically wrong.
*****
Kurt has been crying himself empty for weeks, steadying himself in the shower every night before joining Noah in bed, where he tries to make himself as small as possible. The worst part is that he’s found himself falling apart at the most inopportune moments: on the train, at the supermarket, walking home from the T stop at night. And today, embarrassingly, when he had to excuse himself from class after unexpected tears fell onto his notebook and he ended up bawling in a bathroom stall. Something had to change, but he was at a loss. Finally, this afternoon he bailed on his study group and sat outside in the cool fall air talking to the one person he could think of who didn’t have some kind of personal investment in his marriage: Mr. Schue. Will. It had been a spur of the moment decision born of desperation and the uncomfortable feeling that he was suffocating in his own head. As he had dialed Will’s number with shaking hands, he hoped he wasn’t making a colossal mistake. Thankfully, he hadn’t.
He’d spilled the whole sorry story: the fighting, the feeling like he and Noah were in such different places, the long hours of work and school. “Some days,” he’d said, “I look at him and don’t know who I’m seeing.”
Will had taken the call with kindness and grace, and had told Kurt that sometimes things changed, especially since they had gotten together when they were still so young. Kurt had been surprised by his frankness: “Part of what killed my marriage to Teri was that we stopped seeing each other, and we didn’t put the work in to find each other again. If you love him, don’t be afraid of the work. And don’t be so afraid of losing him if you say something that you don’t even try to fix things. Because then you’d just be letting him go.”
“I love him. God, I love him. I just don’t know how we got here.”
“Put the how in the past. Focus now on working through this. And Kurt?”
“Yeah?”
“You can always call me.”
So of course Noah walked in on him losing it again, hiding tears under running water. He was almost hoping that when Noah heard him, heard the roughness in his voice, he’d say something. Anything. Acknowledge that things were bad or that they were both clearly hurting. But, like so many nights in recent months there was nothing. Kurt finished washing up and turned the faucet off. He toweled off, brushed his teeth, and ran a hand through his hair before taking a deep breath and heading into the bedroom. Something was going to change and even if it killed him it was starting tonight.
Noah was sitting propped on his pillows, glasses on and a book in his hand. Kurt turned off his bedside light and slid naked between the cool sheets. He snaked one hand along Noah’s stomach, and choked out the only words he could think of. “I have no idea what to say to you. But something has to change.”
Noah’s reply was barely a whisper. “I know.”
“I just don’t know how to start it.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you still love me?” It hurt Kurt to think that he even had to ask, that he didn’t just know that Noah loved him.
“God, K. Of course I love you.”
He took another deep breath. “Show me.”
It was risky; they hadn’t had sex in weeks, and even that last time Noah had been disengaged. But Kurt knew that if he could break down that mask of Puck that he had been seeing more and more over the past months, maybe that would be a start. He needed to feel something besides empty, needed Noah to feel something other than distant. If they couldn’t connect with words, maybe they could connect this way.
*****
Noah relaxed into the feeling of Kurt’s palm against his stomach. It was warm through the cotton of his t-shirt, and gentle with just the right amount of pressure. It felt familiar, but in a faded kind of way he couldn’t quite touch. He had a choice to make. Kurt was offering him a start, a chance to try to find each other again. The only thing that kept echoing in his head was his mother the day after his father left, holding his skinny little-boy self in her arms and telling him that his father had been gone for a long time. Noah wasn’t going to be that guy. He’d been fighting it his whole life, and he knew that if he didn’t take what Kurt was offering then he would be no better than his dad had been. It was time to be a real man. He put his book down, took off his glasses, and turned out his light before turning to face Kurt.
“I’m scared. I don’t know where I went.” That didn’t even come close to putting a dent in the jumbled mess of his head, but it was a start.
“Let me help.” Kurt’s voice was barely audible, his hand toying with the hem of Noah’s t-shirt. “Let me show you who you are, how much I love you.” Noah could hear the unfinished thought of even though I don’t like you very much right now.
“Okay.”
Acquiescence was all Kurt needed, apparently, because Noah had barely pulled in a breath before Kurt’s hands were tugging at his clothes. He had to work to stay out of his head, to feel Kurt’s hands and mouth, the length of his body against Noah’s. The warmth of him, the beat of his own heart under Kurt’s hand. “Stay with me,” Kurt whispered in his ear before leaning in to kiss him. God, Noah tried. But he felt so numb. Kurt stopped, pulled away with tears running down his face.
“Damn you. Why can’t you just let go?”
“Of what?”
“Of Puck. Where did Noah go?”
“I don’t know. Please. Just . . . please. Keep going.”
“Not until you tell me why you started hiding.”
Noah could feel the words boiling, all the self-hatred, the doubt. The fear that he’d be stuck forever and that despite his best efforts, he was turning into his father. The bone-crushing anger that the things he’d worked for were lost in a haze of budget cuts. He didn’t know how to start, and he was scared that once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop. He turned away, pulled the sheet up over himself.
“If that’s the way it’s going to be, then, I think I’ll go sleep on the couch.”
Noah reached his hand out, blindly feeling for Kurt. “No. Don’t. Please, just give me a minute.” He took a few deep breaths, heard Kurt sigh behind him and settle back against his own pillows. And then he began.
“I’m not getting that promotion. The city has put in a hiring freeze, and that applies to promotions for current employees as well. And before you can ask, I found out in August.”
“Noah-”
“Stop. Please just let me talk. So I’m not going to get Paramedic. And I can’t do this job forever. You’ve got such a bright future, and I don’t want to hold you back, but I also don’t want to ask you to leave a future here to follow me. And I don’t want you to think of me as less than anything or anyone. And I’m afraid that if I tell you what I want to do, you’re going to tell me I’m exactly the last person who should be doing it. I don’t want your world to get so big that I get left behind. And all these feelings just piled up and it was easier to hide than to say anything. I thought if I just sucked it up, something would change. But nothing changed. I’m still miserable, and now I’m hurting you.”
“You’re miserable with me.”
“No. Oh. Kurt, no. I could never be miserable with you. I just hate that I’ve been hurting you, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“What’s making you miserable, then?”
“Work. This damn city.”
“It failed you.”
“It feels that way. And it makes me angry.”
“And anger and fear and hurt make you hide. But you don’t have to hide from me.”
Kurt’s hand was moving again, soft on Noah’s hip. “Let me see you. Please.”
Noah knew what Kurt was asking, knew that he was terrible at hiding himself during sex and that Kurt wanted it as a way to start to break the wall down. The chinks were there already. There was nothing left to lose, really. So he turned back to Kurt and kissed him, hard.
In the end, it didn’t take much; a well-placed touch, the whispered softness of a kiss on his shoulder, the soft slide as Kurt entered him. He kept his eyes open, saw all the hurt and anger and pain on Kurt’s face, felt it in every movement. It broke his heart and sent him reeling. It was the most connected he’d felt to Kurt in months, and he told him so as they lay together afterwards. “I’m sorry,” he told Kurt through the salt of his own tears. “Don’t give up on me yet.”
Kurt’s reply was heavy with fatigue and a bare hint of relief. “I won’t. But there’s a lot of work to do. Besides, you haven’t told me what you want to do when you grow up.”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Just . . . don’t stop fighting for me, even when it seems like I’ve stopped fighting for myself.”