carries on; glee
Title: Carries On
Pairing: Sam/Kurt.
Summary: AU. Ever since they were children, Sam’s had a trouble with being seen that Kurt’s never had to deal with.
CARRIES ON
When they were kids, Kurt once lost Sam during a game of hide-and-seek and had to send their friends out in rescue teams to find him again. Finn held his hand until the sun started disappearing over the roof of their house and looked around the entire street for him: even under the bushes of thorns and nettles, even down past the end of their street, and much closer to the train tracks than they were ever allowed to go. Kurt had cried and cried and thought of how disappointed his father would be in him, of how Sam’s baby sister would sob if she knew he’d lost her brother forever.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Finn had told him, squeezing his hand tightly, both of them sweaty and stuck together by then, although his eyes were becoming shiny too, that way they always did when they’d seen too much of Kurt crying. “He couldn’t just disappear.”
But it had definitely looked that way a few hours before, when Puck pointed to the base of a tree he said Sam had been hiding behind a moment ago, to find nothing but the patch of bent grass where he’d been sitting. “He was there, anyway,” Puck had said, scratching his head and idly kicking at daisies. Kurt had felt something in his gut then, like a slab of stone-heavy dread weighing down on his insides.
It was almost night when Kurt heard Sam’s voice, cautious and soft and much closer than he’d realized, calling out for him, so suddenly he finally let go of Finn’s hand.
“Sam?” His voice sounded too high from all the crying. He wiped his eyes a little roughly on the sleeve of his shirt, willing them not to be red anymore. Then again: “S-Sam?”
He didn’t see him anywhere. He couldn’t. Finn turned and made a face at him, almost concerned.
Then Sam appeared just a step in front of Kurt, eyes just as red if not more than Kurt’s own, his hair messy with twigs and tugs, his clothes dirty with muck and sitting crookedly on his shoulders, like he’d been pulling on them. “Kurt,” he murmured, throat sounding dry and sore.
Finn and Kurt had took him home. At the door Sam shook and couldn’t let go of their hands for a moment and Kurt had almost refused to let go of his at all.
-
It was a hard thing to grow up with.
Sam would never talk about it when they were little, but they still lived next door to each other, and Burt and Carole had always believed they played a part as Sam’s second pair of parents - they spent a lot of their time whispering in hushed voices about how Sam’s father was taking him to this doctor for another inspection; how Sam’s grandparents were trying to inject or feed or pray for Sam’s way out of it. “We wouldn’t do any better in their shoes, would we?” Carole would say to Burt in a careful tone - quiet enough that Kurt had to strain to hear her and soft enough for his father to know better than to push the subject. Burt would sigh and turn another newspaper page, shaking his head just because.
It was almost broached, once. Sam was in his garden, dragging a stick over the top of the fence separating them, while Kurt sat on the patio his father built at his tiny pink table with his mother’s old tea-set. He always took care, handling it, imagining her on the opposite chair, gratefully taking the porcelain cups from his offering hands. Sam was fascinated by it.
“I wish I was more like you,” he told Kurt, his voice small.
Kurt almost dropped the teapot in his hands. He put it down on the table cloth and pretended to be unfazed, primly smoothing out the fabric of his shorts and looking away from Sam’s face. His face felt hot. “Why would you say that?”
He’d hated to ask. He’d hated his voice - everybody found him strange at once when he spoke, everybody knew he was fundamentally different. Kurt was ten and his dad wouldn’t always be around to fight battles with stern looking red-necks at his elementary school. Finn wouldn’t always get away with beating other kids up, especially not when he realized himself Kurt wasn’t ‘cool’ like the rest of his friends were - or at least, that was what Kurt feared.
He looked at Sam, curiously.
Sam was smiling at him with knitted eyebrows, shrugging with heavy looking shoulders. “Everybody sees you,” he explained.
Kurt stared at him for a moment before inviting him round for some imaginary afternoon tea that Sam hadn’t replied to - he’d just grinned broadly and boyishly and hauled himself over the fence between them, nodding his head a little in thanks.
-
Sam was homeschooled the last year of elementary when his ‘condition’ became worse. It went on for the whole of two days at one point, where the only way Sam could make his existence known to the world was by singing wherever he went - old folksy songs when he wanted his parents or Burt and Carole to see him, nursery rhymes for his sister and newborn brother, and the sparse handful of Broadway lyrics he had some familiarity with for Kurt. Sam’s mother taught him that year, and when her husband came home sometimes she would come over to their house for tea with Carole and Kurt and Finn would hear her crying even though Burt forbid them from listening in.
“Are you going to highschool, then?” Puck asked Sam flatly. They were in Sam’s room, he and Finn going through his comic-book collection and making it into a mess Kurt would try his best to ignore but eventually clean away, heaving great sighs the entire time. Sam would jump to his feet to help whenever he saw Kurt start to tidy up.
Sam’s cheeks flushed. He stacked away his father’s worn out issues of Superman and didn’t look at any of them. “Not sure yet.”
Kurt made a face at Finn and gestured to Puck. Finn elbowed Puck in the ribs.
“Jeez, I was only asking!” Puck hissed, holding his hands over his chest like he’d been wounded. “I mean I thought you’d be happy to have superpowers, Sammy -” (and here, Sam winced in pain) “- but all anyone’s ever doing is crying about it and -”
Kurt picked up a random issue and heaved it at Puck’s head. “Will you ever-” he threw another “- learn how to -” another “- shut your stupid mouth!”
Suddenly, Kurt was too breathless and furious to register the rest of the room except for Puck, spread lazily over Sam’s Pokémon bedsheets, openly gaping at him and looking completely innocent. His breathing became rapid and hard enough for him to feel dizzy after a moment, and then - embarrassed. He tucked his chin against his chest and straightened his shirt out, staring at the remaining few comic-books in front of him.
Sam disappeared. Kurt didn’t even have to look up to know it.
Guiltily, Puck picked up the comic books Kurt threw at him and began filing them away in silence. Finn sat on the edge of the bed and did what his mom taught him to do when he didn’t know what to do: counted to ten under his breath.
Kurt felt Sam’s hand pat his knee. “It’s okay, Kurt,” he promised him. Kurt watched his invisible hand store gliding books away; felt the other brush over the skin of his wrist like it meant to curl around it but decided otherwise. “Maybe it will be a cool superpower one day or something, right?”
Sam laughed, shakily. Puck stopped cleaning to stare intently at his locked hands instead, and Kurt heard Finn still whispering under his breath, one, two, three…
Kurt reached out for where he thought Sam’s hand was and spread his own over the back of it, looking at the wall in front of him. He tried to smile when he said, “Maybe.”
-
Sam didn’t make it for the first year of highschool.
He stayed home every day and listened to Finn and Puck and Rachel talk about all the new people when they got home, instead - new friends and new pretty faces and a new world Sam might never get to see. The first few days, Kurt refused to tell him about Mckinley and insisted Sam go through his entire day at home, instead, and it made him laugh, for a while. “Just tell me,” Sam said to him eventually, shrugging, but Kurt thought his eyes might have been watering and couldn’t bring himself to in the end.
“I’d like it better if you were there,” he told him, and he meant it. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d like it much better if he could disappear, too, and all the senior jocks had nowhere to aim their disapproval or disgust and all his friends couldn’t tell when he’d been crying. But that wasn’t a fair thing to say.
He was scared to think Sam ever knew just how much he hated McKinley high. He should have been glad he had the chance to go, and the opportunities there, while Sam was stuck miserable in his house all day long, all week long, all year round. Kurt would only ever let himself cry about how horrible highschool felt in his room, where nobody else was around to judge him or condemn him for it; or for anything else.
Sam heard him through the window, some nights. Kurt didn’t know if he’d secretly wanted him to hear how upset he really was or not, but he knew it changed something in Sam. He was too over-protective, over-affectionate, overly-careful for a thirteen year old to be with his best-friend. He kept secrets.
“That boy’s sweet on you,” Carole whispered to him whenever Sam darted back home for dinner, grabbing at Kurt’s cheeks and laughing when he’d blush all over.
-
Sam still sang whenever he disappeared, only now his voice was this rougher, lovelier thing that gave Kurt a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach to hear. He’d sing to catch Kurt’s attention, but unlike before, he’d take his hand while he spoke to him, and hold it tight even when he reappeared, his cheeks flushed and his grin pulled taut across his face.
“I’m getting better at it, don’t you think?” Sam asked him once, hopefully, but all Kurt could think about was the feeling of Sam’s thumb rubbing circles across the knobs of his knuckles.
-
Sam did get better at it. He learned to control it.
“This isn’t really what I was expecting,” he admitted on his first day of highschool. He pushed his soggy food across his plate and shot Kurt a lopsided, funny smile.
Some girls at the table beside them giggled and watched him. Kurt tried to ignore them, and the way the possibility of them made his insides hurt.
He looked down at the lunch-table instead, grimacing at the sticky soda remains there, his food, and the mess of wrappers Santana made beside him with no intention of cleaning up. “It’s not much.”
Sam laughed, softly. One of his arms disappeared completely and Kurt blinked at him, wide-eyed - although nobody else seemed to notice around them. Kurt felt the pressure of Sam squeezing his hand and squeezed back, reflexively, staring up at Sam, staring back down at him.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Sam said, shrugging, breaking into another crooked, charming grin.
Kurt loved him.
-
Finn and Puck pestered Sam into joining the football team all year. Sam never agreed, even though he loved football and even though Kurt knew he wanted to. Kurt knew Sam wouldn’t join because he hated football players - including Finn and Puck, sometimes. Jocks would call him names, jostle him in the hallways, and snicker about his clothes in classes. Kurt would ignore them; Finn and Puck would eat lunch with them and laugh with them.
“You should just join up already,” he said, feigning absentmindedness and waving a dismissive hand. They were supposed to be studying, but Kurt’s mind kept drifting back to pretty cheerleaders, pretty jocks, all the pretty ways Sam could desert him if he wanted to. His eyes were starting to burn, but he couldn’t stop.
Sam glanced up at him over the book he was pretending to read. He knocked his pen against his teeth for a moment, then paused - a thoughtful pause. “Would you still like me if I did?”
The page Kurt was turning almost tore in his hand. He looked up at Sam, face warm, and swallowed. “Of course,” he said, his voice sounding too throaty and too dry. He smiled, shook his head. “Nothing would change, you know.”
Maybe if he said it aloud it would be true. Maybe if he said it over and over Sam would be all his again, only this tiny little boy sitting on his porch with his legs dangling over it, patiently waiting for him to come home.
“It wouldn’t,” Sam breathed.
Kurt looked down at his page until the words stopped making sense and listened to Sam’s hard, deep breaths until they stopped, and Sam’s soft, shy lips were pressing against his cheek, warmly.
He couldn’t see Sam when he looked up again but - that happened, sometimes, when Sam just couldn’t manage his invisibility, and thankfully it was never around people who didn’t understand it.
“I’ll always like you, Sam,” he murmured, staring back down at his textbook until Sam appeared, again. Smiling.
-
He was forced into watching all of Sam’s games, the same way he was forced because of Finn the year before. His and Sam’s family had their own spot in the stands next to Puck’s mom, so her daughter could play with Stacey whenever she was feeling restless or too bored.
Stevie wasn’t big on football, either. He liked taking off his shoes and climbing onto Kurt’s shoulders and yelling his brother’s name as loudly as he could, but he wasn’t big on the sport, not like his dad or his mom or Burt were.
“I like when he scores, though,” Stevie told him, drowsily. He clung to Kurt’s neck, his little legs hung at Kurt’s sides. He’d get sleepy like this a lot, but Kurt was never too bothered, as long as his dirty sneakers weren’t on.
Kurt laughed and shrugged the shoulder Stevie’s head rested on. “I like that, too.”
He’d seen enough football to know Sam was good for a highschool kid. He would wave a dopey smile at them when he came onto the pitch and blow his mom a kiss, but when he played, it was more aggressively than Kurt could imagine him behaving normally, ever.
A pretty cheerleader gave him a kiss on his cheek at half-time and he looked up at Kurt. The stands chanted his name. He rocketed across the pitch. He revelled in the world, seeing him at last.
And on the final yard he disappeared entirely.
-
He found Sam later, sitting outside his window, beneath the ledge in his planet-patterned pyjamas.
“He always comes home,” Sam’s mom had said earlier, her voice still trembling a little. Kurt had passed Stevie over to her and kissed her cheek goodnight, but he would never know how to reassure Sam’s parents over their son because nobody ever could.
Kurt sighed a pretend sigh and reaches his hand out into the cold air to ruffle Sam’s bangs. He wanted to be mad, as jealous and miserable as he’d been earlier, but he was only relieved to see Sam, again, to feel him against his skin. “I thought you played a good game, you know,” he offered, quietly.
Sam snorted below him. He reached up and fumbled for Kurt’s hand before taking it into his own and humming under his breath. “You have to think that.”
“I don’t have to. I just… feel more inclined to.”
Silence. Sam said nothing, just swayed their linked hands.
Kurt wondered desperately who she was. If Sam ever touched her the same tender, |adoring way he touched him.
“I don’t want a girlfriend,” Sam stated, abruptly. His hand squeezed around Kurt’s.
“Okay,” Kurt said. He wanted to say more. He wanted to ask for more. “Who was that girl?” was all he could manage, at least for now. That was okay, too, that was still a big step for them.
Sam shifted onto his knees until he was facing Kurt through the open window. He ran the hand not tucked in Kurt’s through his messy hair and looked down at the grass beneath him, frowning. “She’s - she wants to date me. We never even talk, or - or anything like that,” he said in a rush, then he shook his head. “I don’t want a girlfriend, Kurt.”
His head tilted back up and he looked Kurt straight in the eye, his gaze hard and searching.
Kurt nodded, slowly. “Okay. That’s okay.”
They sat for a while like that. Sam looked at their tangled hands and breathed from his parted lips in slow, even breaths. Kurt squeezed his limp hand at odd intervals and tried incessantly to smooth down his untidy blond hair, trying not to think too hard about everything for once. It was getting late, but Kurt couldn’t bring himself to mention it, even when he caught Sam blinking himself awake. He just wanted them to stay that way for a little longer.
Sometimes Kurt felt like the entire world was coming between them.
“I think it happens when I’m scared, now,” Sam told him, startling him out of his thoughts. Sam glanced at him, almost timidly, before he continued. “I mean, I can do it on purpose when I want but I do it when I’m scared, too. But tonight it wasn’t that I was scared of losing the game.” He smiled, a little. “I don’t care that I lost the game, not really. I was just - scared of losing…”
He looked at Kurt’s eyes. Kurt’s lips. He squeezed Kurt’s hand like it was all he could do.
“You never have to be,” Kurt promised him, softly. He was smiling, too wide than felt natural on his face, too wide than he should have been at midnight. But Sam was smiling back at him.
-
As they got older, it happened more suddenly. Mostly, it happened in school.
Sam disappeared in the middle of history. Sam went to the bathroom and never seemed to return. Sam caught a football during practice but the only part you could see of him was the ball in his invisible hands.
After a while, Kurt figured out what was scaring him so badly. He stopped taking his invisible hand between classes in the corridors. He stopped smiling at him over his books in the library. He stopped talking to him in front of his jock friends.
Sam just disappeared more and more because of it.
-
Some days, Kurt knew Sam was in his bedroom with him. He was good at keeping still, quiet; but Kurt could always smell the grass on his clothes, the cheap shampoo in his hair, always see the slightest flicker of him in the most inconspicuous tremble of his bedroom curtains.
Once, he heard him.
In the morning after he’d woken up, groggily rubbing his eyes and pasting moisturizer over his face at his vanity, he hadn’t been thinking of Sam, or what Sam could do, or where Sam could be (and if he’d known, he’d have put on his usual show, feigning more grace than came natural to anyone and humming soft songs under his breaths; the awful songs he would hear from Sam’s room window most nights.) It was strange how easy a thing it was to forget - especially on tired, mindless mornings like this. So Kurt stood and carelessly slid off his pyjama shirt, his bottoms, his underwear and socks, and he heard it. A gasp.
Heard Sam, watching him.
He stood frozen for a moment in surprise. Then he dressed himself with deliberate slowness and care: brushing his fingers over the sensitive insides of his thighs while he pulled his boxers on, running a warm hand across his chest before slipping into his t-shirt and sliding his fingers through his hair while he styled it, catching locks of it in his fists every once in a while so it looked tugged on and messy. He could hear Sam when he tried, taking in deep, heavy breaths behind him.
Kurt blinked once. When he looked back into the mirror of his vanity, Sam was standing behind him, his hands balled into fists around the back of Kurt’s seat and his face flushed scarlet with embarrassment.
There was a moment of Sam staring at him intently through the mirror, his bottom lip caught between his teeth while he sucked on it, nervously, his chest heaving with every breath he took and his eyes a little dark - different than Kurt had ever seen them before.
He didn’t want to wait anymore. He was tired of just waiting.
Kurt stood up from his seat to face Sam and looked at him thoughtfully for a second, before surging up on his tip toes to kiss him hard and full on the lips. The force almost knocked Sam back into the shelves behind him, but his hands latched onto Kurt’s waist in time and slid around him, almost painfully tightly, so they were almost painfully close to each other. Sam kissed back the same messy way Kurt kissed him - unpractised and overeager from years and years of thinning patience. Their teeth met, first, then their tongues, and Sam laughed against his mouth at them both, but it sounded more desperate than anything else; Kurt couldn’t laugh back because he had to breathe, and he had to breathe to keep kissing Sam like this. It felt messy and hurried and unlike it looked in the movies Kurt had wished for his first kiss to be like, but it still felt the way he’d always wanted it to: liberating and warm and with Sam, always.
They were only sixteen - or Sam would be too in a few weeks, anyway - but Kurt felt like this had been following them around since the very beginning, since six-year-old Sam Evans knocked on his front door and said through his big crooked smile, my family just moved in next door, want to play Wonder Boy with me?
“I need you so much,” Sam muttered against his lips, lowly. He grabbed Kurt’s face and dragged his shaky thumbs over his cheekbones while he kissed him, slowly and deeply. “I need you so much, sometimes all I can do is sit around, needing you, Kurt.”
Kurt let out a gust of breath and slipped his hands up beneath the front of Sam’s shirt, dragging over the line of his muscles just the right way to make Sam tremble against him. “Why did it take us so long to - oh -“
He felt Sam’s erection pressing against his hip. Sam had gotten hard five minutes ago, watching him undress, watching him strip naked, and now Sam was sucking a line of bruises into his neck and rocking against him insistently, letting out huffs of warm breath and soft whimpers all the way from the back of his throat. His fingertips would leave angry red skin over Kurt’s hipbones tomorrow, and the thought of it alone made him shudder.
Sam pressed his forehead to Kurt’s, his pupils blown wide over his green eyes and lips almost bright red from kissing. He grinned at Kurt like he found something funny. “Please touch me,” he whispered, his breath hitching halfway through his words and his big grin straining a bit. “Please.”
Kurt licked his lips and smiled.
-
Sam was good at sneaking in, of course. He would hop out of his window, climb over the fence and hop into Kurt’s room at night. Kurt’s parents would never see him in the mornings, a space of nothing but air at Kurt’s side while he pretended to sleep and Carole tip-toed inside to steal the hairdryer out of his room. She knew, though. She always knew the things Kurt didn’t want her to know - but at least somebody else knew.
He tried to bring it up one morning: a lazy Saturday under the sheets with Sam, with Finn out with his new girlfriend and his parents getting groceries and far too much to do in his locked bedroom with his best-friend.
“Maybe we should -” Sam licked a wet path down his stomach, looking up at him curiously through his lashes. Kurt shook his head, took a deep breath and tried again. “Maybe we should tell people, now.”
Sam spoke with his mouth against the freckle he’d decided to be fond of on Kurt’s hip. “Well, everyone - they pretty much know, don’t they? I mean everyone kind of expected it, didn’t they?” He dragged his teeth over where Kurt’s hipbone jutted out, humming thoughtfully. “Can’t we just have this?”
Kurt was always afraid of this would happen. Sam’s hands, where they were spread broadly across Kurt’s thighs, faded away slowly before his eyes.
“Why don’t you want people to know?” he asked, his voice neutral. He dropped his hands from Sam’s hair to rest at his own sides, instead, and when Sam looked up at him he couldn’t find it in himself to look back in case when he did, there was nothing left to see.
“It’s not like that,” Sam told him. His voice sounded thick and strange and it made Kurt wince. His hand slid warmly over Kurt’s cheek, but he was half gone, then, too terrified to even talk about it. “Please don’t think I don’t want you or something.”
Kurt smiled thinly and pushed Sam’s hand from his face, nodding. “You don’t want people to know you do.”
The blame could go anywhere. Maybe Sam was too used to disappearing that it was his first choice now. Maybe Sam had always been able to disappear for this very reason, to hide this very thing. Maybe it was Kurt’s fault for letting Sam see his fresh bruises from bullies who hurt him for what he was, what the both were. But Kurt could never disappear, although sometimes it had felt like the safer option to have, because he never wanted to. That was never him.
“Maybe we just shouldn’t, instead,” he said.
Sam had disappeared entirely. Kurt only knew he was there from the way the bedsheets levitated around where his body had been. His breath was still warm against his skin. Kurt felt it stutter there before Sam spoke.
Kurt felt Sam kiss his stomach, lightly, carefully. “I don’t want to be another reason for you getting hurt.”
It had gotten better since Sam showed up, really. Sometimes nobody could protect Kurt, especially himself, he’d learnt; the attacks were always random, malicious things that happen with no preparation, their eyes just landed on the faggy kid alone in between classes and suddenly Kurt was thrown into the nearest set of lockers by two strangers in letterman jackets who he didn’t know and who certainly didn’t know him. He hardly ever told Sam, anymore, or Finn, or Puck or even Santana. It felt weak.
“You’re scared,” Kurt accused him. He felt like crying. “That’s what this is. That’s what it’s always been.”
Sam’s invisible hand threaded through his own. Kurt could feel the weight of his body over his, suddenly, heavy and still reassuring despite himself. “I’m scared, yeah. For the both of us.”
“I’m not scared at all,” Kurt told him, honestly. Kurt was never scared. Kurt was the person in the house who caught the spiders in Finn’s room for him, Kurt was the person who wore zebra-pattern pants to school whenever he felt like it, Kurt was the person who put his hand up in classes to say what nobody else ever seemed to like hearing. Kurt was the person who everybody always thought loved the wrong way, looked the wrong way and talked the wrong way. He knew he could do anything - he always had.
Sam laughed, softly. He kissed both corners of Kurt’s mouth and Kurt hated when he couldn’t see Sam, kissing him, hated it completely. “You’re never scared, though.”
And Sam was always scared.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” Kurt told him. He reached out to cup the sides of his face, brushing back the hair he could feel over Sam’s eyes. He kissed the thin air and it kissed back, desperately.
-
Sam began to flicker on Monday afternoon, in and out of visibility.
“You were right,” he said. He stopped Kurt at his locker and spoke with an apologetic half smile curling at his mouth. When he reached for Kurt’s hand, his own disappeared entirely; the students were used to it, were told not to acknowledge it negatively, the same thing they were told when they harassed Kurt, although with Sam they never could acknowledge it in any manner because they hardly ever noticed it happening.
Sam looked down at where his hand should have been, shaking his head hopelessly and gnawing at his bottom lip. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.” He squeezed Kurt’s hand in his and shut his eyes, willing himself to reappear, and then his whole body began to flicker like a candle about to go out.
“Sam, it’s okay,” Kurt insisted, but Sam had already disappeared, just the pressure of his hand squeezing Kurt’s fist remaining.
Kurt led him outside instead of going to class and took him into his car to kiss him until he showed up again - draped across the backseat of the car with his t-shirt pushed up to bunch at his armpits and his head back, moaning. Kurt freckled the skin of his neck with kisses, the way Sam liked. He could feel it calming him down, the evenness of his breath returning.
“Sometimes I’m scared I’ll never come back,” Sam admitted, quietly.
Sometimes Kurt was, too.
-
Finn would take his girlfriend Rachel out on dates. Sam would take Kurt up to Stacey and Stevie’s room so his sister could fake-marry them and his brother could be best man.
She’d push at Sam’s shoulders after she told him to kiss the groom. He’d always zone out a little after it, staring dopily into Kurt’s face with his lazy grin and bright, happy eyes. When they kissed, it would be light and chaste and Stacey would insist on another, and Stevie would insist this game was stupid, let’s play Kirby.
Sam was never scared in front of his family. He loved them too much, and they loved him the same, and when he took Kurt’s hand at the dinner table Kurt didn’t even think anyone noticed anything out of the ordinary between them. Sam’s dad still talked cars with him, as usual, and Sam’s mom still liked when he helped out around the kitchen afterwards so she could gossip about these parents and this celebrity to him.
Kurt’s family loved Sam, too. A son, Burt said, and Finn had rolled his eyes and said, “You’re really throwing that word around now, huh?” and just laughed when his mom had kicked him, like it was some joke they were all in on.
“I think I’ve loved you forever,” Sam told him, lying across Kurt’s bedroom floor and staring up at him while he sat at his vanity and fixed himself for bed. He kissed the bone of Kurt’s ankle. Sam knew Kurt didn’t like him being invisible around him, and Kurt knew he didn’t, either, so he snuck over less and less, now normally only staying long enough to say goodnight.
Kurt smiled down at him and nudged his jaw up with his foot to look him in the eye. “I think you have, too,” he agreed, nodding.
-
He couldn’t help Sam with it. Sam could hardly help himself anymore, really, but they’d keep trying, and once, Sam even kissed his cheek in front of his teammates before slipping out of sight.
“I’ll protect you,” Kurt told him. They sat outside, their backs pressed to the school building, the weight of Sam’s head spread over his lap, his fingers tangling in the invisible locks of hair. His teachers knew he was with Sam when he wasn’t in class, and since nobody knew the right way to be sensitive about Sam’s condition, they let him away with it, even after most of them caught Kurt clutching the space of air that was Sam’s hand through the halls. There’d be backlash, one day, of course there would be. Sam couldn’t always live safe and hidden - and they both knew he shouldn’t.
Sam faded back in. He was grinning up at Kurt, the sunlight on his face making him squint. “I know you will,” he agreed, softly, and then he took Kurt’s hand into his and kissed the back of it with his smile.
Pairing: Sam/Kurt.
Summary: AU. Ever since they were children, Sam’s had a trouble with being seen that Kurt’s never had to deal with.
CARRIES ON
When they were kids, Kurt once lost Sam during a game of hide-and-seek and had to send their friends out in rescue teams to find him again. Finn held his hand until the sun started disappearing over the roof of their house and looked around the entire street for him: even under the bushes of thorns and nettles, even down past the end of their street, and much closer to the train tracks than they were ever allowed to go. Kurt had cried and cried and thought of how disappointed his father would be in him, of how Sam’s baby sister would sob if she knew he’d lost her brother forever.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Finn had told him, squeezing his hand tightly, both of them sweaty and stuck together by then, although his eyes were becoming shiny too, that way they always did when they’d seen too much of Kurt crying. “He couldn’t just disappear.”
But it had definitely looked that way a few hours before, when Puck pointed to the base of a tree he said Sam had been hiding behind a moment ago, to find nothing but the patch of bent grass where he’d been sitting. “He was there, anyway,” Puck had said, scratching his head and idly kicking at daisies. Kurt had felt something in his gut then, like a slab of stone-heavy dread weighing down on his insides.
It was almost night when Kurt heard Sam’s voice, cautious and soft and much closer than he’d realized, calling out for him, so suddenly he finally let go of Finn’s hand.
“Sam?” His voice sounded too high from all the crying. He wiped his eyes a little roughly on the sleeve of his shirt, willing them not to be red anymore. Then again: “S-Sam?”
He didn’t see him anywhere. He couldn’t. Finn turned and made a face at him, almost concerned.
Then Sam appeared just a step in front of Kurt, eyes just as red if not more than Kurt’s own, his hair messy with twigs and tugs, his clothes dirty with muck and sitting crookedly on his shoulders, like he’d been pulling on them. “Kurt,” he murmured, throat sounding dry and sore.
Finn and Kurt had took him home. At the door Sam shook and couldn’t let go of their hands for a moment and Kurt had almost refused to let go of his at all.
-
It was a hard thing to grow up with.
Sam would never talk about it when they were little, but they still lived next door to each other, and Burt and Carole had always believed they played a part as Sam’s second pair of parents - they spent a lot of their time whispering in hushed voices about how Sam’s father was taking him to this doctor for another inspection; how Sam’s grandparents were trying to inject or feed or pray for Sam’s way out of it. “We wouldn’t do any better in their shoes, would we?” Carole would say to Burt in a careful tone - quiet enough that Kurt had to strain to hear her and soft enough for his father to know better than to push the subject. Burt would sigh and turn another newspaper page, shaking his head just because.
It was almost broached, once. Sam was in his garden, dragging a stick over the top of the fence separating them, while Kurt sat on the patio his father built at his tiny pink table with his mother’s old tea-set. He always took care, handling it, imagining her on the opposite chair, gratefully taking the porcelain cups from his offering hands. Sam was fascinated by it.
“I wish I was more like you,” he told Kurt, his voice small.
Kurt almost dropped the teapot in his hands. He put it down on the table cloth and pretended to be unfazed, primly smoothing out the fabric of his shorts and looking away from Sam’s face. His face felt hot. “Why would you say that?”
He’d hated to ask. He’d hated his voice - everybody found him strange at once when he spoke, everybody knew he was fundamentally different. Kurt was ten and his dad wouldn’t always be around to fight battles with stern looking red-necks at his elementary school. Finn wouldn’t always get away with beating other kids up, especially not when he realized himself Kurt wasn’t ‘cool’ like the rest of his friends were - or at least, that was what Kurt feared.
He looked at Sam, curiously.
Sam was smiling at him with knitted eyebrows, shrugging with heavy looking shoulders. “Everybody sees you,” he explained.
Kurt stared at him for a moment before inviting him round for some imaginary afternoon tea that Sam hadn’t replied to - he’d just grinned broadly and boyishly and hauled himself over the fence between them, nodding his head a little in thanks.
-
Sam was homeschooled the last year of elementary when his ‘condition’ became worse. It went on for the whole of two days at one point, where the only way Sam could make his existence known to the world was by singing wherever he went - old folksy songs when he wanted his parents or Burt and Carole to see him, nursery rhymes for his sister and newborn brother, and the sparse handful of Broadway lyrics he had some familiarity with for Kurt. Sam’s mother taught him that year, and when her husband came home sometimes she would come over to their house for tea with Carole and Kurt and Finn would hear her crying even though Burt forbid them from listening in.
“Are you going to highschool, then?” Puck asked Sam flatly. They were in Sam’s room, he and Finn going through his comic-book collection and making it into a mess Kurt would try his best to ignore but eventually clean away, heaving great sighs the entire time. Sam would jump to his feet to help whenever he saw Kurt start to tidy up.
Sam’s cheeks flushed. He stacked away his father’s worn out issues of Superman and didn’t look at any of them. “Not sure yet.”
Kurt made a face at Finn and gestured to Puck. Finn elbowed Puck in the ribs.
“Jeez, I was only asking!” Puck hissed, holding his hands over his chest like he’d been wounded. “I mean I thought you’d be happy to have superpowers, Sammy -” (and here, Sam winced in pain) “- but all anyone’s ever doing is crying about it and -”
Kurt picked up a random issue and heaved it at Puck’s head. “Will you ever-” he threw another “- learn how to -” another “- shut your stupid mouth!”
Suddenly, Kurt was too breathless and furious to register the rest of the room except for Puck, spread lazily over Sam’s Pokémon bedsheets, openly gaping at him and looking completely innocent. His breathing became rapid and hard enough for him to feel dizzy after a moment, and then - embarrassed. He tucked his chin against his chest and straightened his shirt out, staring at the remaining few comic-books in front of him.
Sam disappeared. Kurt didn’t even have to look up to know it.
Guiltily, Puck picked up the comic books Kurt threw at him and began filing them away in silence. Finn sat on the edge of the bed and did what his mom taught him to do when he didn’t know what to do: counted to ten under his breath.
Kurt felt Sam’s hand pat his knee. “It’s okay, Kurt,” he promised him. Kurt watched his invisible hand store gliding books away; felt the other brush over the skin of his wrist like it meant to curl around it but decided otherwise. “Maybe it will be a cool superpower one day or something, right?”
Sam laughed, shakily. Puck stopped cleaning to stare intently at his locked hands instead, and Kurt heard Finn still whispering under his breath, one, two, three…
Kurt reached out for where he thought Sam’s hand was and spread his own over the back of it, looking at the wall in front of him. He tried to smile when he said, “Maybe.”
-
Sam didn’t make it for the first year of highschool.
He stayed home every day and listened to Finn and Puck and Rachel talk about all the new people when they got home, instead - new friends and new pretty faces and a new world Sam might never get to see. The first few days, Kurt refused to tell him about Mckinley and insisted Sam go through his entire day at home, instead, and it made him laugh, for a while. “Just tell me,” Sam said to him eventually, shrugging, but Kurt thought his eyes might have been watering and couldn’t bring himself to in the end.
“I’d like it better if you were there,” he told him, and he meant it. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d like it much better if he could disappear, too, and all the senior jocks had nowhere to aim their disapproval or disgust and all his friends couldn’t tell when he’d been crying. But that wasn’t a fair thing to say.
He was scared to think Sam ever knew just how much he hated McKinley high. He should have been glad he had the chance to go, and the opportunities there, while Sam was stuck miserable in his house all day long, all week long, all year round. Kurt would only ever let himself cry about how horrible highschool felt in his room, where nobody else was around to judge him or condemn him for it; or for anything else.
Sam heard him through the window, some nights. Kurt didn’t know if he’d secretly wanted him to hear how upset he really was or not, but he knew it changed something in Sam. He was too over-protective, over-affectionate, overly-careful for a thirteen year old to be with his best-friend. He kept secrets.
“That boy’s sweet on you,” Carole whispered to him whenever Sam darted back home for dinner, grabbing at Kurt’s cheeks and laughing when he’d blush all over.
-
Sam still sang whenever he disappeared, only now his voice was this rougher, lovelier thing that gave Kurt a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach to hear. He’d sing to catch Kurt’s attention, but unlike before, he’d take his hand while he spoke to him, and hold it tight even when he reappeared, his cheeks flushed and his grin pulled taut across his face.
“I’m getting better at it, don’t you think?” Sam asked him once, hopefully, but all Kurt could think about was the feeling of Sam’s thumb rubbing circles across the knobs of his knuckles.
-
Sam did get better at it. He learned to control it.
“This isn’t really what I was expecting,” he admitted on his first day of highschool. He pushed his soggy food across his plate and shot Kurt a lopsided, funny smile.
Some girls at the table beside them giggled and watched him. Kurt tried to ignore them, and the way the possibility of them made his insides hurt.
He looked down at the lunch-table instead, grimacing at the sticky soda remains there, his food, and the mess of wrappers Santana made beside him with no intention of cleaning up. “It’s not much.”
Sam laughed, softly. One of his arms disappeared completely and Kurt blinked at him, wide-eyed - although nobody else seemed to notice around them. Kurt felt the pressure of Sam squeezing his hand and squeezed back, reflexively, staring up at Sam, staring back down at him.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Sam said, shrugging, breaking into another crooked, charming grin.
Kurt loved him.
-
Finn and Puck pestered Sam into joining the football team all year. Sam never agreed, even though he loved football and even though Kurt knew he wanted to. Kurt knew Sam wouldn’t join because he hated football players - including Finn and Puck, sometimes. Jocks would call him names, jostle him in the hallways, and snicker about his clothes in classes. Kurt would ignore them; Finn and Puck would eat lunch with them and laugh with them.
“You should just join up already,” he said, feigning absentmindedness and waving a dismissive hand. They were supposed to be studying, but Kurt’s mind kept drifting back to pretty cheerleaders, pretty jocks, all the pretty ways Sam could desert him if he wanted to. His eyes were starting to burn, but he couldn’t stop.
Sam glanced up at him over the book he was pretending to read. He knocked his pen against his teeth for a moment, then paused - a thoughtful pause. “Would you still like me if I did?”
The page Kurt was turning almost tore in his hand. He looked up at Sam, face warm, and swallowed. “Of course,” he said, his voice sounding too throaty and too dry. He smiled, shook his head. “Nothing would change, you know.”
Maybe if he said it aloud it would be true. Maybe if he said it over and over Sam would be all his again, only this tiny little boy sitting on his porch with his legs dangling over it, patiently waiting for him to come home.
“It wouldn’t,” Sam breathed.
Kurt looked down at his page until the words stopped making sense and listened to Sam’s hard, deep breaths until they stopped, and Sam’s soft, shy lips were pressing against his cheek, warmly.
He couldn’t see Sam when he looked up again but - that happened, sometimes, when Sam just couldn’t manage his invisibility, and thankfully it was never around people who didn’t understand it.
“I’ll always like you, Sam,” he murmured, staring back down at his textbook until Sam appeared, again. Smiling.
-
He was forced into watching all of Sam’s games, the same way he was forced because of Finn the year before. His and Sam’s family had their own spot in the stands next to Puck’s mom, so her daughter could play with Stacey whenever she was feeling restless or too bored.
Stevie wasn’t big on football, either. He liked taking off his shoes and climbing onto Kurt’s shoulders and yelling his brother’s name as loudly as he could, but he wasn’t big on the sport, not like his dad or his mom or Burt were.
“I like when he scores, though,” Stevie told him, drowsily. He clung to Kurt’s neck, his little legs hung at Kurt’s sides. He’d get sleepy like this a lot, but Kurt was never too bothered, as long as his dirty sneakers weren’t on.
Kurt laughed and shrugged the shoulder Stevie’s head rested on. “I like that, too.”
He’d seen enough football to know Sam was good for a highschool kid. He would wave a dopey smile at them when he came onto the pitch and blow his mom a kiss, but when he played, it was more aggressively than Kurt could imagine him behaving normally, ever.
A pretty cheerleader gave him a kiss on his cheek at half-time and he looked up at Kurt. The stands chanted his name. He rocketed across the pitch. He revelled in the world, seeing him at last.
And on the final yard he disappeared entirely.
-
He found Sam later, sitting outside his window, beneath the ledge in his planet-patterned pyjamas.
“He always comes home,” Sam’s mom had said earlier, her voice still trembling a little. Kurt had passed Stevie over to her and kissed her cheek goodnight, but he would never know how to reassure Sam’s parents over their son because nobody ever could.
Kurt sighed a pretend sigh and reaches his hand out into the cold air to ruffle Sam’s bangs. He wanted to be mad, as jealous and miserable as he’d been earlier, but he was only relieved to see Sam, again, to feel him against his skin. “I thought you played a good game, you know,” he offered, quietly.
Sam snorted below him. He reached up and fumbled for Kurt’s hand before taking it into his own and humming under his breath. “You have to think that.”
“I don’t have to. I just… feel more inclined to.”
Silence. Sam said nothing, just swayed their linked hands.
Kurt wondered desperately who she was. If Sam ever touched her the same tender, |adoring way he touched him.
“I don’t want a girlfriend,” Sam stated, abruptly. His hand squeezed around Kurt’s.
“Okay,” Kurt said. He wanted to say more. He wanted to ask for more. “Who was that girl?” was all he could manage, at least for now. That was okay, too, that was still a big step for them.
Sam shifted onto his knees until he was facing Kurt through the open window. He ran the hand not tucked in Kurt’s through his messy hair and looked down at the grass beneath him, frowning. “She’s - she wants to date me. We never even talk, or - or anything like that,” he said in a rush, then he shook his head. “I don’t want a girlfriend, Kurt.”
His head tilted back up and he looked Kurt straight in the eye, his gaze hard and searching.
Kurt nodded, slowly. “Okay. That’s okay.”
They sat for a while like that. Sam looked at their tangled hands and breathed from his parted lips in slow, even breaths. Kurt squeezed his limp hand at odd intervals and tried incessantly to smooth down his untidy blond hair, trying not to think too hard about everything for once. It was getting late, but Kurt couldn’t bring himself to mention it, even when he caught Sam blinking himself awake. He just wanted them to stay that way for a little longer.
Sometimes Kurt felt like the entire world was coming between them.
“I think it happens when I’m scared, now,” Sam told him, startling him out of his thoughts. Sam glanced at him, almost timidly, before he continued. “I mean, I can do it on purpose when I want but I do it when I’m scared, too. But tonight it wasn’t that I was scared of losing the game.” He smiled, a little. “I don’t care that I lost the game, not really. I was just - scared of losing…”
He looked at Kurt’s eyes. Kurt’s lips. He squeezed Kurt’s hand like it was all he could do.
“You never have to be,” Kurt promised him, softly. He was smiling, too wide than felt natural on his face, too wide than he should have been at midnight. But Sam was smiling back at him.
-
As they got older, it happened more suddenly. Mostly, it happened in school.
Sam disappeared in the middle of history. Sam went to the bathroom and never seemed to return. Sam caught a football during practice but the only part you could see of him was the ball in his invisible hands.
After a while, Kurt figured out what was scaring him so badly. He stopped taking his invisible hand between classes in the corridors. He stopped smiling at him over his books in the library. He stopped talking to him in front of his jock friends.
Sam just disappeared more and more because of it.
-
Some days, Kurt knew Sam was in his bedroom with him. He was good at keeping still, quiet; but Kurt could always smell the grass on his clothes, the cheap shampoo in his hair, always see the slightest flicker of him in the most inconspicuous tremble of his bedroom curtains.
Once, he heard him.
In the morning after he’d woken up, groggily rubbing his eyes and pasting moisturizer over his face at his vanity, he hadn’t been thinking of Sam, or what Sam could do, or where Sam could be (and if he’d known, he’d have put on his usual show, feigning more grace than came natural to anyone and humming soft songs under his breaths; the awful songs he would hear from Sam’s room window most nights.) It was strange how easy a thing it was to forget - especially on tired, mindless mornings like this. So Kurt stood and carelessly slid off his pyjama shirt, his bottoms, his underwear and socks, and he heard it. A gasp.
Heard Sam, watching him.
He stood frozen for a moment in surprise. Then he dressed himself with deliberate slowness and care: brushing his fingers over the sensitive insides of his thighs while he pulled his boxers on, running a warm hand across his chest before slipping into his t-shirt and sliding his fingers through his hair while he styled it, catching locks of it in his fists every once in a while so it looked tugged on and messy. He could hear Sam when he tried, taking in deep, heavy breaths behind him.
Kurt blinked once. When he looked back into the mirror of his vanity, Sam was standing behind him, his hands balled into fists around the back of Kurt’s seat and his face flushed scarlet with embarrassment.
There was a moment of Sam staring at him intently through the mirror, his bottom lip caught between his teeth while he sucked on it, nervously, his chest heaving with every breath he took and his eyes a little dark - different than Kurt had ever seen them before.
He didn’t want to wait anymore. He was tired of just waiting.
Kurt stood up from his seat to face Sam and looked at him thoughtfully for a second, before surging up on his tip toes to kiss him hard and full on the lips. The force almost knocked Sam back into the shelves behind him, but his hands latched onto Kurt’s waist in time and slid around him, almost painfully tightly, so they were almost painfully close to each other. Sam kissed back the same messy way Kurt kissed him - unpractised and overeager from years and years of thinning patience. Their teeth met, first, then their tongues, and Sam laughed against his mouth at them both, but it sounded more desperate than anything else; Kurt couldn’t laugh back because he had to breathe, and he had to breathe to keep kissing Sam like this. It felt messy and hurried and unlike it looked in the movies Kurt had wished for his first kiss to be like, but it still felt the way he’d always wanted it to: liberating and warm and with Sam, always.
They were only sixteen - or Sam would be too in a few weeks, anyway - but Kurt felt like this had been following them around since the very beginning, since six-year-old Sam Evans knocked on his front door and said through his big crooked smile, my family just moved in next door, want to play Wonder Boy with me?
“I need you so much,” Sam muttered against his lips, lowly. He grabbed Kurt’s face and dragged his shaky thumbs over his cheekbones while he kissed him, slowly and deeply. “I need you so much, sometimes all I can do is sit around, needing you, Kurt.”
Kurt let out a gust of breath and slipped his hands up beneath the front of Sam’s shirt, dragging over the line of his muscles just the right way to make Sam tremble against him. “Why did it take us so long to - oh -“
He felt Sam’s erection pressing against his hip. Sam had gotten hard five minutes ago, watching him undress, watching him strip naked, and now Sam was sucking a line of bruises into his neck and rocking against him insistently, letting out huffs of warm breath and soft whimpers all the way from the back of his throat. His fingertips would leave angry red skin over Kurt’s hipbones tomorrow, and the thought of it alone made him shudder.
Sam pressed his forehead to Kurt’s, his pupils blown wide over his green eyes and lips almost bright red from kissing. He grinned at Kurt like he found something funny. “Please touch me,” he whispered, his breath hitching halfway through his words and his big grin straining a bit. “Please.”
Kurt licked his lips and smiled.
-
Sam was good at sneaking in, of course. He would hop out of his window, climb over the fence and hop into Kurt’s room at night. Kurt’s parents would never see him in the mornings, a space of nothing but air at Kurt’s side while he pretended to sleep and Carole tip-toed inside to steal the hairdryer out of his room. She knew, though. She always knew the things Kurt didn’t want her to know - but at least somebody else knew.
He tried to bring it up one morning: a lazy Saturday under the sheets with Sam, with Finn out with his new girlfriend and his parents getting groceries and far too much to do in his locked bedroom with his best-friend.
“Maybe we should -” Sam licked a wet path down his stomach, looking up at him curiously through his lashes. Kurt shook his head, took a deep breath and tried again. “Maybe we should tell people, now.”
Sam spoke with his mouth against the freckle he’d decided to be fond of on Kurt’s hip. “Well, everyone - they pretty much know, don’t they? I mean everyone kind of expected it, didn’t they?” He dragged his teeth over where Kurt’s hipbone jutted out, humming thoughtfully. “Can’t we just have this?”
Kurt was always afraid of this would happen. Sam’s hands, where they were spread broadly across Kurt’s thighs, faded away slowly before his eyes.
“Why don’t you want people to know?” he asked, his voice neutral. He dropped his hands from Sam’s hair to rest at his own sides, instead, and when Sam looked up at him he couldn’t find it in himself to look back in case when he did, there was nothing left to see.
“It’s not like that,” Sam told him. His voice sounded thick and strange and it made Kurt wince. His hand slid warmly over Kurt’s cheek, but he was half gone, then, too terrified to even talk about it. “Please don’t think I don’t want you or something.”
Kurt smiled thinly and pushed Sam’s hand from his face, nodding. “You don’t want people to know you do.”
The blame could go anywhere. Maybe Sam was too used to disappearing that it was his first choice now. Maybe Sam had always been able to disappear for this very reason, to hide this very thing. Maybe it was Kurt’s fault for letting Sam see his fresh bruises from bullies who hurt him for what he was, what the both were. But Kurt could never disappear, although sometimes it had felt like the safer option to have, because he never wanted to. That was never him.
“Maybe we just shouldn’t, instead,” he said.
Sam had disappeared entirely. Kurt only knew he was there from the way the bedsheets levitated around where his body had been. His breath was still warm against his skin. Kurt felt it stutter there before Sam spoke.
Kurt felt Sam kiss his stomach, lightly, carefully. “I don’t want to be another reason for you getting hurt.”
It had gotten better since Sam showed up, really. Sometimes nobody could protect Kurt, especially himself, he’d learnt; the attacks were always random, malicious things that happen with no preparation, their eyes just landed on the faggy kid alone in between classes and suddenly Kurt was thrown into the nearest set of lockers by two strangers in letterman jackets who he didn’t know and who certainly didn’t know him. He hardly ever told Sam, anymore, or Finn, or Puck or even Santana. It felt weak.
“You’re scared,” Kurt accused him. He felt like crying. “That’s what this is. That’s what it’s always been.”
Sam’s invisible hand threaded through his own. Kurt could feel the weight of his body over his, suddenly, heavy and still reassuring despite himself. “I’m scared, yeah. For the both of us.”
“I’m not scared at all,” Kurt told him, honestly. Kurt was never scared. Kurt was the person in the house who caught the spiders in Finn’s room for him, Kurt was the person who wore zebra-pattern pants to school whenever he felt like it, Kurt was the person who put his hand up in classes to say what nobody else ever seemed to like hearing. Kurt was the person who everybody always thought loved the wrong way, looked the wrong way and talked the wrong way. He knew he could do anything - he always had.
Sam laughed, softly. He kissed both corners of Kurt’s mouth and Kurt hated when he couldn’t see Sam, kissing him, hated it completely. “You’re never scared, though.”
And Sam was always scared.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” Kurt told him. He reached out to cup the sides of his face, brushing back the hair he could feel over Sam’s eyes. He kissed the thin air and it kissed back, desperately.
-
Sam began to flicker on Monday afternoon, in and out of visibility.
“You were right,” he said. He stopped Kurt at his locker and spoke with an apologetic half smile curling at his mouth. When he reached for Kurt’s hand, his own disappeared entirely; the students were used to it, were told not to acknowledge it negatively, the same thing they were told when they harassed Kurt, although with Sam they never could acknowledge it in any manner because they hardly ever noticed it happening.
Sam looked down at where his hand should have been, shaking his head hopelessly and gnawing at his bottom lip. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.” He squeezed Kurt’s hand in his and shut his eyes, willing himself to reappear, and then his whole body began to flicker like a candle about to go out.
“Sam, it’s okay,” Kurt insisted, but Sam had already disappeared, just the pressure of his hand squeezing Kurt’s fist remaining.
Kurt led him outside instead of going to class and took him into his car to kiss him until he showed up again - draped across the backseat of the car with his t-shirt pushed up to bunch at his armpits and his head back, moaning. Kurt freckled the skin of his neck with kisses, the way Sam liked. He could feel it calming him down, the evenness of his breath returning.
“Sometimes I’m scared I’ll never come back,” Sam admitted, quietly.
Sometimes Kurt was, too.
-
Finn would take his girlfriend Rachel out on dates. Sam would take Kurt up to Stacey and Stevie’s room so his sister could fake-marry them and his brother could be best man.
She’d push at Sam’s shoulders after she told him to kiss the groom. He’d always zone out a little after it, staring dopily into Kurt’s face with his lazy grin and bright, happy eyes. When they kissed, it would be light and chaste and Stacey would insist on another, and Stevie would insist this game was stupid, let’s play Kirby.
Sam was never scared in front of his family. He loved them too much, and they loved him the same, and when he took Kurt’s hand at the dinner table Kurt didn’t even think anyone noticed anything out of the ordinary between them. Sam’s dad still talked cars with him, as usual, and Sam’s mom still liked when he helped out around the kitchen afterwards so she could gossip about these parents and this celebrity to him.
Kurt’s family loved Sam, too. A son, Burt said, and Finn had rolled his eyes and said, “You’re really throwing that word around now, huh?” and just laughed when his mom had kicked him, like it was some joke they were all in on.
“I think I’ve loved you forever,” Sam told him, lying across Kurt’s bedroom floor and staring up at him while he sat at his vanity and fixed himself for bed. He kissed the bone of Kurt’s ankle. Sam knew Kurt didn’t like him being invisible around him, and Kurt knew he didn’t, either, so he snuck over less and less, now normally only staying long enough to say goodnight.
Kurt smiled down at him and nudged his jaw up with his foot to look him in the eye. “I think you have, too,” he agreed, nodding.
-
He couldn’t help Sam with it. Sam could hardly help himself anymore, really, but they’d keep trying, and once, Sam even kissed his cheek in front of his teammates before slipping out of sight.
“I’ll protect you,” Kurt told him. They sat outside, their backs pressed to the school building, the weight of Sam’s head spread over his lap, his fingers tangling in the invisible locks of hair. His teachers knew he was with Sam when he wasn’t in class, and since nobody knew the right way to be sensitive about Sam’s condition, they let him away with it, even after most of them caught Kurt clutching the space of air that was Sam’s hand through the halls. There’d be backlash, one day, of course there would be. Sam couldn’t always live safe and hidden - and they both knew he shouldn’t.
Sam faded back in. He was grinning up at Kurt, the sunlight on his face making him squint. “I know you will,” he agreed, softly, and then he took Kurt’s hand into his and kissed the back of it with his smile.