Fic: and remember when i moved in you [1/1]
Media: Fic
Title: and remember when i moved in you
Rating: PG-13 (?)
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Character death
Word Count: 2456
Summary: He’s a sobbing, soaked mess and he’s naked, strung out over his comforter.
AN: So. This is my fic to go along with cacell's absolutely lovely piece of fanart. I went in a rather different direction the other two lovely fics on it and therefore, I'm sorry? Guys, I'm shaking from this and I just want to go call my best friend and curl up and cry for a little bit.
Title comes from Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" which I sobbed though listened to while writing this, along with "Not Alone" by Darren Criss, "Let It Be" by The Beatles and "I Wanna Hold You Hand" by The Beatles (but sung by Chris Colfer); in case you're interested.
It’s not like Kurt to mope. He is not one to wallow and sulk and recite soliloquies or anything like that. He copes through competency. He makes lists and phone calls and plans and keeps himself in a state of perpetual motion. Like a shark: if he stops, he’ll die. If he gives himself one second to slow down and think and grieve, he won’t make it. He can’t afford himself that so he keeps moving.
He keeps moving but there’s nothing for him to do this time.
With his father, it was easy. That was his responsibility. He had things to do then because it was his father who was sick so it was his job to call family and check in with the nurses and doctors and do research of his own on the internet and make sure everything was ready for when his father would be coming home. But this time… This time all that is someone else’s job. Except, well, the jobs are different this time. The jobs are different because the situation is different and the family all knows and the doctors and nurse have done all they can and the internet hasn’t served a cure for this yet and no one will be coming home from this.
So instead of doing things, Kurt just does. He makes sure he keeps on living and all. Keeps his spine straight, shoulders back, chin up, upper-lip stiff and eyes dry. And everyone around him keeps telling him that it’s okay and they won’t think any less of him if he cries and he should be crying, they would be crying right now if they were him, sobbing in fact, and did he need a hug or anything? Mercedes asked him to pray with her and he wanted to scream because didn’t he make how he felt about all that abundantly clear when his father had his heart attack?
And he hates all the platitudes he receives and all the apologetic looks and sympathy and Rachel hasn’t stopped crying since and even Quinn shed a few tears on his shoulder. And he doesn’t want to be bitter about their grief; he really doesn’t, because he was their friend too. It’s just when Finn hesitantly approached the threshold to his bedroom and shifted awkwardly, he said, “I can’t imagine how you’re handling it all, dude,” and “I don’t know what I would do if Rachel…you know.” And that was the only time Kurt lost his cool since he heard the news. He told Finn to just get out and Finn didn’t listen and so Kurt screamed it and reached for the nearest thing he could grab to throw at his stepbrother. Except that happened to be a throw pillow, so no satisfying damage was done, aside from getting Finn to leave.
Kurt wanted to fall apart then. He wanted to scream some more, until his throat bled and he didn’t have his voice anymore (that “voice of an angel,” as he had said more than once, adoring gaze on Kurt and Kurt had thought it was all too good to be true and now, of course, he knew it was). He wanted to scream and kick things and cry and destroy his room like he had a few days after his mother’s funeral. He wanted to slam himself up small into the corner of his room and fold into himself, crying, until there was nothing left inside of him and he crumpled away and never had to feel this way again.
Because who the hell - no, who the fuck did Finn think he was, saying that? How could he even compare what Kurt lost to what Finn would lose if he lost Rachel? The relationships weren’t similar in the slightest. Finn and Rachel got broken up and back together more times than pairs of shoes Kurt owns and neither of them really knew how they felt about each other. Not with things like Quinn and popularity and Santana and Glee Club and Jesse St. James and Puck and everything else getting in the way. What Kurt had was something pure. Something so much more sacred than anything anyone else in Glee had ever had. Anyone else at McKinley had. Could ever hope to have. Because it wasn’t based on what other people thought or jealousy and it wasn’t impatient or rushed or hiding any motives. It was just two people, two best friends, loving each other and supporting each other and helping each other and making each other laugh and wanting the best for each other.
And so how dare Finn compare it to him and Rachel? A relationship so petty and catty and juvenile and Blaine is dead, for Christsakes .
It suddenly hits Kurt harder than Karofsky ever did.
Blaine is dead. Blaine, Blaine, his wonderful, beautiful, smiling, trying-so-hard, perfect Blaine. Who had waited and made him wait and kept him honest and had been honest in return and who was hopelessly confused and clueless and did his absolute best at loving Kurt and his best was better than anyone else’s, it was the best and Jesus, now Kurt’s crying.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table with his cell phone idling in front of him (had was been planning on calling Blaine’s little sister because they got fairly close and he knows the teen must be devastated by all this and it’s at least something Kurt can do) and his fingers digging so tightly into his expensive, fire-engine-red jeans that he thinks he might tear through the stitching and he’s crying. He’s crying because he stopped doing for half a second and started thinking and feeling instead. He gives these hiccupped little gasps, trying to keep the emotion out of himself, or maybe inside himself, when a hand drops on his shoulder.
He jerks and whimpers a little at the intrusion and turns to find his father there. Burt looks broken by the expression on his son’s face and Kurt immediately tries to straighten himself out. “Son,” Burt says in a strained voice. “Kurt.”
Kurt just shakes his head and picks up his phone. “No, I’m fine. I’m fine.” And he wipes the few tears that managed to escape off his cheeks, swallows past the pain in his throat and scrolls aimlessly through his contacts just to have something to focus on other than the searing in his stomach. His hands are shaking like he just missed a note in a solo but he ignores it.
“Kurt,” his father says again, sharper and he walks around in front him, putting his hands on Kurt’s shoulders and leveling him with a look. “You don’t have to do this, you know. I don’t want you to. You… You can’t be this way, Kurt. You’re hurting and if you don’t do something about it, you’re… I’m worried what’ll happen.”
Kurt pulls a scowl and lets his phone clatter to the tabletop. “Why? Why do I need to do something about it? Do what? Dad, what will me crying help? What will matter if I sob my eyes out or sit here and handle this like an adult?”
Burt’s face is a map of disbelief at that and he shakes his head. “Like an adult? Kurt, I cried like a baby when we lost your mom. It doesn’t make you any less of a man. Dammit Kurt, do you think Blaine would want you to sit around killing yourself from the inside out?”
A long, tense silence stretches taut between them at that. Kurt pushes his chair out and rises primly, taking a stabilizing inhale. “Blaine would want me to have courage,” is all he says before walking mechanically through the kitchen, up the stairs and into his room. He doesn’t see his father bury his face into his hands, ever-present ball-cap going askew, and give a shuddery, torn breath. Locking his door, Kurt immediately begins undoing his clothes. He needs a shower. A scalding hot shower and if he cries it will be from the sting of heat and then he can get out of the shower and…do something. He’ll find something. Anything.
His clothes leave a trail from his door to his bathroom and he’s under the hot spray without any in between. And he’s not thinking about him and Blaine sharing this shower, pressing fingers to each other’s lips in an effort to shush the giggles that kept dropping with the water-drops. He’s not thinking about Blaine’s soap-slipped fingertips gliding and barely touching his sides as they coasted up, numbering ribs, making Kurt shiver even in the steam and heat. He’s not thinking about the steam and heat rising from the blacktop as he and Blaine lie together in the grass of the local park just a few months ago at the peak of summer. He’s not thinking about lying in Blaine’s bed, tracing the contours of Blaine’s face while Blaine’s breathing hitched and faltered underneath him. He’s not thinking of his own faltering steps when Blaine pulled him close one afternoon in the spring and spun them into a slow dance. He’s not thinking of being paired up with Blaine to dance the choreography for some song in Glee that they’ll never perform now. He’s not thinking of performing all the countless duets he and Blaine had performed together. He’s not thinking of Blaine picking at a guitar hesitantly, singing nonsense words that morph into Top 40s ballads that stream into 1940s croons that falls finally to his own, original words and notes. He’s not thinking about the song that Blaine wrote, that Blaine had denied being for Kurt, it was about Kurt, which is very different.
He’s not thinking about any of that as his wet grip fumbles hopelessly with the faucet handle, cutting the water, sobs rippling through his body like his reflection in the blurry chrome. He trips out of the basin and slips-slides-stumbles-steadies on the tiled floor, not stopping as he moves for his bed. He’s wet and overheated and his hair needs to be dried or else it will be a wreck but Kurt can’t be bothered with that. His father’s words are echoing in his head and the slideshow of his relationship with Blaine is echoing through his heart, through his very basic, entire being and he only wishes he were killing himself from the inside out, literally, because then this would be over at some point and it would be done and wouldn’t have to think or feel.
But then he thinks of Blaine and the text messages from the childhood of their relationship and “courage” flashes in his mind and he breaks.
He’s a sobbing, soaked mess and he’s naked, strung out over his comforter. He’s Heather Locklear in every Lifetime movie she’s ever been in and he doesn’t want to feel like this. He doesn’t want this ache to be in him like this and more than anything he wishes Blaine were here. He wishes Blaine were here with him, next to him, lounged alongside him, one hand resting soothingly on his side, tender with Kurt’s vulnerability. Kurt’s fist closes spasmodically on the fabric of his pillowcase because suddenly he can feel that. He can feel Blaine touching him, all gentle and patient and everything inside hurts like the building pressure of a clogged pipe and he think he might explode from it all inside of him and then, like a fault in that pipe breaking, he leaks out at the seams. Everything inside of him stretches and bloats and he gives.
He’s a crying newborn on his bed and his face is so unattractively blotchy, he’s sure, and buried into his pillow and he can’t really breath between the suffocation of the pillow and the suffocation of the inhale-inhales and the suffocation of the absolute fucking grief that he can’t get a grasp on. He’s making these terrible noises like a dying engine, half between a moan and a whine. He gives a full-body shudder and then he twitches and turns, balances on one hip and brings his knees to his chest, curling into fetal position like that will protect him from this reality.
At some point, he’s not sure when, he starts talking. To Blaine, at first and then to his father and then to Blaine again and then to no one in particular except maybe this God everyone seems convinced of or, if not that, then just the universe in general. And he’s cursing and shouting in broken words, asking why him, why this, why his life has to be the cosmic screw-up where he gets the shit end of every stick. Why every good thing he has gets taken away from him or tainted in some way. And some part of him, some little boy part of him - the same part that believed Momma was going to come waltzing back through the front door, all smiles and sundresses, like she never left - is spouting out fantasies and hopes, making him want to believe that it can’t be true. Blaine can’t be dead, he just can’t be, even though Kurt touched the cold wrist in the casket, even though he watched the casket being lowered into the earth. (And, fuck, he looked so goddamn beautiful on that day that Kurt nearly bit a hole through his cheek to keep himself from crying.) Blaine’s not dead, he’s coming back. There’s some convoluted plot that not even the Disney Channel would buy for one of its teenybopper primetime original movies that’s made Blaine make everyone who loves him believe that he’s dead.
Except that hurts more because Kurt knows it’s not true; it’s not happening. Blaine’s not coming back.
So he curls himself up tighter and cries harder until he thinks he might be nauseas from it. He cries until his heat-raw fingers ache and burn from digging into the sheets and until he’s hyperventilating and his head is dizzy and ten feet higher than the rest of his body. He cries until he’s exhausted and his head is pounding and his heart is too and he falls asleep.
And, he’s tired and altered so he can’t be sure, but he thinks, just before he drifts off to the other side of consciousness, that he hears someone humming Teenage Dream and that he feels the swipe of gentle, patient fingertips brushing over the hollows under his eyes, the press of dry, sweet lips to the corner of his mouth.
But he’s tired and altered and overheated anyway, so it must just be a trick of the buzzing in his ears, must be the water droplets sliding over his skin.
Title: and remember when i moved in you
Rating: PG-13 (?)
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Character death
Word Count: 2456
Summary: He’s a sobbing, soaked mess and he’s naked, strung out over his comforter.
AN: So. This is my fic to go along with cacell's absolutely lovely piece of fanart. I went in a rather different direction the other two lovely fics on it and therefore, I'm sorry? Guys, I'm shaking from this and I just want to go call my best friend and curl up and cry for a little bit.
Title comes from Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" which I sobbed though listened to while writing this, along with "Not Alone" by Darren Criss, "Let It Be" by The Beatles and "I Wanna Hold You Hand" by The Beatles (but sung by Chris Colfer); in case you're interested.
It’s not like Kurt to mope. He is not one to wallow and sulk and recite soliloquies or anything like that. He copes through competency. He makes lists and phone calls and plans and keeps himself in a state of perpetual motion. Like a shark: if he stops, he’ll die. If he gives himself one second to slow down and think and grieve, he won’t make it. He can’t afford himself that so he keeps moving.
He keeps moving but there’s nothing for him to do this time.
With his father, it was easy. That was his responsibility. He had things to do then because it was his father who was sick so it was his job to call family and check in with the nurses and doctors and do research of his own on the internet and make sure everything was ready for when his father would be coming home. But this time… This time all that is someone else’s job. Except, well, the jobs are different this time. The jobs are different because the situation is different and the family all knows and the doctors and nurse have done all they can and the internet hasn’t served a cure for this yet and no one will be coming home from this.
So instead of doing things, Kurt just does. He makes sure he keeps on living and all. Keeps his spine straight, shoulders back, chin up, upper-lip stiff and eyes dry. And everyone around him keeps telling him that it’s okay and they won’t think any less of him if he cries and he should be crying, they would be crying right now if they were him, sobbing in fact, and did he need a hug or anything? Mercedes asked him to pray with her and he wanted to scream because didn’t he make how he felt about all that abundantly clear when his father had his heart attack?
And he hates all the platitudes he receives and all the apologetic looks and sympathy and Rachel hasn’t stopped crying since and even Quinn shed a few tears on his shoulder. And he doesn’t want to be bitter about their grief; he really doesn’t, because he was their friend too. It’s just when Finn hesitantly approached the threshold to his bedroom and shifted awkwardly, he said, “I can’t imagine how you’re handling it all, dude,” and “I don’t know what I would do if Rachel…you know.” And that was the only time Kurt lost his cool since he heard the news. He told Finn to just get out and Finn didn’t listen and so Kurt screamed it and reached for the nearest thing he could grab to throw at his stepbrother. Except that happened to be a throw pillow, so no satisfying damage was done, aside from getting Finn to leave.
Kurt wanted to fall apart then. He wanted to scream some more, until his throat bled and he didn’t have his voice anymore (that “voice of an angel,” as he had said more than once, adoring gaze on Kurt and Kurt had thought it was all too good to be true and now, of course, he knew it was). He wanted to scream and kick things and cry and destroy his room like he had a few days after his mother’s funeral. He wanted to slam himself up small into the corner of his room and fold into himself, crying, until there was nothing left inside of him and he crumpled away and never had to feel this way again.
Because who the hell - no, who the fuck did Finn think he was, saying that? How could he even compare what Kurt lost to what Finn would lose if he lost Rachel? The relationships weren’t similar in the slightest. Finn and Rachel got broken up and back together more times than pairs of shoes Kurt owns and neither of them really knew how they felt about each other. Not with things like Quinn and popularity and Santana and Glee Club and Jesse St. James and Puck and everything else getting in the way. What Kurt had was something pure. Something so much more sacred than anything anyone else in Glee had ever had. Anyone else at McKinley had. Could ever hope to have. Because it wasn’t based on what other people thought or jealousy and it wasn’t impatient or rushed or hiding any motives. It was just two people, two best friends, loving each other and supporting each other and helping each other and making each other laugh and wanting the best for each other.
And so how dare Finn compare it to him and Rachel? A relationship so petty and catty and juvenile and Blaine is dead, for Christsakes .
It suddenly hits Kurt harder than Karofsky ever did.
Blaine is dead. Blaine, Blaine, his wonderful, beautiful, smiling, trying-so-hard, perfect Blaine. Who had waited and made him wait and kept him honest and had been honest in return and who was hopelessly confused and clueless and did his absolute best at loving Kurt and his best was better than anyone else’s, it was the best and Jesus, now Kurt’s crying.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table with his cell phone idling in front of him (had was been planning on calling Blaine’s little sister because they got fairly close and he knows the teen must be devastated by all this and it’s at least something Kurt can do) and his fingers digging so tightly into his expensive, fire-engine-red jeans that he thinks he might tear through the stitching and he’s crying. He’s crying because he stopped doing for half a second and started thinking and feeling instead. He gives these hiccupped little gasps, trying to keep the emotion out of himself, or maybe inside himself, when a hand drops on his shoulder.
He jerks and whimpers a little at the intrusion and turns to find his father there. Burt looks broken by the expression on his son’s face and Kurt immediately tries to straighten himself out. “Son,” Burt says in a strained voice. “Kurt.”
Kurt just shakes his head and picks up his phone. “No, I’m fine. I’m fine.” And he wipes the few tears that managed to escape off his cheeks, swallows past the pain in his throat and scrolls aimlessly through his contacts just to have something to focus on other than the searing in his stomach. His hands are shaking like he just missed a note in a solo but he ignores it.
“Kurt,” his father says again, sharper and he walks around in front him, putting his hands on Kurt’s shoulders and leveling him with a look. “You don’t have to do this, you know. I don’t want you to. You… You can’t be this way, Kurt. You’re hurting and if you don’t do something about it, you’re… I’m worried what’ll happen.”
Kurt pulls a scowl and lets his phone clatter to the tabletop. “Why? Why do I need to do something about it? Do what? Dad, what will me crying help? What will matter if I sob my eyes out or sit here and handle this like an adult?”
Burt’s face is a map of disbelief at that and he shakes his head. “Like an adult? Kurt, I cried like a baby when we lost your mom. It doesn’t make you any less of a man. Dammit Kurt, do you think Blaine would want you to sit around killing yourself from the inside out?”
A long, tense silence stretches taut between them at that. Kurt pushes his chair out and rises primly, taking a stabilizing inhale. “Blaine would want me to have courage,” is all he says before walking mechanically through the kitchen, up the stairs and into his room. He doesn’t see his father bury his face into his hands, ever-present ball-cap going askew, and give a shuddery, torn breath. Locking his door, Kurt immediately begins undoing his clothes. He needs a shower. A scalding hot shower and if he cries it will be from the sting of heat and then he can get out of the shower and…do something. He’ll find something. Anything.
His clothes leave a trail from his door to his bathroom and he’s under the hot spray without any in between. And he’s not thinking about him and Blaine sharing this shower, pressing fingers to each other’s lips in an effort to shush the giggles that kept dropping with the water-drops. He’s not thinking about Blaine’s soap-slipped fingertips gliding and barely touching his sides as they coasted up, numbering ribs, making Kurt shiver even in the steam and heat. He’s not thinking about the steam and heat rising from the blacktop as he and Blaine lie together in the grass of the local park just a few months ago at the peak of summer. He’s not thinking about lying in Blaine’s bed, tracing the contours of Blaine’s face while Blaine’s breathing hitched and faltered underneath him. He’s not thinking of his own faltering steps when Blaine pulled him close one afternoon in the spring and spun them into a slow dance. He’s not thinking of being paired up with Blaine to dance the choreography for some song in Glee that they’ll never perform now. He’s not thinking of performing all the countless duets he and Blaine had performed together. He’s not thinking of Blaine picking at a guitar hesitantly, singing nonsense words that morph into Top 40s ballads that stream into 1940s croons that falls finally to his own, original words and notes. He’s not thinking about the song that Blaine wrote, that Blaine had denied being for Kurt, it was about Kurt, which is very different.
He’s not thinking about any of that as his wet grip fumbles hopelessly with the faucet handle, cutting the water, sobs rippling through his body like his reflection in the blurry chrome. He trips out of the basin and slips-slides-stumbles-steadies on the tiled floor, not stopping as he moves for his bed. He’s wet and overheated and his hair needs to be dried or else it will be a wreck but Kurt can’t be bothered with that. His father’s words are echoing in his head and the slideshow of his relationship with Blaine is echoing through his heart, through his very basic, entire being and he only wishes he were killing himself from the inside out, literally, because then this would be over at some point and it would be done and wouldn’t have to think or feel.
But then he thinks of Blaine and the text messages from the childhood of their relationship and “courage” flashes in his mind and he breaks.
He’s a sobbing, soaked mess and he’s naked, strung out over his comforter. He’s Heather Locklear in every Lifetime movie she’s ever been in and he doesn’t want to feel like this. He doesn’t want this ache to be in him like this and more than anything he wishes Blaine were here. He wishes Blaine were here with him, next to him, lounged alongside him, one hand resting soothingly on his side, tender with Kurt’s vulnerability. Kurt’s fist closes spasmodically on the fabric of his pillowcase because suddenly he can feel that. He can feel Blaine touching him, all gentle and patient and everything inside hurts like the building pressure of a clogged pipe and he think he might explode from it all inside of him and then, like a fault in that pipe breaking, he leaks out at the seams. Everything inside of him stretches and bloats and he gives.
He’s a crying newborn on his bed and his face is so unattractively blotchy, he’s sure, and buried into his pillow and he can’t really breath between the suffocation of the pillow and the suffocation of the inhale-inhales and the suffocation of the absolute fucking grief that he can’t get a grasp on. He’s making these terrible noises like a dying engine, half between a moan and a whine. He gives a full-body shudder and then he twitches and turns, balances on one hip and brings his knees to his chest, curling into fetal position like that will protect him from this reality.
At some point, he’s not sure when, he starts talking. To Blaine, at first and then to his father and then to Blaine again and then to no one in particular except maybe this God everyone seems convinced of or, if not that, then just the universe in general. And he’s cursing and shouting in broken words, asking why him, why this, why his life has to be the cosmic screw-up where he gets the shit end of every stick. Why every good thing he has gets taken away from him or tainted in some way. And some part of him, some little boy part of him - the same part that believed Momma was going to come waltzing back through the front door, all smiles and sundresses, like she never left - is spouting out fantasies and hopes, making him want to believe that it can’t be true. Blaine can’t be dead, he just can’t be, even though Kurt touched the cold wrist in the casket, even though he watched the casket being lowered into the earth. (And, fuck, he looked so goddamn beautiful on that day that Kurt nearly bit a hole through his cheek to keep himself from crying.) Blaine’s not dead, he’s coming back. There’s some convoluted plot that not even the Disney Channel would buy for one of its teenybopper primetime original movies that’s made Blaine make everyone who loves him believe that he’s dead.
Except that hurts more because Kurt knows it’s not true; it’s not happening. Blaine’s not coming back.
So he curls himself up tighter and cries harder until he thinks he might be nauseas from it. He cries until his heat-raw fingers ache and burn from digging into the sheets and until he’s hyperventilating and his head is dizzy and ten feet higher than the rest of his body. He cries until he’s exhausted and his head is pounding and his heart is too and he falls asleep.
And, he’s tired and altered so he can’t be sure, but he thinks, just before he drifts off to the other side of consciousness, that he hears someone humming Teenage Dream and that he feels the swipe of gentle, patient fingertips brushing over the hollows under his eyes, the press of dry, sweet lips to the corner of his mouth.
But he’s tired and altered and overheated anyway, so it must just be a trick of the buzzing in his ears, must be the water droplets sliding over his skin.