A/N: Written for the Kurtoberfest prompt "holiday recipes".
Warning for angst and mention of Finn passing.
Rare pair: Kurt and Carole
Kurt stumbles up the stairs to his loft, balancing an armful of packages from work along with two reusable cloth bags filled with candy for the night's Trick-or-Treaters. Last year, he underestimated the amount of kids that would make their way up to the loft and didn't buy nearly enough.
That turned out to be a mistake he doesn't want to repeat.
It took him a full day to scrub the dried egg off his loft door, courtesy of a gang of displeased fifth graders from down the block.
He reaches for the handle to his door, able to grip it only with his fingertips, and slides it open, not registering until he does that the door should be locked. He lifts his eyes over his packages and sees her sitting there, alone at the kitchen table, staring off into space. He sighs, with relief and with guilt. He's had so much on his mind today, he forgot that Carole was there, hanging out at the loft while his dad attended some convention downtown.
"Hey, Carole," he says, putting his packages and his bags down on the closest flea market chair, and bending down to give her a kiss on the cheek. She startles at the touch of his lips on her skin, and he suspects that he's just interrupted some daydream of Finn. He looks up at her line of sight and sees Finn's camo coat, hanging on a coat tree in the corner. He had completely forgot to put it away before she came. He could kick himself for forgetting. She was here to forget about her problems, not relive them. "How's your day been so far?"
"It's been…pleasant," she says in a way that makes Kurt not believe her. "Quiet."
Ah. Kurt knows that when she says quiet like that, what she really means is lonely.
"Did you get a chance to go sightseeing like you wanted to?" Kurt asks, heading to the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on since the mug in front of her looks like it's been cold and empty for a while.
"I did," she says, smiling at the prospect of a fresh cup, especially the way Kurt makes it, which, she has to admit, is far superior to her coffee-making technique. "I stumbled across a little farmer's market on the way back, and I picked up a few things."
"Good," Kurt says with a smile. It's nice to know that Carole was up and about. After Finn passed, it was hard for her to get back into the swing of things. At first, she threw herself into her work, taking extra shifts where she could to keep her mind occupied. But being a nurse in a hospital, watching sick and injured children come through the E.R. every day, some of them not leaving again, she couldn't handle it. She eventually asked for a leave of absence. But without her job to go to, she spent a lot of time shut up in the house alone, going through old scrapbooks and photo albums, crying herself to sleep with them open in her lap. Which was one of the reasons Kurt's dad brought her along to this convention. It was only two days in New York City, but it was something else to do than sit on the sofa and stare off into space.
The way she was when Kurt walked through the door.
Baby steps, though.
He understands how small those steps can be.
Kurt takes a deep breath in as the coffee starts to steam, and catches a whiff of something else lingering in the air.
"Carole?" he says, his lips curling into a hopeful grin. "Have you been baking?"
"Maybe," she says, smiling, but not catching his eyes.
"Yay!" he says. "I've missed your baking." He sees the oven door open a hair, obviously to let whatever was setting inside cool. He walks over and opens it a bit more, breathing in the aromas percolating inside. "What in the world is that" - Kurt stops breathing in. It's a fight or flight reflex, but it doesn't come fast enough because he almost retches. Apparently, first impressions are deceiving. What originally smelled warm and inviting, on second pass, smells…grossly unappetizing – "interesting odor?"
"Yeah," Carole says, chuckling awkwardly. "I made that. Sorry."
"No," Kurt says, quick to cover, "no sorry. It smells…" Kurt attempts another sniff, to play off his initial response, but his body puts its foot down and says no.
"Awful," Carole says, getting up from her seat and joining Kurt in the kitchen.
"I wouldn't say…" Kurt doesn't finish when Carole shoots him a look, one that demands that she not be patronized. "Yes," he says. "Awful just about covers it."
"Well, Finn actually invented it," she explains, "when he was little." She grabs the pot holders and bumps Kurt aside with her hip. He takes a step to his left, opening the oven the rest of the way so she can pull her pie out. "He called it Hand Me Down pie."
Kurt scrunches his nose as the creation in the metal pie tin passes under his nose, the custard in the center a dark, muddy, molasses brown, with some kind of unidentifiable lumps breaking through the crystallized surface.
"Why did he call it that?" Kurt asks, following Carole to the table, pinching his nose, not entirely used to the smell. She holds the pie about a foot above the top and then drops it. Kurt runs to rescue his table top from the mess of flying custard, but to his surprise, it doesn't move.
"Because when he was little," she says, re-taking her seat, "every Christmas and Thanksgiving, he'd ask me to make about a dozen different pies. But I couldn't. I didn't have the time, or the money."
Kurt chuckles. Hand it to Finn to make his mom bankrupt over pie.
"So, he got the bright idea one year to take everything he loved from every pie he'd ever eaten, plus uh…maybe a few other odd ingredients."
Kurt, pulling out his chair to sit, stops and raises a brow. "What other odd ingredients?"
"Just things he found interesting, or funny. Let's see, one year there was cumin, and another Cream of Tartar. Oh, and then there was the toothpaste."
"Toothpaste?"
"Don't worry," Carole says, pulling out two forks from a holder in the center of the table, "we stopped putting toothpaste in it years ago."
"Great," Kurt says, taking the fork she puts in his hand as a cue to give this catastrophe a try. He wasn't sure that he should, or that it would be safe, but he can't say no. This is important to Carole, sharing this memory with him. Besides, it's Finn. For as much as Kurt knew Finn, now that he's gone, he knows he can't learn too much. If this pie is a part of knowing Finn, then he's going to try it, even if it might give him listeria.
He breaks through the hard crusty surface with his fork, releasing a whole slew of stronger smells, none of them delightful. It's strange that a pie made up of parts of other pies could look like sludge and smell so rotten. Kurt's seen Finn eat pie before. What were his favorites? Peach, blueberry, apple, pumpkin, pecan…nothing too outrageous. With careful planning, those ingredients could be combined to make a halfway decent dessert.
But then there's the toothpaste.
And the cumin.
And…is that allspice he smells?
Kurt brings the fork to his face and tries to take a bite. Carole's already had three, and she's not vomiting profusely, so it can't be that bad.
Kurt slips the piece of pie past his lips.
And like many other assumptions he's had in the last few years, he couldn't be more wrong.
"Oh, wow," Kurt says, trying hard not to sound appalled, "that has got to be…"
"The worst thing you've ever tasted?" Carole laughs.
"How did you ever guess?" Kurt asks. He holds a hand over his mouth, looking for a napkin, or a trashcan to spit in to, but that seems sacrilege. It might be disgusting, but he can't just spit it out. This is something Finn created. Kurt will have to knuckle it down. Now if he can explain that to his esophageal process, he'll be golden.
"Yeah, it is that," Carole agrees. "But we made it every year, and we ate the whole thing."
"And how many times did you have to get your stomach pumped?" Kurt asks around the bite that still won't go down.
"Only once," she says. "The year of the chocolate laxative incident."
Kurt chortles, and Carole wipes a tear from her eyes. It's not necessarily a happy tear, but Kurt barely notices. Banishing the occasional tear has become like blinking and breathing for all of them. After about a hundred, it's nothing but a reflex now, no longer an event.
"He would tweak a few things here and there, take out stuff he'd grown out of, add stuff he thought might make it better." She points at the pie with her fork. "This is pretty much the final rendition of it. He never did the chance to perfect it."
Kurt nods, regarding the pie thoughtfully as his mostly digested piece finally makes its way down his gullet. Ridiculously, he takes another forkful and puts it in his mouth, openly grimacing now that he knows he doesn't need to fake liking it for Carole's sake.
"You know," Kurt says, struggling to swallow his bite, but his body doesn't seem to want to let him, "I think I know a way we can fix it."
"Really?" Carole asks with a surprised look. She should have guessed that if someone could fix Finn's horrible recipe, it would be Kurt. They had that effect on each other, Kurt and Finn, playing off one another's strengths and weaknesses.
"Yeah." Kurt goes in for another bite, a small one, to get the flavors on his tongue and sort them out in his head. "It wouldn't take much."
"Wow," Carole says. "To tell you the truth, I never gave much thought to trying to fix it after he…but maybe that would be…"
Carole nods at the idea.
Kurt nods back.
Carole looks at Kurt.
Kurt looks at Carole.
They both side-eye the pie, sitting on the kitchen table with a few bites taken out of it, waiting for them to make a decision on its fate.
But at the exact same moment, both of them realize that it's not really their decision to make.
"Nah," Kurt and Carole remark in unison, chuckling when they discover they'd had the same idea.
"It wouldn't be the same," Kurt says, going in for another bite, needing another taste of it. Yup. It's just as vile as before, but somehow, it's Finn. Every bit of it. It's sweet and sour and tart. Parts of it are delicious and then others don't match up. There are flavors that compliment each other, or taste like they should, and the rest are all over the place. But most of all, he can't eat it without giggling, and that might be what he likes about it, why he keeps going in for bite after bite, even after his stomach starts to gurgle. "Oh my God," he chuckles, putting a hand over his mouth as he laughs, swallowing as fast he can to be rid of it. "I'll be tasting that for days."
"I know," she says, taking another bite and snorting a laugh. "It kind of sticks with you."