AN: A one-shot, something a little different than my other stories. Reviews always appreciated!
Happiness stumbled over him, unaware of its course.
He wasn't sure if it would stay at first, but, rather than dusting itself off and continuing on its way, it lay down beside him, hands crossed over its stomach.
"You know the point isn't to literally make people 'fall head-over-heels', right?" it asked him.
When he got up from the grass, he invited it to follow him. He wasn't entirely sure where he was going, but happiness was more than willing to take over, guiding him through swimming sidewalks and noise-infested streets, until they finally reached what he was informed would be his happy place.
It turned out his happy place served artisan roast coffee and smelled like blueberry muffins, and had a jolly woman with a belly laugh working the front counter.
He bought happiness a coffee, and they sat down to talk; after all, it had been a while since they'd last met.
They talked about failed dreams and shitty jobs and second chances. They talked about how life was not so bad but also not so good, and how they were racing against time and how time always seemed to win, and how he'd never replied to happiness's Facebook friend request from years ago (he'd been busy).
"Are you happy?" happiness asked him out of the blue.
"I don't know," he'd replied. "Is it really that important, being happy, do you think? Couldn't it be enough to just be…okay?"
Looking back, he was glad that at the time he hadn't known that he was talking to happiness (it had never properly introduced itself), because if he'd known, he would have very likely screwed everything up somehow – he'd never been very good at keeping happiness around.
But as it was, he hadn't known, and he didn't screw it up, and happiness said it would see him again soon, and he believed it.
Happiness sent him another friend request, and this time he accepted.
He didn't always find happiness when he went to his happy place, but it was often enough that happiness burst in, flustered after a busy day of fixing people, that he came regularly anyway.
"Do you live here?" it asked him once, "because I literally always see you here now."
"Only on weekdays. On the weekends, I sleep in that Thai place across the street," he'd replied, and happiness sent him a haughty glare. It liked to do that a lot, send him glares, but no matter what he said, it always stayed, so he figured he didn't have to worry about that too much.
Happiness cursed a lot more than he remembered.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" it said in frustration as it scrambled all of its stuff together from the floor. "I'm already ten minutes late!"
"Hey, High School Musical! Why don't you apologize?" he'd said to the lanky teen that had run head-on into happiness a moment ago and was trying to sneak out unnoticed. Who the hell just pushed happiness over without apologizing, anyway?
"Sorry," the teen had muttered, hands shoved into his pockets, eyes trained down.
"It's alright," happiness huffed, finally gathering its refilled bag from the floor, and the teen slipped out of the door without a look back.
"Prepubescent asshole," he'd said, and happiness had given him another one of its glares, but this one had a hidden smile – he liked the hidden smiles more than the obvious ones.
"He's just a kid," happiness said, slinging its bag over its shoulder. "Besides, I hate my job. Probably why I'm always late."
Happiness liked to take him to ballets every once in a while, and he liked to listen to happiness explaining the history behind the scores and the composers to him.
"Why are ballets always so sad?" happiness whispered to him during Romeo and Juliet.
"Because unlike musicals, they represent real life," he'd replied. Happiness had shaken its head disapprovingly and fallen silent.
A few minutes later, however, it leaned over to him again. "If that's true, you get the knife and I get the poison," it whispered.
Happiness had promised to stay (not in so many words, but it had always been implied, he'd thought), so it felt like a loss of the worst kind when it suddenly announced it was leaving him.
"Why can't you be happy for me?" it asked, shoulders sagging more with each second that passed. It had looked so excited when it burst in to tell him the news, but that excitement was now fading away in front of him, slipping through the cracks of the floorboard and the fingers of his hand, and how could happiness ask him to be happy for something that, by definition, was its very opposite?
He didn't want to hurt happiness, but he ended up doing it anyways, because he never had quite learned how to deal with his emotions.
"I thought we were friends?" happiness asked him, but he'd thought they weren't, and he said so, and happiness entirely misunderstood what he'd meant.
"The sad thing is, I would have been happy for you," happiness said quietly, crescent tears in the corner of its eyes – except that wasn't the sad thing at all, not to him.
When he didn't say anything, happiness got up from the table, without another word or glance, and the door slammed shut behind it with the usual tinkle of bell.
He was terrified that happiness would leave without saying goodbye, but it knocked on his door one morning.
"I'll miss you," happiness said softly, and hugged him, and he wanted to pull it into his apartment and make it stay there, with him, forever.
But happiness pulled back, and the moment was over, and it gave him a teary smile that was hardly any consolation.
"I'll see you again soon," it promised (but this time he didn't believe it).
He tried to convince himself that it hadn't really been happiness after all – it had been something else, masquerading as happiness. And most nights, he could convince himself, but some nights were just so starkly lit by shimmery moonlight that everything was too honest and too clear.
He didn't spend his time alone. He met indifference, but whenever he stayed the night with it, it left him unsatisfied. He also met adequacy, and lust, and ecstasy, but all of those passed in and out of his life like traffic lights and he wasn't particularly sorry to see them go.
His job was still shitty, and he still didn't have many friends, and he never went to the ballet. His happy place was no longer his happy place – it was a coffee shop on Sixth, and he made himself go in there once a month to prove to himself that he didn't really care anymore.
Some nights he considered visiting happiness, surprising it, out of the blue, but the thought of saying goodbye all over again was too painful, and so instead he went over to indifference's apartment, or he buried his nose into his pillow and tried to fall asleep without thinking about artisan coffee.
One night, drowning at a skeevy bar, he ran into an old friend of happiness. They had dinner together, and he couldn't resist the temptation of asking how happiness was doing.
"Pretty good, I think," the friend replied, poking at his pasta (happiness had left him, too, after promising to stay, but that had been a very long time ago).
"Don't you still keep in touch?" the friend asked.
He didn't. Happiness had stopped calling him a few months after it had left, because he'd never picked up the phone, and he'd never listened to any of its voicemails (because the sound of happiness's voice being happy without him would have probably broken him in some unfixable way). He didn't have the heart to remove it from his list of friends on Facebook, so he had just stopped logging on altogether.
"Not so much anymore," he lied to the friend, and the friend simply shrugged.
"Me neither. Busy, I guess. It's hard."
And in the friend, in the friend that happiness had left long before it had left him, he saw his future, a future of no longer being a friend of happiness, of pushing happiness so far away there was no chance of it ever finding him again.
So that night when he came home, he drank half a bottle of tequila, and with shaking fingers he pressed happiness's name on his phone. Every second of hollow, unanswered rings set his heart thudding in his chest, felt like acute torture softened not even a little by the blur of alcohol, but then…
"Hello?"
Happiness sounded tired, and his heart broke for it a little.
"It's me," he said stupidly, all coherent thoughts suddenly abandoning him.
"I know," happiness sighed, and the silence ate at his heart.
"Sorry," he finally said, into the stretching void that was separating him and happiness. "I should've answered your calls."
"You should have," happiness agreed with him, and it still sounded tired, and he wished it was with him right now, so he could hold it close to him.
"Sorry," he repeated. "I miss you."
"You're drunk," happiness informed him, and he wasn't sure whether he should deny it or admit it was right.
"You know how I know you're drunk?" happiness asked him.
"No," he said, desperate to keep it on the phone.
"It's because you're only ever a decent person when you're wasted," it told him, and he could hear the hidden smile in its voice, and suddenly, he knew happiness would forgive him.
Talking to happiness on the phone wasn't quite the same thing as having happiness – it was more like having a little bit of happiness, but he supposed that was better than not having any at all.
He stopped visiting indifference soon after, because it turned out indifference hadn't been quite so indifferent after all, and he knew he couldn't give it what it wanted.
"The show was a godawful mess last night," happiness chattered to him on the phone as he sat at his desk, sifting through files to find the one he needed. "Julia completely lost her place halfway through the first act, so she started improvising, and if there's one thing that she can't – are you listening?"
"Of course. You should totally go for it, babe."
"You're an asshole."
"Well, don't ask me stupid questions. You know I'm listening. I told you Julia was a hot mess two months ago."
"I wish you'd been there to see it," happiness burst out, out of nowhere, as if he didn't wish the same thing every minute of every day.
If he could at all afford to scrounge the time off of work, he would have ordered plane tickets right then – maybe even one-way. But life always had a way of getting in the way of happiness, so all he could say was, "You wanted me to see your disaster of a show last night?"
"I just wish – " happiness started but trailed off, lapsing into silence.
He would have given the earth and the moon to hear the end of that sentence.
For the first time in many years, he spent St. Patrick's Day alone in his apartment. For some reason, the idea of drinking in the company of raucous strangers on a holiday he didn't really have allegiance to didn't appeal to him anymore, and so instead, he decided to stay home and catch up on paperwork.
He would have called happiness, but it had had some dinner event it needed to go to tonight (hopefully not with a date, though he didn't dare to ask).
So he stretched out on his couch, placing a thick stack of reading material in his lap, and set the TV to a channel halfway through playing The Matrix, and got down to it.
He woke up to the sound of a woman ordering what she was having, and he turned bleary eyes toward the television screen to see Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes, pulling up the energy to move himself to bed, when an insistent knocking sounded on his door, and he realized the sound had been why he'd woken up.
With a creaking back, he pushed himself off of the couch and began plodding towards the door. Taking a deep breath and running his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair, he threw open the door.
"Happy St. Paddy's Day!"
Three girls were standing outside his door, dressed in leprechaun top hats and outfits that were just a hair from green lingerie. One of them leaned in suddenly, planting a sloppy kiss on his mouth, and he got a brief taste of rum and cinnamon.
"You're not wearing green," one of the other girls pouted, leaning over to pinch him on his arm.
"You should come out with us," the kisser said, already pulling on his hand.
"Get a cab home, ladies," he said, extricating himself from her grip and moving to shut his door. "And a bit more fabric."
He closed his door on them booing him loudly, and collapsed back on his couch. He wasn't a romantic by any means, but for the briefest moment, just a single delusional second, part of him had hoped it would be happiness at the door, flying over to surprise him.
Now all he had was the taste of cheap alcohol and sapphic imagery completely wasted on his sexuality.
He pulled out his phone, scrolling to happiness's message thread.
just got St. Paddied by three drunk college girls doing house visits. Maybe should've invited them in for a foursome. Thoughts?
He figured happiness wouldn't reply until it got back from whatever dinner function it was at – a little message to make it smile at the end of a long, probably tiring night.
But instead, his phone pinged only a few seconds later.
Foursome? Someone's a little under-ambitious. Don't you think they had more friends?
And only a second after that, his phone was lighting up with happiness's face, its ringtone interrupting Meg Ryan's dialogue.
He immediately accepted the call.
"Hey," he said. "Thought you were at dinner."
"I know, I still am," happiness said softly. "I wanted to call, but I thought maybe you were out…"
As if he'd prefer watching under-agers throwing up at some bar over talking to happiness.
"No, just embracing the middle-age monotony I'm destined for."
"Well, I kind of lied to you," it said hurriedly, and he suddenly noticed that its voice was barely containing excitement. "I'm at a dinner, but it's not exactly a function like I said."
His heart sank. He was not prepared to hear happiness chattering happily about a date with some sonofabitch who probably wouldn't know what happiness was if it hit him in the face.
"They took us out to confirm the news."
He absentmindedly watched Billy Crystal walking somewhere, his heart not quite rising but also not quite sinking anymore. "What news?"
"They're taking our show to Broadway. They want me to join the cast!"
There was intense silence on either end of the phone. Happiness seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for him to say something. He was waiting for the same thing – waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under his feet, for the punchline to reveal itself.
"What – what does that mean?" he finally asked, his voice slightly thick with nervousness.
"It means I'm coming home," happiness said, and just like that, the world was alright again.
Happiness stumbled over him, unaware of its course.
"Careful there, Ginger. Watch where you're going every once in a while," he said, tilting slightly under one of happiness's boxes but regaining his balance in time.
"Sorry," it said apologetically, pulling open the door for him as he entered the apartment.
"Where do you want this?" he called back over his shoulder, only to find that happiness had at some point darted in front of him.
"Right here," it said, pointing to the corner. He set the box down, straightening to hear a pop in his back.
"Jesus Christ, I'm getting old." He ran a hand haphazardly through his hair as he stretched.
"You're fine," happiness said, propping the box open and rummaging inside. "A little gray adds maturity."
"I do not have any –" he cut himself off as happiness turned back to him with a grin. "You're an asshole, you know that?"
"But you love me anyway."
Something about how simply happiness said it, as if it had always been an unspoken truth between them, from the very beginning, pulled the earth out from under him.
"Don't you?" happiness asked, tilting its head to the side with a suddenly open, serious expression.
From the moment happiness had stumbled over him at the park, all those years ago, from the moment happiness had flooded, overturned, and overrun his entire life, from the moment that it had taken him to a ballet and called them Romeo and Juliet, he'd known his life would never be the same.
"Do I lug boxes up three flights of stairs for just anyone, Hummel?" he said. "What do you think?"
Kurt's face lit up with a radiance that put the sun to shame.
"I think I'll be sticking around for a while," he said, and this time, Sebastian believed him.