Pairing: Sebklaine
Rating: PG-13 for language
~5,100 words
Summary: The dynamics of arguments and fights in a polyamorous relationship are explored in a particularly nasty fight between two of them that creates strain on their relationship as a whole and escalates to a major outburst.
Original Prompt: Kurt is walking around their apartment barefoot when he steps on a sharp piece of glass. Kurt is calm and goes about trying to remove it while his boyfriends are freaking out but he can't get it because of the awkward angle so he needs one of them to do it for him.
A/N: Okay, so I deviated from the prompt, but it's definitely included. This got a little twisted into something angsty (it's a reflex, I swear), but I hope the prompter likes it! (It could have been worse—at first I was veering towards abuse, so at least there's not that.)
Kurt and Sebastian had truly lost track of what the argument was originally about. Each day went past and they found new things to get on each other about, and by the end of day three, they were reduced to petty insults of the little things that irked them about each other. Blaine watched from the sidelines, having given up on placating the pair of them the day before. It was common for Kurt and Sebastian to get into little arguments here and there, more vocal about things that irritated them than Blaine would ever be.
He tended to be the "bottle your emotions" type of person, keeping all of his qualms deeply locked within himself until they gradually subsided (which happened a majority of the time—he was good at not sweating the small stuff) to where they didn't bother him or in extreme cases they accumulated to the point of forcibly and painfully breaking free. Kurt and Sebastian, though…not as simple, so Blaine would end up sitting and listening to them fight and complain. Occasionally, he'd jump in and make them back off on each other, but for the most part they solved their issues themselves. They had this strange ability that Blaine never really understood where they could bitch at each other for straight ten minutes and snap out of it, being completely fine within the matter of seconds, like nothing had really happened in the first place (this was not the current case).
Blaine could barely keep up sometimes, but he was grateful that they could normally just get over it because it drained his energy just by proximity to the argument sometimes. He was thrown by the length and intensity of their current fight and it was sufficiently emotionally exhausting.
Of the three, he was the most likely to take arguments and negative comments to heart, which is probably why Kurt and Sebastian were more careful of what they said to him in fights than they were to each other. They both got in their own individual arguments with Blaine, sure. That was just a natural and unavoidable part of being in a relationship (as a couple and group), living in a small apartment where they constantly overlapped, and just going through the typical ups and downs of life. Blaine ever only really picked fights with either of them when he was frustrated with a thousand other things going on, though, whether they be his work or his family, so he had gotten quite good at managing things well enough to avoid his side of fights. It was a dynamic that few understood, but it worked for them in the end.
They had only really fought as couples: Kurt and Sebastian, Kurt and Blaine, or Blaine and Sebastian, not so much engaging in fully-fledged fights with all three of them being mad at each other. The issue that had come up most often in being in a polyamorous relationship was that the likelihood was that when they had an argument, there would be a 2-1 consensus, and immediately when two of them would begin to argue, the third part would try to completely detach themselves to avoid choosing sides in a fight no matter their original opinions on the subject matter.
They had a few rules about fighting early on, one of them being that no matter how angry they were, they were not allowed to not sleep in their shared bed (which came to fruition after the closest they had really come to a completely rounded fight where none of them spoke to each other). The major fight had been between Sebastian and Blaine early on in their relationship and made Blaine choose to sleep in the guest room, which caused a follow-up argument involving Kurt, who absolutely refused to choose sides and proceeded to get a room at a hotel, saying he wouldn't come back until they had worked it out and he stopped getting dragged in the middle and pit against each other. Kurt cared very little about the original disagreement, only upset that he felt forced out of his own home, unable to bear the company of either of his boyfriends when they were so hostile and refusing to be in the same room. It's well known that you can't have the best of both worlds, but at the very least they ended up assuring each other that regardless of the level of intensity of their arguments, they would still all crawl in the same bed at night.
Whether they had argued up until the time they brushed their teeth for bed or they hadn't spoken for the entire evening, they still all settled into the same bed each night with Blaine curled up in the middle since he was the smallest and the other two often got claustrophobic when encased by two bodies for the entire night.
The only difference was, for the past three nights, Kurt and Sebastian didn't reach out to each other when they cuddled up to Blaine, and where their hands usually linked, even if only for a few minutes before drifting off to sleep, they chose to ignore the other side of the bed entirely.
Blaine felt like he was being pulled apart, regardless.
The most recent argument in the three day extravaganza of fighting began from an offhand comment Kurt made about how messy their apartment was and had spun into…well, none of them really grasped what it had turned into. It wasn't even a comment made to purposely elicit some reaction. It was a small comment, an innocent observation that wouldn't have been taken to mean anything on a normal day, but it wasn't a normal day. It was day three of his and Sebastian's fight and on day three, well, everything seemed like a trigger. Sebastian was at the point of taking every word out of Kurt's mouth as hostile, so his reactions, while not necessarily appropriate, couldn't be considered exactly shocking.
Blaine was sitting at the kitchen table, shoveling cereal into his mouth and facing the internal battle that was his urge to just get in the middle of it all and do some yelling himself. He was sick of it, sick of both of his boyfriends and their ability to fight for days and not just LET IT GO.
They would be so hateful to each other, but act almost normally with Blaine, taking to ignoring the other when the three of them were at the dinner table or in bed. Hell, they even skipped movie night on Thursday because they claimed to have stuff to do, but Blaine knew they just didn't want to sit on the couch with him for two hours and just pretend to be civil. They apartment was silent a high majority of the time and the only instances where it wasn't, there was only arguing to fill the air. Less important, but with a growing frustration was the strain all of the arguing was putting on their sex life (while sex as just couples wasn't uncommon whenever their schedules wouldn't match up, it was a general rule that the third person not in the fight refused to touch either of his boyfriends as a form of protest).
It was absolutely ridiculous, and Blaine was at his limit.
He was defensive of both of his boyfriends and their relationship, particularly because of their rocky beginnings in transforming from a couple to a threesome. He wouldn't take any crap from friends and especially not his family (whom he rarely spoke to anymore because of their disapproval), and he was tired of having to take crap from within his own relationship, goddamnit. He wouldn't let a stranger speak to Kurt the way Sebastian was and vice versa, so he was certainly about to be nudged over the edge of what he could handle with the two of them.
So, Saturday morning when Blaine put his cereal bowl in the dishwasher, he finally turned to his boyfriends, both still arguing in the dining room and shouted, "Will you two just shut up already? For two fucking minutes. I am begging you."
"Maybe if Kurt wasn't being such a controlling fucking bitch we wouldn't be having any issues," Sebastian bit back.
"Oh, yeah, because it's all my fucking fault for trying to keep some semblance of order and rationality around here. That's just fantastic. How are you going to twist the situation tomorrow? I'm just dying to know," Kurt shouted, finally throwing his hand into the air and turning towards their bedroom, cradling his mostly un-drunk coffee in his hand.
Sebastian could have shut up, ended their recent argument there and picked it up later like they'd been doing for days, but he didn't. He pushed. Often he knew the point where it was too far, but occasionally he decided to push anyway, like this masochistic part of his mind chanted keep going and it was the part of him that fucked everything up for himself in high school that let him listen to the voice.
It was early in the morning; Kurt had had his morning coffee interrupted by Sebastian's freak-out about Kurt's messy apartment comment, and they both hadn't had an actual good night's sleep since Tuesday night, stuck in a constant push and pull every day since then, both becoming increasingly exhausted with their argument, but prideful personalities stretching them thin.
So, Sebastian pushed, stalking after Kurt and continuing his bitching, coming up with creative insults of just how Kurt tried to control their lives, from their mixed schedules to every last decoration in their apartment. It wasn't until the words left his mouth that he realized he really had twisted Kurt's comment into something completely unrelated—which, granted, they had both kind of been doing the entire fight, but they were getting to their limits, since it was the longest, most drawn out fight any of the two of them had had since they got together.
Kurt spun around, yelling, "Are you fucking kidding me? Are you actually complaining about the way we decorated?"
"The 'we' is a bit subjective."
Kurt stared at him with a confused frustration, finally reaching his breaking point.
"You know what," Kurt began. "How about you just decorate your fucking self, then, if it means that much to you? You say you don't care about a dirty fucking apartment, then fine." Kurt punctuated his final word by chucking his coffee mug across the apartment until it hit their bare wall. Glass shattered, the mug leaving a small dent, but it was overshadowed by the dark liquid splattered across their perfectly white wall, trickling down onto their beige carpet. The silence hung heavy in the room, only disturbed by Kurt's panting at his outburst before he began speaking again, the snarl apparent in his words. "There. I've had that mug since Blaine and I first moved in together, but you know what? It's pretty fucking ugly. The wall and carpet color and pretty bland and boring, too, so who cares if those get ruined? And this," Kurt said mockingly, moving into the living room and stopping in front of an art piece he'd bought at the first gallery his old boss, Isabelle, has brought him to. "I suppose my taste in art is really shitty, so let's just get this off the wall." Kurt hoisted the painting off its hook, flinging it as best he could across the room. It crashed into their DVD case, sending the entire display to the ground.
"Kurt, stop," Sebastian said, finally cutting in.
"No, no. Why stop when I'm on a roll here?" Kurt continued his mini-rampage, flinging random items about, but taking special care to ignore all of Blaine's personal stuff. He at least made an attempt in keeping Blaine out of it, however impossible that was proving to be.
Kurt wound up in the kitchen, ignoring Sebastian shouting after him. Kurt was at the point where he honestly couldn't tell anyone what Sebastian was yelling about anymore.
"Oh, and this," Kurt said, picking up the spice rack. "Who the fuck needs a decorative spice rack? I'm the only one who really cooks in here and even I barely use it, so what the point?" Kurt flicked his wrist and release his grasp, sending twenty or so glass bottles of spices towards the ground, where they shattered on impact, glass and spices mixed at his feet.
"This is enough," Sebastian screamed at him. "Stop breaking every fucking thing in our apartment!"
Just as Kurt was moving to step around the mess as best as he could, Sebastian grabbed his arm, yanking Kurt back to him. Kurt was so determined to twist out of his boyfriend's grasp that he drove his foot into the floor, grinding it against the glass and into the spices as he tried to turn. It took a moment for the pain in his foot to catch up with his brain, but when it did…
Kurt yelped in pain, collapsing back into Sebastian's hold and trying to pick his hurt foot off of the ground while simultaneously trying to keep the other foot from moving so much as a centimeter.
Sebastian tensed with worry.
"Shit, did I hurt you?" he asked, releasing his hold on Kurt's arm immediately, which only made things more difficult. Kurt wrapped his arms loosely around Sebastian to try and keep himself upright, tears stinging in his eyes.
"No, I—my foot. Fuck. Will you please just pick me up and get me out of the kitchen?" Kurt begged, any pride frustration he might have felt at asking for help completely overshadowed by the spikes of pain in his heel, the pain smothering until the ache encompassed his entire foot. Sebastian complied immediately, placing an arm at Kurt's back and under his knees, stepping back slowly and carrying him to the couch. Blaine shoved off a few trace items sprawled across the couch from Kurt's fit, worry etched on his face.
"Shit. What did you do, Sebastian?" Blaine accused, watching Kurt face squint in pain as he was sunk down on the couch, keeping his foot elevated on his own.
"I didn't—I don't know," Sebastian worried, distressed hands fluttering in the air aimlessly as he wasn't sure what to do. He was never the calm one in situations like these. He was the impulsive one, occasionally hot-headed, and passionate, but not the calm one. He tended to feel more of a burden than anything else when he found himself in a case where he wasn't confident about what to do, how to help. Blaine, in his credit, was much better at being level-headed, slightly more analytical and in control of his emotions than Sebastian was, but when the strain became a little too tight, his logical and composed qualities started to ebb away and panic got the better of him.
"Just—just stop talking for a second," Kurt requested, shoving the heels of his hands in his eyes in some small attempt to control the burn and ache in his heel. "I stepped—fuck—I stepped in some of the glass and some spices got in the cut, so my foot basically feels like it was slashed open and set on fire and said fire is currently threatening to take over my ability to handle pain," Kurt gasped out, taking deep breaths until he was able to twist his facial expression into one of calm control.
"Oh my god. I am so sorry," Sebastian apologized, taking hold of Kurt's heel and lifting it to inspect the wound. "Oh god, oh god, oh god. I didn't realize—there's a lot of blood. Shit, this is all my fault." Blaine twisted around to look as well, and Kurt had to fight to ignore the horrified face Blaine pulled.
"Oh my—Kurt, that looks really bad. We should probably go to the ER or something," Blaine stressed.
"No, no. We are not going to the Emergency Room for something like this. This is humiliating enough. And it's not your fault, Bas. I'm the idiot who dropped the fucking spice rack on purpose. It's fine. I can take care of it," Kurt assured them, gaining more and more control over his reaction as the seconds passed. "Just get me some tweezers, Blaine."
"Get you…what?" Blaine asked, bewildered. "You can't get that out. We could…let's get Mrs. Lebowski from downstairs. She was a nurse; she can do it."
"Blaine, we are not having one of our neighbors come into our apartment with it looking like this. If it was either of you that got hurt, I'd probably be looked at for domestic abuse charges," Kurt said, trying to turn his leg to get a better look at the bottom of his foot.
"No, it's not—it's not your fault. I'm so sorry," Sebastian pressed on. "I shouldn't have grabbed you back like that because you wouldn't have stepped on anything and I—shit, I'm really sorry, Kurt. We shouldn't have even been fighting this morning. I pushed on about something so stupid and it doesn't even actually matter, but you don't realize those kinds of things until it's too late, and now you're injured, and it's all my fault, and I love you so much and I don't want to see you hurt and I don't even care about what we were fighting about because it just all got so out of control that I don't even barely remember much besides the fact that I was just frustrated with being frustrated, but you mean so much to me, you and Blaine, and I'm so sorry, baby. I just—"
Kurt finally pressed his index finger against Sebastian's mouth at his most recent "I'm sorry," causing the rest of his words to be mumbled around the finger before his lips finally stilled and Sebastian was blinking away the tears from his eyes.
"Sebastian. Calm down. I'm not dying. It is just a little glass, reinforced by some flaming hot spice that I can assure you I will never cook with again, besides the fact that it's all spilled onto our kitchen floor," Kurt said. "Yes, it hurts like a bitch, but it will hurt a hell of a lot less if one of you would go get the tweezers like I asked so I don't have to hop to the bathroom on one foot." Sebastian sprang up immediately, placing Kurt's foot gently in Blaine's hold before running off to their bathroom as asked. "Grab the first aid kit, too," he called after Sebastian.
"Are you sure we don't need to go to the ER? I just—it looks really bad. What if you need stitches?" Blaine worried, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth, his eyebrows scrunching downward and he stared at Kurt's heel.
"It's okay, B. I promise. I've dealt with a lot more pain than this." Blaine's face only twisted more with worry at Kurt's words, the assurances being quickly forgotten.
Upon Sebastian's return, Blaine quickly but gently placed Kurt's foot back into Sebastian's hold, his hands reaching to tug through his air as he stood for a second, taking deep breaths through his mouth as he turned away slightly. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
"Blaine, why don't you just—just walk out for a little while," Kurt suggested, watching Blaine halt his breathing for a few seconds. He knew Blaine didn't generally fare well around blood in the first place, but coupled with the fact that it was one of his boyfriends who was hurt…well, Kurt knew he was probably allowing his freak out levels to escalate. "Seriously. Seb and I have got it covered, okay?" Blaine didn't respond at first, instead choosing to shake his head vigorously before sitting at Kurt's side, grasping their hands together.
"No, no, it's fine. I promise. I can be strong for you," Blaine told him earnestly. Kurt couldn't help but release a small chuckle.
"I think you're being a little melodramatic, B. I'm not dying. It's a cut with some spices in it. I'll survive."
"Will you—will you just shut up and let me be here, please?"
Kurt couldn't deny him, nodding and squeezing their hands together.
"Kurt," Sebastian interrupted. "I think Blaine is right. Maybe we should get Mrs. Lebowski or something. I don't know exactly what I'm doing here."
"Give me the kit," Kurt instructed. Sebastian did as he was told, watching Kurt work for a second, pulling items from the kit: gauze, medical tape, and those wipes that stung worse than the original pain but were helpful in keeping the injury from swelling twice its size from an infection. Kurt took a deep breath, mostly unnecessary, but it was a natural preparatory reflex. He pulled his leg from Sebastian's hold, bending at the knee and angling his foot inward so he could see the bottom.
"Wait, you can't actually do that yourself," Sebastian criticized, putting a hand to Kurt's leg to stop his movements, leaving it suspended midair.
"And why not?"
"Because however flexible you are, babe, and believe me I know just how much that is, you still can't see at a good enough angle and you risk digging the glass even further."
Kurt sighed, looking to Blaine who still had his gazed firmly locked on Kurt's. Kurt fought the urge to roll his eyes as he lowered his leg back towards Sebastian, admitting defeat.
"Look. We're not going to the ER or getting Mrs. Lebowski and Blaine is incapable of even looking anywhere near the wound at this point, so you're the only option left, Bas. It'll be really easy. I'll just tell you exactly what to do, okay?"
Sebastian stared at Kurt's heel for a minute, and whether he was waiting for the injury to reveal its secrets or miraculously fix itself, Kurt wasn't sure. Finally, though, Sebastian reached for the tweezers, determination clear in his eyes.
"Just—just start slow. Locate each piece of glass and take the easiest path available to get it out. Try to avoid any, you know, digging," Kurt told him, his own worry growing slightly. He started by watching the line's of Sebastian's face. It was the first time in days that he had really just looked at Sebastian, at least, looked at him when Sebastian's face wasn't twisted into a sneer or scowl. He had missed this, though. The peaceful Sebastian. There was still tension in his eyes. His eyebrows drew down slightly and his forehead wrinkled in concentration, but it was still soothing, calm in a way that Kurt had taken for granted. His train of thought occupied him for several moments while Sebastian carefully extracted piece after piece of glass from his foot. He let himself get further lost in thought with each tug on his skin, the ache both increasing and dulling.
Now that he was really thinking about it, he hadn't really looked at Blaine much throughout the last few days, either. It's not like Blaine was really included in their fight, so he didn't purposely ignore him like he did with Sebastian, but their overall relationship with each other was suffering from the strain. Blaine tended to withdraw into himself when his boyfriends were fighting with each other, and it was really hitting Kurt how much he missed that connection with Blaine as well. Just as he was turning his head to look at Blaine, Sebastian dug particularly deep into his heel after several attempts at removing a single piece of glass. His turn for a glance turned into a grimace as Kurt winced into Blaine's shoulder. Blaine's hands released Kurt's, and his arms wrapped around Kurt tightly, careful enough to not disturb their boyfriend's work at the edge of the sofa.
"Fuck. I'm sorry. I'm trying, I just—"
"Shit. That one just isn't coming out is it," Kurt cursed into Blaine's chest, his face hidden, but twisted in pain as he fought the urge to literally kick himself away from Sebastian, forcing his leg and foot to remain immobile. After several passing minutes of Kurt taking calculated, labored breaths to keep himself under control, he fought the urge to burst out laughing when Sebastian gave a triumphant cry, holding the extracted piece (and wow that was large enough to make Kurt feel faint at the thought) in the air.
"That was the last one!" Sebastian exclaimed, grinning for the first time in days. Kurt allowed himself a minute to just look, his head still resting on Blaine's shoulder and a faint smile on his own face.
"Thank you, Seb. Now if you'll just sanitize it wrap it up, that'd be great."
Sebastian nodded, his face twisting into determination once more as he followed Kurt's instructions, insisting on first carrying Kurt to the bathroom to rinse his foot in the bathtub. The issue of spices in the cut was still a large one, but a thorough stream of water helped to relieve the burn and soon Sebastian was able to clean it up and wrap it tightly and securely in the gauze.
The entire process required so much concentration that by the time Sebastian was finished, he wasn't exactly sure what to do with himself. He and Kurt technically hadn't really resolved anything, but he wasn't sure if Kurt wanted to actually talk at the present moment or if he just wanted Sebastian to leave him alone, maybe retreat to their room by himself or carry Kurt to the bed and leave him to be alone with Blaine for a while or something. Sebastian had basically decided to focus solely on cleaning up the medical supplies before maybe just reading on the balcony to give Kurt space when Kurt suggested otherwise.
"Why don't you just wash your hands and come sit down, Seb? We can get all of that stuff later," Kurt said apprehensively, like he was worried he might still be rejected, but Sebastian simply nodded in agreement, disappearing for a quick second and returning to sit on the ottoman he previously occupied. "Will you just…come sit next to me?" Kurt requested.
"Yeah, okay." Sebastian felt a little tension leave him as he plopped on the couch, closer to Kurt than they had been since the beginning of their fight. Blaine had served as a barrier, both physically and in conversation, so it was nice to just be peacefully next to Kurt like this. At this train of thought, Sebastian couldn't help but feel guilty at how Blaine had suffered from their fighting.
Sebastian breathed for a moment, just enjoying the proximity of being next to his boyfriend in a room that wasn't filled with insults or the awful pressure a long-term argument usually cause. It wasn't exactly a comfortable atmosphere, since there was a lot hanging in the air unsaid, but it was a definite improvement. Blaine helped eased the remaining tension by reaching across Kurt, connecting his fingers with Sebastian's, linking them together in even the smallest way, but it helped.
"I feel like an absolute idiot. Literally just looking around at all of the stuff I messed up—I don't think I have ever done something so childish." Kurt avoided either of their eyes, looking around at the apartment guiltily. He finally rolled his eyes upward, determinedly staring at the ceiling as his only real defense to stop the tears that pooled in the corners of his eyes.
"Hey, don't—it's okay," Blaine soothed, reaching to stroke against Kurt's cheek as a single tear escaped. "It just…got out of hand. All of it did."
"I'm really sorry, Kurt," Sebastian began. "I just—it's all my fault. I should've just shut up this morning, but I didn't and it escalated really quickly—or, well, maybe not so quickly since it's been kind of building for a while, but—if I hadn't have tried to get in the way, you wouldn't have even hurt your foot, and I just really feel like shit."
"Are you really apologizing?" Kurt asked perplexedly, a nervous laugh escaping his lips through the tears. "Believe me, you have nothing to apologize for when you take into account how I acted today. I let it really, really get to me, but we've been fighting for days. There's no way you could've known that today would be the day I went batshit crazy."
"First, you're not batshit crazy. I can't deny you aren't a little insane because, well, I've known you too long to say otherwise." Sebastian bumped their shoulders together, a small smile assuring that he was mostly joking (but Kurt knew he could get a little crazy at things, so it was okay and—most of the time—manageable). "And second, it isn't all your fault. We just…let it go too far and didn't respect our usual limits, I think. But if you're up for it, I'd really love to just stop fighting and start cuddling because I am physically and emotionally exhausted for the day and it's not even 10am."
"I think that sounds like a great idea," Kurt replied with a tentative grin, leaning back against Blaine and pulling his arm around Sebastian to pull them all together, wrapped as closely around each other as was possible on their couch.
"Oh, thank god." Blaine breathed a sigh of relief, holding his arms around Kurt, perfectly angled to stroke at Sebastian's shoulders comfortably. "I don't think I could've handled much more than that. I was seriously plotting to find a way to lock you two in the bathroom or something until you just got over yourselves. It was excruciating."
Both Sebastian and Kurt winced at his words, looking at each other guiltily.
"We're sorry, B," Sebastian said. "We can't exactly promise to never fight again, but we can agree to not let it get so bad?" Kurt nodded his agreement, twisting around to give Blaine a peck on the lips and bending down to repeat the motion on the top of Sebastian's head. His fingers carded through Sebastian's hair, and Sebastian immediately sighed in contentment.
Kurt let himself get lost in the strong hold of Blaine behind him and Sebastian positively melting into his fingertips. There was hours of work to be done, he reminded himself solemnly, still not quite done with being upset with himself about the extent of which he absolutely trashed the apartment, but he'd do something to make it up to them, Blaine particularly since he was a casualty in a fight he didn't sign up for.
For now, though, nothing was more perfect than curling up in the midst of a debris-covered war zone with his boyfriends.