I one again felt the need to dive into the ethreal world that is Kurt's dreams. It's just so awesome that anything can happen there. It calls to me. Enjoy :)
He isn't ok.
He feels the thin arms, thinner than they should be, thinner than they were, wrapped around him.
He feels the long reddish-brown hair that is just a little darker and redder than his own brushing against his shoulders through his thin shirt.
He feels the soft lips pressed ever so lightly against his hair.
He feels the warm, living breath on his skin; the breath goes with the words she is whispering. Words that are supposed to make him feel better.
"It's ok, mommy is right here. I'm not going anywhere, so don't cry, ok?"
It is not! It's not ok! Let me cry! He wants to scream and shout it to her and to the world, until it hears him and fixes it.
The arms. The hair. The lips. The breath. He had felt them all before. He had been in this exact same position a thousand times before in his eight short years of life. This time it was different. He had been here in Mommy's arms before, but he hadn't been HERE in this room.
This room smells of a burning, unkind cleanliness… sterile. Like it bleached out all traces of humanity. This room makes Mommy look pale and tired with its bland white décor. Mommy who was losing that scent, that wonderful scent she always wears, with every passing day.
Mommy is dressed in that hideous white gown that he would never let her wear in a billion years if it was his choice. It wasn't. Mommy who is paler and skinnier and less smiley and doesn't smell like Mommy anymore. She isn't ok. He isn't ok either.
He feels a strange disconnect. The words he knows are far fewer than the words he is using, and yet he understands them. He has a sense of foreboding that doesn't belong. He believes words at eight. He should believe that it is ok. It's different from the memory.
He has been in these arms in this room before. He remembers it, the same situation but the right way. Back then he hadn't, but now… when is now? Isn't it the same as then? Why does he remember then if it is now?
The room shifts. He shifts. Mommy shifts.
He is standing, all over at once, and Mommy is changing much too quickly. She is fragile Mommy. She is skin-and-bones Mommy. She is crying Mommy. She is I'm-not-allowed-to-touch Mommy. She is a Mommy whose arms are twigs, whose hair is hay, whose lips are dry and rough and icky, whose breaths come short and shallow. She is a Mommy who he doesn't know. She is all of these things all at once and he is watching her from all different places around the room as she fades.
Suddenly, she disappears. He is in one spot again, in a different room. Dad is arguing with someone in a white coat and crying. He feels numb as Dad does it. She was a Mommy he knew after all, enough for her to disappear and leave a hole even bigger than the rest of the Mommies did when they vanished.
He isn't crying.
Now he is. He's crying all the time. He cries as someone talking about something he doesn't believe in over something in a box. It looks like Mommy, but it can't be. It isn't her. The breath isn't there.
Her smell drifts over as he is crying. He is crying in class. He is crying at home. He is crying over pointless things, but he is really crying over Mommy.
He is getting bigger and crying less and less, though he still wants to. He knows now that the something in the box was Mommy. He is made fun of for his tears, and locks them away for special moments. He releases them when he is hurt, or when his pride is injured, or when he can't take it anymore. He is always, deep in his heart, crying over Mommy, though.
For some strange reason that he doesn't know, her scent still lingers. Is that her watching him, near him? He can't feel the life though. He can't feel the breath. It's just the memory coming back to haunt him.
He is tossed in dumpsters and slushied and pushed into lockers and called names and people don't care and he lets out a few more tears, for Mommy really.
He is being shaken, shaken, shaken suddenly and hears Mommy's voice calling "Kurt…" over and over again. The voice changes into something more masculine, and he cries inside that Mommy is gone again and the hole in his chest is still there. But so is the scent, stronger than ever.
He blinks, and looks up into overly-familiar, chocolate-brown puppy dog eyes.
"Finn," he breathes out in recognition of the eyes' owner. His voice is muddled by sleep. He moves to sit up, only to notice he feels very heavy and his back hurts. He looks down at the enormous letterman jacket with red sleeves covering his torso and raising his body heat to a comfortable warmth. He also notices that he is sitting up on the floor, explaining the back ache. Why is he on the floor?
The scent washes over him and he remembers. He remembers getting back from Dalton for the weekend and going straight up to the room with the dresser, trying to forget the unwelcome feeling he still had sometimes though he had been there for weeks. He remembers pulling all the drawers open and letting the scent wash over him just as it is now, forgetting everything with the comforting smell in his nostrils. He must have fallen asleep.
"Sorry to wake you up, dude, but Mom says dinner is ready."
Finn closes the dresser and pulls him to his feet. He stumbles a little, and Finn catches him in his arms without so much as a grimace at the contact. Their bodies are pressed close together, and it feels so good to him. But not like it used to. No heart pounding and cheeks burning. Just a gratifying tingle at the closeness, the contact, the catching-me-if-I-fall-feeling. The thereness, the realness.
The scent swirls around inside, filling the hole but not closing it. It is deep, but it has patches, so many colorful patches, to make sure he doesn't fall inside. Finn, Carol, Dad, Mercedes, Quinn, and so many more patches cover the hole. A new one, a big one, is at the center. Blaine.
Blaine is patching the hole the most out of anyone. He is so important, so central, that Kurt feels like he would fall in without him.
He will tell him, one day, exactly how much he patches the holes.
One day, Blaine will know just how big a place he holds in Kurt's broken yet fixed heart.
One day the dream won't come back, it will be a dream of Blaine instead.
One day.