Title: you're listening for a song that I don't know, that no one has yet sung
Fandom: Highlander/Glee
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from Denise Levertov
Warnings: AU after "Born This Way" for Glee; post-series for Highlander; character death
Pairings: Kurt/Puck, Rachel/Finn
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 385
Point of view: third
Notes: for maldeluxx, who wanted either boy's pov
Dad dies in a car accident when Kurt is thirty-five. Kurt goes home for the funeral, carefully disguising himself to look his actual age. Noah doesn't join him.
Kurt holds Carole and Finn while they grieve and tries not to have a breakdown. He stays for three days, taking care of the family he hasn't seen in over a decade, not since he graduated college. He has three more degrees now, and a dozen different names.
He hasn't aged a day since he was seventeen. In their grief and pain and fury at the senselessness of Dad's death, no one notices.
0o0
When Kurt is forty-six, Carole has a stroke. Finn calls him in a panic and Kurt goes running. If everyone wasn't so worried, they'd notice he looks thirty years too young.
Carole dies. Kurt arranges everything with Rachel's help. He hugs Finn goodbye and leaves right after he sees Finn home.
0o0
Kurt is eighty-three when Finn dies in his sleep. He is the last of Kurt's friends. Kurt pretends to be his own grandson for the funeral and claims his father and grandfather are too ill to travel.
Noah goes home with him this time. They stand in the back of the room and hold hands. Before they leave, they visit the graves of everyone they've loved and outlived.
"I would've come with you," Kurt says softly as Noah traces the name on his sister's stone.
"I know," Noah says.
0o0
Matt calls them his boys. Kurt calls him Matt until he changes his name, and then calls him whatever that is until the next time. Kurt never loses track of anyone's identity and Noah leaves him in charge of that part of their lives. Noah calls their teacher Old Man, never anything else.
When they're three hundred and twelve and barely recognize the world anymore, their teacher (named Adam today) takes them to an old sanctuary in the mountains, a place of stone forgotten by time.
Nathaniel and Karl are shed; Noah and Kurt hold each other close and remember when they were children, before swords and before lightning, before Death and his lessons, before they never aged anymore.
0o0
"When were you young?" Kurt asked his teacher once.
The man he still called Matt laughed then and said, "Oh, my dear, a long time ago."