A/N: Happy '10, everyone! Here's Chapter 10 to celebrate. (Yes, I labeled the previous chapter "Chapter 10" too. I'm a writer, I never said I could count.) I thought this was going to be the last chapter before the epilogue, but now I think there's going to be one more and then an epilogue. Either way, we're nearing a close, at which point I expect to repress my instinct to write hurt/comfort stories that put poor Kurt through hell and try something light and fun for a change. :) Anyway, thanks again for reading...
CHAPTER TEN (for real this time)
"Can't?" Finn said blankly. "What do you mean, can't?"
"What I said. I can't."
"But... I mean... we did," Finn said, and Kurt had to choke back a giggle at the look on Finn's face. "I mean, we... I don't understand."
Kurt bit his lip, marshaled both the giggles and the sarcasm, and tried to find the words that were left in the space they'd vacated. "Things are different now, Finn. We can't go back to the way things were. What happened..." Kurt tried to find words for it, the way the rose-tinged, giddy times he'd shared with Finn seemed cleaved off from the antiseptic-scented present with a knife. The way he knew they'd never be the same couple because he wasn't the same person anymore, how he'd been kicked and punched and shattered and shoved into a grown-up world that Finn couldn't be part of. That was a part of who he was now, and it was what he would be dealing with for years, if not forever. He couldn't handle a relationship now, too. And if he could, he couldn't have handled a relationship with Finn.
"Is it because you think I'll get beaten up?" Finn asked, unsure how to read the silence. "Because I can take care of myself. I swear."
Kurt gritted his teeth against a brief backwash of bitter words. Three of them, Finn? One holding your arms behind your back while the other two stomp you with cleats, pound your head against the pavement, try to crack your spine, your skull – you can take care of yourself? You can handle that? It took him several breaths to regain his control. Finn didn't know that, didn't know the way it was. Maybe he should have, but he didn't. "You can't take care of yourself," he said eventually, neutrally, "not if they want to take you down. But... no, I'm not really worried about that. There are ways to be more careful, but you'll figure that out on your own if you go with some other guy sometime. For you and me... I'm not worried, because we..." He tried to say "It's over." The words wouldn't quite come. He fell back on, "We can't."
"No, but don't you get it?" Finn strode back and forth, agitated. "You're all, 'we can't go back to the way things were,' but that's it, because I can't go back to the way things were either. I mean, before you and me, and all of that. I can't go back from it now. I know this about myself now, right? I can't go back."
Kurt sighed. They were going to have to do this the long way "Okay. What do you know about yourself?"
"I... I like you."
Kurt cursed himself internally for the flush that rose to his cheeks at that, the impulse to smile. He favored Finn with a cool, diamond-cut gaze to compensate. "So you're gay."
"I – well – see..." Finn bit his lip, twisted his fingers together. "No, I'm serious, though, it's just, like, how could I have gotten Quinn pregnant –" Kurt cut his eyes down – "I mean, I was really into her, right? I mean, not, like that, but –" Now Finn's face was bright red, and Kurt looked vaguely puzzled. "I mean, maybe what I had going with you felt more... more..."
"More what?" Kurt's voice was quiet now. Tense. And uncharacteristically, Finn decided to take a breath before he spoke, gather his thoughts.
"You were nicer to me," was what he said in the end. "Quinn's hot, duh. So are you," he added hurriedly, as Kurt's eyebrow shot up in a dangerous way. "That wasn't it. It's just... I could talk to you. It wasn't all messing around, all wanting stuff I could never get –" Never get? Kurt was beginning to get an inkling of why it was that Puck was so sure that Finn couldn't be the father, and his own sense of Finn's intellectual deficiencies was ballooning as a result – "but even though you – even though we – you know, I –"
"Got it?" Kurt suggested, deadpan. Finn's face was now beyond beet-red; the color and the round, wide eyes combined reminded Kurt of Elmo from Sesame Street.
"Yeah... well, what I'm trying to say is, that's not all it was with us. You talked to me about stuff, when I was having a hard time or whatever. I never felt like you were playing me." Finn's voice had dropped low. "I really liked that about us, Kurt."
Kurt was silent for a long moment, eyes cast down. Because Finn was right in a way, and oh, God, what Kurt wouldn't give to go back to those times, when they'd been falling slow but steady into a relationship that felt like something solid, something real. Something that wasn't just blowjobs in locker rooms, or frantic makeout sessions behind locked bedroom doors with music blaring loud to cover their moans. It was the leap Kurt had taken in telling Finn about his mom, the scent of her lingering in a room she'd left ten years ago, and the way Finn had understood a little bit and cared enough to make up for what he didn't understand. It was the leap Finn had taken in telling Kurt how he felt about his baby girl, the child he'd probably never know. They'd shared those things, and others, too – the stresses of everyday life in the fishbowl world of high school, what it meant to be special in a place and time that didn't care for that at all. What they'd had had gone deeper than an average high school relationship of negotiating sex acts and evaluating degrees of virginity. Kurt had been infatuated with Finn from the first time he'd seen him, but it was over the few weeks that they'd been together that he'd started to understand how separate "love" was from "infatuation" – and to understand that for him and Finn, love might actually be in the cards someday.
And then he'd been beaten. And Finn had never visited him.
Kurt was smart enough to know that that didn't negate the possibility of love. What it did mean was that whether or not the two of them were in love, or ever could be, might be beside the point. If Finn let his fear take over, then that would be it.
"But you said you wanted to man up," he whispered. Finn craned his neck to hear.
"What?"
Kurt sighed. His heart was jackrabbiting now, his earlier calm having deserted him. When he spoke, the words were very precise, very deliberate. "Finn, when I asked if you were gay, you said –"
Finn twisted a foot back and forth on the floor. "Kurt, it's not that – I just don't think – because Quinn, and, you know, I mean, I like girls, but –"
"Okay." Kurt sighed again. "You like girls. And guys?"
"I... guess?"
"So you're bisexual?"
"I..." Finn's face had returned to Elmo-shade. "Is that what you call that?"
Kurt could have laughed. Almost. "Yes. If you're sexually attracted to girls and guys, you're bisexual."
"So then... I guess... but I don't know," Finn blurted. "I just like you."
"Not guys? Just me?"
Finn shrugged helplessly.
A thin smile twined around the edges of Kurt's mouth. "So you're Kurt-sexual, then."
"Is that a thing?" Finn asked, and Kurt burst out laughing After a second, Finn joined in.
"I don't know," Kurt said finally, recovering. "I know..." He bit his lip. "It means a lot." A lot. Way more than felt safe right now. He'd sworn to stay in control, that he knew how this had to go, and now – oh, God, Finn.
Finn took his hand, and Kurt closed his eyes. For the length of that moment, everything was just the way he wanted it and the hard edges of the real world were a forgotten nightmare.
"I don't know about labels and shit," Finn said quietly. "I just want to be with you. Please."
"I can't... Finn, you..."
Kurt started to cry.
"Oh – no. Oh, Kurt, baby, no. Please," Finn said, sounding panicked. He bent down beside the bed, pressed Kurt's head against his chest. "Please don't cry. Okay? Just – please don't." The slight note of terror in Finn's voice made Kurt choke out a half-hysterical laugh through his tears. Finn stroked his hair and looked completely lost. And Kurt fought for control, and lost, and weeks' worth of dammed tears flooded out onto Finn's shirt.
"I hate this," he cried eventually, pushing Finn away with both hands, Finn still looking stunned. "I don't cry in front of people! I don't!"
"It's okay to cry, dude," Finn said. "Didn't you tell me that one time, when I was all messed up about the baby?"
"It's fine for you." The words almost came out in a snarl, Kurt trying to push the tears back with anger. "I just can't... if I let go in front of people, then..."
"Then what?"
"They win. Give me that box of tissues." Finn did, and Kurt turned away, Finn looked ostentatiously at an ugly pastel on the opposite wall until Kurt had honked and snuffled his way back to normal.
"Sorry," Kurt said, blowing his nose one last time and turning back to face Finn.
"It's okay."
"I need to say this, and I need to be able to say it pulled together, so please don't interrupt," Kurt said, voice still raw. Finn nodded. "I want to be with you so much... you don't even... wait, no, whatever," Kurt said, biting back a sob, trying to turn it into a laugh. "But we can't do this, Finn. We just can't. You can't even say the word "gay" yet. And it's not that you don't know whether you're into guys or not – it's that you don't even know how to look at the question." Finn opened his mouth, then shut it as Kurt raised a warning figure. "Here's something about being gay that you learn from the inside: there's two kinds of being 'closeted', and the one most people know about is the one that doesn't matter half as much. Being closeted to the outside world is one thing: you play straight, and it hurts, and you've got to be prepared for that. But the other thing... there's being out to yourself, Finn, and that's so much more important and so much more confusing and... I don't even know how to say it. But I know you know what it's like." Kurt was studying Finn's face carefully, noting the thousand emotions swarming through Finn's eyes: recognition, embarrassment, determination, fear – always fear... "You're not out to yourself yet, Finn. I've seen you checking out guys' asses and then pulling your eyes away, and I know you're making excuses in your head for why that's normal, how you're just, I don't know, checking out whether they've got the right build for the football team. I've seen you close your eyes every time you and I do anything – like you're afraid to see who it is you're with. At first I thought you were pretending I was a girl. But that's not it, is it?" Finn didn't answer. "You're trying to hide from everything. You know it's me you're with, and that's..." Kurt almost lost control for a second. "...that's more than I thought and more than I... hoped... but listen," and his voice got hard and taut again, snapping back into control, "I can't do that, I can't. It's bad enough trying to keep a relationship closeted – I can't be with a guy who still isn't out to himself."
There was a long, long silence. Kurt wondered if Finn had understood anything he'd said at all.
"But... you know all that," Finn said, finally. "You know what all of that's like. I mean, you can't expect... it's all just... I'm trying," he said, pleading. "I really am. I just don't know how to..."
Against his better judgment – way against his better judgment – Kurt reached out and took Finn's hand. "I know. But I... with things like this?" He gestured at the hospital bed, the few monitors and slow-dripping plastic bags left. "I can't help you figure it out, Finn. I have too much to deal with on my own."
"No, but I'll figure it out, I will," Finn said, and Kurt looked away, trying not to roll his eyes, as he realized he'd done it: he'd pushed Finn over the point at which he got eager and determined and totally impervious to common sense. The sort of mood in which he picked out names for a child that would never be his, and named it Drizzle; the sort of mood in which he first decided he was going to quit football and do Glee full-time, then decided he was going to quit Glee and do football full-time, then retracted both those decisions and decided he was going to drop out of school and work full-time and propose to Quinn and start a family (talking Finn out of that one had been one of the first bonding experiences Kurt had had with Finn, and something he'd never look back on without a shudder of horror). Finn had no idea who he was, and Kurt could accept that – they were in high school, high school was about figuring this stuff out – but Kurt couldn't ride the rollercoaster with him this time. But Finn wouldn't let up: "You're right, I gotta figure all this out, but I totally will. I'll – I don't know, join that group, the alligator thing –"
"LesBiGayTr Alliance," Kurt told him, mouth twitching. "It stands for Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transsexual. They're in Dayton."
"Yeah, that – I'll figure out what it means. Swear to God. I need to figure it out. You don't have to worry about any of that with me – I'll figure it out on my own time – just, please, look, I know how bad I chickened out, I know how I fucked up, but I'm not going to chicken out anymore. Give me a chance to prove it to you. Please, Kurt."
Kurt was going to say no. Looking over the covers at his twisted knee, running his tongue over the gap where two of his teeth used to be, he was going to say no. He needed to spend these next months regaining his own security, re-learning how not to be afraid of who he was, coming to terms with the real dangers of being gay in a homophobic world. He couldn't hold Finn's hand through the coming-out process while he was dealing with so much stuff on his own – it was too much stress, too much emotional energy, too much –
Finn knelt by the bed and kissed him.
When Kurt spoke a century later, his head was spinning and his voice was ragged. "I'll try," he said.