Inspired by the Klaine advent drabble prompt "clouds".
Kurt looks out his studio window at the neighborhood down below. It's 10:15 and a Tuesday, so it isn't as if the place is teeming with activity. Everyone living on Colony Lane seems content to stick to their own boxes, abide by their own schedules, and go about their own lives, without much interference from the outside world.
Kurt hates to hand it to Sebastian, but that's what he wants as well. This brand of isolationism is exactly what he needs.
Another point for Sebastian. Damn. He seems to be racking them up lately, while Kurt …
… Kurt can admit that he's not trying as hard as he probably should be, but he's also giving himself permission to be selfish. There shouldn't be a timetable for bouncing back from loss. Kurt got the double-whammy. He has betrayal to get over, too. He knows that repairing his marriage should be a priority, but he also needs to do what's right for him.
He hasn't exactly figured out what that is yet, but he's working on it.
An underlying childhood guilty has him believing that he should introduce himself to the neighbors. That's considered etiquette, after all. It's what his mother would do. When Kurt was young, every time his family moved (and it had been a handful of times) Kurt's mother would bake a batch of cookies, put groups of them into colorful cellophane bags, tie the tops with curled ribbon, and take them door to door to say hello. She wouldn't wait for people to show up on their doorstep with a casserole and a smile. She believed in being pro-active. She would tell him, "New neighborhood, new life. Go out and be a part of it."
But Kurt doesn't want to, and the neighbors seem just fine with that. It's been three days, and Kurt and Sebastian have only gotten one visitor – the technician who came to fix the heating. Of course, the neighbors could be waiting for them to get settled. Then they'll pounce on over with perfectly iced Gingerbread Bundt cakes and Chicken Kievs, church invites and Girl Scout cookie order forms, like a swarm of Stepford Wives.
Kurt doesn't care about being pro-active, and besides, his mother isn't around anymore to scold him for behaving like a hermit.
That may be harsh, but it's true.
The clouds pulling together in the sky overhead, threatening rain, give Kurt an excuse to shut himself away and work on the house. With his laptop open on the floor in front of him, he browses those websites that feed his design fetishes – Ethan Allen, Neiman Marcus, Anthropologie – but he's not feeling in the least inspired. He'd decided to start small, take things room by room instead of visualizing everything at once. But he's stumped, staring at the page in front of him, unsure whether the chair he's been mulling over for the past half hour is gorgeous or gaudy.
He should really focus on getting the living room together since it's the room where they do the bulk of their entertaining … provided that they ever start entertaining again. Also, he should do something about the master bedroom, which, for the moment, houses a bed, a TV, and a dresser within the confines of four drab, ashy walls. Kurt has always felt that the bedrooms are the heart of the home. They're the individual sanctuaries where dreaming and planning and affirmation happen. He only has the one to worry about, so he should put extra effort into making it warm and comforting, with a touch of the sensual on the off chance he ever plans on touching his husband again.
The jury is still out on that one, unfortunately.
The kitchen, he's not looking forward to decorating. Aside from his studio, he and Grace spent much of their time together in the kitchen, baking cakes and cookies, and learning (through YouTube videos and online courses that Kurt ordered through Groupon) to prepare various types of cuisine. Some were a hit, others a miss, but it was always an adventure. He had done something similar with his mother and her collection of vintage cookbooks, congregating around the kitchen island in the afternoons to shed the angst of public school and spread the wings of his stifled creativity. He and his mother discussed everything in the kitchen while sifting flour and creaming butter. It was a tradition he had so looked forward to continuing.
Now, he'd rather not be bothered ever going into the kitchen again.
He'll probably just pick a page out of the IKEA catalog and recreate it. That should offend him. It did when Sebastian suggested it the first time Kurt redecorated their penthouse. But Kurt hardly cares. It just doesn't matter as much as it did. He can't remember the last time he stepped into the kitchen and prepared anything more elaborate than toast and coffee, maybe some dry scrambled eggs. Sebastian took over cooking duties after Grace died, which, nine times out of ten, includes ordering out, if for no other reason than he has to leave the house to pick the food up.
He knows that Kurt appreciates the time alone more than he does a home-cooked meal.
Then there's Sebastian's office, which Kurt is decorating for the first time. He's tried to start a shopping cart for it numerous times, but, unlike the windfall of ideas he had for his studio, he can't get into a groove. He remembers a time when thinking about decorating Sebastian's office put a hundred ideas into his head, but now he has only one.
The cheap, vomit worthy, knock-off furnishings of the no-tell hotel room he pictures whenever he thinks of Sebastian sleeping with another man.
How would Sebastian feel if Kurt decorated his office to look like the business suite at the Marriot?
Kurt sighs. Petty revenge thoughts are getting him nowhere. He's not breaking through his creative block anytime soon, so he puts his plans for the other rooms on the back burner and decides to spend time picking out furniture for his studio. With the exception of his sewing machines, he didn't bring anything from his penthouse studio here, so he's starting over fresh. He switches tabs and starts filling his online shopping cart with the basics - a new drafting table, a cabinet, a chair he'll have to custom-upholster, a bolt of drapery fabric he can repurpose to make a bedspread (if he goes through with his plans for a foldout), and a few other miscellaneous odds and ends, nothing worth wasting too much time over.
Sebastian has been considerate enough to let Kurt do his thing undisturbed for the morning. Kurt can hear him stacking cans in the kitchen cabinets, washing dishes, and fixing the sticky pantry door. Kurt plans on redoing the kitchen, giving the entire room a facelift, and Sebastian knows that. But fixing the door gives Sebastian something to do.
Kurt's reluctance to talk to anyone extends to Sebastian, which Sebastian seems to understand. He's been keeping his distance. But it's nice to hear him puttering around the house. It gives Kurt comfort, the same way listening to his father snore in the middle of the night helped Kurt feel less alone after his mother died. He may want to be left alone, but it's nice to know that he's not alone.
Today did not start out as a good day for Kurt.
Kurt woke up later than he'd intended, and when he did, he couldn't remember where he was. He was alone. Sebastian had woken up and crawled out of bed hours earlier. Kurt climbed out of bed confused, and wandered around aimlessly, hands feeling along the walls, looking for something familiar. He heard a noise downstairs and became frightened. He didn't want to venture down to the lower level because he didn't know who could be there. Maybe someone had broken in, or worse - this was somebody else's house, and Kurt was the invader.
He felt his heart race. He panicked, started hyperventilating. He went from room to room, frantically trying to figure out where he was and why he was there. It wasn't until the second time he went into the room that is his studio that he began to remember. He saw his bag on the floor and, beside it, his sketchbook. He remembered sitting in there the day before, making plans for his new studio. He remembered the wood grain of the floor, the dusty glass, the tree outside, the wallpaper, and that ripped corner by the window, which Kurt refuses to acknowledge any more than he has to.
He feels it behind him, like the sun on his back, trying to get him to turn his face to it, but he refuses. Of all the things he needs to deal with, that one doesn't do the palpitations in his chest any favors.
It confuses him.
It angers him.
It saddens him.
But this is his house, his new house. This is where he's going to live from now on.
These episodes aren't uncommon. They crop up whenever Kurt needs to adapt to change. They're unexpected, like mines in fields he discovers he's been running through when a second ago he was picking flowers in the park, or strolling down the street.
His life for the last ten years revolved around his daughter Grace. When she was a baby, he adjusted his work schedule to match her sleep schedule. They had the money to afford the best nurses in New York, but Kurt didn't want that. He didn't want his daughter raised by a governess. He was as hands-on a parent as there ever was. As Grace grew, her schedule changed, and Kurt adjusted - to her daycare schedule, her Gymboree schedule, her kindergarten schedule, her ballet schedule, her elementary school schedule. He dropped her off in the mornings, picked her up in the afternoons, then spent the rest of the evening going over her homework until it was time for them to make dinner, which they did together.
That was the great thing about being a designer and freelance editor. Kurt could work from anywhere, and, aside from doing consultations at Vogue, he could work any time.
When Grace became sick, Kurt's schedule was dictated by her doctor's visits, her medication regimen, then her chemo.
Towards the end, there was only one item written in Kurt's schedule - lying beside his daughter in her bed, holding on to her for dear life.
And not just her life.
His, too.
Grace kept Kurt's life regimented, but things flipped drastically when she died. He felt adrift. Detached from the life he knew, he didn't know what to latch on to. It took a while for him to get used to her being gone. His internal clock would wake him up bright and early at six to get Grace ready for the day, only to find himself walking blindly into a vacant bedroom. At the store, he would grab her favorite cereal out of habit and put it in his cart even though it wasn't on the list. He would jolt when he heard a song he thought she'd like, or saw an advertisement for a movie he thought she'd enjoy. He has yet to stop the automatic deposits from his bank account into hers, her weekly allowance piling up on top of birthday money and Christmas money, all of it earmarked for college (her decision, not his), but now waiting to be donated to the children's hospital that took such incredible care of her. He doesn't have the heart to empty it. She was so proud of it. He doesn't know what it will do to him to see the balance at zero.
But the worst moment of them all, the absolute worst, was when he tried to go back to work right after they lost her, and he found himself grabbing his coat at 2:15 to pick her up from school.
There are many moments after Grace's death, during Kurt's own struggle for acceptance, that blur together, but this one he remembers so vividly, it brings a lump to his throat and tears to his eyes. He was in the middle of a brainstorming session with his team. His boss Isabelle was there. She had dropped by with a box of cronuts and a grande nonfat mocha. Kurt hadn't been eating. Everyone could tell. But Kurt overlooked the signs – the sharper than normal angle to his cheekbones and chin, his collarbone that showed through his skin just a little too much, his hands that never seemed to stop shaking. He had originally waved the food away when she offered, but an hour later, he was on his third one.
The tension of his presence in the office so soon after his daughter's death slowly dissipated, making way for the familiar, though attenuated, back and forth banter he had so missed. Without knowing it, he was paving the way for a potential comeback. He wouldn't have a line up for a while, and he would need to keep an eye on fashion trends as they came and went in his absence, but this, this just felt so natural, so normal, it almost seemed like it was. He got caught up in the rhythm of this impromptu jam session. Somewhere in the middle of outlining a rough schedule, he looked down at the time on his phone. Mid-sentence, he got up from his chair and walked over to get his coat off the hook by the door.
"Alright," he said with a chuckle over Chase's last clap back at a jab his boyfriend Ian had made, "thanks for everything, you guys, but I've gotta run. We'll talk about this more when I come in tomorrow."
The room went silent, but Kurt didn't seem to notice.
"Where are you going, Kurt?" Isabelle asked, getting up from her seat on the corner of his desk and approaching, knowing that he would need her in a second, the way she always knew. Kurt has referred to Isabelle as his "fairy Godmother" ever since he first walked in to Vogue, fresh out of high school and trying to find a foothold in the hectic Gulf Stream that is New York City. She became his pillar of support, a sympathetic ear and a clear head whenever he needed one. She had thrown his bachelor party. Hers was the apartment he stayed in the night before his wedding. She'd hosted Grace's baby shower, and also Grace's wake.
She didn't have children of her own, but she loved Grace as much as anyone.
And hers was the shoulder he cried on all night when he found out Sebastian had cheated.
Kurt looked at her confused, wondering why it was that, suddenly, everyone around him seemed to be holding their breath. "I just … have to go pick up Grace. From school. I'm going … I'm going to be late."
Isabelle shook her head and put a hand on his. "Sweetie …"
It took Kurt a second. Even after one person gasped and another person sniffled, with Isabelle's sorrowful eyes staring at him, begging him to remember so she didn't have to say it, he didn't understand.
But when he did, it hit him like an electric shock all over his body, rendering his muscles useless, and he crumbled to the floor.
Isabelle held him in her arms in that one spot until Sebastian arrived, and when he did, Kurt didn't want to leave. He didn't want to go with Sebastian to their empty penthouse and face the truth about his empty life. He wanted to stay at Vogue and stay with Isabelle and live in that moment where everything was alright again, for one shimmering second, even if it wasn't real.
But he had to go. He had to leave with Sebastian who had hurt him; back to his life, even if it killed him; because even though he felt like his life was over, everything else continued on. People lived and people died. The sun still set in the evening, but in the morning, it would rise again.
He just didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
Not without his Grace.
He was cried out completely by the time Sebastian got him home. Sebastian undressed him, helped him with his cleaning and moisturizing ritual, and then put him to bed. It was Friday evening when Kurt shut his eyes and went to sleep. He lived that whole horrible moment at his office over again a hundred times before he opened his eyes, and when he did, it was Sunday morning.
Like yesterday, but to a greater extent, when these attacks happen, locked in his own brain, sifting through the pieces to find one big enough and sturdy enough to hold on to, Kurt loses time.
In a blink, hours go by, sometimes a day. He'll climb in the shower in the morning, turn the water on hot, and by the time he realizes it's ice cold, it's close to noon. He has sat at the dining room table for breakfast, staring at a bowl of oatmeal, and when he found the will to pick up the spoon, the oatmeal was old and hard, and it was dinner time. He's gone to bed on Monday and stared at the black behind his eyelids till Wednesday.
As far as Kurt knows, it's only around lunch time, but he glances at the clock in the corner of his screen to be sure.
12:45.
He breathes a sigh of relief. He double checks the date to make sure he has a reason to be, and sighs again.
Kurt switches back to the IKEA tab he'd been laboring long but not hard on earlier. He looks at the shopping cart he's been steadily filling, scrolls through his selections of personality bereft, assembly line furniture, and groans. This isn't him. Where this house, this blank slate, should be an endless fount of motivation, he feels numb. Maybe he shouldn't rush into this. He should give this house and the neighborhood time to grow on him before he sentences it to the mundane.
He needs a break. (Kurt Hummel need a break from shopping? Who knew?) He flips to a new page in his sketchbook. Just for shits and giggles, he tries drawing a sketch for his husband's office. He starts with the easy part – Sebastian's desk. Sebastian didn't leave that in the penthouse, so Kurt will make that the linchpin and design around it. It flows surprisingly easily from there once he gets started, with a pencil in his hand writing on paper instead of working on an impersonal screen – an ornamental rug, a matching leather chair, burgundy velvet curtains, a chainmail style Tiffany desk lamp, 1930s art deco décor with a soupcon of Persian flair. But he doesn't want the room to be too dark. No. Kurt wants nothing in their house to be dark. He adds a Salento chandelier over the largest open portion of the room, and a sweep of color – one wall, opposite a window, a lighter shade than the rest. He doesn't know what Sebastian's office looks like, but there has to be a wall in there that fits that bill.
An enamel and copper vase, a Khatam inlaid photo frame, a few Negar Gari …
Would Sebastian want that? These softer elements countering the strict, straight lines of the art deco pieces, what could be described as "feminine" influences, are Kurt's personal touch. But would Sebastian want just the plain art deco without Kurt's fingerprints all over it? Isn't that what Sebastian meant by Kurt being "heavy handed with the pastels"? Kurt thinks back on a time when he'd decorated his high school bedroom so that he and his stepbrother could share it. He'd worked hard on it, trying to fuse a masculine air with his theatrical influence. What he thought was an eclectic representation of the masculine and the feminine turned into a Moroccan themed disaster.
Actually, the word his stepbrother chose to use at the time was "faggy".
Sebastian has made jabs in their youth about Kurt not wearing "boy clothes", comments that Kurt can recognize now as the teenage boy equivalent of pulling Kurt's pigtails, but at the time, they stung. But Sebastian wouldn't have made those comments if there weren't at least a grain of truth to them, would he? He's never contradicted those statements, so as far as Kurt is concerned, they stand.
Kurt flips his pencil over and starts erasing. He'll pare down the extras – trade the Tiffany lamp for an understated banker's lamp, replace the rug with something more Brooks Brothers than Pier 1.
Maybe he should just opt for another IKEA recreation, but that feels like going back on his word.
He could always ask Sebastian. He swears he's heard his husband pass by a few times, but he didn't think anything of it. Kurt figures he's passing through on his way to get something from the bedroom that he needs downstairs. Kurt doesn't imagine the man is pacing the hallway, even if he is, trying to find a way to tell Kurt that lunch is ready. Little things like this, innocuous things, have become huge divides over the past few months. With anyone else, Sebastian has a history of railroading right over them, hurt feelings be damned.
But Sebastian has learned his lesson. He paid a hefty price to learn it, too.
Contemplating between clearing his throat so that Kurt knows he's there and letting another meal go cold, he sees Kurt's head lift up. It seems like an opening. Whether or not it is, Sebastian takes it.
"Kurt? Lunch is ready."
"Mm-hmm," Kurt mumbles, brushing eraser shavings aside.
"Are you … are you coming downstairs?"
Kurt erases again, then pencils something on a sheet of paper that Sebastian can't see. "Hmmm … mmm?"
It sounds like a question and an answer, but since Kurt doesn't follow it up with anything, it most likely means that Kurt will be skipping lunch today … again. Sebastian knocks idly on the door frame, giving Kurt a second longer to tell him for sure.
"Alright," he says. Disappointed, he turns to leave. "I guess I'll come back up at dinner then."
Kurt doesn't know why the thought returns when he wasn't even thinking about it; why it decided to nag at his brain when he had been able to ignore it for this long, but that's the way his brain works now. His thoughts don't always travel down straight paths. They twist and turn, taking one thing and linking it to something unrelated. Erasing those ideas he'd written down, removing every inch of himself from his picture of Sebastian's office, made him think about how eager he was to be rid of that word darling from above the window, and that ripped corner returns to his mind with a vengeance.
Well, as long as Sebastian is there, he might as well ask.
"Sebastian?"
"Yes?" Sebastian pauses in the doorway, not daring to move.
"When was the last time you were here?" Kurt raised an eyebrow at the idea when it originally came to him. When would Sebastian have come to this house that Kurt didn't know? They traveled Upstate once a year, but they always did it together as a family. And while they were here, Sebastian rarely ventured out alone. Sebastian isn't the kind of person who would buy a house sight unseen.
Unless he had found it during one of his outings with Grace. Which would mean that Grace had seen the inside.
Which meant that Grace would have seen this room and thought it would be hers, thought that they would someday live here, and Sebastian hid that word darling by the window for her, and not Kurt.
The thought is so painful, it makes Kurt want to tear his nails out with his teeth so he'll stop thinking about it.
Sebastian keeps his eyes locked to Kurt's profile so he won't miss it the moment Kurt decides to look at him instead of the floor, the wall, or the ceiling.
"I found this house online. It wasn't even on the market when I stumbled on it. To be honest, I'd only driven by it once. I hadn't been inside until we moved in."
"But you've seen the inside," Kurt asks. "Otherwise, how would you know about this room?"
"I took a virtual tour," Sebastian admits sheepishly, "but it was very thorough. I've seen the blueprints, gone over the permits and the zoning. I had Tristan from the office look over the place when he came up to visit his folks. He facetimed with me while he was here." Sebastian furrows his brow. "Why? Is something wrong?"
So Grace hadn't seen it. Hearing that lets Kurt's heart beat regular again. Kurt's eyes find the torn section of wallpaper, but they don't stay there. He doesn't want to clue Sebastian in about it if Sebastian doesn't already know. He wants to uncover this mystery on his own. If Sebastian gets to keep secrets, big ones at that, then Kurt wants this one for himself.
"No, no. Nothing's wrong. I was just curious, you know. Wanted to understand your process. Why this house … why this neighborhood … that sort of thing."
Kurt's sentence comes out choppy. It's odd how awkward talking has become for them. Sebastian used to think that the two things they had mastered were talking and fucking. They did both with such ease. There were never any boundaries between them, emotionally or physically. Even when they were cutting each other down, which they did in the beginning, it was never a difficult thing to talk to one another.
Not like now, when Sebastian feels like he's walking on eggshells and Kurt doesn't want to hear half of what he has to say.
"If you come down for lunch, we can talk about my process. If you're curious, that is." Sebastian watches Kurt expectantly, waiting for an answer.
And while Sebastian does, Kurt looks at his sketch – Sebastian's office, exactly the same way Sebastian always has it decorated. This is Sebastian, Kurt thinks, without him and Grace - bland and emotionless, with no light, little color, and no joy. Nothing exciting, nothing nuanced … nothing that indicates that he and Sebastian are together, not even those pictures he's so proud of.
Kurt still hasn't decided whether that's a bleak picture or not.
It might be bleak for Sebastian, but is it bleak for Kurt?
"Sure. I'll be down in a sec," Kurt decides, because he does and doesn't have an answer to that one. It changes as the day changes, and the days change too quickly.
"Alright. I'll be waiting." He hears Sebastian walk away, or he thinks he does. He checks the time on his clock. It's closing in on 2.
Kurt glances up at the window, the dangling wallpaper bouncing with the breeze coming from a draft near the ceiling. It would be so easy to just tear it down – grab an edge and rip, be done with it once and for all. It might even feel cathartic, exposing whatever is underneath it. But lunch is ready. He's already left Sebastian waiting long enough.
He leaves the mystery for another day.
