It's Hard To Be The One Who Stays [Kurtbastian]

In Movement (November, 2013)

A/N: Do not worry!! I am here to mend your heart. 

The weeks crawl at a snail's pace. It's an incredibly busy time, with rehearsals and midterms at every corner. But every day, Kurt texts Sebastian—things that he would've texted to Sebastian or mentioned during their evening calls. How his classes were going, gossip Sebastian might've been interested in, the latest happenings in trash TV land. Every other day or so, Sebastian texts back something inoffensive, a bit snarky, mostly just so Kurt knows he's still reading, Kurt thinks.

Elliot, whom he picked up on one of those terrible bar nights—but not like that, Kurt means friend picked-up, where Elliot held his hand and made sympathetic noises while he had a break down at the bar—, laughs at him every time he sees him text.

"Still being led on a string, Kurt?" He would tease, but Kurt never replies, because he can hear the real hint of disapproval underneath. Instead, he shoots off the text quickly and goes back trying not to choke on Elliot's cologne or get glitter all over himself as they talk. He wonders all the time if the befuddled way he feels interacting with Elliot is how straight people feel interacting with him.

Elliot isn't the only one who makes frowny faces at him about Seb, of course. Jose still keeps offering to build things for his show, and Rachel recently bought him self-help books without a trace of irony. The only people who seem to really support him, who asks after Seb and whether they've talked yet, is his dad and Seb's dad. He'd thinks he'd better get the best son award from both of them one day.

"Not yet," he'd tell them, and means the yet. Kurt isn't delusional. If Sebastian wants to tell him no and is sure of that no, he'd say it directly to Kurt, and there would be nothing for Kurt to do but accept it. Sebastian's never been one to pull punches. Until then. Until then—

But weeks slip by, and then it almost time to go back to Ohio for Thanksgiving, and Kurt seriously starts thinking about calling Sebastian up just to yell at him again.

Thankfully for Seb, days before Kurt is supposed to get on a plane back to Lima, Kurt's phone lights up with an incoming call from Meerkat, and Kurt's heart starts pounding. This is it, he thinks. He can feel it.

"Hey, Kurt," Sebastian says, his voice almost drowned out by what sounds like airport chatter. Seb sounds close enough to casual that if Kurt hadn't known him so well, he'd think Sebastian was really at ease. "Are you going back for Thanksgiving?"

"Sebastian," Kurt replies, trying to strike a similar tone. "Yeah, in a couple of days. Are you?"

"I am," Seb says. "So's Maman."

There is a long pause. Kurt blinks.

Seb's mother lives in Paris.

Seb's mother also loathes his dad, and the feeling is mutual. Seb, for his part, adores and avoids his mother in equal measures, always throwing himself into Kurt's arms when he comes back from his trips to France while loudly promising he'd never return.

According to Seb, his mother was the quintessential French woman: beautiful, charming, exacting, and unbearably flighty. Best in very small doses. Kurt has no idea how Sebastian will survive the visit.

"She's... going to Thanksgiving dinner?" he clarifies, just to make sure he understood right. "The Smythes' Thanksgiving dinner? At your dad's house? Which the French don't even celebrate?"

Seb coughs. "Yeah, and Maman's even staying with us. She's saying she wants to personally hear her son's 'first-year adventures,' like I don't talk to her every week. It's going to be a fucking blood bath, even in my dad's stupidly enormous house."