#tanfic

Kurt’s like a bird.

klaine | part 2 of 3 magical realism, high school, anthropomorphic by bossymarmalade (tanhands)

the shortest of hands quinn, blaine

Quinn rolls over in bed and snorts inelegantly when Blaine texts back:

You're very rude. But I forgive you since you were raised in a Laura Ashley barn.

The funniest thing, she's realized very quickly in the time they've been texting each other, is that Blaine can be pretty rude himself. They're both covered in laid flat prickles like well-groomed hedgehogs and he mostly deploys his when he's pushed past the limits of even his custardy patience or -- or! -- when he's talking to Quinn and he's weirdly ... unfettered, both of them standing over the rubble of all that. The particular set of manners that you develop when you're the younger sibling of the gorgeous clan wunderkind, and your family mostly prefers that you keep the peace in front of company and not be underfoot.

(Or embarrassing, like say getting pregnant in high school or coming out gay in middle school. What on earth would the partners at work and the ladies in the social club think.)

Sixteen minutes later Blaine sends her a photo; it's him sitting on the bus and the bag of popcorn is on the seat next to him. This bag of popcorn is one that Quinn found out that a local movie theatre was selling, the equivalent of just over five large-sized popcorns for a reasonable price (she supposes), and she had it Postmated to Blaine as a laugh. But now he keeps sending her photos of himself carrying this torso-sized bag of popcorn everywhere with him like it's one of those high school egg-baby assignments.

Quinn had opted out of the egg baby assignment. Obvious reasons.

I hope they charged you the child fare for it.

While she's waiting for Blaine to reply, she scrolls through the other photos he'd sent her since the bag of popcorn arrived: them having breakfast together with a shallow dish of coffee in front of the thing on the table, Blaine carrying it stuffed into an IKEA bag slung over his shoulder (too big for his side satchel, 'they grow so fast' he'd texted), the bag sitting in one of those kiddie swings at the park while Blaine pushed it ('you actually found somebody who wasn't entirely creeped out to take that photo?' she'd texted, and he'd sent back 'and got his number too!' even though they both know he's still hollowed out by the breakup and it's a lie), Blaine tucking the bag of popcorn into bed at night. Quinn goes back to the one in the park, trying to figure out if the laugh on Blaine's face is fake, or real, or acting, or fifty/fifty, or a mask, or just to make her giggle.

She decides to go with the last one. She's here in Yale and he's there in Westerville, and the secret Blaine's told her is that he likes it there, really, truly, down deep in his heart. He likes a small place where somebody will take a photo of him pushing popcorn on the swing, where things can be quiet and sweet and measured, where he doesn't really need his hedgehog spikes. Except with Quinn because they both like it, pricking themselves and each other, bloodless release of the built-in, chronic pressure.

I'll drive out there to your campus and show up in your Feminist Witness Testimony class to yell at you for missing Butter's birthday. A whole big scene.

Her first instinct is to make fun of him for the name -- Butter? -- but the sudden memory of Drizzle cuts that one short and instead Quinn finds herself sending a completely different text.

Do it, then, bitch.

Blaine doesn't take too long to respond because he knows damn well how she'll be feeling after sending that. When his picture comes through, it's a map of Connecticut with popcorn pieces carefully circled around New Haven and his hand stuck into the frame, thumbs-up.

Santana's fascinated at first because touching Britt is all about another tight firm sculpted and manicured body, because the Cheerios are who they are and they're symbols before they're people and a symbol, Santana knows, cannot show any flaws or it will be toppled and trampled and left broken and alone in the dust. The one dyke who'd been on the Cheerios when Santana had just gotten in, nobody had ever proven anything, but she (her name was Chao and she'd had a mouth like a macaron but Santana never says that name aloud) had quit suddenly and Sue had thrown everything in her changeroom locker out onto the gym floor and instructed the remaining Cheerios to scavenge what they wanted before it was compacted into a cube and sent to Chao's parents at their expense, and Santana had busted her Cheerio gang violence cherry by shoving some stick girl out of the way to grab a black CD sleeve with a red x on it that says "so jealous" and Santana listens to that CD once a month and no more because it makes something like hot strawberry licorice uncoil in a bullwhip low down in her belly.

-- but anyway Britt, she's seal-smooth and groomed and taut all the way to her panty line and beyond, and when Santana touches Tina's leg through her fishnets, fucking around and laughing and joking, there's something new. Like one of those stress relief jelly toys crammed in a net bag and then squeezed; Tina's flesh gives, it takes, it swells and it retreats. The moment passes but Santana finds more moments. Makes them for herself. When they're dancing and she slaps Tina's ass the way you do as a good friend when you're girls because touching each other doesn't necessarily mean anything when you're girls, only Santana aims a little lower so she can see when Tina's skirt flips with the movement and there's tiny dimples just under the curve of her butt, there one moment and gone the next, flower petals on the ground. Santana doesn't wonder what those would feel like if she touched them real light with just the very tips of her fingers and she doesn't think about doing the same thing with her tongue. Tina's already starting to look at her sometimes, unafraid and unmoving in her sloe-black stare that's almost, almost almost a little mocking. Tina goes through Santana's bag one day and she finds that black single with its red x and she takes it, and Santana pretends she doesn't give a fuck because getting mad at Tina doesn't work. It never works. Tina's too accustomed to everyone getting mad at her.

The CD never comes back but another one does through the slats of her locker, a burned one in a handmade paper sleeve of magazine pictures packing-taped onto cut-up pieces of a Froot Loops box, and ransom note lettering except it's entirely x's. There's not even a name on it but there's a track listing on a slip of black paper in silver pen and somewhere between songs by Veruca Salt and L7 and The Runaways, there's "i know i know i know" by Tegan and Sara.

Santana considers breaking the CD and shoving it into Tina's locker. She considers throwing it across the choir room like a discus and announcing loudly that people need to stop abandoning their trash on her like she's a church step accepting unwanted teen babies (Quinn's away this week, it's fine). She forgets to do those things and it goes home with her and Santana listens to it under her covers with her eyes shut. i know i know i know. Tina, the next day, is wearing a black jean jacket with the sleeves cut off, a red x painted on the back. Santana's fingertips, later, feel the edges of the thick poster paint as she starts to peel it off and Tina's thighs jiggle, the way girl thighs do.

neighbourhood pride | kurt; mike

KH: Came to check on my garden this morning on a walk. I want you to take special note of the little sign that clearly says NO! because that's gonna be relevant. MC: Don't tell me. Or should I say -- don't take a picture. KH: Disgusting! As if I would. But yes you guessed right, I turned around and right across the path from my beautifully tended garden niche was the evidence of somebody who wanted to own a shiba inu but not clean up after it. MC: Get yourself a banana bread matcha from Steam Teahouse down the block and don't dwell. KH: I don't dwell. MC: Oh you're a total dweller KH: I dwell proportionally. Evidence of this neighbourhood going downhill Exhibit Part Deux:

[ gleecouver: an au where they all live in the metro vancouver area of british columbia ]-come what may challenge-

union and prior | mercedes; santana

"You always want to come to the most depressing places," Santana says. "Would it kill you to find some kind of ancestral connection to a bar, or a park, or I mean hell, I'll take a picturesque back alley at this point?"

"Quit exaggerating. It's not that bad." Mercedes keeps walking, looking around, and after a moment's lag Santana catches up to her. She has to admit -- Hogan's Alley may not be much to look at these days, nowhere near how it must have been in its heyday when there were chicken shacks and cathouses, when Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong rolled on through -- but the gravitas Mercedes is giving it, Santana can't help but feel a little bit of the same reverence. "If you took the Black Atlantic course with me, Ms Lopez, then you'd know the significance."

Santana gives a light snort, tossing her eyes but not with any real annoyance. "I'm just fine with all my Women's & Gender Studies crap, thanks," she says, scuffing the toe of her sandal against a dropped Hawkins cheezie to grind it into the dirt. "Even though there's a wave of garlic that wafts through the air at the start of every class when everyone opens their tubs of hummus. I used to hold my breath but now I just breathe in deep and let it clear my sinuses."

That gets a laugh out of Mercedes, and she shakes her head and reaches for Santana. She doesn't take her hand, instead latching onto Santana's wrist, and her fingers snug against the pulse there. "You and me," Mercedes says, "if we'd been around then, this is where we would've been. Down here with the porters and the singers, and the steak shack owners and the bootleggers--"

"And the hookers, they were important, don't forget them."

"--and the sex workers too, yeah." Mercedes has come a long way since high school because she doesn't even falter, even though she rephrases Santana's term. "All the musicians. Jimi Hendrix's grandma lived here."

"Ooooh. Foxy," Santana smirks, but she does look across the lot to the sign on Nora Hendrix Place, and thinks past her abuela, to her grandmother on the other side who had died well before Santana had even been a possibility. Her father's never talked much about his family and Santana had learned not to ask, that some things needed to stay buried. She presses the ball of her foot hard against the ground, feeling the broken twigs through the sole of her sandal, looking at the way the sunshine plays along the dirt. If she looks up, the sunshine will be falling on Mercedes, the open awe on her face as she soaks in the history of this place through her skin, and Santana's afraid she won't feel it, she never will.

She grabs Mercedes' wrist with her free hand and Santana's fingers find the other girl's pulse without trying, a rhythm exchanged and twinned, borrowed and left waiting. "I don't wanna be here anymore," she blurts, and then covers quickly with, "--Britt needs me to meet her at the Skytrain. Otherwise she gets into fights with that Canada goose that hangs out there."

"Girl," Mercedes says, but nothing more than that. She squeezes down hard on Santana's wrist before moving on, and again, Santana follows.

i was the bad guy who walked out

Finn Hudson, Paul Karofsky Rating: M | Non-Con Tags: Missing Scene, Revenge, Humiliation, Non-Consensual Oral Sex

Kurt's gone and the window of chance for Finn to do something about that has gone too. All except for one chance shot.

Elliott's friends are the kinds of people who were eating tofu scramble and following intense meditation-slash-hallucinogen regimens before that was a thing, who all bring with them stories about lugging home woven bags of jasmine rice from the H-Mart because the bodegas don't carry that size, who have art shows which Elliott invites Kurt to and when he gets there it's a single plaster cast of part of a spine displayed on a shelf in a hairdressing salon the size of a subway car. Kurt makes convincingly interested sounds at the peyote stories and contributes his feelings about basmati rice and drinks his one half-glass of wine that the artist doles out while she waits for their praise for her work, and he tells himself that this is fine, this is New York, this is the big city experience he's wanted his whole life. And that he isn't any slouch or small town peanut himself, able to hold (lower) court in the world of fashion mavens who wear high stiff chiffon collars for a week before trading them in, beheading-style, for decolletage-baring unisex jerseys while declaring each trend an undying marker of the taste-makers.

It's ridiculous sometimes. But Kurt can handle ridiculous; look at where he grew up. He can handle being "and this is Kurt! It's his band I joined, you wouldn't believe the way this kid can wrangle a pop ballad" when Elliott introduces him at parties in apartments that each seem to be exactly four blocks from a subway station no matter where they are. The people at these parties aren't unfriendly -- at least, not uniformly -- and Kurt meets more gay people, which is something he welcomes, and makes connections, also welcome. He steps in entirely too much kitty litter tracked on people's floors and one time resorts to drinking out of his cupped hand at the kitchen sink because there's no clean dishware, but generally he has fun. Even if:

"--but remember there's only three Reese's cups in a package!"

"Put that down with your salad tong hands!"

"...mmmmmmmayoNAIse. Don't make them come looking for us."

These people seem to talk almost entirely in code sometimes, and Kurt can feel his smile get a little strained on occasion when the friend groups forget to account for a newbie. An interloper, more like, even though Elliott's always giving him slightly apologetic smiles and diverting the conversation. Kurt gets it intellectually but in practice it reminds him how short a time he's been living in New York and how close-knit he is with his other friends, his Lima friends, who know all the same references and all the same insults and jokes.

It's not a new feeling for Kurt, being lonely. But he thought he'd forgotten what it was like to be lonely in a crowd.

This current party is wearing long, and Kurt's wondering if Elliott will mind much if he says he's got to go home and wash his hair, when Elliott turns to him and says as part of a conversation Kurt's only been half-tuned in for, "--but we could survive anything, right? We already narrowly avoided the Apocalypstick," and he's grinning, laughing in his big top ringleader Elliott way with his kohled eyes sparkling, and Kurt laughs back, half in surprise more than anything else.

"And just barely made it safely out of Areola 51," Kurt says. The other friends give confused smiles, and Elliott wraps an arm around Kurt, breath warm against his ear.

the sandwich society

Finn/Emma Rating: T | No Archive Warnings Apply Tags: Alternate Reality, Post-Canon, Workplace Relationship, Slice of Life

Is it called a clique when you're an adult? Probably not, if it just involves talking about whether or not you like your crusts cut off.