kumpez:

21

AU. Sam keeps going back. Sam/Kurt.

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I’m a sucker for sad edges. Cold contours, old and failing city walls. Desperate fires smothering the shadows inside. The sort of feeling posts like this give me.

Since it’s now kosher to repost Christmas exchange gifts, as I understand it, I’ve uploaded the fic I wrote for clayblahblah here with proper formatting. (The original posting got whitewashed, formatting-wise - my fault entirely - which I can only imagine made Stave 4 in particular difficult to follow.) 

a-canoe-christmas:

title: where everything was strange and dear

author: cor/gamblestache

rating: nc-17

notes: happy holidays tonberry :D lyrics from “christmas dream” by neil diamond. 

The Berry household was barely big enough to hold just the original glee clubbers two years ago, and it’s hardly big enough to hold all of this year’s new additions just for a party — much less for a sleepover.

So it’s only fair, Rachel announces, that they draw names from a hat to decide who’s sharing with whom. Though she hasn’t learned her lesson about the alcohol, Rachel doesn’t seem keen on pressing her luck with her parents by letting everyone shack up as they want, and somehow she sees this as a perfectly acceptable alternative: no fighting about who’s rooming with who, purportedly decreased odds about who’s going to be shacking up, and most of all, a fun sense of tradition.

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Hooraaaaaaaaaaay! ‘tis wonderful. You even made my silly indulgent prompt into something believable! Many, many thanks.

a-canoe-christmas:

Gifter: tonbury

Giftee: clayblahblah

Prompt: The title says it all. Merry Christmas!

PRELUDE

Winter in the city arrives without fanfare, as the rustle of calendar pages, the hum and chime of vents and pipes in the walls. Exhaust colors the air in seasonal grays and whites, and greenery blossoms behind store windows. Halos form in the glass where glowing bulbs grow. But New York is always a festival of lights. Deflected trade winds buoy the temperature, and autumn-wear clings tight to clothes hangers in closets all over town.

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Huh. Not sure how this wound up completely bolded / missing other formatting. I suppose that’s what I get for copying from a GDoc.  

I had to do something while the power was out during Sandy, and I do love me some bitchy Kurt, flirty Kurt, drunk Kurt, and sexy Kurt. Untitled, Kurt/OC, NC-17. 

- - -

When Kurt had received the invitation he’d checked yes out of instinct, a desire to witness spectacle, romance, centerpieces. In an itchy tux stained with half of his third glass of champagne, he wishes he hadn’t. Long draped tables with too much lace and green and orange bridesmaids’ dresses and “Celebration” blaring on the loudspeakers. Fuck it all.

He is past a social buzz but not yet truly drunk, idling in the sweet spot that makes his world taste sour. Bitter and pensive, thoughts strike him like fever pains: Who the hell pairs lilies with roses? How the hell did that woman fit into that dress? (He wishes she hadn’t; her skin reminds of him of pancake batter, and he feels nauseous enough already.) Where the hell is the waiter? (His glass isn’t filling itself.) When the hell is this pep rally of a reception going to end? (He knows he could just leave. Maybe he will, dammit.) Why the hell hasn’t he gotten laid in three months?

That last one he answers easily enough, but it doesn’t stop the question from rising in him, over and over. The fact that the groom is named Eli isn’t helping matters. Kurt knows the bride, Tasha, from work; he’s met her new husband once or twice. The second most boring person Kurt’s ever had the misfortune to talk to. He’s the most boring person Kurt ever remembers talking to, but he figures any duller and he wouldn’t have bothered remembering, so he keeps the first place slot open, just in case. 

The ceremony fit the couple perfectly, short like her and bland like him. Kurt had been sure he was on his way to breaking his flawless crying-at-weddings streak until the best man’s speech. Something about eternal love and an anecdote about a little girl crying in a library and a poem with rivers and circles in it. It made sense at the time. Trying to stifle the waterworks Kurt had squeaked like a sewer rat. Or worse - like a pubescent boy. 

An arm with a bottle passes his circular table (empty save for him, thanks to a few well-placed dirty looks) and Kurt holds out his glass like a toll gate. “If you value your life, you will not stop pouring until I tell you to,” he warns. 

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Hand wrote this while bored on a drive up to NY for the 4th. Prompt (“Rachel brings Sam to the National Art Gallery”) courtesy my traveling companion.

Normally Sam marvels at little aside from Marvel, but since he’s in D.C., not just reading it, he lets Rachel drag him between gluttonous pillars gorged on marble and into the National Gallery. She looks at home among grand things, a statue that’s stepped off its plinth, but beneath the high lobby dome (creased and rippling like stage curtains around its edges) he feels the weight of insignificance press into him like yards of down, disastrously comforting and guaranteed to knead the life from him a year at a time.

“Sam!” Rachel chides from beneath a doorway, a tremendous arch yawning at the nobodies mulling past. He follows her through a labyrinth of square rooms shouting centuries from every wall—dead scenes swallowed by the relentless appetite of history, melted down to viscous liquid and slathered over canvas by defiant mortals: This is what I think of time! they seem to say. In his pocket Sam feels a carefully folded sketch cringe and wrinkle at the touch of his sweaty hand. With the closing of his fist the paper collapses to a ball, its edges rough like cracks in hardened oil.

Around her neck Rachel wears a tangerine-colored digital camera, which she lifts to her eyes periodically. (A timid crack has slain the digital display.) The grind of the machinery as her finger touches the trigger reminds Sam of a distant, artificial thunder (no lightning—no flash). “You’ve been awfully quiet,” she observes.

“Why are you taking pictures of the pictures?”

She offers a Mona Lisa smile—the Louvre would be furious. “So that I can look at them later?” She grips the camera like a secret, and rubs her thumb over the cracked screen. “You never know what will inspire you as a performer. That’s why my professor says you should always surround yourself with high culture.”

Sam thinks of the shelf of comics and DVDs in his studio halfway across the country.

“Does it bother you?” she asks.

He doesn’t know how to communicate what he feels—that trapping the strokes and smudges of these works (these champions over fickle apathies, over the atrophy of memory) into tiny boxes, to be diluted in copies and tamed by glossy rectangles or the pixelated wash of a monitor, feels blasphemous—so he says, “No.”

In the East Gallery they walk between sculptures of anonymous hands immortalized as his will never be and find a room where tangles of shapes hang from the ceiling and God paints their shadows on the walls. “A face,” Rachel says with an amused smile—and she’s right; wire and sheets of metal, meaningless, cast a man’s features onto the wall behind.

Later Sam will stand in the Washington sun and will the light to make a masterpiece of him, to reveal the holes he feels in negative space on the mall lawn. Instead his shadow is full and black, half his size. He will sign his name: Sam Evans. A graphite sketch in God’s pocket, balled to a cloud of nothing.

Anonymous asked: I am extremely excited that you're writing again and was wondering if this new story will be Kum endgame? I know I'll end up reading it anyway but the ending to Tautology literally had me in tears (your writing's amazing!) and I'd love to know if I should brace myself. I realize this is probably a silly question and one that you might not want to answer so as to not give away the ending but I thought it'd be worth a shot.

It was worth a shot ;) But I’m staying silent on the matter for now. I will say for sure that it will be Kum-centered, lest there be any doubt; obviously the relationship between Kurt and Sam was the focus of the original, and that will be no less true of the sequel, though I may throw in a few additional PoVs (as I’ve already done with Blaine), as the characters are (at the moment, anyway) physically separate. If you’re worked up about it, you can wait ‘til it’s finished and decide whether to read it then, though fair warning: As you probably know, I’m a bit slow, so that could be a while. The sequel’s going to have more chapters than the original, though many of them will be short ones like Under Virgo. 

Tautology (Prequel)

Prologue 

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January 1st announces itself in Ohio with trumpets and wolf whistles, brassy blasts of air that topple trees and sly flute-song that checkers the sky with clouds so that the sun winks at every suitor, be it flame or filament. By evening power lines twitch in gutters like electric eels or black veins uprooted and neighborhoods shudder with the hum of generators, resonant with the shivers of families without.

Kurt is still as a wax figure, and why not—there’s wax to spare; the house is a chandler’s dream, awash in restless light that fidgets with every exhale. The candles bleach his rounded edges and shade his creases charcoal, imply motion, and in canceling the illusion Blaine’s brain overcompensates, dismisses the rise and fall of Kurt’s chest as imaginary.

It is unsettling.

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Through the windshield the highway feels like a coast of black sand, or a tarry sea, waves of rubber churning the asphalt. At best lonely currents guide them forward, over stubby white eels and coral yellow. At worst wrecks leave mirror shards like sea glass for waders to net and polish.

In the evening the sun dips and darkens, an open sore, and the sky shyly tips sideways to hide the wound beneath the horizon. Semis bend their loose joints around the corners of crossroads, Chinese dragons bowing their heads in the day’s wake. Purple clouds shed their silver linings and drape their wings over the opalescent aether of twilight.

They save their money for gas and skip the hotel stop, Mom and Dad switching seats under streetlights in the forever of the Midwest. Atop the tremor of the engine his siblings’ heads knock timid rhythms against the cold glass of car windows, but his fatigue sinks into night’s quicksand, and before long he has forgotten how to close his eyes. The moon trills its name in swells of roadside rainwater, blushes against the shoulder of the earth.

In the dark he daydreams that he is sleeping, cradled between whitecaps, doused in gullsong, drifting further and further, farther and farther from shore.

And when light’s modesty fails and morning boasts its way over the new landscape, and the truck sculpts wheel tracks into the gravel of their new driveway, and their things are straining to fill the nothing of new rooms, Sam feels the weight of an old shadow, pale and lithe, and hears its snakeskinned seraph’s laugh, and tastes its capricious smile.

He is still too close.

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bumblbear asked: So, First off, I wanted to give you a complete, overall "Wow" on Tautology- It's not just fantastic story-telling, but the language itself and the symbolism and general flow of the words is -beautiful-. I've been reading through your commentary (Which very much helped soften the blow of the ending, haha), and I was simply wondering- with the thought you've presented of it being a "history" for them, and not necessarily their final future- has a sequel ever occurred to you?

It has. I’ve gone back and forth about whether I’d want to dive into that universe again, and I’m still not entirely sure. If it did happen, it would most definitely be more AU than Tautology was; Sam, for instance, wouldn’t return to McKinley during the following school year, and Blaine would not have been made a junior. The fic would have three PoV characters instead of two - Kurt, Sam, and Blaine - and would likely take place mostly a year and a half/two years after Tautology. 

I actually have it pretty much entirely plotted in my head already, but I dunno. People had some issues with some of my characterizations in Taut, and those would almost certainly not go away. I’d want to finish Amaranthine before I even thought about jumping back to Taut, for one thing because it’s nice to have a little less outright angst to wade through, and given my despicable rate of production that’ll delay it for a little while. You’re not the only one who’s asked about a sequel, though, so I guess there’s interest out there. 

The suspense!