Title: When You Start Counting

Author: Spider

Pairing, Character(s): Kurt, Burt, and Mama Hummel

Rating: PG? Because someone dies (and someone else is drunk)

Warnings: Hummel Angst should count as a warning.

Spoilers: About Kurt's mom

Disclaimer: DEFINITELY not mine.

Summary: Kurt says his mother has been dead for ten years. Burt says his wife has been dead for eight. They're both right. It's just a matter of counting.

Word Count: 574

Notes: While this ficlet can stand alone, another ficlet of mine, Second Count, is its companion piece.

.

.

WHEN YOU START COUNTING

.

Kurt says his mother has been dead for ten years. Burt says his wife has been dead for eight. They're both right. It's just a matter of counting.

Kurt counts from the last day she told him she loved him, when he was tucked up against her chest in the hospital room, her too-thin arms wrapped around him so loosely. She couldn't hug him anymore, could barely hold him, but she would smile at him and let him brush her limp hair and tie it up in bows, and she would let him practice with her makeup, first on his face and then on hers (and then, if Daddy was sleeping, he would do his face too). Kurt would stick his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he carefully filled in her pale lips with her lipstick and brushed the pink blush over her hollow cheeks, and when he finished, he would curl up beside her and hold up a mirror, and they would look at their reflections and Mommy would blow kisses and Kurt would giggle, and she'd call them both utterly beautiful and press a lipstick-kiss to Kurt's cheek. He wouldn't wipe it off. He'd keep it there until his daddy made him take a bath and washed it off himself.

Kurt kept her last lipstick kiss on his cheek for a week. His daddy wasn't very good about making him take baths.

Burt counts from the last day his wife's chest rose and fell for a final time, almost two years to the day after she slipped into that coma. He had kept her alive, hoping, praying that she would return... but two years had come and gone, two years in which Kurt had hardened into a little block of stone and Burt's work at the shop floundered due to all the time he spent sitting by her bedside, waiting for her to open her eyes. Burt had sat Kurt down one day and explained to him just what it would mean to remove the life support, but Kurt had stared unblinkingly back at him and said, in his so-childish voice of logic, "Mommy's been dead for years, Daddy. We should let her go now."

Kurt hadn't cried when the monitors attached to his mother flat-lined, and he hadn't cried when the doctors pulled the sheet over her head. He hadn't cried as he helped Burt into the taxi that took them home, and he hadn't cried as Burt held him too tightly and hid his own tears in his son's hair. He only shed one tear at the funeral, a fact Burt's sister, Mildred, commented on. She had been drunkenly insulting about it—how could that little devil hate his mother so much he couldn't weep for her—but Kurt had just looked calmly at her and said "I cried when she died. She's not dying now. She's free."

Kurt would cry again, in the many years to follow, but never over his mother. He would cry when his favorite bag got ripped at school, or when he was first called a fag (though Burt wouldn't find out for many more years what that bout of tears had been for). He cried while watching most chick-flicks (and some action shows). Kurt didn't cry when Burt did, and he did cry when Burt didn't, and together, somehow, they made it through eight-or-ten years. Depending on when you started counting.