Where Wind and Water Meet - Chapter 1
Title: Where Wind and Water Meet
Artist: morph0fairy
Author: firefly_ca
Rating (art/fic if different): PG
Word Count: 24K
Warnings (if any): Major character death wrapped up in magic realism.
Fic Summary: Inspired by/loosely based on George MacDonald's At The Back of the North Wind. Blaine has never behaved the way normal children do and has always been too quiet and detached from the world around him. Everything changes the day he meets a strange boy named Kurt with the ability to change his appearance and who says he can control the wind. Blaine doesn't know why, but it feels like he's known Kurt forever. AU, but not totally detached from the Glee universe.
A/N: Yes, they're real children's books. Yes, they're awesome.
Chapter 1
Sometimes Blaine notices things when he's not supposed to. His mom tells him he's got his head in the clouds with a smile on her face, when Blaine falls because he misses the top stair to the basement again, but he notices the worry hiding behind her eyes when she says it. He doesn't like knowing that she feels bad when she thinks about him or looks at him too hard, but Blaine can't make himself be more like Cooper, normal, like other boys, the way she wants him to be. He knows. He's tried, but nothing about the world he walks through feels real to him. He feels like he lives in the wrong place, like he's always fighting his way through water. Sometimes it's so hard understanding the point of the people around him, he forgets easy things, like what a birthday does or where the stairs start and end.
Still, for as much as Blaine misses, he does notice. He noticed that first night, the way his father's face went tight when Blaine said a boy tried to break into the house. The tightness left as soon as everyone saw the branch, so Blaine lets his dad think the boy was all a dream, just until he has a chance to get used to the idea. One of the things he's noticed is that people get a lot less upset about new things once they've had a chance to stop being new. For him, the strange boy stops being new the very next night.
The wind is still howling and shrieking outside the window, even louder now that the glass has gone, a sheet of heavy plastic taped in its place. Mom had wanted him to stay in Cooper's room for the night, but Cooper gets so grumpy for no reason when Blaine goes in there, Blaine usually feels better if he stays away completely. He's always missing something when he's in Cooper's room, so he asks to sleep in his own bed instead.
By the time the wind has started to blow so fiercely that Blaine can hear the tape starting to rattle along with the plastic, making tearing, painful-sounding rasps as it does, he decides he's made a mistake. Maybe staying with Cooper wouldn't be so bad after all. He buries his head further under the covers. It feels like the house is going to shake down. After a while the rattling stops almost completely, even though Blaine is sure he can now hear the wind whipping around inside the room. He tries not to make noise, but still cries out a little when someone taps very pointedly on his shoulder.
"Well there's no need for that," says a voice, high and strong and cold like the wind that's rushing past Blaine's ears as his blanket almost blows away from his head completely. "Stop crying. I can't be bothered talking to a crying boy."
"It's so loud," Blaine whimpers, trying to pull the covers tighter over his head.
"Oh for the - " the voice begins. "It wouldn't have to be this loud if you weren't so un-cooperative."
The wind picks up even louder, positively screaming, the noise crawling inside Blaine's head and throwing itself against his skull. The blanket is finally ripped out of his fingers as it flies to the far side of the room. Blaine cries out again and scrambles to cover his ears with his arms, but the shrieking wind dies down almost immediately, a faint breeze suddenly the only movement in the room.
"That's better," says the voice, pausing for a moment before huffing, "Are you going to hide in plain sight the entire evening or are you going to talk to me? Get up."
Cautiously Blaine peeks out from underneath his arms. There's a boy standing next to the bed, not too much older than Cooper. He's looking at Blaine with his arms folded, and his mouth in a thin, displeased line. Blaine recognizes him immediately.
"You're the boy who broke my window," he exclaims, springing up into a sitting position, forgetting to be afraid when he's so distracted by being angry.
"I did no such thing," the boy snaps.
"You did," Blaine insists. "I watched you do it."
"I never broke your window," the boy says. "You covered over mine, after I went through all the trouble of opening it. It took a lot of hard work for me to get that window the way that I like it, and then you went and had them cover it with plastic."
"But that's my window," Blaine says, even more alarmed. "It's my window because it's a part of my house."
"No," says the boy, talking in a voice that says he thinks Blaine is being very stupid. "The window is on my house, and you had no right to go covering it up."
"But you don't live here," Blaine says. "And we're in my house right now."
"Of course I don't live here," the boy says, pointing back out the window. "I live there. That's my house and this window is the best view I have of outside, so stop taping it down, please."
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Blaine is quiet for a moment before he finally stammers,
"Your - your house is outside?"
"My house is inside," says the boy. "And we are outside, right now."
Blaine shakes his head.
"No, no. We're in the house right now. We have to be, because there are walls and a ceiling. Out there with the trees and the sky, that's outside. My dad told me. He's old, so he knows."
"The trees and sky are my walls and ceiling," says the boy. "And your dad isn't that old. He doesn’t know everything."
"He's older than you," Blaine says, confidently. "He's even older than my brother."
Cooper is always talking about how big and old and special he is. He talks about how he's going to go to middle school soon, and then even to McKinley, the big high school that they drive past every time they have to go to the dentist, but Blaine can't come with him because he's too short.
"He is not," the boy says, still unimpressed. "I'm older than you, your father, your mother, and your brother all put together."
"No you're not," Blaine says, who knows what a lie looks like. "I can prove it. How many years old are you?"
The boy looks at him, surprised, like he's only just sorting something out about Blaine. "I'm older than counting, Blaine. I'm older than numbers."
"You can't be," Blaine says. "You look like you're not a lot more than Cooper, and he's not that big, no matter what he says."
"You can't always believe what you see, Blaine," the boy says, suddenly uncertain, like he's not sure how to explain himself. "I look the way you want me to look, right down to my clothes. If I look like a boy to you right now, it's because right now a boy won't be scary for you. I'm not here to scare you, Blaine."
"You scared me when you came in," Blaine says, accusingly. "If you're not a boy what are you?"
"Are you sure you don't already know?" the boy asks, and the cool breeze gets stronger, blowing the curtains and ruffling Blaine's hair. But not the boy's hair, Blaine notices. Suddenly he realizes that he wind is coming from the boy himself. But it doesn't seem like he's making the wind, the way you can with a fan or a sheet of paper. It's like…
"Are you the wind?" he asks, cautiously, and for the first time since he's come in, the boy's face lights up with a brilliant, and very nice, smile.
"I was hoping you would know without me telling you," he says. "I've got a good feeling about you, Blaine."
"Why are you so cold?" Blaine asks, uncertainly. It doesn't seem right that a face that happy could still be cold enough to sting the skin on Blaine's arms.
"I'm not," the boy insists. "I'm North. The North Wind always feels cold when you go against it, but I can't help if people aren't smart enough to go where I tell them."
"Is that your name?" Blaine asks. "North Wind?"
"I have a lot of names," the boy says dismissively, but Blaine presses on.
"What name do you want me to call you?"
The boy is silent for a moment, thinking hard.
"Well," he says, slowly. "If you're Blaine, than I must be…Kurt. You can call me Kurt."
"Why Kurt?" Blaine asks. "What does me being me have to do with you being you?"
"I don't know," Kurt says, and Blaine notices that he's telling the truth. "But I know this is how it has to be. This is what works. You ask a lot of questions."
"I have more," Blaine says, because he's not embarrassed to ask why, ever. Asking is the first part of knowing. "Why did you come to my room? Why does this window have the best view?"
Kurt looks at him sharply, and if Blaine wasn't so good at noticing the things that try to hide, he might have missed the way Kurt's chin trembles just a little, or how empty his whole face gets before snapping back to normal.
"You saw me," he says. "I was going past the window and I saw you look right at me, but you weren't even scared. No one ever sees me unless they do something wrong first, and no one ever looks at me like they aren't scared to see me. People who see me think that I'm ugly, but all they're seeing in me is themselves. The beautiful people never see me, except for you. I wanted to try to talk to you. I haven't talked to anyone in a long time."
"Longer than counting?" Blaine asks, and Kurt smiles.
"Not that long," he says, "but not for a long time. I wanted to see what it was like to talk again."
"You're very good at it," Blaine offers. "Your voice is like music."
Kurt smiles that big smile again.
"Thank you," he says. "Your voice is very happy. I like it."
"If you like happy things, why are you making the outside - sorry, inside. No… wait."
Blaine furrows his brow very hard as he tries to make the things he's thinking come out properly.
"Why are you making your house and my outside so angry?"
"Storms aren't angry, Blaine," Kurt says, smiling again. "They're housekeeping. Sometimes I need to do an extra-big clean to take care of all the places I don't like tidying up. That's all a storm is."
Blaine hates cleaning up, so this makes sense to him. He nods, carefully.
"Is it clean yet?" he asks.
"Soon," Kurt says. "I'll be finished tonight."
He pauses for a second, before adding, "Do you want to come with me? I'm not done talking to you yet."
"I'm not supposed to go anywhere without telling someone," Blaine says.
"You can tell me, " Kurt offers. "I'm older than they are, anyhow. I know better than they do, and you'll be back before they know you're gone."
This makes sense to Blaine so he gets up and grabs his housecoat and slippers, already halfway to the door before he hears Kurt laughing again.
"Not that way," Kurt says, holding out his hand. "I go out the way I came in."
"I can't go through the window," Blaine protests. "It's too high. I'll fall."
"You won't fall," Kurt says dismissively. "You can climb onto my back if you're worried."
"What if I slip?" Blaine insists.
"You won't even have to hold on," Kurt insists. "Here, I'll show you."
He reaches out to Blaine and takes him by the arms, swinging him up onto his back like Blaine weighs nothing at all. Kurt lets go and Blaine panics because he hasn't had a chance to steady himself or grab Kurt's shoulders yet, but then he realizes that Kurt is right. Somehow the material of Kurt's shirt has formed a sort of seat, comfortable and roomy, like Kurt has gotten so big that Blaine is sitting in the folds of a giant's clothes, even though when he stares hard at Kurt he's exactly the same size as before.
"Where does your mom buy your clothes?" he asks, suspiciously. Kurt laughs.
"I don't have a mother, and I don’t buy my clothes. They're made of clouds."
"They feel like coming home," Blaine says, even though he doesn't know why he says it, and then suddenly Kurt dives through the small gap in the plastic and they're in the sky.
"You didn't say we'd be flying," Blaine says, clinging tightly to Kurt's neck in terror.
"Blaine," Kurt says, condescendingly. "Have you ever seen the wind walk somewhere?"
"Until I met you, I'd never seen any wind at all," Blaine says. He doesn't know why he should have been expected to know about this part. At first he's terrified, but after he's gotten used to the way the ground rushes away from beneath him, it becomes exciting. All around him the wind is howling, making the loudest noises he's ever heard, bending tree branches and sending them flying, driving into people who run for shelter, trying to find a safe place to hide. But nothing touches Blaine, and he has no problem hearing Kurt calmly answer when Blaine asks questions, or tell him all the best ways to walk out in a storm without getting hurt and where to find the best shelter.
They see a man with a guitar case gripped awkwardly in his hands as he races to cross the street against the "Don't Walk" sign that's already turned solid. A gust of wind rises up and rips the guitar away, knocking it to the ground where it gets crushed by a bus before the man can snatch it back up.
"Why did you do that?" Blaine demands. "That was mean! He's sad now."
"Obey the street signs, Blaine," Kurt says. "It's dangerous to just walk across the street like that. His guitar would have been fine if he was obeying the rules."
"It would have been fine if you hadn't pulled it away from him," Blaine counters. "I don't think you're so nice anymore."
"I'm not," Kurt says. "I've never been nice. I don't want to be. I want to be good. I want to do what's right."
"It's not right to make someone so sad," Blaine says, thinking about the distraught look on the man's face.
"I've been watching him for a while," Kurt says, sternly. "Sometimes it is right to make someone sad if it's going to help them later. That man has dreams, Blaine. He wants to leave Ohio and become a famous musician. He wants the world to know his name. In a perfect world it might happen, but right now what he does have is a wife and a son who love him very much, and another baby on the way. With the money he made playing at the bar tonight, he thought he had enough to leave his family and start a new life for himself, where no one loves him and he has nothing but dreams to talk to. That's a terrible, dangerous way to live, Blaine. If you want to live with dreams you need to decide early, before you make people need you. When people love you, it hurts if you leave too soon."
"How did breaking his guitar help?" Blaine asks.
Kurt smirks a little.
"He can't chase after his dreams if he doesn't have anything to chase it with," he says. "He'll still leave, eventually, but he'll need a new guitar first, and it will take years before he can go away. His little boy deserves more, but in the end I can only do so much."
Blaine is silent for a while after that, thinking about the family whose daddy is leaving so slowly they don't know how to make it stop. He knows how sad he would feel if he was that little boy. Not as sad as Cooper, probably, because he's never been as close to his parents as Cooper is, but it would still be the most terrible thing Blaine can imagine.
They've been flying for a while when a flash of dark hair and a red fall coat on the ground below catches his eye. He looks closer and sees a small Asian girl, desperately trying to keep her coat held together over her thin nightgown, and her hair out of her eyes as it whips all around her face. She's crying, and she looks scared.
"Stop," Blaine says, "Let's talk to her and see what's wrong."
"We can't stop," Kurt says, shortly. "And what's wrong is that her parents don't notice when their daughter goes out into a storm in pajamas. I'll deal with them when I have a chance, but I can't help someone who needs kindness when I need to be angry."
"But she's scared," Blaine insists, "And I went into the storm in my pajamas. Why can't you carry both of us?"
"You're not in the storm, you're with the storm," Kurt says. "That makes all the difference, and I can't carry everyone. You're special because you see me and we can talk to each other when things aren't bad or scary, but if I carry anyone else on my back it's because they can never go home again. I'll send a message to the South and West winds to come see to her once I'm gone, but it's the best I can do. I'm sorry, Blaine."
Blaine is so surprised to hear there's more than one wind he almost stops thinking altogether to ask about it, but then a pitiful wail from the girl below reminds him what they're fighting about.
"Put me down," Blaine says quickly.
"What?" Kurt sounds shocked. "No. It's dangerous on the ground, Blaine."
"You can't help good people right now, but I can. Put me down and I'll help her be safe until you're finished, then you can come and take me home."
"I have a lot of work to do, Blaine," Kurt says. "You'll be alone a long time."
"I'll be with her," Blaine says. "And I won't be scared like she is. She needs me."
Kurt huffs a little like Cooper does when Blaine asks him to buy him something, but he's smiling a little like he's proud. He lifts Blaine up and sets him carefully on the ground, just around the corner from where the girl is crying.
"Don't get hurt," he says abruptly before he's gone, except for the wind that flies at Blaine like it's hitting him.
He scurries around the corner and up to the girl, who looks like she might be as old as he is. She screams a little when he runs up to her from behind and grabs her hand, but he only shakes his head at her as he looks around for a safe place where the wind won't chase them, trying to remember what Kurt said about the places he won't go. He finally finds what he's looking for when he sees a ditch, not too far away from them in front of a closed golf course. He pulls the girl after him and they climb down inside as quickly as they can. It's quieter inside, and they have a clear view of the road several yards away from them. The little girl is still crying.
"It's okay," Blaine says, as consolingly as he can. "There's nothing to be scared of now."
"I wanna go home," the little girl cries.
"Why are you out here?" Blaine asks, curiously, hoping to distract her. "You shouldn't be out in a storm this bad by yourself."
"I was running away," says the girl, huddling closer to Blaine for warmth as the wind howls above them.
"Why?" he asks.
"No one sees me," she says, and she's so hard to hear over the wind with her quiet little voice. "No one cares if I'm at home or not, because all they talk about is my brother. I don't think they like me very much, so I went to find people who did."
"I like you," Blaine offers, which is the truth. The little girl is friendly and when she smiles her eyes are warm and soft. He doesn't understand why her parents wouldn't like her.
"My name is Tina," she says. "What's yours?"
Blaine tells her, and then she asks,
"Are you running away, too?"
"I was visiting a friend," Blaine says, trying to talk the way he's heard his mother talk after she goes over to other people's houses. "We were going by when I saw you and wanted to help."
"Where's your friend now?"
"He'll be back later. He has to take me home."
The girl's face crumples a little at the mention of home, so Blaine quickly changes the subject. He finds out that Tina is the same age as he is and both her brother and Cooper go to the same school. Blaine thinks that he might even go to the same kindergarten as her when school starts up in a few days. They both have the same favourite colour (blue), and Tina thinks that the best book is Higglety Pigglety Pop, even though the best book is clearly Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. They're still arguing about this what feels like hours later when a car drives down the road, slowly, with a worried face peering out the window shining a flashlight down the street.
"That's my mom!" Tina exclaims, jumping up and waving excitedly. "They noticed I wasn't there, Blaine! They missed me!"
"So you're not running away anymore?" Blaine asks. "They look really upset."
"They noticed," Tina is almost glowing. "I don't need to."
She reaches down to him and holds out her hand, but Blaine shakes his head.
"I can't," he says. "I promised Kurt I would stay close so he could take me home. He won't be long. Goodnight, Tina. I'm glad your parents want you."
Tina falls back to the ground to hug him before leaping up again to rush and meet her parents, who are almost at the ditch by now. They start talking to her excitedly in a language Blaine doesn't understand but likes the sound of. They go back to the car and drive off into the night. Blaine is glad Tina is safe with her parents again, but he is very tired, so tired he doesn't even feel cold anymore. His eyes stay closed longer and longer, until they don't open again at all. When he wakes up he is back at home in his own bed with only very vague memories of being gently picked up and carried back by the wind.
To Prologue | To Masterpost | To Chapter 2
Artist: morph0fairy
Author: firefly_ca
Rating (art/fic if different): PG
Word Count: 24K
Warnings (if any): Major character death wrapped up in magic realism.
Fic Summary: Inspired by/loosely based on George MacDonald's At The Back of the North Wind. Blaine has never behaved the way normal children do and has always been too quiet and detached from the world around him. Everything changes the day he meets a strange boy named Kurt with the ability to change his appearance and who says he can control the wind. Blaine doesn't know why, but it feels like he's known Kurt forever. AU, but not totally detached from the Glee universe.
A/N: Yes, they're real children's books. Yes, they're awesome.
Chapter 1
Sometimes Blaine notices things when he's not supposed to. His mom tells him he's got his head in the clouds with a smile on her face, when Blaine falls because he misses the top stair to the basement again, but he notices the worry hiding behind her eyes when she says it. He doesn't like knowing that she feels bad when she thinks about him or looks at him too hard, but Blaine can't make himself be more like Cooper, normal, like other boys, the way she wants him to be. He knows. He's tried, but nothing about the world he walks through feels real to him. He feels like he lives in the wrong place, like he's always fighting his way through water. Sometimes it's so hard understanding the point of the people around him, he forgets easy things, like what a birthday does or where the stairs start and end.
Still, for as much as Blaine misses, he does notice. He noticed that first night, the way his father's face went tight when Blaine said a boy tried to break into the house. The tightness left as soon as everyone saw the branch, so Blaine lets his dad think the boy was all a dream, just until he has a chance to get used to the idea. One of the things he's noticed is that people get a lot less upset about new things once they've had a chance to stop being new. For him, the strange boy stops being new the very next night.
The wind is still howling and shrieking outside the window, even louder now that the glass has gone, a sheet of heavy plastic taped in its place. Mom had wanted him to stay in Cooper's room for the night, but Cooper gets so grumpy for no reason when Blaine goes in there, Blaine usually feels better if he stays away completely. He's always missing something when he's in Cooper's room, so he asks to sleep in his own bed instead.
By the time the wind has started to blow so fiercely that Blaine can hear the tape starting to rattle along with the plastic, making tearing, painful-sounding rasps as it does, he decides he's made a mistake. Maybe staying with Cooper wouldn't be so bad after all. He buries his head further under the covers. It feels like the house is going to shake down. After a while the rattling stops almost completely, even though Blaine is sure he can now hear the wind whipping around inside the room. He tries not to make noise, but still cries out a little when someone taps very pointedly on his shoulder.
"Well there's no need for that," says a voice, high and strong and cold like the wind that's rushing past Blaine's ears as his blanket almost blows away from his head completely. "Stop crying. I can't be bothered talking to a crying boy."
"It's so loud," Blaine whimpers, trying to pull the covers tighter over his head.
"Oh for the - " the voice begins. "It wouldn't have to be this loud if you weren't so un-cooperative."
The wind picks up even louder, positively screaming, the noise crawling inside Blaine's head and throwing itself against his skull. The blanket is finally ripped out of his fingers as it flies to the far side of the room. Blaine cries out again and scrambles to cover his ears with his arms, but the shrieking wind dies down almost immediately, a faint breeze suddenly the only movement in the room.
"That's better," says the voice, pausing for a moment before huffing, "Are you going to hide in plain sight the entire evening or are you going to talk to me? Get up."
Cautiously Blaine peeks out from underneath his arms. There's a boy standing next to the bed, not too much older than Cooper. He's looking at Blaine with his arms folded, and his mouth in a thin, displeased line. Blaine recognizes him immediately.
"You're the boy who broke my window," he exclaims, springing up into a sitting position, forgetting to be afraid when he's so distracted by being angry.
"I did no such thing," the boy snaps.
"You did," Blaine insists. "I watched you do it."
"I never broke your window," the boy says. "You covered over mine, after I went through all the trouble of opening it. It took a lot of hard work for me to get that window the way that I like it, and then you went and had them cover it with plastic."
"But that's my window," Blaine says, even more alarmed. "It's my window because it's a part of my house."
"No," says the boy, talking in a voice that says he thinks Blaine is being very stupid. "The window is on my house, and you had no right to go covering it up."
"But you don't live here," Blaine says. "And we're in my house right now."
"Of course I don't live here," the boy says, pointing back out the window. "I live there. That's my house and this window is the best view I have of outside, so stop taping it down, please."
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Blaine is quiet for a moment before he finally stammers,
"Your - your house is outside?"
"My house is inside," says the boy. "And we are outside, right now."
Blaine shakes his head.
"No, no. We're in the house right now. We have to be, because there are walls and a ceiling. Out there with the trees and the sky, that's outside. My dad told me. He's old, so he knows."
"The trees and sky are my walls and ceiling," says the boy. "And your dad isn't that old. He doesn’t know everything."
"He's older than you," Blaine says, confidently. "He's even older than my brother."
Cooper is always talking about how big and old and special he is. He talks about how he's going to go to middle school soon, and then even to McKinley, the big high school that they drive past every time they have to go to the dentist, but Blaine can't come with him because he's too short.
"He is not," the boy says, still unimpressed. "I'm older than you, your father, your mother, and your brother all put together."
"No you're not," Blaine says, who knows what a lie looks like. "I can prove it. How many years old are you?"
The boy looks at him, surprised, like he's only just sorting something out about Blaine. "I'm older than counting, Blaine. I'm older than numbers."
"You can't be," Blaine says. "You look like you're not a lot more than Cooper, and he's not that big, no matter what he says."
"You can't always believe what you see, Blaine," the boy says, suddenly uncertain, like he's not sure how to explain himself. "I look the way you want me to look, right down to my clothes. If I look like a boy to you right now, it's because right now a boy won't be scary for you. I'm not here to scare you, Blaine."
"You scared me when you came in," Blaine says, accusingly. "If you're not a boy what are you?"
"Are you sure you don't already know?" the boy asks, and the cool breeze gets stronger, blowing the curtains and ruffling Blaine's hair. But not the boy's hair, Blaine notices. Suddenly he realizes that he wind is coming from the boy himself. But it doesn't seem like he's making the wind, the way you can with a fan or a sheet of paper. It's like…
"Are you the wind?" he asks, cautiously, and for the first time since he's come in, the boy's face lights up with a brilliant, and very nice, smile.
"I was hoping you would know without me telling you," he says. "I've got a good feeling about you, Blaine."
"Why are you so cold?" Blaine asks, uncertainly. It doesn't seem right that a face that happy could still be cold enough to sting the skin on Blaine's arms.
"I'm not," the boy insists. "I'm North. The North Wind always feels cold when you go against it, but I can't help if people aren't smart enough to go where I tell them."
"Is that your name?" Blaine asks. "North Wind?"
"I have a lot of names," the boy says dismissively, but Blaine presses on.
"What name do you want me to call you?"
The boy is silent for a moment, thinking hard.
"Well," he says, slowly. "If you're Blaine, than I must be…Kurt. You can call me Kurt."
"Why Kurt?" Blaine asks. "What does me being me have to do with you being you?"
"I don't know," Kurt says, and Blaine notices that he's telling the truth. "But I know this is how it has to be. This is what works. You ask a lot of questions."
"I have more," Blaine says, because he's not embarrassed to ask why, ever. Asking is the first part of knowing. "Why did you come to my room? Why does this window have the best view?"
Kurt looks at him sharply, and if Blaine wasn't so good at noticing the things that try to hide, he might have missed the way Kurt's chin trembles just a little, or how empty his whole face gets before snapping back to normal.
"You saw me," he says. "I was going past the window and I saw you look right at me, but you weren't even scared. No one ever sees me unless they do something wrong first, and no one ever looks at me like they aren't scared to see me. People who see me think that I'm ugly, but all they're seeing in me is themselves. The beautiful people never see me, except for you. I wanted to try to talk to you. I haven't talked to anyone in a long time."
"Longer than counting?" Blaine asks, and Kurt smiles.
"Not that long," he says, "but not for a long time. I wanted to see what it was like to talk again."
"You're very good at it," Blaine offers. "Your voice is like music."
Kurt smiles that big smile again.
"Thank you," he says. "Your voice is very happy. I like it."
"If you like happy things, why are you making the outside - sorry, inside. No… wait."
Blaine furrows his brow very hard as he tries to make the things he's thinking come out properly.
"Why are you making your house and my outside so angry?"
"Storms aren't angry, Blaine," Kurt says, smiling again. "They're housekeeping. Sometimes I need to do an extra-big clean to take care of all the places I don't like tidying up. That's all a storm is."
Blaine hates cleaning up, so this makes sense to him. He nods, carefully.
"Is it clean yet?" he asks.
"Soon," Kurt says. "I'll be finished tonight."
He pauses for a second, before adding, "Do you want to come with me? I'm not done talking to you yet."
"I'm not supposed to go anywhere without telling someone," Blaine says.
"You can tell me, " Kurt offers. "I'm older than they are, anyhow. I know better than they do, and you'll be back before they know you're gone."
This makes sense to Blaine so he gets up and grabs his housecoat and slippers, already halfway to the door before he hears Kurt laughing again.
"Not that way," Kurt says, holding out his hand. "I go out the way I came in."
"I can't go through the window," Blaine protests. "It's too high. I'll fall."
"You won't fall," Kurt says dismissively. "You can climb onto my back if you're worried."
"What if I slip?" Blaine insists.
"You won't even have to hold on," Kurt insists. "Here, I'll show you."
He reaches out to Blaine and takes him by the arms, swinging him up onto his back like Blaine weighs nothing at all. Kurt lets go and Blaine panics because he hasn't had a chance to steady himself or grab Kurt's shoulders yet, but then he realizes that Kurt is right. Somehow the material of Kurt's shirt has formed a sort of seat, comfortable and roomy, like Kurt has gotten so big that Blaine is sitting in the folds of a giant's clothes, even though when he stares hard at Kurt he's exactly the same size as before.
"Where does your mom buy your clothes?" he asks, suspiciously. Kurt laughs.
"I don't have a mother, and I don’t buy my clothes. They're made of clouds."
"They feel like coming home," Blaine says, even though he doesn't know why he says it, and then suddenly Kurt dives through the small gap in the plastic and they're in the sky.
"You didn't say we'd be flying," Blaine says, clinging tightly to Kurt's neck in terror.
"Blaine," Kurt says, condescendingly. "Have you ever seen the wind walk somewhere?"
"Until I met you, I'd never seen any wind at all," Blaine says. He doesn't know why he should have been expected to know about this part. At first he's terrified, but after he's gotten used to the way the ground rushes away from beneath him, it becomes exciting. All around him the wind is howling, making the loudest noises he's ever heard, bending tree branches and sending them flying, driving into people who run for shelter, trying to find a safe place to hide. But nothing touches Blaine, and he has no problem hearing Kurt calmly answer when Blaine asks questions, or tell him all the best ways to walk out in a storm without getting hurt and where to find the best shelter.
They see a man with a guitar case gripped awkwardly in his hands as he races to cross the street against the "Don't Walk" sign that's already turned solid. A gust of wind rises up and rips the guitar away, knocking it to the ground where it gets crushed by a bus before the man can snatch it back up.
"Why did you do that?" Blaine demands. "That was mean! He's sad now."
"Obey the street signs, Blaine," Kurt says. "It's dangerous to just walk across the street like that. His guitar would have been fine if he was obeying the rules."
"It would have been fine if you hadn't pulled it away from him," Blaine counters. "I don't think you're so nice anymore."
"I'm not," Kurt says. "I've never been nice. I don't want to be. I want to be good. I want to do what's right."
"It's not right to make someone so sad," Blaine says, thinking about the distraught look on the man's face.
"I've been watching him for a while," Kurt says, sternly. "Sometimes it is right to make someone sad if it's going to help them later. That man has dreams, Blaine. He wants to leave Ohio and become a famous musician. He wants the world to know his name. In a perfect world it might happen, but right now what he does have is a wife and a son who love him very much, and another baby on the way. With the money he made playing at the bar tonight, he thought he had enough to leave his family and start a new life for himself, where no one loves him and he has nothing but dreams to talk to. That's a terrible, dangerous way to live, Blaine. If you want to live with dreams you need to decide early, before you make people need you. When people love you, it hurts if you leave too soon."
"How did breaking his guitar help?" Blaine asks.
Kurt smirks a little.
"He can't chase after his dreams if he doesn't have anything to chase it with," he says. "He'll still leave, eventually, but he'll need a new guitar first, and it will take years before he can go away. His little boy deserves more, but in the end I can only do so much."
Blaine is silent for a while after that, thinking about the family whose daddy is leaving so slowly they don't know how to make it stop. He knows how sad he would feel if he was that little boy. Not as sad as Cooper, probably, because he's never been as close to his parents as Cooper is, but it would still be the most terrible thing Blaine can imagine.
They've been flying for a while when a flash of dark hair and a red fall coat on the ground below catches his eye. He looks closer and sees a small Asian girl, desperately trying to keep her coat held together over her thin nightgown, and her hair out of her eyes as it whips all around her face. She's crying, and she looks scared.
"Stop," Blaine says, "Let's talk to her and see what's wrong."
"We can't stop," Kurt says, shortly. "And what's wrong is that her parents don't notice when their daughter goes out into a storm in pajamas. I'll deal with them when I have a chance, but I can't help someone who needs kindness when I need to be angry."
"But she's scared," Blaine insists, "And I went into the storm in my pajamas. Why can't you carry both of us?"
"You're not in the storm, you're with the storm," Kurt says. "That makes all the difference, and I can't carry everyone. You're special because you see me and we can talk to each other when things aren't bad or scary, but if I carry anyone else on my back it's because they can never go home again. I'll send a message to the South and West winds to come see to her once I'm gone, but it's the best I can do. I'm sorry, Blaine."
Blaine is so surprised to hear there's more than one wind he almost stops thinking altogether to ask about it, but then a pitiful wail from the girl below reminds him what they're fighting about.
"Put me down," Blaine says quickly.
"What?" Kurt sounds shocked. "No. It's dangerous on the ground, Blaine."
"You can't help good people right now, but I can. Put me down and I'll help her be safe until you're finished, then you can come and take me home."
"I have a lot of work to do, Blaine," Kurt says. "You'll be alone a long time."
"I'll be with her," Blaine says. "And I won't be scared like she is. She needs me."
Kurt huffs a little like Cooper does when Blaine asks him to buy him something, but he's smiling a little like he's proud. He lifts Blaine up and sets him carefully on the ground, just around the corner from where the girl is crying.
"Don't get hurt," he says abruptly before he's gone, except for the wind that flies at Blaine like it's hitting him.
He scurries around the corner and up to the girl, who looks like she might be as old as he is. She screams a little when he runs up to her from behind and grabs her hand, but he only shakes his head at her as he looks around for a safe place where the wind won't chase them, trying to remember what Kurt said about the places he won't go. He finally finds what he's looking for when he sees a ditch, not too far away from them in front of a closed golf course. He pulls the girl after him and they climb down inside as quickly as they can. It's quieter inside, and they have a clear view of the road several yards away from them. The little girl is still crying.
"It's okay," Blaine says, as consolingly as he can. "There's nothing to be scared of now."
"I wanna go home," the little girl cries.
"Why are you out here?" Blaine asks, curiously, hoping to distract her. "You shouldn't be out in a storm this bad by yourself."
"I was running away," says the girl, huddling closer to Blaine for warmth as the wind howls above them.
"Why?" he asks.
"No one sees me," she says, and she's so hard to hear over the wind with her quiet little voice. "No one cares if I'm at home or not, because all they talk about is my brother. I don't think they like me very much, so I went to find people who did."
"I like you," Blaine offers, which is the truth. The little girl is friendly and when she smiles her eyes are warm and soft. He doesn't understand why her parents wouldn't like her.
"My name is Tina," she says. "What's yours?"
Blaine tells her, and then she asks,
"Are you running away, too?"
"I was visiting a friend," Blaine says, trying to talk the way he's heard his mother talk after she goes over to other people's houses. "We were going by when I saw you and wanted to help."
"Where's your friend now?"
"He'll be back later. He has to take me home."
The girl's face crumples a little at the mention of home, so Blaine quickly changes the subject. He finds out that Tina is the same age as he is and both her brother and Cooper go to the same school. Blaine thinks that he might even go to the same kindergarten as her when school starts up in a few days. They both have the same favourite colour (blue), and Tina thinks that the best book is Higglety Pigglety Pop, even though the best book is clearly Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. They're still arguing about this what feels like hours later when a car drives down the road, slowly, with a worried face peering out the window shining a flashlight down the street.
"That's my mom!" Tina exclaims, jumping up and waving excitedly. "They noticed I wasn't there, Blaine! They missed me!"
"So you're not running away anymore?" Blaine asks. "They look really upset."
"They noticed," Tina is almost glowing. "I don't need to."
She reaches down to him and holds out her hand, but Blaine shakes his head.
"I can't," he says. "I promised Kurt I would stay close so he could take me home. He won't be long. Goodnight, Tina. I'm glad your parents want you."
Tina falls back to the ground to hug him before leaping up again to rush and meet her parents, who are almost at the ditch by now. They start talking to her excitedly in a language Blaine doesn't understand but likes the sound of. They go back to the car and drive off into the night. Blaine is glad Tina is safe with her parents again, but he is very tired, so tired he doesn't even feel cold anymore. His eyes stay closed longer and longer, until they don't open again at all. When he wakes up he is back at home in his own bed with only very vague memories of being gently picked up and carried back by the wind.
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