Glee!fic, mageverse, Through All False Things pt I
Through All False Things, part I, from the mageverse that will not die. See previously In The Dark, Close Your Eyes and And See Further.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me but the magic <3
Rating: R? I know I swear a lot so I'm assuming anyway =/
Summary: It's the Solstice. (Or, three handfastings and no funeral ;) )
Note: This was meant to be one relatively short fic. lol no it's going to be two quite long parts. Why can I never control my word vomit ;_;
It's the Solstice. There's snow on the ground still though they're further south now, snow against the sheltered side of the tree where they've tethered Archimedes the horse for the night. The earth underfoot is hard, the stars are brittle and brilliant as cracked diamond in the sky, and underneath the clear cold moon the mages are all a little bit high.
"The magic," Kurt says, cheeks flushed, eyes glazed, holding his wrist up and mostly letting Blaine do the tying, putting his fingers where directed for the knot. The fire snaps behind him, a bank of bright heat. "It's a bit. Much. It's a thin time."
"Thin time?" Blaine says, tugging one-handed at the ends of the strip of cloth now binding their wrists together, tightening the knot. Kurt tilts his bound hand left and right, gently tilting Blaine's too, happily contemplating it.
"The magic makes things thin. The barriers between - things, people, worlds, we can see between them if we really like to, if there's a gateway we can walk between, we -" Kurt blinks a few times, tries to put his hand on the side of his head and tugs Blaine's hand with it, laughs. Blaine smiles, reaches up with both their hands to brush Kurt's hair back; the fire's turned his skin to shifting shades of amber. "It's a thin time. It's when we handfast because -" He puts his free hand on Blaine's chest, and Blaine feels the buzz of magic pressed there. Kurt wets his lips, says, "I don't know if a human and mage ever . . . before."
Blaine keeps his hand on the side of Kurt's face, and looks into his eyes, and Kurt looks back at him so proud. And then Santana yelps behind them and they turn to see Brittany shaking the bond loose again, and Santana jumping on her so she screams and goes down, so Santana can pin her with her knees and start forcibly tying their wrists together. "If you would just. Stop. Wriggling holy crap-"
Mike and Tina are almost done, laughing and eyes on their wrists, tightening their knot. Kurt's fingers fold into Blaine's. "Do you want to go first?"
Blaine looks at the fire, set in a ditch they spent half the afternoon digging, while Kurt, Quinn and Tina went into the nearest town to negotiate for the barrel of wine that's probably contributing to the mages' happy high, and definitely contributed to the argument that means that Rachel is furiously drinking at the side of the clearing, and Finn is off sulking somewhere in the forest, and only three couples are handfasting this Solstice. Blaine watches the sparks break loose, make their mad bid for freedom in the sky like stars trying to get home, and he says slowly, "This is what you do."
"It's more dangerous for us than you," Kurt points out. "Robes are a fire hazard."
"I could carry you over."
"Such a gentleman." Kurt leans in and kisses him next to his nose. "No. We jump. Look."
Mike and Tine are tied, and are approaching the fire now. They push at each other, giggling and so happy, and Blaine watches them feeling warm as they back off, pulling their robes up with their one free hand each, biting their lips, readying for the run. Mercedes beats the barrel she's sitting on and whoops for them, Sam smiling a little next to her, Quinn runs her hands down the fur of the white hare sitting on her lap and grins, and with a shared scream the two hydromages charge at the fire and leap.
Sparks scatter, robes flare.
They land with mutual shrieks and a stagger and a quick run on to save their robes from the flames, then Tina leaps on Mike throwing her arms and legs around him and Mike spins, laughing, holding her up. A whole year they promise to love each other for, whatever love means. And Blaine just stares at them as Tina lifts her head and their noses nuzzle before they kiss, and he thinks, I want exactly that.
The wrist tied to his tugs, getting his attention. He looks across and he has exactly that, he has better, Kurt watching him quieter now and sure through the controlled thrum Blaine can feel at this proximity with his magic strung up so wild, each particle glancing off his skin like a gentle blizzard of warm-cool snowflakes. Blaine says, "Are you ready?"
Kurt looks right at him and says, "From the day I met you." and it catches in Blaine's throat, and he kisses him, first.
For that moment they're the only people in the clearing.
But then Mike and Tina are chanting jump jump jump from the other side of the fire and Mercedes is banging out a drum roll on the barrel, and Blaine closes his fingers through Kurt's, Kurt squeezes back, and they face the bank of fire. The colours are gorgeous, creamy white and gaudy orange in the dark, and Blaine listens to Kurt breathe, and says, "Just a jump. We've faced worse."
Kurt's hand shifts, settles in his. "It's worth it."
They sway their weight back. They kick into a run.
The sound of the coven shouting seems distant in the second that they spring, throwing themselves into the air, hand tight in hand and the heat is a physical press on the skin -
- and then they crash onto earth too solid after all that air, Kurt's foot lands on his robes and he yelps as his own weight hurtles him forward; Blaine catches his arm too late to save him, rolls them as they drop instead and lands on top of him, Kurt's body turned into his and Kurt's face under his, heart thrumming hard to Blaine's chest, hand pressed to his side and clutching in the chainmail. "- hey," Kurt whispers, and blinks, and Blaine looks down at their bound wrists and thinks, We can renew it every year. We get to do that again every year.
"Hey," he says, and kisses him.
"Just a heads-up!" Santana's voice yells. "You got exactly three seconds an' me an' Britt are jumping right on your bony rear ends so shift, guys!"
Kurt's hand is in Blaine's hair, and he whispers to his mouth, "My whole life."
"Everything." Blaine confirms, and kisses him again but very quickly before he pulls back and yanks Kurt up with him, because he can hear the cheerful wail of Brittany doing her run-up.
*
Kurt wakes up with more than a bit of a headache.
He screws his eyes closed, curses and hisses, feels through himself, oh good, hangover. He prods gingerly at his own liver, which lets him know that until he gets some water into his dehydrated system this is going to suck whatever he does. He sighs, slow and long, and cracks his overheated eyes open, and tips his head to look at the boy sleeping with his cheek on his chest.
Then he smiles, a little, through the horrible.
He looks so young, asleep. He's a knight - he's earned the title by now, more than any of those boys he trained with - and deadly when he has to be, Kurt knows that, strong and dependable and rational in ways the mages can never be, he's the only reason they don't wake up in waterlogged and collapsed tents as often as not. And now Kurt watches him sleep with his cheek scrunched up against Kurt's breastbone, the covers bundled up to his nose, and the love inside him shivers like there's not enough room for it, sometimes.
He hears a breath come different further down the tent and Sam sits up, puts his palm to his forehead and screws his eyes closed, and whispers a little curse. Kurt lifts his magic a little to let Sam know he's awake, gives a commiserating smile; Sam grins wearily back, whispers, "How're you with hangovers?"
"Drink a couple of pints of water and I'll think about it. Well hello, sleeping beauty." as the heavy body on his wriggles, and then gives a small whining breath of oh oh horrible as Blaine's hangover asserts itself. Kurt lifts a hand to brush his hair back and finds that it's still tied to Blaine's, and laughs out loud, lifts his other hand to run through Blaine's tangled curls. "Did you sleep well?"
"Kuuurrrrt," Blaine moans, which means, I feel horrible, why do I feel horrible, you would never let me feel horrible. Kurt brushes his hair back, runs his thumb over the edge of his ear.
"You need to drink some water. We all need to drink some water. I'm not even fixing myself until I've drunk some water."
"I'ma barf," Santana says with sudden horrible clarity, asleep to nauseous in a fraction of a second. She scrabbles out of the tent with Brittany hauled after her with a scream, swung from their sleeping bag by the bound wrist.
Blaine pulls a little at Kurt's wrist. "When do we take these off . . . ?"
Kurt yawns, covers it with a hand, then rubs his eyes. "Mmf, now, if you like. What's done is done."
"It was fun."
"It was fun."
"We should do it again."
Kurt looks down at his one revealed eye, the other pressed to Kurt's own chest, upraised like a hopeful puppy's. Kurt touches his cheek. "We will do it again."
Kurt can tell by how his eye crinkles that he's smiling, and he pulls the covers down with a finger to see it, grins back. "Do you feel different?"
". . . should I feel different?"
"It's a promise, not magic. Not our kind of magic."
Blaine shifts himself up, folds his arms over Kurt's chest to prop his chin up there and gazes up at him. "I feel like I love you," he says. "And really happy. And seriously hungover."
"So same as usual, bar the hangover."
"How do you feel?"
Like I love you too much to speak.
He wraps his arms around Blaine as Blaine wriggles up, so their foreheads can bump and Kurt's magic can coil around them both, and Kurt can close his eyes and whisper, "Like the luckiest person on the entire planet."
The luckiest most hungover person on the entire planet.
Everyone pesters him for a magical hangover cure as they stumble around outside the tent getting a fire lit for coffee, and Kurt glares them off through sheer dead-eyed ill-feeling, he's not even healing himself. He will never learn how truly evil red wine is until he just lets his body suffer through it. The mages read the low churn of his magic and back off, while Blaine unties their wrists, then rolls that strip of cloth up neatly and puts it into his pocket. Kurt catches his eye and they both look away quickly, smiling; Kurt knows that it's sentimental to keep it, but he also knows that Blaine will find some inventively filthy use for it at some point, he really is under no illusions about the man he just promised himself to.
Speaking of promises, they told the inn they'd bring the barrel back. Half the coven stay to clear up their tents and get some laundry done in the stream nearby, and Kurt and Blaine kiss a goodbye before he sets off with Rachel, Sam and Mercedes, taking turns to roll the barrel through the forest. Undrunk wine slops around inside it like the hangover sloshing Kurt's brain. Cold air helps a little. Cold air and a walk, and maybe they can pick up some coffee in this town . . .
While Sam and Mercedes walk a little ahead, rolling the barrel and talking in low voices, Rachel hangs off Kurt's arm and stares at the ground as she walks. She says, "Can you do anything about broken hearts?"
Kurt glances at her, turns his eyes up to the thin branches of trees again, black against the pale sky. "What did you fight about?"
"Don't remember," she mutters. "He called me overbearing."
"I heard you call him a provincial boor."
"He called me stuck-up!"
"Well, you did call him a provincial boor."
"He just doesn't understand. He just doesn't understand things, he didn't grow up with magic, he still has all these stupid closed-off human thoughts -"
Kurt pats her hand, and feels really too crappy to get angry right now. "Think about who you're saying that sentence to."
Rachel's just confused for a second, staring at him, then her face drops. "I don't - mean it like that. He just - it's different. Being a mage and becoming a mage, you just - we just see things differently, it's difficult to make it work for us -"
"Brittany and Santana make it work."
"Okay, that doesn't count, Brittany is just strange."
"Blaine and I make it work."
She waves her hand. "Well maybe you're more human than mage too."
"Okay, you know what?" Kurt unpicks Rachel's arm from his elbow. "The things you're saying right now are incredibly arrogant and ugly, and I'm going to pretend that you're still kind of drunk and walk away from you. Later on we won't talk about this again. Is that agreed?"
"Kurt -"
He pulls a, oh did you speak? Because I just said that we weren't talking about it anymore face, and strides off to catch up with Sam and Mercedes, just as Sam's laughter blooms his magic out, and then it catches in small again as if on the memory that maybe it shouldn't, yet.
Kurt's coven, drunk. They really should learn their lesson.
*
It's only a small town, funny that Rachel should choose the word 'provincial' last night. They'd known when they arrived that no-one wanted mages camping inside the town's borders but since they were Solsticing they didn't even want to be in a town, they needed space and air and freedom for the magic -
Oh gods the magic on the Solstice, the echoes of it still buzz a little inside Kurt's bones, it was just insane. He'd felt high with it, struggling to concentrate, at one point in the night Tina had put her palm on the outline of his aura fully five feet from his body and he'd felt it there, through the daze of it all pumping through his blood. Normally his magic is a lot. Last night it had been too much.
But then there was Blaine, solid Blaine, steadfast Blaine, keeping him tethered to the world. The Solstice is a thin time, and more than once that night Kurt had felt himself slipping somewhere sideways before Blaine's wrist jerked his, and he was snapped back to the ground again. It's dangerous, to be a mage. Too much joy can sidestep you out of your own life in the thin times. Thank the gods they're only twice a year. Thank the gods for the merely quite dangerous rest of their lives.
It's market day and the town's chaotic with stalls and shouting, chickens and pedlars, an escaped goat making a bid for freedom through the crowd and upsetting a fire-eater Puck and Santana would only glare contempt at. They drop the barrel off at the inn and Kurt checks on the lamed horse he'd healed last night as part of the payment (Tina, asked to unblock a 'drain', didn't want to discuss what her task had actually consisted of) but she's fine, snorting softly as he strokes her snout with his knuckles, dark eyes and warm breath. He heads out again to Rachel and Mercedes having wandered off to look at the market stalls, and Sam waiting there awkwardly for him, turning his weight a little on his hips and chewing his not unimpressive bottom lip. "They said you'd know what we needed to pick up and carrying stuff's more of a boy's job anyway."
"Of course they said that." Kurt says crisply, and regrets not bringing Blaine if this was going to involve heavy lifting. He sighs, though, lets his breath out through his nose, closes his eyes against the fuzz of the hangover and remembers that Blaine and he . . .
Things are better when he remembers that. He's pretty certain that any situation would be instantly better if he just remembered that.
"Oats for porridge," he says, opening his eyes. "Another groundsheet if we can find one. Dried fruit, as many apples as we can carry we're feeding so many to the horse, tea leaves, vegetables for stew, salt, cheese and bread . . ."
"We're carrying all of it?"
"No, we're hunting them down and if we have to tying their share to their backs. We might as well make a start, it's going to take long enough through those crowds anyway."
Walking at Sam's side into the market feels strange, it's been so long since he's been around a mage who's not a part of their coven, and Sam's magic feels oddly - distinct, against his. Crisp-edged. He's aware of it in a way he can't be with his coven, his coven's magic is just a part of what the world is like, no more separate than the air he breathes. Sam has his hands in his pockets as he walks and Kurt tries to surreptitiously look over his face, his magic, but Sam keeps himself pretty closed in. Maybe it's to be expected. Kurt doesn't know what he'd be like if he was the only survivor of his coven, the last one left.
No. He does. He knows exactly what he'd be like and he won't think about it.
"You and Mercedes are getting on pretty well," he says, to distract the both of them.
Sam glances up, smiles tightly. "Yeah." He shrugs. "Nice to hang out with another warlock."
Kurt almost asks if there weren't any other warlocks in his last coven and then stops himself, and looks to the side. "So, you get on with - Blaine pretty well," Sam says, and Kurt looks across at him again, feels the smile claim the corner of his mouth and he loses the battle for it not to take the whole of his face. He smiles, shakes his head, he can't help it.
"Yes. We do."
"I seriously never heard of a mage who handfasted a human before."
"We're not doing it for the novelty value," Kurt points out.
"I guess not. So . . . what's the sex like, is he not kind of -"
Kurt's magic shocks out and then squeezes inward with horror. "Ohmygods."
"- I mean, without magic, isn't he just a bit - ?"
Sam is doing hand gestures. Kurt claps a hand over his mouth and waves the other one urgently at Sam, stop gesturing that -
And then something barges his shoulder and he staggers forward, shocked to a yelp, no-one ever touches a mage. Sam grabs him by the arm and yells, "Hey!" and Kurt blinks back at the man on the horse, who doesn't even look around, just keeps trotting on. Sam's face goes dark, and he throws his arm out to free his hand from its sleeve. "Hey."
"Sam it's-"
The wall of magic, sudden gleam of solid gold in front of it, makes the horse rear and whinny loud, as the man jerks the reins and pulls back, drops it to its hooves turned almost to face them again. "What the hell?" Sam shouts at him. "You were just gonna knock him down an' ride off? He's a healer!"
"Sam it's fine," Kurt says quickly, pulling at his arm, the crowd's gone silent but for murmurs out of sight, and people are trying to edge away. "It doesn't matter-"
"Of course it matters, you're a healer! What the hell kind of human do you have to be, what, would you knock down any mage or is it just 'cause he can't shove back? You wanna try knocking me down?" He steps in front of Kurt who grabs his arm and gets shaken back and he doesn't know what to do. "I'm a warlock, I can shove back plenty hard, come at me."
"Sam-"
"Sam!" They both look up, everyone including the increasingly white-faced man on horseback looks up, at Mercedes striding up with Rachel following in a hurry. "Hell're you doing, we didn't come here to pick a stupid fight!"
"He could've knocked Kurt over, he's a healer! What kind of idiot human picks a fight with a mage, what kind of dick picks a fight with a healer-"
"Sam it really doesn't matter," Kurt insists, while Mercedes shouts at Sam, "Stop talking like that, this is why they think we're a bunch of stuck-up-"
"This is why we are better than them!"
Rachel takes Kurt's arm, and her hands aren't quite steady. Kurt puts a hand over hers, says, "We all need to calm down. No-one came here for a fight." He reaches for Sam's barrier of magic, picks his way through it - Sam can feel him doing it, he gets plenty of warning for Kurt dissolving it into particles the humans can't see anymore. "It's fine. Everything is fine."
Sam turns to Kurt again. "You let them shove you around like that?"
Kurt holds his eye. "I was one of 'them'."
Sam's face doesn't know what to do with itself, then he turns with a whirl of grey robes and stalks off. "Sam!" Mercedes calls, but when she tries to follow he waves a jagged angry arm, the magic snaps and spits, and humans scramble out of his way. He vanishes between the stalls, leaving just the three of them, and Kurt with his heart knotted in his throat.
He hadn't asked, but it's been pretty obvious that Sam was born a mage to mage parents, the same as most of the coven, the same as Rachel and Mercedes. It's not like they've ever let it matter. But now he looks to the side, as the man on horseback quickly urges the horse away, and the crowds begin to murmur and mill again, slowly lapping back into the apparently no longer dangerous radius of the mages.
Mercedes stares frustrated through the crowds for Sam then says, "Kurt - ?"
"It's fine," Kurt says, and feels through the magic, feels Sam in his sulk throw himself to sit against the wall at the edge of the market. "Let's just get what we need and then pick him up and get the hell out of here."
He feels really, really weird while they pick up the necessities for travelling on, all of them hesitant and awkward with the stallholders. They don't carry money. Mages trade services required but otherwise they just ask for things, because humans always will need mages and sometimes they need them with nothing to trade back, so they tend not to deny requests when they come. It's largely the fact that they've got Kurt with them that they get what they need in human markets, no-one knows when they might need a healer, no-one wants to say no to someone who could hold their life in their hands one day. Kurt looks down at his own green robes, and folds his arms into the sleeves, close against his body.
No-one would be stupid enough to start a fight with a mage. But more than that just no-one would knock down a healer, no-one would do that, unwritten and unspoken but people do know what they might one day ask a healer to suffer for them. And it makes Kurt feel strange. Separate, special, not in a good way. The way a goat bathed and garlanded for sacrifice might feel. Special: for a price. Special but different, held to one side, not respected for himself but for what they might need from him. Special isn't always nice.
He wishes he was but he's still glad that Blaine isn't here right now, because he feels oddly ashamed.
He's hiking a sack of oats over his shoulder when a voice says roughly, "Here." and Sam takes it from him. He blinks, manages a tight smile up at him. "Thank you."
Sam shrugs, and takes a sack from Mercedes too.
Coming out of the stalls there's a shout and they look up at a man holding a boy, trying to run but sweating through a laden-down jogging; the boy, maybe ten years old, tilts his head, looks at them with something that could almost be curiosity, if it had the strength for it. "- said you were - healer -" the man pants, and Kurt makes the mistake of meeting his eye, then looks quickly back at the boy's grey-tinged face.
A woman is scrambling up behind the man, holding her skirts in tight-knuckled hands. Kurt makes sure not to actually look in her eye, hearing the way her breath twists sharp as it comes. Something is wrong inside the boy. Kurt feels it and it turns low in him with knowing, what is broken, how hard it must have hit. "Put him down," he says, quietly. "A horse?"
The man drops to one knee, lets the boy's weight sag, but he doesn't stop holding him up with one arm around his shoulders. "Kicked him, the doctors can't -" He swallows. "We've nothing to give -"
"It's okay." He checks the ground but there's nothing for it, there's no point trying to keep robes clean on these journeys, gods - he puts down the bag of apples and kneels, on cobbles and scattered straw, and finds a smile for the boy. "My name's Kurt, I'm a healer. This is going to feel strange but then it'll get better, I promise."
The boy stares at him, dull-eyed through long pain, and Kurt feels the grey death waiting to creep in for him, slow through the nights while his parents watch. Then he closes his eyes, and puts a hand on his own abdomen.
It's strange how the hangover focuses it, what matters is sharper, more obvious, when everything else is a fuzz. He breathes through it. He's more acute to gradations of pain now, nuances of pain, it rarely panics him like it used to, like some force larger than he was that he couldn't contain. He observes it, and breathes, breathes, feels his liver hate him particularly hard and compromises by healing the hangover out with the injury, breathes, breathes, breathes. And then he feels tired and drained and drowsy, and he hears the boy's breath come in, fall loose, as he breathes, breathes, breathes.
Mercedes helps him up, and he dusts his robes down, becomes aware for the first time since he closed his eyes of the sound of the crowd watching, murmuring, and the mother is beginning to cry, a tight high keening sound biting her knuckles to keep it in, and Kurt really doesn't want to be here anymore, he wants Blaine. He picks up the sack of apples again and his knees say oh no really and Kurt thinks shut up and do as you are told.
He bows, maybe a little shakily, for the crying father and the boy opening his eyes properly, squirming up in his grip, trying to get a look at the mages as they turn away. Kurt's knees want to stagger but Rachel takes his arm, helps him walk a little unsteadily for the road again. Kurt feels through his magic, feels out -
It's not that he feels other people's pain when he does this. It's that he feels that they have pain, which is almost worse, coming with the knowledge of what he could do. He feels the elderly, creaking and struggling, he feels the asthma caught in a child's chest, he feels the old war wound still knocking a man's hip crooked, he feels the gout, the strains, the breaks, the sickness, he feels every tiny way they could pick him to pieces with greedy pinching fingertips until
Rachel says, "Are you alright?"
Kurt blinks, sucks his breath in. "I'm fine."
Her voice is distant. "I wasn't asking you now."
He stares at her face, and her eyes are focused on some point past his skull. He opens his mouth but he doesn't know what to say while she blinks, slowly, dragging herself back from some other when, hungover and tired again, and he puts his eyes forward and thinks hard about Blaine and nothing but Blaine.
Healers aren't the only ones held always slightly separate. I wasn't asking you now.
. . . when else will you need to ask me that . . . ?
*
"You are actually getting round now, Archie." Blaine tells the horse, who swishes his tail and huffs into his cupped hands. "Seriously, I know they mean well but you need to start turning down the apples. You are portly. You are rotund. Soon we'll be the ones carrying you."
Archimedes bats an ear, and lifts his head to look over Blaine's shoulder. Blaine turns his head and the others are back, Kurt is back, handing a sack of apples to Puck and giving a tight smile to something he says, looking around the clearing - spotting Blaine.
Blaine turns as Kurt hurries to him at a pace that can barely be called a walk, and throws his arms around his neck. Blaine's dragged in off-balance, grabbing Kurt's waist just to stay upright, while Kurt breathes at the side of his face and Blaine says, "Hey, hey hey hey." He turns his head, nose nuzzling in across Kurt's cheek. "Hey, what's wrong? That was like, less than two hours, did you miss me that much?"
"Idiot," Kurt huffs against his ear, and Blaine hugs him in closer by the waist, closes his eyes and tips his forehead against Kurt's, nose alongside nose now.
Blaine strokes the shallow bowl of Kurt's lower back with a thumb. He says, "I love you too."
*
Another day of walking, another night in the tents, nuzzled up against the containing shape of Kurt's body like a cradle. Blaine wakes with Kurt's breath shifting the hair by his ear, Kurt's heartbeat a slow strong pulse against his cheek. He settles his arms in closer around him, blinking in the dim before dawn, and thinks, Another day of walking.
He tries to think of a better life, sometimes. Apart from their own tent so they don't have to find a quiet patch of woodland when they want to, he mostly can't.
Finn is snoring, and Sam; Rachel's sleeping in the other tent while their fight drags on. Mercedes sighs, turns over. It was Mercedes who caught Blaine aside while they packed the last of their camp up yesterday to tell him Kurt had healed a boy in the town, to keep an eye on him, but Kurt had seemed no worse than before. Tired, though they were all tired. Hungover and full of sleepy love and worry Blaine had taken his hand, walked by his side, while Kurt leaned his body imperceptibly to Blaine's but still kept walking. Strongest person Blaine's ever met. He'll be fine.
Blaine runs a hand down the soft skin of his arm, and thinks of that strip of cloth binding them together. He knows that he's failed before, trying to understand the lives of mages in human terms - he'd thought a coven meant friends, and then thought it meant family, and only now he's dropped the human concepts does he understand what it really means (thick, comfortable cloud of magic surrounding all of them; they are a coven, and nothing else). A handfasting is not a marriage. Mages have no concept of marriage.
("I don't belong to you. Everything given is a gift, every time. You don't belong to me. I can't ask you for anything that you don't freely give me." Kurt's hands twisting a little in his, their fingers slipping, catching together. "It doesn't even mean you have to stay faithful, if you don't want to. Hush. Listen. What it means is that I love you and I respect you and I know, I know, that this time next year I still will. We might not renew it but if we didn't, I would still love you and respect you and wish you nothing but well. All it is is that promise. The rest is all a gift, nothing binds me to it, it's yours because I want you to have it." Squeeze of his hands, intensity of his eyes so forest green so suddenly. "I will be faithful, you know that. I'll never feel like this about anyone else for my whole life, I know that. And if you didn't want to renew it, I would just let you go. I would, Blaine. I don't - promise there would be anything much left of me for you to come back to if you changed your mind, though."
"I would never do that. I do belong to you."
"No. I know that would make things easier, but it's not true. You belong to you. Anything you do want to give me, you have no idea how grateful I am for it, but -" Lean in, quick kiss, sharp with need. "Be with me because you want to be with me, not because you have to. Choose it. We don't have to be here, Blaine, we don't have to do anything, I only give you everything because I want it to be yours. But I can only keep on giving you these things if they're mine to give. I don't belong to you. But I give you everything, everything, every day of my life. I love you. That's what I'm promising. I love you, and you saved my life and changed my life, and I have never been so happy as I am with you. So I want to be allowed to return the favour." Squeeze of his hands. "That's all I'm asking in return."
Quietly, "You know what I'm promising in return."
No-one's eyes in all the world see Blaine and know him the way Kurt's do. "I know."
How simple promises are.)
Mages do understand love, he thinks, love and regret, and how complex these things can be. So they bind their hands and promise a year, not knowing what the year will bring. They bind their hands and promise that if it can't last past the year, the love was still worth giving.
Kurt shifts underneath him, eyelashes beginning the slow dance of waking.
They bind their hands, and make their choice. Freely given, freely shared.
He turns his head into Kurt's chest and nuzzles so hard into his breastbone, I love you I love you I love you, and Kurt smiles before his eyes have come fully open.
Another day of walking. There's mist on the ground, low and sullen, as they cut out through the forest following the drag of Rachel's pendulum. Blaine walks at Kurt's side, leading Archimedes with his free hand in Kurt's, thinking distant things. He's remembering his favourite wooden sword as a child, he doesn't know why, and how he broke it trying to lever up a too-big stone with it, making a dam for a stream. Kurt keeps giving him long strange looks, oddly intense, and Blaine catches his eye and hopes that he's not in his reverie mumbling out loud.
Something familiar about the damp in the air and hard ground underfoot, and the smell of the undergrowth as the mages tramp through it. Memory's a funny thing. Midwinter's past but this is still the storytelling season, gathered in close around the fire on a night, huddled in their tents, and stories churn your memories like a toy sword stirring silt in the bottom of a stream; Sam and Puck are tossing a ball of magic back and forth over the mages' heads and Blaine remembers, smiles a little, as Kurt's hand twitches its grip on his and he hears, Can you hear me?
He screams, as Santana will later delight in informing him, like a girl.
It's just - walking in the forest Kurt holding his hand and all the coven around them all so very everyday and then whispered not by but inside his ear Kurt's voice like he's testing - Blaine staggers sideways (Archimedes' harness dropped the horse simply stops walking, and waits placidly for whatever inscrutable decision the coven will make next) and Kurt's hand slips loose, he yelps, "Blaine-" and Blaine stares at him, heart pounding through his eardrums -
Kurt puts his hands over his mouth. "You heard me. Oh gods oh my gods you heard me -"
"What the hell?" Finn says, and Blaine stares at Kurt, who steps forward, something has lit behind his face, he holds a hand out for Blaine with his fingers not hiding his smile now as he says, "Blaine -"
And in Blaine's mind, and he can feel the delight in the words, Can you hear me?
"Y-" Blaine stops, and - feels -
(The presence of Kurt, or Kurt's magic, or - both, more than that, some link between them never quite closed - ?)
. . . yes . . . ?
Kurt explodes out a noise of sheer joy and throws his arms around Blaine's neck. Blaine staggers back under the hug, patting his back, laughing out loud at Kurt's elation, as the coven stops walking all around them to stare. Quinn leans down to pick up the hare, so both of them can be near eye-level to glare at them as she says, "What exactly on earth are you two doing?"
"-in my head I heard him in my brain it was-"
"-thought we could so I tried and he heard me he heard me-"
Santana says, "In sentences that make sense would be awesome, boys."
"I thought - because we've, before, we've shared that link before, he's been in my mind I thought -" Kurt grips Blaine's hand tight and stares at his face and Blaine can't believe, feels through, finds - it's just like he knows an opening in his own mind, an opening in the air, an opening in life, where Kurt is. Can you hear me? and Kurt's hand jolts and he laughs out loud. "I thought it might still be open and it is -"
Finn says, "Which . . . means . . ."
Blaine says, "He can talk into my head."
"We can talk into each other's heads."
"This is the most -"
"You remember, against the dhampir, we were so-"
"One person."
"And I knew if I could -"
"In my head."
"I knew if we could -"
"Okay," Santana says. "The levels of creepy that you two reach just keep on finding that extra notch, huh?"
"In your head?" Tina says, and Kurt leans down, forehead bumping to Blaine's, and Blaine feels in his mind, Can you hear me?
Blaine closes his eyes, feels through to that level, almost too deep for the words. I can always hear you.
Blaine this is . . .
This isn't normal.
"No," Kurt whispers out loud, and opens his eyes, stares into Blaine's. "No. Nothing about this is normal."
"I read about something like this once," the Artie-owl says, and hops itself neatly into Mike's pocket. "Let me go find the book, be right back!"
This is . . . Blaine feels through to Kurt, and Kurt watches his eyes.
Do you think it's creepy?
Blaine considers it. No. No. Not at all. It feels really - really strangely perfectly -
Kurt offers, softly, Right.
"Right," Blaine says, and kisses him.
*
Maybe it should be scary; it isn't.
It's Kurt. Kurt would never do anything that would hurt Blaine. And it's not like they have access to each other's every thought all of a sudden - there is difficulty in finding that particular level they can communicate on like this, and it's tiring, and they stop after a while because it's giving them both a buzzing headache, though that might just be the comedown from their sheer excitement high. For about half an hour almost all they said to each other without saying a thing out loud, grinning wildly the whole time, was, Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi!, anyway.
Artie's back within a couple of hours, while they're picking their way down a steep bank from the forest to an actual road. He'd read it years ago and put it down as one of those things mages of the past could do, the great mages who had power like no-one does anymore; there's a record of two mages speaking to each other silently, after they shared their magic.
"He doesn't have any magic to share," Santana snaps, pointing at Blaine, who's holding Kurt still by the hip as he leans down to untangle a bramble from the hem of his robes.
"He's not a zombie, he is alive." Kurt snaps right back. "We shared my magic against that dhampir. He's been in my dreams. It leaves - echoes of how. That's all. It's just a path we know, now."
Blaine stands up again, twitching the fall of Kurt's robes straight at the waist with one hand. Kurt smiles at him, and they both look up and offer a hand to Mercedes slithering down the bank.
"Some crazy shit," Artie says, sounding impressed. "Technomage tried to replicate it with a device once, couldn't find mages who'd let him punch it into their brain though."
"I can't imagine why," Quinn murmurs, and the hare cocks an ear, and Blaine thinks that it's giving a grin.
Rachel's standing at the edge of the road, eyebrows low as she glares at the pendulum, which is swinging in heavy circles. "Oh come on," Mercedes moans. "Not again, Rach, jeez-"
"The magic works to its own reasons!" Rachel snaps.
"The human would make a better seer than you." Santana says, and drops her pack from her shoulders to sit on it. She holds a hand up for Brittany, who stands behind her, folds her arms around Santana's neck and rests her cheek on top of her head. "Break for lunch, since gods know we're going hella nowhere 'til Rachel stops sucking."
"Who died and put you in charge?" Tina mutters.
"Oh the hydro's picking a fight? What you gonna do, be a bit damp at me?"
"Guys, chill." Finn says, and Rachel looks away, and Blaine says, "It's probably a good idea to take a break while we can, right?"
Sam kicks at a little at a clump of wild garlic, head down. Blaine wishes he was a mage sometimes just because putting the goggles on is so obvious, and he doesn't want to noticeably ogle Sam's magic all the time, but Sam's the only mage not part of the coven that Blaine's hung out with. He's learned so much about magic just by seeing how Sam's magic differs from theirs, and he's spent some time trying to read when Sam's magic is hollow and lost and sad to know when to approach him as a friend -
But Sam's not especially interested in being friends with Blaine. He treats him always in a one-step-back way, and he talks to him the way people speak to children and dogs, and Blaine's the only human most mages have hung out with too. He wonders sometimes what would have happened if he and Kurt had met under other circumstances, normal circumstances, without a monster in the dark pushing them together. Would they have trusted each other, talked to each other, even have paid each other the slightest attention?
Of course I would have, he thinks, looking at Kurt's face as Kurt looks calmly back, then reaches up to neaten Blaine's hair a little. Of course I would always have wanted to know him.
He knows that's not true. He knows that if he'd passed Kurt on the street the most he would have done is glanced (well, performed a double-take, hell Kurt would still look like that) at him. If Blaine hadn't known Kurt's courage, how could he have been brave himself?
They have fresh food from the town, so there's one of those rare lunches actually worth looking forward to, sitting on the grass between hedged field and the dun-coloured road. Bread and cheese and tea boiled on a fire Santana snaps to life, while Rachel sits with an arm around her knees, still staring woefully at the slowly circling pendulum, horribly sad eyes like all of life hates her. After Kurt finishes his apple he passes the core to Blaine, who feeds them to Archimedes with a little twinge of guilt because under the mages' gentle regime, that horse really is getting big. Puck's minding him now, leaning against a tree next to him and making little pops of magic scare the flies off him. Puck and Finn had 'carried' Archimedes down the bank, supporting him on a cloud of burning-bright magic, Archimedes wild-eyed but accepting of it. He likes travelling with the mages. He should, he never has to move faster than a walk and never has to carry anything the mages wouldn't be willing to carry themselves, they feel really uncomfortable making a horse do it for them, and he gets more fresh fruit than the mages themselves do. Horse, Blaine thinks, mostly amused. They treat him like a lapdog.
Kurt's laying on his back in the grass, one arm folded over his eyes against the thin winter sunlight, so Blaine walks back and lays down with his head resting on Kurt's stomach, and Kurt laughs softly and doesn't move. The ground's cold but Blaine's got Kurt's green cloak and Kurt's warm body and he's happy, anyway.
A couple of farmers pass with an ox cart, ignored by the mages apart from Santana's smirk and finger-wiggling wave, as Brittany hooks back the hair flopped over her face to squint up at them. Rachel's beginning to mutter, shaking the pendulum angrily, and Blaine snaps the goggles on to see if the magic's doing anything weird; it spirals like autumn leaves in playful winds around the pendulum but only lazily, like it has all the time in the world, not like it's fighting anything. "Why won't it work?" he murmurs to Kurt, who sits up and looks sleepily across at Rachel, then shrugs and leans into Blaine's body, yawns behind a hand.
"Don't know. Sometimes it just doesn't. If it doesn't want to you can't make it."
"Not even you?"
Kurt shakes his head against Blaine's shoulder, and yawns again.
Archimedes lifts his head and his ears twist before they hear more hooves approaching. Santana and Brittany are playing some complicated clapping game, palms smacking palms to a quick rhythm as they sing some slightly sinister song meant to scare faeries from leaving a changeling in a cradle, Tina and Mike are playing a game with an oddly-weighted ball of magic rolling in the air over their hands, Kurt nuzzles his nose in against Blaine's neck and Quinn is saying to the hare, "Maybe if we ever get moving again." and Blaine thinks, Well, it's not like anyone's going to travel past anything unusual.
It's a ranger on horseback who comes around the bend of the road, his cloak a more worn and faded green than Blaine's. He looks immediately at the mages, looks immediately at Blaine who's got a healer draped along his side and drowsily blinking against the clean cold afternoon light (Kurt is a very talented napper and is working his way towards another masterpiece on Blaine's shoulder), and he pulls at the reins of his horse.
The mages look up, as the horse draws alongside them and stops. Sam looking mulish says, "Can we help you?"
The ranger flicks his eyes to him then back to Blaine. "Are you by any chance Blaine Anderson?"
Kurt sits up, and touches his hair where he was leaning into Blaine. Blaine says, "Um, yes. Are you -" He stands up, brushes his cloak off, bows. The ranger climbs down from his horse, tugs open a saddlebag.
"Name's Robert, sent by my commanding officer, he says he owes you. Jack Silber?"
Blaine grins, and Kurt stands up beside him, smoothing his robes neatly down. "Hey, how's Jack doing?"
"Pretty good, we're training some good young rangers now. We had a bunch of letters come up to us chasing a coven of mages with a knight travelling with them -" He picks a red-sealed letter out of the saddlebag and holds the whole pouch of letters out to the coven. "- and an urgent message for one Blaine Anderson, been chasing you since the autumn."
Blaine says, his voice coming very neutral, "Oh."
Kurt looks at him, but his attention is largely held by Tina gleefully grabbing the bag of letters and quickly reading out the names, "Quinn, this one's to all of us, Finn, Kurt-"
Blaine looks at the red-sealed letter, and he knows the crest even without seeing it, just the particular rich burgundy of the wax is enough. He takes it because it's impolite not to. "Thank you."
"No problem, got me out of the snow for a week. You guys got anything you want taking North?"
"Hang on and let us write a thank you letter!" Mercedes calls, already digging through her pack for ink. Kurt's holding a letter from his father but he's looking at Blaine, and Blaine feels a little touch through that path between them, not even a word, just a brush of thought, a question. Blaine puts a smile on and says, "How about a thank you mug of tea? We haven't got much else to give, sorry."
Brittany is cooing over the ranger's horse, stroking its mane with her fingers, and Sam's looking closed off again, arms folded and glaring up the road. This time Blaine feels Kurt's, Blaine, are you alright? but he still doesn't look at his eyes, just feels back through the humming strain of it, Not in front of the ranger.
I am such an embarrassment to you, Kurt's words come teasingly back, but then he slips his own letter into the pocket of his robes, and kneels to help Santana make the tea.
*
Blaine walks a little further up the road and sits on the fence to read his letter, aware of Kurt watching him from the main body of the coven, having waved the ranger off now the afternoon's wearing on and the clouded sky is silvery-gold with the lowering sun. He can hear the edge of Rachel's voice loudly telling everyone how obviously the magic was telling them to stay there to wait for the ranger while he reads his letter, then he folds it up again, and sits for some time just swinging his heels, gazing across the field where sheep are determinedly scuffing their hooves at the thin winter grass.
Kurt gives him five minutes, which he's grateful for, forcibly settling himself, making himself steady. Kurt's boots shift the grass. He says, "My dad said hi." and then he climbs up next to Blaine, perches on the fence beside him. He tilts his head, looks questioningly up at him and Blaine shrugs, letter crinkling against his thigh, says, "My father."
Kurt watches his face, and says carefully, "What did it say?"
Blaine lifts his head a little, scans the horizon, one lumpen hill rising directly in front of them dull heather-purple, distant sparkle of a lake off there to the south west. "He's waiting for me in our northernmost estate. Quite near here, actually. Maybe two days' ride."
"Waiting for you," Kurt says, because Kurt is very sensitive to the words people use.
Blaine works his jaw a little. "My father doesn't request, he just summons."
"Will you go?"
Blaine watches the wind run silver over the grass then comb it back dull green again. He says, "I don't know what to say to him."
Kurt shifts his seat a little, draws his shoulders back, breathes. "It's your decision what you do. You belong to you. Not to him, and not to me. But if you go - you don't have to go alone."
Blaine looks across at him, at Kurt just watching him, head tipped and eyes uncertainly raised to his. Blaine swallows, and looks at the horizon again. "I still don't know what to say to him. Of course he cares that I - that I walked away from the knights, the life he wanted me to have, and - and he knows I'm travelling with you. And . . ." He takes a slow breath. "Kurt, talk will travel, you know that. Humans don't travel with mages, we both know we're not 'normal', we stand out, and we've passed enough inns and enough towns, we've never - we've never hidden anything -"
Quietly, "Do you wish we had?"
"No! No, not for one second, no. But I just - I don't know what to say to him. I . . ."
Blaine clasps his hands between his legs, and the letter creases in his grip. Kurt's silent for a moment, then says and his voice comes rough, "I don't know what to say. I don't want to say 'sorry' for this, for us-"
"No."
"I just, I know - I know how - how difficult and - it's not fair. For it to be fine for me and my dad-" He has to stop, and swallow. "We could talk to him," he says, pleadingly. "Couldn't we . . . wouldn't he at least accept . . . ?"
It takes a few attempts for the words to come from his mouth; "I'm such a coward."
"Blaine, no."
"I'm scared to go face him. I'm scared of how he'll look at me. But -" It all churns inside, too much feeling to make sense of. "He's my father," Blaine says, helplessly, and Kurt reaches across and puts his hand over the nearest of Blaine's, still clenched together tight.
"I'll come with you. He can blame it on me if he likes, gods know it's not your fault-"
"It's no-one's fault, it's not wrong!"
"I know," Kurt says, and he sounds like he's trying not to cry. Blaine grits his teeth, opens his hands to hold Kurt's, tight. "I'll come with you," Kurt whispers. "You shouldn't go alone. You shouldn't be alone."
Something in the way he says 'you'; you shouldn't be alone. Blaine's throat lumps with hurt and he swallows it down, looks at Kurt's face and Kurt looks back with his face drawn but steady, and Blaine knows that Kurt can deal with anything, but Kurt doesn't know Blaine's father. He closes his eyes, shakes his head. "What about your coven? I really shouldn't turn up on his doorstep with a whole coven of mages, it's not a great first impression of my new life."
"They don't have to come with us, they can live without me for five minutes, gods."
"I meant leaving them, after everything in the North-"
"What? Oh my gods, Blaine, you just watched me walk into town yesterday, for gods' sakes-"
"What? Oh - yeah, wait, hold on-"
"The magic knows," Kurt says irritably, and pulls at his hand. "The magic knows like we know when it's forever. I can come with you and we can both come back to them, it won't kill any of us." He looks at Blaine's eyes. "I can come with you. Can't I?"
". . . yeah. Yes. You can. We can."
The smile twitches nervous on Kurt's mouth, and Blaine feels his smile come too frightened and too hopeful back. Kurt's smile grows braver, and he says, "Your 'northernmost estate', Blaine?"
"Oh, uh, yeah. We only ever used it in the summer."
"Exactly how many estates do you have? How high up the nobility are you?"
"You know." The blush must show. "Just sort of, sort of, generally noble."
Teasingly, "You handfasted very far below yourself, didn't you?"
"No." He means that absolutely, every bone in his body is sure of it. "I handfasted the noblest person I ever met."
Kurt's thumb strokes the side of his hand. Blaine looks into his eyes and there's no shame in him, how can there be? Kurt might be absolutely nothing that Blaine's father expected, but for god's sake, the most powerful mage of his generation and the most beautiful human being Blaine's ever seen, there can't be any rational reason for Blaine's father not to . . .
He looks across at the horizon, and Kurt strokes his hand.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me but the magic <3
Rating: R? I know I swear a lot so I'm assuming anyway =/
Summary: It's the Solstice. (Or, three handfastings and no funeral ;) )
Note: This was meant to be one relatively short fic. lol no it's going to be two quite long parts. Why can I never control my word vomit ;_;
It's the Solstice. There's snow on the ground still though they're further south now, snow against the sheltered side of the tree where they've tethered Archimedes the horse for the night. The earth underfoot is hard, the stars are brittle and brilliant as cracked diamond in the sky, and underneath the clear cold moon the mages are all a little bit high.
"The magic," Kurt says, cheeks flushed, eyes glazed, holding his wrist up and mostly letting Blaine do the tying, putting his fingers where directed for the knot. The fire snaps behind him, a bank of bright heat. "It's a bit. Much. It's a thin time."
"Thin time?" Blaine says, tugging one-handed at the ends of the strip of cloth now binding their wrists together, tightening the knot. Kurt tilts his bound hand left and right, gently tilting Blaine's too, happily contemplating it.
"The magic makes things thin. The barriers between - things, people, worlds, we can see between them if we really like to, if there's a gateway we can walk between, we -" Kurt blinks a few times, tries to put his hand on the side of his head and tugs Blaine's hand with it, laughs. Blaine smiles, reaches up with both their hands to brush Kurt's hair back; the fire's turned his skin to shifting shades of amber. "It's a thin time. It's when we handfast because -" He puts his free hand on Blaine's chest, and Blaine feels the buzz of magic pressed there. Kurt wets his lips, says, "I don't know if a human and mage ever . . . before."
Blaine keeps his hand on the side of Kurt's face, and looks into his eyes, and Kurt looks back at him so proud. And then Santana yelps behind them and they turn to see Brittany shaking the bond loose again, and Santana jumping on her so she screams and goes down, so Santana can pin her with her knees and start forcibly tying their wrists together. "If you would just. Stop. Wriggling holy crap-"
Mike and Tina are almost done, laughing and eyes on their wrists, tightening their knot. Kurt's fingers fold into Blaine's. "Do you want to go first?"
Blaine looks at the fire, set in a ditch they spent half the afternoon digging, while Kurt, Quinn and Tina went into the nearest town to negotiate for the barrel of wine that's probably contributing to the mages' happy high, and definitely contributed to the argument that means that Rachel is furiously drinking at the side of the clearing, and Finn is off sulking somewhere in the forest, and only three couples are handfasting this Solstice. Blaine watches the sparks break loose, make their mad bid for freedom in the sky like stars trying to get home, and he says slowly, "This is what you do."
"It's more dangerous for us than you," Kurt points out. "Robes are a fire hazard."
"I could carry you over."
"Such a gentleman." Kurt leans in and kisses him next to his nose. "No. We jump. Look."
Mike and Tine are tied, and are approaching the fire now. They push at each other, giggling and so happy, and Blaine watches them feeling warm as they back off, pulling their robes up with their one free hand each, biting their lips, readying for the run. Mercedes beats the barrel she's sitting on and whoops for them, Sam smiling a little next to her, Quinn runs her hands down the fur of the white hare sitting on her lap and grins, and with a shared scream the two hydromages charge at the fire and leap.
Sparks scatter, robes flare.
They land with mutual shrieks and a stagger and a quick run on to save their robes from the flames, then Tina leaps on Mike throwing her arms and legs around him and Mike spins, laughing, holding her up. A whole year they promise to love each other for, whatever love means. And Blaine just stares at them as Tina lifts her head and their noses nuzzle before they kiss, and he thinks, I want exactly that.
The wrist tied to his tugs, getting his attention. He looks across and he has exactly that, he has better, Kurt watching him quieter now and sure through the controlled thrum Blaine can feel at this proximity with his magic strung up so wild, each particle glancing off his skin like a gentle blizzard of warm-cool snowflakes. Blaine says, "Are you ready?"
Kurt looks right at him and says, "From the day I met you." and it catches in Blaine's throat, and he kisses him, first.
For that moment they're the only people in the clearing.
But then Mike and Tina are chanting jump jump jump from the other side of the fire and Mercedes is banging out a drum roll on the barrel, and Blaine closes his fingers through Kurt's, Kurt squeezes back, and they face the bank of fire. The colours are gorgeous, creamy white and gaudy orange in the dark, and Blaine listens to Kurt breathe, and says, "Just a jump. We've faced worse."
Kurt's hand shifts, settles in his. "It's worth it."
They sway their weight back. They kick into a run.
The sound of the coven shouting seems distant in the second that they spring, throwing themselves into the air, hand tight in hand and the heat is a physical press on the skin -
- and then they crash onto earth too solid after all that air, Kurt's foot lands on his robes and he yelps as his own weight hurtles him forward; Blaine catches his arm too late to save him, rolls them as they drop instead and lands on top of him, Kurt's body turned into his and Kurt's face under his, heart thrumming hard to Blaine's chest, hand pressed to his side and clutching in the chainmail. "- hey," Kurt whispers, and blinks, and Blaine looks down at their bound wrists and thinks, We can renew it every year. We get to do that again every year.
"Hey," he says, and kisses him.
"Just a heads-up!" Santana's voice yells. "You got exactly three seconds an' me an' Britt are jumping right on your bony rear ends so shift, guys!"
Kurt's hand is in Blaine's hair, and he whispers to his mouth, "My whole life."
"Everything." Blaine confirms, and kisses him again but very quickly before he pulls back and yanks Kurt up with him, because he can hear the cheerful wail of Brittany doing her run-up.
*
Kurt wakes up with more than a bit of a headache.
He screws his eyes closed, curses and hisses, feels through himself, oh good, hangover. He prods gingerly at his own liver, which lets him know that until he gets some water into his dehydrated system this is going to suck whatever he does. He sighs, slow and long, and cracks his overheated eyes open, and tips his head to look at the boy sleeping with his cheek on his chest.
Then he smiles, a little, through the horrible.
He looks so young, asleep. He's a knight - he's earned the title by now, more than any of those boys he trained with - and deadly when he has to be, Kurt knows that, strong and dependable and rational in ways the mages can never be, he's the only reason they don't wake up in waterlogged and collapsed tents as often as not. And now Kurt watches him sleep with his cheek scrunched up against Kurt's breastbone, the covers bundled up to his nose, and the love inside him shivers like there's not enough room for it, sometimes.
He hears a breath come different further down the tent and Sam sits up, puts his palm to his forehead and screws his eyes closed, and whispers a little curse. Kurt lifts his magic a little to let Sam know he's awake, gives a commiserating smile; Sam grins wearily back, whispers, "How're you with hangovers?"
"Drink a couple of pints of water and I'll think about it. Well hello, sleeping beauty." as the heavy body on his wriggles, and then gives a small whining breath of oh oh horrible as Blaine's hangover asserts itself. Kurt lifts a hand to brush his hair back and finds that it's still tied to Blaine's, and laughs out loud, lifts his other hand to run through Blaine's tangled curls. "Did you sleep well?"
"Kuuurrrrt," Blaine moans, which means, I feel horrible, why do I feel horrible, you would never let me feel horrible. Kurt brushes his hair back, runs his thumb over the edge of his ear.
"You need to drink some water. We all need to drink some water. I'm not even fixing myself until I've drunk some water."
"I'ma barf," Santana says with sudden horrible clarity, asleep to nauseous in a fraction of a second. She scrabbles out of the tent with Brittany hauled after her with a scream, swung from their sleeping bag by the bound wrist.
Blaine pulls a little at Kurt's wrist. "When do we take these off . . . ?"
Kurt yawns, covers it with a hand, then rubs his eyes. "Mmf, now, if you like. What's done is done."
"It was fun."
"It was fun."
"We should do it again."
Kurt looks down at his one revealed eye, the other pressed to Kurt's own chest, upraised like a hopeful puppy's. Kurt touches his cheek. "We will do it again."
Kurt can tell by how his eye crinkles that he's smiling, and he pulls the covers down with a finger to see it, grins back. "Do you feel different?"
". . . should I feel different?"
"It's a promise, not magic. Not our kind of magic."
Blaine shifts himself up, folds his arms over Kurt's chest to prop his chin up there and gazes up at him. "I feel like I love you," he says. "And really happy. And seriously hungover."
"So same as usual, bar the hangover."
"How do you feel?"
Like I love you too much to speak.
He wraps his arms around Blaine as Blaine wriggles up, so their foreheads can bump and Kurt's magic can coil around them both, and Kurt can close his eyes and whisper, "Like the luckiest person on the entire planet."
The luckiest most hungover person on the entire planet.
Everyone pesters him for a magical hangover cure as they stumble around outside the tent getting a fire lit for coffee, and Kurt glares them off through sheer dead-eyed ill-feeling, he's not even healing himself. He will never learn how truly evil red wine is until he just lets his body suffer through it. The mages read the low churn of his magic and back off, while Blaine unties their wrists, then rolls that strip of cloth up neatly and puts it into his pocket. Kurt catches his eye and they both look away quickly, smiling; Kurt knows that it's sentimental to keep it, but he also knows that Blaine will find some inventively filthy use for it at some point, he really is under no illusions about the man he just promised himself to.
Speaking of promises, they told the inn they'd bring the barrel back. Half the coven stay to clear up their tents and get some laundry done in the stream nearby, and Kurt and Blaine kiss a goodbye before he sets off with Rachel, Sam and Mercedes, taking turns to roll the barrel through the forest. Undrunk wine slops around inside it like the hangover sloshing Kurt's brain. Cold air helps a little. Cold air and a walk, and maybe they can pick up some coffee in this town . . .
While Sam and Mercedes walk a little ahead, rolling the barrel and talking in low voices, Rachel hangs off Kurt's arm and stares at the ground as she walks. She says, "Can you do anything about broken hearts?"
Kurt glances at her, turns his eyes up to the thin branches of trees again, black against the pale sky. "What did you fight about?"
"Don't remember," she mutters. "He called me overbearing."
"I heard you call him a provincial boor."
"He called me stuck-up!"
"Well, you did call him a provincial boor."
"He just doesn't understand. He just doesn't understand things, he didn't grow up with magic, he still has all these stupid closed-off human thoughts -"
Kurt pats her hand, and feels really too crappy to get angry right now. "Think about who you're saying that sentence to."
Rachel's just confused for a second, staring at him, then her face drops. "I don't - mean it like that. He just - it's different. Being a mage and becoming a mage, you just - we just see things differently, it's difficult to make it work for us -"
"Brittany and Santana make it work."
"Okay, that doesn't count, Brittany is just strange."
"Blaine and I make it work."
She waves her hand. "Well maybe you're more human than mage too."
"Okay, you know what?" Kurt unpicks Rachel's arm from his elbow. "The things you're saying right now are incredibly arrogant and ugly, and I'm going to pretend that you're still kind of drunk and walk away from you. Later on we won't talk about this again. Is that agreed?"
"Kurt -"
He pulls a, oh did you speak? Because I just said that we weren't talking about it anymore face, and strides off to catch up with Sam and Mercedes, just as Sam's laughter blooms his magic out, and then it catches in small again as if on the memory that maybe it shouldn't, yet.
Kurt's coven, drunk. They really should learn their lesson.
*
It's only a small town, funny that Rachel should choose the word 'provincial' last night. They'd known when they arrived that no-one wanted mages camping inside the town's borders but since they were Solsticing they didn't even want to be in a town, they needed space and air and freedom for the magic -
Oh gods the magic on the Solstice, the echoes of it still buzz a little inside Kurt's bones, it was just insane. He'd felt high with it, struggling to concentrate, at one point in the night Tina had put her palm on the outline of his aura fully five feet from his body and he'd felt it there, through the daze of it all pumping through his blood. Normally his magic is a lot. Last night it had been too much.
But then there was Blaine, solid Blaine, steadfast Blaine, keeping him tethered to the world. The Solstice is a thin time, and more than once that night Kurt had felt himself slipping somewhere sideways before Blaine's wrist jerked his, and he was snapped back to the ground again. It's dangerous, to be a mage. Too much joy can sidestep you out of your own life in the thin times. Thank the gods they're only twice a year. Thank the gods for the merely quite dangerous rest of their lives.
It's market day and the town's chaotic with stalls and shouting, chickens and pedlars, an escaped goat making a bid for freedom through the crowd and upsetting a fire-eater Puck and Santana would only glare contempt at. They drop the barrel off at the inn and Kurt checks on the lamed horse he'd healed last night as part of the payment (Tina, asked to unblock a 'drain', didn't want to discuss what her task had actually consisted of) but she's fine, snorting softly as he strokes her snout with his knuckles, dark eyes and warm breath. He heads out again to Rachel and Mercedes having wandered off to look at the market stalls, and Sam waiting there awkwardly for him, turning his weight a little on his hips and chewing his not unimpressive bottom lip. "They said you'd know what we needed to pick up and carrying stuff's more of a boy's job anyway."
"Of course they said that." Kurt says crisply, and regrets not bringing Blaine if this was going to involve heavy lifting. He sighs, though, lets his breath out through his nose, closes his eyes against the fuzz of the hangover and remembers that Blaine and he . . .
Things are better when he remembers that. He's pretty certain that any situation would be instantly better if he just remembered that.
"Oats for porridge," he says, opening his eyes. "Another groundsheet if we can find one. Dried fruit, as many apples as we can carry we're feeding so many to the horse, tea leaves, vegetables for stew, salt, cheese and bread . . ."
"We're carrying all of it?"
"No, we're hunting them down and if we have to tying their share to their backs. We might as well make a start, it's going to take long enough through those crowds anyway."
Walking at Sam's side into the market feels strange, it's been so long since he's been around a mage who's not a part of their coven, and Sam's magic feels oddly - distinct, against his. Crisp-edged. He's aware of it in a way he can't be with his coven, his coven's magic is just a part of what the world is like, no more separate than the air he breathes. Sam has his hands in his pockets as he walks and Kurt tries to surreptitiously look over his face, his magic, but Sam keeps himself pretty closed in. Maybe it's to be expected. Kurt doesn't know what he'd be like if he was the only survivor of his coven, the last one left.
No. He does. He knows exactly what he'd be like and he won't think about it.
"You and Mercedes are getting on pretty well," he says, to distract the both of them.
Sam glances up, smiles tightly. "Yeah." He shrugs. "Nice to hang out with another warlock."
Kurt almost asks if there weren't any other warlocks in his last coven and then stops himself, and looks to the side. "So, you get on with - Blaine pretty well," Sam says, and Kurt looks across at him again, feels the smile claim the corner of his mouth and he loses the battle for it not to take the whole of his face. He smiles, shakes his head, he can't help it.
"Yes. We do."
"I seriously never heard of a mage who handfasted a human before."
"We're not doing it for the novelty value," Kurt points out.
"I guess not. So . . . what's the sex like, is he not kind of -"
Kurt's magic shocks out and then squeezes inward with horror. "Ohmygods."
"- I mean, without magic, isn't he just a bit - ?"
Sam is doing hand gestures. Kurt claps a hand over his mouth and waves the other one urgently at Sam, stop gesturing that -
And then something barges his shoulder and he staggers forward, shocked to a yelp, no-one ever touches a mage. Sam grabs him by the arm and yells, "Hey!" and Kurt blinks back at the man on the horse, who doesn't even look around, just keeps trotting on. Sam's face goes dark, and he throws his arm out to free his hand from its sleeve. "Hey."
"Sam it's-"
The wall of magic, sudden gleam of solid gold in front of it, makes the horse rear and whinny loud, as the man jerks the reins and pulls back, drops it to its hooves turned almost to face them again. "What the hell?" Sam shouts at him. "You were just gonna knock him down an' ride off? He's a healer!"
"Sam it's fine," Kurt says quickly, pulling at his arm, the crowd's gone silent but for murmurs out of sight, and people are trying to edge away. "It doesn't matter-"
"Of course it matters, you're a healer! What the hell kind of human do you have to be, what, would you knock down any mage or is it just 'cause he can't shove back? You wanna try knocking me down?" He steps in front of Kurt who grabs his arm and gets shaken back and he doesn't know what to do. "I'm a warlock, I can shove back plenty hard, come at me."
"Sam-"
"Sam!" They both look up, everyone including the increasingly white-faced man on horseback looks up, at Mercedes striding up with Rachel following in a hurry. "Hell're you doing, we didn't come here to pick a stupid fight!"
"He could've knocked Kurt over, he's a healer! What kind of idiot human picks a fight with a mage, what kind of dick picks a fight with a healer-"
"Sam it really doesn't matter," Kurt insists, while Mercedes shouts at Sam, "Stop talking like that, this is why they think we're a bunch of stuck-up-"
"This is why we are better than them!"
Rachel takes Kurt's arm, and her hands aren't quite steady. Kurt puts a hand over hers, says, "We all need to calm down. No-one came here for a fight." He reaches for Sam's barrier of magic, picks his way through it - Sam can feel him doing it, he gets plenty of warning for Kurt dissolving it into particles the humans can't see anymore. "It's fine. Everything is fine."
Sam turns to Kurt again. "You let them shove you around like that?"
Kurt holds his eye. "I was one of 'them'."
Sam's face doesn't know what to do with itself, then he turns with a whirl of grey robes and stalks off. "Sam!" Mercedes calls, but when she tries to follow he waves a jagged angry arm, the magic snaps and spits, and humans scramble out of his way. He vanishes between the stalls, leaving just the three of them, and Kurt with his heart knotted in his throat.
He hadn't asked, but it's been pretty obvious that Sam was born a mage to mage parents, the same as most of the coven, the same as Rachel and Mercedes. It's not like they've ever let it matter. But now he looks to the side, as the man on horseback quickly urges the horse away, and the crowds begin to murmur and mill again, slowly lapping back into the apparently no longer dangerous radius of the mages.
Mercedes stares frustrated through the crowds for Sam then says, "Kurt - ?"
"It's fine," Kurt says, and feels through the magic, feels Sam in his sulk throw himself to sit against the wall at the edge of the market. "Let's just get what we need and then pick him up and get the hell out of here."
He feels really, really weird while they pick up the necessities for travelling on, all of them hesitant and awkward with the stallholders. They don't carry money. Mages trade services required but otherwise they just ask for things, because humans always will need mages and sometimes they need them with nothing to trade back, so they tend not to deny requests when they come. It's largely the fact that they've got Kurt with them that they get what they need in human markets, no-one knows when they might need a healer, no-one wants to say no to someone who could hold their life in their hands one day. Kurt looks down at his own green robes, and folds his arms into the sleeves, close against his body.
No-one would be stupid enough to start a fight with a mage. But more than that just no-one would knock down a healer, no-one would do that, unwritten and unspoken but people do know what they might one day ask a healer to suffer for them. And it makes Kurt feel strange. Separate, special, not in a good way. The way a goat bathed and garlanded for sacrifice might feel. Special: for a price. Special but different, held to one side, not respected for himself but for what they might need from him. Special isn't always nice.
He wishes he was but he's still glad that Blaine isn't here right now, because he feels oddly ashamed.
He's hiking a sack of oats over his shoulder when a voice says roughly, "Here." and Sam takes it from him. He blinks, manages a tight smile up at him. "Thank you."
Sam shrugs, and takes a sack from Mercedes too.
Coming out of the stalls there's a shout and they look up at a man holding a boy, trying to run but sweating through a laden-down jogging; the boy, maybe ten years old, tilts his head, looks at them with something that could almost be curiosity, if it had the strength for it. "- said you were - healer -" the man pants, and Kurt makes the mistake of meeting his eye, then looks quickly back at the boy's grey-tinged face.
A woman is scrambling up behind the man, holding her skirts in tight-knuckled hands. Kurt makes sure not to actually look in her eye, hearing the way her breath twists sharp as it comes. Something is wrong inside the boy. Kurt feels it and it turns low in him with knowing, what is broken, how hard it must have hit. "Put him down," he says, quietly. "A horse?"
The man drops to one knee, lets the boy's weight sag, but he doesn't stop holding him up with one arm around his shoulders. "Kicked him, the doctors can't -" He swallows. "We've nothing to give -"
"It's okay." He checks the ground but there's nothing for it, there's no point trying to keep robes clean on these journeys, gods - he puts down the bag of apples and kneels, on cobbles and scattered straw, and finds a smile for the boy. "My name's Kurt, I'm a healer. This is going to feel strange but then it'll get better, I promise."
The boy stares at him, dull-eyed through long pain, and Kurt feels the grey death waiting to creep in for him, slow through the nights while his parents watch. Then he closes his eyes, and puts a hand on his own abdomen.
It's strange how the hangover focuses it, what matters is sharper, more obvious, when everything else is a fuzz. He breathes through it. He's more acute to gradations of pain now, nuances of pain, it rarely panics him like it used to, like some force larger than he was that he couldn't contain. He observes it, and breathes, breathes, feels his liver hate him particularly hard and compromises by healing the hangover out with the injury, breathes, breathes, breathes. And then he feels tired and drained and drowsy, and he hears the boy's breath come in, fall loose, as he breathes, breathes, breathes.
Mercedes helps him up, and he dusts his robes down, becomes aware for the first time since he closed his eyes of the sound of the crowd watching, murmuring, and the mother is beginning to cry, a tight high keening sound biting her knuckles to keep it in, and Kurt really doesn't want to be here anymore, he wants Blaine. He picks up the sack of apples again and his knees say oh no really and Kurt thinks shut up and do as you are told.
He bows, maybe a little shakily, for the crying father and the boy opening his eyes properly, squirming up in his grip, trying to get a look at the mages as they turn away. Kurt's knees want to stagger but Rachel takes his arm, helps him walk a little unsteadily for the road again. Kurt feels through his magic, feels out -
It's not that he feels other people's pain when he does this. It's that he feels that they have pain, which is almost worse, coming with the knowledge of what he could do. He feels the elderly, creaking and struggling, he feels the asthma caught in a child's chest, he feels the old war wound still knocking a man's hip crooked, he feels the gout, the strains, the breaks, the sickness, he feels every tiny way they could pick him to pieces with greedy pinching fingertips until
Rachel says, "Are you alright?"
Kurt blinks, sucks his breath in. "I'm fine."
Her voice is distant. "I wasn't asking you now."
He stares at her face, and her eyes are focused on some point past his skull. He opens his mouth but he doesn't know what to say while she blinks, slowly, dragging herself back from some other when, hungover and tired again, and he puts his eyes forward and thinks hard about Blaine and nothing but Blaine.
Healers aren't the only ones held always slightly separate. I wasn't asking you now.
. . . when else will you need to ask me that . . . ?
*
"You are actually getting round now, Archie." Blaine tells the horse, who swishes his tail and huffs into his cupped hands. "Seriously, I know they mean well but you need to start turning down the apples. You are portly. You are rotund. Soon we'll be the ones carrying you."
Archimedes bats an ear, and lifts his head to look over Blaine's shoulder. Blaine turns his head and the others are back, Kurt is back, handing a sack of apples to Puck and giving a tight smile to something he says, looking around the clearing - spotting Blaine.
Blaine turns as Kurt hurries to him at a pace that can barely be called a walk, and throws his arms around his neck. Blaine's dragged in off-balance, grabbing Kurt's waist just to stay upright, while Kurt breathes at the side of his face and Blaine says, "Hey, hey hey hey." He turns his head, nose nuzzling in across Kurt's cheek. "Hey, what's wrong? That was like, less than two hours, did you miss me that much?"
"Idiot," Kurt huffs against his ear, and Blaine hugs him in closer by the waist, closes his eyes and tips his forehead against Kurt's, nose alongside nose now.
Blaine strokes the shallow bowl of Kurt's lower back with a thumb. He says, "I love you too."
*
Another day of walking, another night in the tents, nuzzled up against the containing shape of Kurt's body like a cradle. Blaine wakes with Kurt's breath shifting the hair by his ear, Kurt's heartbeat a slow strong pulse against his cheek. He settles his arms in closer around him, blinking in the dim before dawn, and thinks, Another day of walking.
He tries to think of a better life, sometimes. Apart from their own tent so they don't have to find a quiet patch of woodland when they want to, he mostly can't.
Finn is snoring, and Sam; Rachel's sleeping in the other tent while their fight drags on. Mercedes sighs, turns over. It was Mercedes who caught Blaine aside while they packed the last of their camp up yesterday to tell him Kurt had healed a boy in the town, to keep an eye on him, but Kurt had seemed no worse than before. Tired, though they were all tired. Hungover and full of sleepy love and worry Blaine had taken his hand, walked by his side, while Kurt leaned his body imperceptibly to Blaine's but still kept walking. Strongest person Blaine's ever met. He'll be fine.
Blaine runs a hand down the soft skin of his arm, and thinks of that strip of cloth binding them together. He knows that he's failed before, trying to understand the lives of mages in human terms - he'd thought a coven meant friends, and then thought it meant family, and only now he's dropped the human concepts does he understand what it really means (thick, comfortable cloud of magic surrounding all of them; they are a coven, and nothing else). A handfasting is not a marriage. Mages have no concept of marriage.
("I don't belong to you. Everything given is a gift, every time. You don't belong to me. I can't ask you for anything that you don't freely give me." Kurt's hands twisting a little in his, their fingers slipping, catching together. "It doesn't even mean you have to stay faithful, if you don't want to. Hush. Listen. What it means is that I love you and I respect you and I know, I know, that this time next year I still will. We might not renew it but if we didn't, I would still love you and respect you and wish you nothing but well. All it is is that promise. The rest is all a gift, nothing binds me to it, it's yours because I want you to have it." Squeeze of his hands, intensity of his eyes so forest green so suddenly. "I will be faithful, you know that. I'll never feel like this about anyone else for my whole life, I know that. And if you didn't want to renew it, I would just let you go. I would, Blaine. I don't - promise there would be anything much left of me for you to come back to if you changed your mind, though."
"I would never do that. I do belong to you."
"No. I know that would make things easier, but it's not true. You belong to you. Anything you do want to give me, you have no idea how grateful I am for it, but -" Lean in, quick kiss, sharp with need. "Be with me because you want to be with me, not because you have to. Choose it. We don't have to be here, Blaine, we don't have to do anything, I only give you everything because I want it to be yours. But I can only keep on giving you these things if they're mine to give. I don't belong to you. But I give you everything, everything, every day of my life. I love you. That's what I'm promising. I love you, and you saved my life and changed my life, and I have never been so happy as I am with you. So I want to be allowed to return the favour." Squeeze of his hands. "That's all I'm asking in return."
Quietly, "You know what I'm promising in return."
No-one's eyes in all the world see Blaine and know him the way Kurt's do. "I know."
How simple promises are.)
Mages do understand love, he thinks, love and regret, and how complex these things can be. So they bind their hands and promise a year, not knowing what the year will bring. They bind their hands and promise that if it can't last past the year, the love was still worth giving.
Kurt shifts underneath him, eyelashes beginning the slow dance of waking.
They bind their hands, and make their choice. Freely given, freely shared.
He turns his head into Kurt's chest and nuzzles so hard into his breastbone, I love you I love you I love you, and Kurt smiles before his eyes have come fully open.
Another day of walking. There's mist on the ground, low and sullen, as they cut out through the forest following the drag of Rachel's pendulum. Blaine walks at Kurt's side, leading Archimedes with his free hand in Kurt's, thinking distant things. He's remembering his favourite wooden sword as a child, he doesn't know why, and how he broke it trying to lever up a too-big stone with it, making a dam for a stream. Kurt keeps giving him long strange looks, oddly intense, and Blaine catches his eye and hopes that he's not in his reverie mumbling out loud.
Something familiar about the damp in the air and hard ground underfoot, and the smell of the undergrowth as the mages tramp through it. Memory's a funny thing. Midwinter's past but this is still the storytelling season, gathered in close around the fire on a night, huddled in their tents, and stories churn your memories like a toy sword stirring silt in the bottom of a stream; Sam and Puck are tossing a ball of magic back and forth over the mages' heads and Blaine remembers, smiles a little, as Kurt's hand twitches its grip on his and he hears, Can you hear me?
He screams, as Santana will later delight in informing him, like a girl.
It's just - walking in the forest Kurt holding his hand and all the coven around them all so very everyday and then whispered not by but inside his ear Kurt's voice like he's testing - Blaine staggers sideways (Archimedes' harness dropped the horse simply stops walking, and waits placidly for whatever inscrutable decision the coven will make next) and Kurt's hand slips loose, he yelps, "Blaine-" and Blaine stares at him, heart pounding through his eardrums -
Kurt puts his hands over his mouth. "You heard me. Oh gods oh my gods you heard me -"
"What the hell?" Finn says, and Blaine stares at Kurt, who steps forward, something has lit behind his face, he holds a hand out for Blaine with his fingers not hiding his smile now as he says, "Blaine -"
And in Blaine's mind, and he can feel the delight in the words, Can you hear me?
"Y-" Blaine stops, and - feels -
(The presence of Kurt, or Kurt's magic, or - both, more than that, some link between them never quite closed - ?)
. . . yes . . . ?
Kurt explodes out a noise of sheer joy and throws his arms around Blaine's neck. Blaine staggers back under the hug, patting his back, laughing out loud at Kurt's elation, as the coven stops walking all around them to stare. Quinn leans down to pick up the hare, so both of them can be near eye-level to glare at them as she says, "What exactly on earth are you two doing?"
"-in my head I heard him in my brain it was-"
"-thought we could so I tried and he heard me he heard me-"
Santana says, "In sentences that make sense would be awesome, boys."
"I thought - because we've, before, we've shared that link before, he's been in my mind I thought -" Kurt grips Blaine's hand tight and stares at his face and Blaine can't believe, feels through, finds - it's just like he knows an opening in his own mind, an opening in the air, an opening in life, where Kurt is. Can you hear me? and Kurt's hand jolts and he laughs out loud. "I thought it might still be open and it is -"
Finn says, "Which . . . means . . ."
Blaine says, "He can talk into my head."
"We can talk into each other's heads."
"This is the most -"
"You remember, against the dhampir, we were so-"
"One person."
"And I knew if I could -"
"In my head."
"I knew if we could -"
"Okay," Santana says. "The levels of creepy that you two reach just keep on finding that extra notch, huh?"
"In your head?" Tina says, and Kurt leans down, forehead bumping to Blaine's, and Blaine feels in his mind, Can you hear me?
Blaine closes his eyes, feels through to that level, almost too deep for the words. I can always hear you.
Blaine this is . . .
This isn't normal.
"No," Kurt whispers out loud, and opens his eyes, stares into Blaine's. "No. Nothing about this is normal."
"I read about something like this once," the Artie-owl says, and hops itself neatly into Mike's pocket. "Let me go find the book, be right back!"
This is . . . Blaine feels through to Kurt, and Kurt watches his eyes.
Do you think it's creepy?
Blaine considers it. No. No. Not at all. It feels really - really strangely perfectly -
Kurt offers, softly, Right.
"Right," Blaine says, and kisses him.
*
Maybe it should be scary; it isn't.
It's Kurt. Kurt would never do anything that would hurt Blaine. And it's not like they have access to each other's every thought all of a sudden - there is difficulty in finding that particular level they can communicate on like this, and it's tiring, and they stop after a while because it's giving them both a buzzing headache, though that might just be the comedown from their sheer excitement high. For about half an hour almost all they said to each other without saying a thing out loud, grinning wildly the whole time, was, Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi!, anyway.
Artie's back within a couple of hours, while they're picking their way down a steep bank from the forest to an actual road. He'd read it years ago and put it down as one of those things mages of the past could do, the great mages who had power like no-one does anymore; there's a record of two mages speaking to each other silently, after they shared their magic.
"He doesn't have any magic to share," Santana snaps, pointing at Blaine, who's holding Kurt still by the hip as he leans down to untangle a bramble from the hem of his robes.
"He's not a zombie, he is alive." Kurt snaps right back. "We shared my magic against that dhampir. He's been in my dreams. It leaves - echoes of how. That's all. It's just a path we know, now."
Blaine stands up again, twitching the fall of Kurt's robes straight at the waist with one hand. Kurt smiles at him, and they both look up and offer a hand to Mercedes slithering down the bank.
"Some crazy shit," Artie says, sounding impressed. "Technomage tried to replicate it with a device once, couldn't find mages who'd let him punch it into their brain though."
"I can't imagine why," Quinn murmurs, and the hare cocks an ear, and Blaine thinks that it's giving a grin.
Rachel's standing at the edge of the road, eyebrows low as she glares at the pendulum, which is swinging in heavy circles. "Oh come on," Mercedes moans. "Not again, Rach, jeez-"
"The magic works to its own reasons!" Rachel snaps.
"The human would make a better seer than you." Santana says, and drops her pack from her shoulders to sit on it. She holds a hand up for Brittany, who stands behind her, folds her arms around Santana's neck and rests her cheek on top of her head. "Break for lunch, since gods know we're going hella nowhere 'til Rachel stops sucking."
"Who died and put you in charge?" Tina mutters.
"Oh the hydro's picking a fight? What you gonna do, be a bit damp at me?"
"Guys, chill." Finn says, and Rachel looks away, and Blaine says, "It's probably a good idea to take a break while we can, right?"
Sam kicks at a little at a clump of wild garlic, head down. Blaine wishes he was a mage sometimes just because putting the goggles on is so obvious, and he doesn't want to noticeably ogle Sam's magic all the time, but Sam's the only mage not part of the coven that Blaine's hung out with. He's learned so much about magic just by seeing how Sam's magic differs from theirs, and he's spent some time trying to read when Sam's magic is hollow and lost and sad to know when to approach him as a friend -
But Sam's not especially interested in being friends with Blaine. He treats him always in a one-step-back way, and he talks to him the way people speak to children and dogs, and Blaine's the only human most mages have hung out with too. He wonders sometimes what would have happened if he and Kurt had met under other circumstances, normal circumstances, without a monster in the dark pushing them together. Would they have trusted each other, talked to each other, even have paid each other the slightest attention?
Of course I would have, he thinks, looking at Kurt's face as Kurt looks calmly back, then reaches up to neaten Blaine's hair a little. Of course I would always have wanted to know him.
He knows that's not true. He knows that if he'd passed Kurt on the street the most he would have done is glanced (well, performed a double-take, hell Kurt would still look like that) at him. If Blaine hadn't known Kurt's courage, how could he have been brave himself?
They have fresh food from the town, so there's one of those rare lunches actually worth looking forward to, sitting on the grass between hedged field and the dun-coloured road. Bread and cheese and tea boiled on a fire Santana snaps to life, while Rachel sits with an arm around her knees, still staring woefully at the slowly circling pendulum, horribly sad eyes like all of life hates her. After Kurt finishes his apple he passes the core to Blaine, who feeds them to Archimedes with a little twinge of guilt because under the mages' gentle regime, that horse really is getting big. Puck's minding him now, leaning against a tree next to him and making little pops of magic scare the flies off him. Puck and Finn had 'carried' Archimedes down the bank, supporting him on a cloud of burning-bright magic, Archimedes wild-eyed but accepting of it. He likes travelling with the mages. He should, he never has to move faster than a walk and never has to carry anything the mages wouldn't be willing to carry themselves, they feel really uncomfortable making a horse do it for them, and he gets more fresh fruit than the mages themselves do. Horse, Blaine thinks, mostly amused. They treat him like a lapdog.
Kurt's laying on his back in the grass, one arm folded over his eyes against the thin winter sunlight, so Blaine walks back and lays down with his head resting on Kurt's stomach, and Kurt laughs softly and doesn't move. The ground's cold but Blaine's got Kurt's green cloak and Kurt's warm body and he's happy, anyway.
A couple of farmers pass with an ox cart, ignored by the mages apart from Santana's smirk and finger-wiggling wave, as Brittany hooks back the hair flopped over her face to squint up at them. Rachel's beginning to mutter, shaking the pendulum angrily, and Blaine snaps the goggles on to see if the magic's doing anything weird; it spirals like autumn leaves in playful winds around the pendulum but only lazily, like it has all the time in the world, not like it's fighting anything. "Why won't it work?" he murmurs to Kurt, who sits up and looks sleepily across at Rachel, then shrugs and leans into Blaine's body, yawns behind a hand.
"Don't know. Sometimes it just doesn't. If it doesn't want to you can't make it."
"Not even you?"
Kurt shakes his head against Blaine's shoulder, and yawns again.
Archimedes lifts his head and his ears twist before they hear more hooves approaching. Santana and Brittany are playing some complicated clapping game, palms smacking palms to a quick rhythm as they sing some slightly sinister song meant to scare faeries from leaving a changeling in a cradle, Tina and Mike are playing a game with an oddly-weighted ball of magic rolling in the air over their hands, Kurt nuzzles his nose in against Blaine's neck and Quinn is saying to the hare, "Maybe if we ever get moving again." and Blaine thinks, Well, it's not like anyone's going to travel past anything unusual.
It's a ranger on horseback who comes around the bend of the road, his cloak a more worn and faded green than Blaine's. He looks immediately at the mages, looks immediately at Blaine who's got a healer draped along his side and drowsily blinking against the clean cold afternoon light (Kurt is a very talented napper and is working his way towards another masterpiece on Blaine's shoulder), and he pulls at the reins of his horse.
The mages look up, as the horse draws alongside them and stops. Sam looking mulish says, "Can we help you?"
The ranger flicks his eyes to him then back to Blaine. "Are you by any chance Blaine Anderson?"
Kurt sits up, and touches his hair where he was leaning into Blaine. Blaine says, "Um, yes. Are you -" He stands up, brushes his cloak off, bows. The ranger climbs down from his horse, tugs open a saddlebag.
"Name's Robert, sent by my commanding officer, he says he owes you. Jack Silber?"
Blaine grins, and Kurt stands up beside him, smoothing his robes neatly down. "Hey, how's Jack doing?"
"Pretty good, we're training some good young rangers now. We had a bunch of letters come up to us chasing a coven of mages with a knight travelling with them -" He picks a red-sealed letter out of the saddlebag and holds the whole pouch of letters out to the coven. "- and an urgent message for one Blaine Anderson, been chasing you since the autumn."
Blaine says, his voice coming very neutral, "Oh."
Kurt looks at him, but his attention is largely held by Tina gleefully grabbing the bag of letters and quickly reading out the names, "Quinn, this one's to all of us, Finn, Kurt-"
Blaine looks at the red-sealed letter, and he knows the crest even without seeing it, just the particular rich burgundy of the wax is enough. He takes it because it's impolite not to. "Thank you."
"No problem, got me out of the snow for a week. You guys got anything you want taking North?"
"Hang on and let us write a thank you letter!" Mercedes calls, already digging through her pack for ink. Kurt's holding a letter from his father but he's looking at Blaine, and Blaine feels a little touch through that path between them, not even a word, just a brush of thought, a question. Blaine puts a smile on and says, "How about a thank you mug of tea? We haven't got much else to give, sorry."
Brittany is cooing over the ranger's horse, stroking its mane with her fingers, and Sam's looking closed off again, arms folded and glaring up the road. This time Blaine feels Kurt's, Blaine, are you alright? but he still doesn't look at his eyes, just feels back through the humming strain of it, Not in front of the ranger.
I am such an embarrassment to you, Kurt's words come teasingly back, but then he slips his own letter into the pocket of his robes, and kneels to help Santana make the tea.
*
Blaine walks a little further up the road and sits on the fence to read his letter, aware of Kurt watching him from the main body of the coven, having waved the ranger off now the afternoon's wearing on and the clouded sky is silvery-gold with the lowering sun. He can hear the edge of Rachel's voice loudly telling everyone how obviously the magic was telling them to stay there to wait for the ranger while he reads his letter, then he folds it up again, and sits for some time just swinging his heels, gazing across the field where sheep are determinedly scuffing their hooves at the thin winter grass.
Kurt gives him five minutes, which he's grateful for, forcibly settling himself, making himself steady. Kurt's boots shift the grass. He says, "My dad said hi." and then he climbs up next to Blaine, perches on the fence beside him. He tilts his head, looks questioningly up at him and Blaine shrugs, letter crinkling against his thigh, says, "My father."
Kurt watches his face, and says carefully, "What did it say?"
Blaine lifts his head a little, scans the horizon, one lumpen hill rising directly in front of them dull heather-purple, distant sparkle of a lake off there to the south west. "He's waiting for me in our northernmost estate. Quite near here, actually. Maybe two days' ride."
"Waiting for you," Kurt says, because Kurt is very sensitive to the words people use.
Blaine works his jaw a little. "My father doesn't request, he just summons."
"Will you go?"
Blaine watches the wind run silver over the grass then comb it back dull green again. He says, "I don't know what to say to him."
Kurt shifts his seat a little, draws his shoulders back, breathes. "It's your decision what you do. You belong to you. Not to him, and not to me. But if you go - you don't have to go alone."
Blaine looks across at him, at Kurt just watching him, head tipped and eyes uncertainly raised to his. Blaine swallows, and looks at the horizon again. "I still don't know what to say to him. Of course he cares that I - that I walked away from the knights, the life he wanted me to have, and - and he knows I'm travelling with you. And . . ." He takes a slow breath. "Kurt, talk will travel, you know that. Humans don't travel with mages, we both know we're not 'normal', we stand out, and we've passed enough inns and enough towns, we've never - we've never hidden anything -"
Quietly, "Do you wish we had?"
"No! No, not for one second, no. But I just - I don't know what to say to him. I . . ."
Blaine clasps his hands between his legs, and the letter creases in his grip. Kurt's silent for a moment, then says and his voice comes rough, "I don't know what to say. I don't want to say 'sorry' for this, for us-"
"No."
"I just, I know - I know how - how difficult and - it's not fair. For it to be fine for me and my dad-" He has to stop, and swallow. "We could talk to him," he says, pleadingly. "Couldn't we . . . wouldn't he at least accept . . . ?"
It takes a few attempts for the words to come from his mouth; "I'm such a coward."
"Blaine, no."
"I'm scared to go face him. I'm scared of how he'll look at me. But -" It all churns inside, too much feeling to make sense of. "He's my father," Blaine says, helplessly, and Kurt reaches across and puts his hand over the nearest of Blaine's, still clenched together tight.
"I'll come with you. He can blame it on me if he likes, gods know it's not your fault-"
"It's no-one's fault, it's not wrong!"
"I know," Kurt says, and he sounds like he's trying not to cry. Blaine grits his teeth, opens his hands to hold Kurt's, tight. "I'll come with you," Kurt whispers. "You shouldn't go alone. You shouldn't be alone."
Something in the way he says 'you'; you shouldn't be alone. Blaine's throat lumps with hurt and he swallows it down, looks at Kurt's face and Kurt looks back with his face drawn but steady, and Blaine knows that Kurt can deal with anything, but Kurt doesn't know Blaine's father. He closes his eyes, shakes his head. "What about your coven? I really shouldn't turn up on his doorstep with a whole coven of mages, it's not a great first impression of my new life."
"They don't have to come with us, they can live without me for five minutes, gods."
"I meant leaving them, after everything in the North-"
"What? Oh my gods, Blaine, you just watched me walk into town yesterday, for gods' sakes-"
"What? Oh - yeah, wait, hold on-"
"The magic knows," Kurt says irritably, and pulls at his hand. "The magic knows like we know when it's forever. I can come with you and we can both come back to them, it won't kill any of us." He looks at Blaine's eyes. "I can come with you. Can't I?"
". . . yeah. Yes. You can. We can."
The smile twitches nervous on Kurt's mouth, and Blaine feels his smile come too frightened and too hopeful back. Kurt's smile grows braver, and he says, "Your 'northernmost estate', Blaine?"
"Oh, uh, yeah. We only ever used it in the summer."
"Exactly how many estates do you have? How high up the nobility are you?"
"You know." The blush must show. "Just sort of, sort of, generally noble."
Teasingly, "You handfasted very far below yourself, didn't you?"
"No." He means that absolutely, every bone in his body is sure of it. "I handfasted the noblest person I ever met."
Kurt's thumb strokes the side of his hand. Blaine looks into his eyes and there's no shame in him, how can there be? Kurt might be absolutely nothing that Blaine's father expected, but for god's sake, the most powerful mage of his generation and the most beautiful human being Blaine's ever seen, there can't be any rational reason for Blaine's father not to . . .
He looks across at the horizon, and Kurt strokes his hand.